given by its adherents of Hamlet's state of mind, as we see him in the
last four Acts, is, on the whole and so far as it goes, a true
description. The energy of resolve is dissipated in an endless brooding
on the deed required. When he acts, his action does not proceed from
this deliberation and analysis, but is sudden and impulsive, evoked by
an emergency in which he has no time to think. And most of the reasons
he assigns for his procrastination are evidently not the true reasons,
but unconscious excuses.
Nevertheless this theory fails to satisfy. And it fails not merely in
this or that detail, but as a whole. We feel that its Hamlet does not
fully answer to our imaginative impression. He is not nearly so
inadequate to this impression as the sentimental Hamlet, but still we
feel he is inferior to Shakespeare's man and does him wrong. And when we
come to examine the theory we find that it is partial and leaves much
unexplained. I pass that by for the present, for we shall see, I
believe, that the theory is also positively misleading, and that in a
most important way. And of this I proceed to speak.
Hamlet's irresolution, or his aversion to real action, is, according to
the theory, the _direct_ result of 'an almost enormous intellectual
activity' in the way of 'a calculating consideration which attempts to
exhaust all the relations and possible consequences of a deed.' And this
again proceeds from an original one-sidedness of nature, strengthened by
habit, and, perhaps, by years of speculative inaction. The theory
describes, therefore, a man in certain respects like Coleridge himself,
on one side a man of genius, on the other side, the side of will,
deplorably weak, always procrastinating and avoiding unpleasant duties,
and often reproaching himself in vain; a man, observe, who at _any_ time
and in _any_ circumstances would be unequal to the task assigned to
Hamlet. And thus, I must maintain, it degrades Hamlet and travesties the
play. For Hamlet, according to all the indications in the text, was not
naturally or normally such a man, but rather, I venture to affirm, a man
who at any _other_ time and in any _other_ circumstances than those
presented would have been perfectly equal to his task; and it is, in
fact, the very cruelty of his fate that the crisis of his life comes on
him at the one moment when he cannot meet it, and when his highest
gifts, instead of helping him, conspire to paralyse him. This aspect of
the tragedy the theory quite misses; and it does so because it
misconceives the cause of that irresolution which, on the whole, it
truly describes. For the cause was not directly or mainly an habitual
excess of reflectiveness. The direct cause was a state of mind quite
abnormal and induced by special circumstances,--a state of profound
melancholy. Now, Hamlet's reflectiveness doubtless played a certain part
in the _production_ of that melancholy, and was thus one indirect
contributory cause of his irresolution. And, again, the melancholy, once
established, displayed, as one of its _symptoms_, an excessive
reflection on the required deed. But excess of reflection was not, as
the theory makes it, the _direct_ cause of the irresolution at all; nor
was it the _only_ indirect cause; and in the Hamlet of the last four
Acts it is to be considered rather a symptom of his state than a cause
of it.
These assertions may be too brief to be at once clear, but I hope they
will presently become so.
3
Let us first ask ourselves what we can gather from the play, immediately
or by inference, concerning Hamlet as he was just before his father's
death. And I begin by observing that the text does not bear out the idea
that he was one-sidedly reflective and indisposed to action. Nobody who
knew him seems to have noticed this weakness. Nobody regards him as a
mere scholar who has 'never formed a resolution or executed a deed.' In
a court which certainly would not much admire such a person he is the
observed of all observers. Though he has been disappointed of the throne
everyone shows him respect; and he is the favourite of the people, who
are not given to worship philosophers. Fortinbras, a sufficiently
practical man, considered that he was likely, had he been put on, to
have proved most royally. He has Hamlet borne by four captains 'like a
soldier' to his grave; and Ophelia says that Hamlet _was_ a soldier. If
he was fond of acting, an aesthetic pursuit, he was equally fond of
fencing, an athletic one: he practised it assiduously even in his worst
days.[39] So far as we can conjecture from what we see of him in those
bad days, he must normally have been charmingly frank, courteous and
kindly to everyone, of whatever rank, whom he liked or respected, but by
no means timid or deferential to others; indeed, one would gather that
he was rather the reverse, and also that he was apt to be decided and
even imperious if thwarted or interfered with. He must always have been
fearless,--in the play he appears insensible to fear of any ordinary
kind. And, finally, he must have been quick and impetuous in action; for
it is downright impossible that the man we see rushing after the Ghost,
killing Polonius, dealing with the King's commission on the ship,
boarding the pirate, leaping into the grave, executing his final
vengeance, could _ever_ have been shrinking or slow in an emergency.
Imagine Coleridge doing any of these things!
If we consider all this, how can we accept the notion that Hamlet's was
a weak and one-sided character? 'Oh, but he spent ten or twelve years at
a University!' Well, even if he did, it is possible to do that without
becoming the victim of excessive thought. But the statement that he did
rests upon a most insecure foundation.[40]
Where then are we to look for the seeds of danger?
(1) Trying to reconstruct from the Hamlet of the play, one would not
judge that his temperament was melancholy in the present sense of the
word; there seems nothing to show that; but one would judge that by
temperament he was inclined to nervous instability, to rapid and
perhaps extreme changes of feeling and mood, and that he was disposed to
be, for the time, absorbed in the feeling or mood that possessed him,
whether it were joyous or depressed. This temperament the Elizabethans
would have called melancholic; and Hamlet seems to be an example of it,
as Lear is of a temperament mixedly choleric and sanguine. And the
doctrine of temperaments was so familiar in Shakespeare's time--as
Burton, and earlier prose-writers, and many of the dramatists show--that
Shakespeare may quite well have given this temperament to Hamlet
consciously and deliberately. Of melancholy in its developed form, a
habit, not a mere temperament, he often speaks. He more than once laughs
at the passing and half-fictitious melancholy of youth and love; in Don
John in _Much Ado_ he had sketched the sour and surly melancholy of
discontent; in Jaques a whimsical self-pleasing melancholy; in Antonio
in the _Merchant of Venice_ a quiet but deep melancholy, for which
neither the victim nor his friends can assign any cause.[41] He gives to
Hamlet a temperament which would not develop into melancholy unless
under some exceptional strain, but which still involved a danger. In the
play we see the danger realised, and find a melancholy quite unlike any
that Shakespeare had as yet depicted, because the temperament of Hamlet
is quite different.
(2) Next, we cannot be mistaken in attributing to the Hamlet of earlier
days an exquisite sensibility, to which we may give the name 'moral,' if
that word is taken in the wide meaning it ought to bear. This, though
it suffers cruelly in later days, as we saw in criticising the
sentimental view of Hamlet, never deserts him; it makes all his
cynicism, grossness and hardness appear to us morbidities, and has an
inexpressibly attractive and pathetic effect. He had the soul of the
youthful poet as Shelley and Tennyson have described it, an unbounded
delight and faith in everything good and beautiful. We know this from
himself. The world for him was _herrlich wie am ersten Tag_--'this
goodly frame the earth, this most excellent canopy the air, this brave
o'erhanging firmament, this majestical roof fretted with golden fire.'
And not nature only: 'What a piece of work is a man! how noble in
reason! how infinite in faculty! in form and moving how express and
admirable! in action how like an angel! in apprehension how like a god!'
This is no commonplace to Hamlet; it is the language of a heart thrilled
with wonder and swelling into ecstasy.
Doubtless it was with the same eager enthusiasm he turned to those
around him. Where else in Shakespeare is there anything like Hamlet's
adoration of his father? The words melt into music whenever he speaks of
him. And, if there are no signs of any such feeling towards his mother,
though many signs of love, it is characteristic that he evidently never
entertained a suspicion of anything unworthy in her,--characteristic,
and significant of his tendency to see only what is good unless he is
forced to see the reverse. For we find this tendency elsewhere, and find
it going so far that we must call it a disposition to idealise, to see
something better than what is there, or at least to ignore deficiencies.
He says to Laertes, 'I loved you ever,' and he describes Laertes as a
'very noble youth,' which he was far from being. In his first greeting
of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, where his old self revives, we trace
the same affectionateness and readiness to take men at their best. His
love for Ophelia, too, which seems strange to some, is surely the most
natural thing in the world. He saw her innocence, simplicity and
sweetness, and it was like him to ask no more; and it is noticeable that
Horatio, though entirely worthy of his friendship, is, like Ophelia,
intellectually not remarkable. To the very end, however clouded, this
generous disposition, this 'free and open nature,' this unsuspiciousness
survive. They cost him his life; for the King knew them, and was sure
that he was too 'generous and free from all contriving' to 'peruse the
foils.' To the very end, his soul, however sick and tortured it may be,
answers instantaneously when good and evil are presented to it, loving
the one and hating the other. He is called a sceptic who has no firm
belief in anything, but he is never sceptical about _them_.
And the negative side of his idealism, the aversion to evil, is perhaps
even more developed in the hero of the tragedy than in the Hamlet of
earlier days. It is intensely characteristic. Nothing, I believe, is to
be found elsewhere in Shakespeare (unless in the rage of the
disillusioned idealist Timon) of quite the same kind as Hamlet's disgust
at his uncle's drunkenness, his loathing of his mother's sensuality, his
astonishment and horror at her shallowness, his contempt for everything
pretentious or false, his indifference to everything merely external.
This last characteristic appears in his choice of the friend of his
heart, and in a certain impatience of distinctions of rank or wealth.
When Horatio calls his father 'a goodly king,' he answers, surely with
an emphasis on 'man,'
He was a man, take him for all in all,
I shall not look upon his like again.
He will not listen to talk of Horatio being his 'servant.' When the
others speak of their 'duty' to him, he answers, 'Your love, as mine to
you.' He speaks to the actor precisely as he does to an honest courtier.
He is not in the least a revolutionary, but still, in effect, a king and
a beggar are all one to him. He cares for nothing but human worth, and
his pitilessness towards Polonius and Osric and his 'school-fellows' is
not wholly due to morbidity, but belongs in part to his original
character.
Now, in Hamlet's moral sensibility there undoubtedly lay a danger. Any
great shock that life might inflict on it would be felt with extreme
intensity. Such a shock might even produce tragic results. And, in fact,
_Hamlet_ deserves the title 'tragedy of moral idealism' quite as much as
the title 'tragedy of reflection.'
(3) With this temperament and this sensibility we find, lastly, in the
Hamlet of earlier days, as of later, intellectual genius. It is chiefly
this that makes him so different from all those about him, good and bad
alike, and hardly less different from most of Shakespeare's other
heroes. And this, though on the whole the most important trait in his
nature, is also so obvious and so famous that I need not dwell on it at
length. But against one prevalent misconception I must say a word of
warning. Hamlet's intellectual power is not a specific gift, like a
genius for music or mathematics or philosophy. It shows itself,
fitfully, in the affairs of life as unusual quickness of perception,
great agility in shifting the mental attitude, a striking rapidity and
fertility in resource; so that, when his natural belief in others does
not make him unwary, Hamlet easily sees through them and masters them,
and no one can be much less like the typical helpless dreamer. It shows
itself in conversation chiefly in the form of wit or humour; and, alike
in conversation and in soliloquy, it shows itself in the form of
imagination quite as much as in that of thought in the stricter sense.
Further, where it takes the latter shape, as it very often does, it is
not philosophic in the technical meaning of the word. There is really
nothing in the play to show that Hamlet ever was 'a student of
philosophies,' unless it be the famous lines which, comically enough,
exhibit this supposed victim of philosophy as its critic:
There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio,
Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.[42]
His philosophy, if the word is to be used, was, like Shakespeare's own,
the immediate product of the wondering and meditating mind; and such
thoughts as that celebrated one, 'There is nothing either good or bad
but thinking makes it so,' surely needed no special training to produce
them. Or does Portia's remark, 'Nothing is good without respect,'
_i.e._, out of relation, prove that she had studied metaphysics?
Still Hamlet had speculative genius without being a philosopher, just as
he had imaginative genius without being a poet. Doubtless in happier
days he was a close and constant observer of men and manners, noting his
results in those tables which he afterwards snatched from his breast to
make in wild irony his last note of all, that one may smile and smile
and be a villain. Again and again we remark that passion for
generalisation which so occupied him, for instance, in reflections
suggested by the King's drunkenness that he quite forgot what it was he
was waiting to meet upon the battlements. Doubtless, too, he was always
considering things, as Horatio thought, too curiously. There was a
necessity in his soul driving him to penetrate below the surface and to
question what others took for granted. That fixed habitual look which
the world wears for most men did not exist for him. He was for ever
unmaking his world and rebuilding it in thought, dissolving what to
others were solid facts, and discovering what to others were old truths.
There were no old truths for Hamlet. It is for Horatio a thing of course
that there's a divinity that shapes our ends, but for Hamlet it is a
discovery hardly won. And throughout this kingdom of the mind, where he
felt that man, who in action is only like an angel, is in apprehension
like a god, he moved (we must imagine) more than content, so that even
in his dark days he declares he could be bounded in a nutshell and yet
count himself a king of infinite space, were it not that he had bad
dreams.
If now we ask whether any special danger lurked _here_, how shall we
answer? We must answer, it seems to me, 'Some danger, no doubt, but,
granted the ordinary chances of life, not much.' For, in the first
place, that idea which so many critics quietly take for granted--the
idea that the gift and the habit of meditative and speculative thought
tend to produce irresolution in the affairs of life--would be found by
no means easy to verify. Can you verify it, for example, in the lives of
the philosophers, or again in the lives of men whom you have personally
known to be addicted to such speculation? I cannot. Of course,
individual peculiarities being set apart, absorption in _any_
intellectual interest, together with withdrawal from affairs, may make a
man slow and unskilful in affairs; and doubtless, individual
peculiarities being again set apart, a mere student is likely to be more
at a loss in a sudden and great practical emergency than a soldier or a
lawyer. But in all this there is no difference between a physicist, a
historian, and a philosopher; and again, slowness, want of skill, and
even helplessness are something totally different from the peculiar kind
of irresolution that Hamlet shows. The notion that speculative thinking
specially tends to produce _this_ is really a mere illusion.
In the second place, even if this notion were true, it has appeared that
Hamlet did _not_ live the life of a mere student, much less of a mere
dreamer, and that his nature was by no means simply or even one-sidedly
intellectual, but was healthily active. Hence, granted the ordinary
chances of life, there would seem to be no great danger in his
intellectual tendency and his habit of speculation; and I would go
further and say that there was nothing in them, taken alone, to unfit
him even for the extraordinary call that was made upon him. In fact, if
the message of the Ghost had come to him within a week of his father's
death, I see no reason to doubt that he would have acted on it as
decisively as Othello himself, though probably after a longer and more
anxious deliberation. And therefore the Schlegel-Coleridge view (apart
from its descriptive value) seems to me fatally untrue, for it implies
that Hamlet's procrastination was the normal response of an
over-speculative nature confronted with a difficult practical problem.
On the other hand, under conditions of a peculiar kind, Hamlet's
reflectiveness certainly might prove dangerous to him, and his genius
might even (to exaggerate a little) become his doom. Suppose that
violent shock to his moral being of which I spoke; and suppose that
under this shock, any possible action being denied to him, he began to
sink into melancholy; then, no doubt, his imaginative and generalising
habit of mind might extend the effects of this shock through his whole
being and mental world. And if, the state of melancholy being thus
deepened and fixed, a sudden demand for difficult and decisive action in
a matter connected with the melancholy arose, this state might well have
for one of its symptoms an endless and futile mental dissection of the
required deed. And, finally, the futility of this process, and the shame
of his delay, would further weaken him and enslave him to his melancholy
still more. Thus the speculative habit would be _one_ indirect cause of
the morbid state which hindered action; and it would also reappear in a
degenerate form as one of the _symptoms_ of this morbid state.
* * * * *
Now this is what actually happens in the play. Turn to the first words
Hamlet utters when he is alone; turn, that is to say, to the place where
the author is likely to indicate his meaning most plainly. What do you
hear?
O, that this too too solid flesh would melt,
Thaw and resolve itself into a dew!
Or that the Everlasting had not fix'd
His canon 'gainst self-slaughter! O God! God!
How weary, stale, flat and unprofitable,
Seem to me all the uses of this world!
Fie on't! ah fie! 'tis an unweeded garden,
That grows to seed; things rank and gross in nature
Possess it merely.
Here are a sickness of life, and even a longing for death, so intense
that nothing stands between Hamlet and suicide except religious awe. And
what has caused them? The rest of the soliloquy so thrusts the answer
upon us that it might seem impossible to miss it. It was not his
father's death; that doubtless brought deep grief, but mere grief for
some one loved and lost does not make a noble spirit loathe the world as
a place full only of things rank and gross. It was not the vague
suspicion that we know Hamlet felt. Still less was it the loss of the
crown; for though the subserviency of the electors might well disgust
him, there is not a reference to the subject in the soliloquy, nor any
sign elsewhere that it greatly occupied his mind. It was the moral shock
of the sudden ghastly disclosure of his mother's true nature, falling on
him when his heart was aching with love, and his body doubtless was
weakened by sorrow. And it is essential, however disagreeable, to
realise the nature of this shock. It matters little here whether
Hamlet's age was twenty or thirty: in either case his mother was a
matron of mature years. All his life he had believed in her, we may be
sure, as such a son would. He had seen her not merely devoted to his
father, but hanging on him like a newly-wedded bride, hanging on him
As if increase of appetite had grown
By what it fed on.
He had seen her following his body 'like Niobe, all tears.' And then
within a month--'O God! a beast would have mourned longer'--she married
again, and married Hamlet's uncle, a man utterly contemptible and
loathsome in his eyes; married him in what to Hamlet was incestuous
wedlock;[43] married him not for any reason of state, nor even out of
old family affection, but in such a way that her son was forced to see
in her action not only an astounding shallowness of feeling but an
eruption of coarse sensuality, 'rank and gross,'[44] speeding post-haste
to its horrible delight. Is it possible to conceive an experience more
desolating to a man such as we have seen Hamlet to be; and is its result
anything but perfectly natural? It brings bewildered horror, then
loathing, then despair of human nature. His whole mind is poisoned. He
can never see Ophelia in the same light again: she is a woman, and his
mother is a woman: if she mentions the word 'brief' to him, the answer
drops from his lips like venom, 'as woman's love.' The last words of the
soliloquy, which is _wholly_ concerned with this subject, are,
But break, my heart, for I must hold my tongue!
He can do nothing. He must lock in his heart, not any suspicion of his
uncle that moves obscurely there, but that horror and loathing; and if
his heart ever found relief, it was when those feelings, mingled with
the love that never died out in him, poured themselves forth in a flood
as he stood in his mother's chamber beside his father's
marriage-bed.[45]
If we still wonder, and ask why the effect of this shock should be so
tremendous, let us observe that _now_ the conditions have arisen under
which Hamlet's highest endowments, his moral sensibility and his genius,
become his enemies. A nature morally blunter would have felt even so
dreadful a revelation less keenly. A slower and more limited and
positive mind might not have extended so widely through its world the
disgust and disbelief that have entered it. But Hamlet has the
imagination which, for evil as well as good, feels and sees all things
in one. Thought is the element of his life, and his thought is
infected. He cannot prevent himself from probing and lacerating the
wound in his soul. One idea, full of peril, holds him fast, and he cries
out in agony at it, but is impotent to free himself ('Must I remember?'
'Let me not think on't'). And when, with the fading of his passion, the
vividness of this idea abates, it does so only to leave behind a
boundless weariness and a sick longing for death.
And this is the time which his fate chooses. In this hour of uttermost
weakness, this sinking of his whole being towards annihilation, there
comes on him, bursting the bounds of the natural world with a shock of
astonishment and terror, the revelation of his mother's adultery and his
father's murder, and, with this, the demand on him, in the name of
everything dearest and most sacred, to arise and act. And for a moment,
though his brain reels and totters,[46] his soul leaps up in passion to
answer this demand. But it comes too late. It does but strike home the
last rivet in the melancholy which holds him bound.
The time is out of joint! O cursed spite
That ever I was born to set it right,--