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The moribund Nur al-Din turns Polonius and delivers himself of sententious precepts. "Security," he tells his son, "lieth in seclusion of thought and a certain retirement from the society of thy fellows.... In this world there is none thou mayst count upon... so live for thyself, nursing hope of none. Let thine own faults distract thine attention from the faults of other men.
He loved his father and mother dearly and was happy in the love of a sweet lady named Ophelia. Her father, Polonius, was the King's Chamberlain. While Hamlet was away studying at Wittenberg, his father died. Young Hamlet hastened home in great grief to hear that a serpent had stung the King, and that he was dead.
But when we have put down the English tragedy, when Hamlet and Ophelia are confounded in death with Polonius and the fratricidal king, we see not what good end for humanity is achieved. The passages that fasten on our memory do not make us happier and holier: they suggest but terrible problems, to which they give us no solution.
It is said that Scott is neglected by modern readers; if so, the matter could be more appropriately described by saying that modern readers are neglected by Providence. The ground of this neglect, in so far as it exists, must be found, I suppose, in the general sentiment that, like the beard of Polonius, he is too long.
No one probably has said of either work that it is too short, and many have uttered the sentence of the critical Polonius "This is too long." It has often been said that the story is told ten times over by almost as many speakers; it would be more correct to say that the story is not told even once.
It is very much less necessary that the audience should laugh at Polonius' quips than that the quips should in no wise impair his position as courtier, as royal adviser, as father of two excellent children, and, at the last, as a man who met death with tragic dignity. In such a case a wise manager intrusts the comic part to an actor who is not comic.
Why go to his house, or know his wife and family?" And yet does not the botanist like to study the flower in the soil where it grows? Polonius, too, is another ancient supposed to be an authority on friendship. The Polonius family must have been a thoroughly dreary one to live with; we have often thought that poor Ophelia would have gone mad anyway, even if there had been no Hamlet.
It would need a hoop of steel to keep them near such a dismal old sawmonger. Friendships, we think, do not grow up in any such carefully tended and contemplated fashion as Messrs. Emerson and Polonius suggest. They begin haphazard. As we look back on the first time we saw our friends we find that generally our original impression was curiously astray.
Violet put on her black dress, costly and simple as the attire Polonius recommended to his son. Mrs. Tempest might relieve her costume with what bright or delicate hues she liked. Violet had worn nothing but black since her father's death. Her sole ornaments were a pair of black earrings, and a large black enamel locket, with one big diamond shining in the middle of it, like an eye.
Perhaps by the method of exclusion we shall find out what Christmas should be. It is not a time for extravagance, for ostentation, for vulgar display, it is possible to purchase pleasure for someone else at too high a price to ourselves. To paraphrase Polonius, "Costly thy gift as thy purse can buy, rich but not expressed in fancy, for the gift oft proclaims the man."
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