Aylwin | Page 4

is one of emotion primarily, or it would not have been written.
There is yet another subject upon which I feel tempted to say a few words. D'Arcy in referring to Aylwin's conduct in regard to the cross says:--
You were simply doing what Hamlet would have done in such circumstances--what Macbeth would have done, and what he would have done who spoke to the human heart through their voices. All men, I believe, have Macbeth's instinct for making 'assurance doubly sure,' and I cannot imagine the man who, entangled as you were in a net of conflicting evidence--the evidence of the spiritual and the evidence of the natural world--would not, if the question were that of averting a curse from acting on a beloved mistress, have done as you did. That paralysis of Hamlet's will which followed when the evidence of two worlds hung in equipoise before him, no one can possibly understand better than I.
Several critics have asked me to explain these words. Of course, however, the question is much too big and much too important to discuss here. I will merely say that Shakespeare having decided in the case of 'Macbeth' to adopt the machinery he found in Holinslied, and in the case of 'Hamlet' the machinery he found in the old 'Hamlet,' seems to have set himself the task of realising the situation of a man oscillating between the evidence of two worlds, the physical and the spiritual--a man in each case unusually sagacious, and in each case endowed with the instinct for 'making assurance doubly sure'--the instinct which seems, from many passages in his dramas, to have been a special characteristic of the poet's own, such for instance as the words in _Pericles_:
For truth can never be confirm'd enough, Though doubts did ever sleep.
Why is it that, in this story, Hamlet, the moody moraliser upon charnel-houses and mouldy bones, is identified with the jolly companion of the Mermaid, the wine-bibbing joker of the Falcon, and the Apollo saloon? It is because Hamlet is the most elaborately-painted character in literature. It is because the springs of his actions are so profoundly touched, the workings of his soul so thoroughly laid bare, that we seem to know him more completely than we know our most intimate friends. It is because the sea which washes between personality and personality is here, for once, rolled away, and we and this Hamlet touch, soul to soul. That is why we ask whether such a character can be the mere evolvement of the artistic mind at work. That is why we exclaim: 'The man who painted Hamlet must have been painting himself.' The perfection of the dramatist's work betrays him. For, really and truly, no man can paint another, but only himself, and what we call 'character painting' is, at the best, but a poor mixing of painter and painted, a 'third something' between these two; just as what we call colour and sound are born of the play of undulation upon organism.

INTRODUCTION TO THE SNOWDON EDITION OF 1901
Though written many years ago this story was, for certain personal reasons easy to guess, withheld from publication--withheld, as The Times pointed out, because 'with the Dichtung was mingled a good deal of _Wahrheit_,' But why did I still delay in publishing it after these reasons for withholding it had passed away? This is a question that has often been put to me both in print and in conversation. And yet I should have imagined that the explanation was not far to seek. It was simply diffidence; in other words it was that infirmity which, though generally supposed to belong to youth, comes to a writer, if it comes at all, with years. Undoubtedly there was a time in my life when I should have leapt with considerable rashness into the brilliant ranks of our contemporary novelists. But this was before I had reached what I will call the diffident period in the life of a writer. And then, again, I had often been told by George Borrow, and also by my friend Francis Groome, the great living authority on Romany matters, that there was in England no interest in Gypsies. Altogether then, had it not been for the unexpected success of _The Coming of Love_, a story of Gypsy life, it is doubtful whether I should not have delayed the publication of Aylwin until the great warder of the gates of day we call Death should close his portal behind me and shut me off from these dreams. However, I am very glad now that I did publish it; for it has brought around me a number of new friends--brought them at a time when new friends were what I yearned for--a time when, looking back through this vision of my life, I seem