The Pacific Monthly
The Sphinx of English Literature.
By GEORGE MELVIN.
FOR near three hundred years it has been read and studied, acted and discussed, and yet is now and for- ever new, is today as interesting, as ir- resistible . in charm, as baffling and in- comprehensible of meaning as when its immortal author first gave it to the Anglo-Saxon World.
Sublime in conception, masterly in ex- ecution, it is Shakespeare's mystery- play. In it he sounds all depths of mind and emotion, compasses the downward reach of mortality, and touches finger- tips with stars.
There have been critics (I forbear to name them here) who have worried un- necessarily over the apparent want of unity, who have grown old trying to reconcile the seeming incongruities of the play, trivial faults that cease to exist when you cease to lo'ok for them. This masterpiece of the world's great master of truth and poetry must be regarded from a comprehensive point of view. If you so regard it, you will find the unities not sacrificed but made subservient to the execution of a conception that soars beyond the reach of rules. All attempts to confine it to certain limits of time, place and action are vain. Hamlet is not to be gauged by common standards.
One critic says of the Danish prince, and truly, I think: "Hamlet is a sort of universal man; in him every individual sees on some side a picture of himself; each one bears away what he compre- hends, and often thinks it is all."
And again: "Everybody reads into Hamlet his own life experience and cul-
ture." In this, maybe, lies the secret of the unfailing charm that draws and holds in close, unconscious sympathy the world of thinking, feeling, struggling humani- ty, a poor, blind passion-cradled world, toiling in the dark, yet ever groping slowly, surely, toward the light.
And Hamlet — is he then a type of many-sided human nature? If we could but read deeper! The written word, though it is full of meaning, and reveals far intellectual reaches to him who leans to look and listen, gives hint of other and yet unsailed soundless seas of thought — glimpses of unsealed heights in man's moral and spiritual nature. "A sort of universal man," this mystical, melancholy prince upon whose every utterance we hang breathless, who thrills us with the truth he voices, and yet who makes us feel that all we see and hear is as a star- gleam through the dusk that hides a world of constellations; who leaves us unsatisfied, hungering to know what is in that pregnant mind which words, mere words, cannot convey.
Act I, scene 2, in the state chamber at Elisnore, where the king and queen, Laertes and the wordy Polonious, are introduced, Hamlet's entrance marks the real beginning of the play. Hamlet is the play. From the first he is distin- guished by an air of majestic sadness, of unspeakable spiritual anguish. Like a mantle it envelops him, and he moves, a sombre, sentient shadow athwart the glare and splendor of that riotous, wicked court, the central figure in its hollow pageantry, but not of it.
