Bring but to Greece again the sister who
All loth at heart in holy temple bides
On shores of Tauris, and the curse is gone.
The very human reconciliation disclosed in these words is clearly that the pure and holy Iphigenia, the sister, is in fact the divine personification and the protectress of the house.
Noble and beautiful I wot in sooth
All that the goddess counselled seemed to me,
exclaims Orestes to Thoas and Iphigenia:
Like to a holy picture
The fate unalterable which walled our town
By one mysterious word, one word Divine,
Is banished, now that city takes thee back,
Who art the true protectress of our home;
Reserve thyself in holy quietness,
A blessing to thy brother and thine own;
It seemed that all deliverance on Earth
Had passed away, and all comes back with thee.
In the spirit of these healing words of reconciliation Iphigenia has already revealed herself to Orestes by virtue of the purity and ethical beauty of her inner life. It is true that her discernment drives him half mad, who in the convulsion of his spirit has lost all faith in peace; but the pure love of the sister does not fail to heal him from every pang with which he is tortured by the Furies of his soul:
Within thine arms
The evil clawed me with its direst clutch
For the last time, and to the very marrow
I shuddered horribly: and then it vanished,
E'en as a serpent to its lair. Anew,
And all through thee, the day's breadth I enjoy.
Here, as elsewhere throughout it, we can hardly emphasize sufficiently our admiration for the profound beauty of this poem.
The material which has the impress of Christianity upon it is more open to criticism than that which was the subject-matter of antique art. In the sacred legends, and generally speaking where the religious conceptions of Christendom prevail, no doubt we may find the appearance of Christ, the Virgin Mary and other saints the subject of universal belief; but along with them the imagination has clothed itself with fanciful aberrations in every direction, so that witches, ghosts, and every sort of spectral apparition are yet more conspicuous objects. In the face of such conceptions, so far at least as they appear foreign powers to our human nature, and man submits himself unreservedly to the charm, seduction, and influence of their illusions, artistic representation is wholly given up to every kind of folly and caprice of mere contingency. It is of unique importance that in the treatment of such material the artist take care that the freedom and independence of judgment are in no way impaired. Shakespeare has shown us how to do this in most noble fashion. The witches in Macbeth, for example, appear as external powers, who foretell for Macbeth his future destiny. What they do foretell, however, is precisely that which is his own most secret wish, which is reflected back on him and declared in this, merely in appearance, external form[349]. With a still closer regard to beauty, yet profounder insight, is the ghost in Hamlet treated as the purely objective embodiment of Hamlet's own intuitions. We find Hamlet in the first instance overpowered with a vague feeling that something horrible has taken place. His father's ghost then appears and gives definite form to these awful premonitions. We naturally expect that Hamlet, after receiving the facts set forth in his father's warning, will at once proceed with energy and bring the murderer to book, a revenge which appears to have ample excuse. But he delays and delays. Critics have made this inactivity a matter of reproach to Shakespeare, blamed him, in fact, as though for this reason the play to some extent never gets properly off. But we must remember Hamlet is not a strongly practical nature, rather a finely strung one, with emotions held in persistent reserve; a nature which finds it difficult to tear itself from its internal harmony; melancholy too, prone to subtleties, hypochondriacal, with emotions deeply rooted. For this reason it is obvious that he is prima facie indisposed to prompt action. And this is fundamentally Goethe's conception of him when he tells us that what Shakespeare sought to represent "was the imposition of some supreme action on a soul whose growth was unadapted to its execution." He in fact interprets the entire drama relatively to this conception of Hamlet. "We have here," he maintains, "an oak tree planted in an exquisite vase, which ought really only to contain and shelter the fair flowers; the roots spread, the vase is shattered." But it should be noticed that Shakespeare, when referring to the apparition of the ghost, contributes a far profounder trait of character in explanation of this debated point. Hamlet delays, because he does not right off wholly believe in the ghost.
The spirit that I have seen
May be a devil: and the devil hath power
To assume a pleasing shape; yea and perhaps,
Out of my weakness and my melancholy,
As he is very potent with such spirits,
Abuses me to damn me: I'll have grounds
More relative than this: the play's the thing,
Wherein I'll catch the conscience of the king.