ideas. The shadow descends till it measures the former brightness; the
revulsion is as great as the enthusiasm.
IV.
Why, then, does he accept the mission of the Ghost? To answer this fully
we must accompany him to the platform.
In this scene Hamlet exhibits in perfection all the elements of
courage--coolness, determination, daring. He is singularly free from
excitement; and this is not because he is absorbed in his own thoughts,
for he easily falls into conversation, and treats the first subject that
comes to hand with his usual felicity and fulness, rising from the
private instance to a public law, and applying it to large and larger
groups of facts till his father's spirit stands before him. Thrilled and
startled he pauses not, "harrowed with fear and wonder like Horatio on
the previous night, but at once addresses it, as he said he would,
though hell itself should gape." No more dignified rebuke ever shamed
terror from the soul than Hamlet administers to his panic-stricken
friends, and when they would forcibly withhold him from following the
Ghost, the steady determination with which he draws his sword is marked
by the play upon words:
"By Heav'n, I'll make a ghost of him that lets me."
In the presence of his father the old life is rekindled within his
filial awe and affection, unquestioned obedience, daring resolve. He
will "sweep to his revenge,"
"And thy commandment all alone shall live
Within the book and volume of my brain,
Unmixed with baser matter."
And this commandment had forbidden him to taint his mind against his
mother.
But what is his first exclamation when he is released from physical
horror, and his thoughts regain the living world? It is
"O! most pernicious woman!"
This singular phrase is one of Shakespeare's final touches, as does not
appear in the quarto of 1603; and it marks, therefore, his deliberate
intention, and is of the highest significance. He who will hereafter be
so often amazed at his own forgetfulness has already forgotten.
When his friends reappear, Hamlet is in a half-ironical humourous and
assuming an astonishing superiority over ghost and mortal alike informs
them--
"It is an honest ghost, that let me tell you."
But when this honest ghost plays sepulchral tricks, Hamlet shows small
respect to it, and at last, in a tone of almost command, cries--
"Rest! rest! perturbed spirit!"
Does Hamlet slight the command of the Ghost? By no means. He never
repudiates it or even calls it in question. There is no hesitation,
cavil, or debate in the acceptance of it as a duty. But the purpose
cools. It cools even on the platform. What passes within him is hardly a
process of thought, otherwise some intimation of it would be given in
his numerous self-communings. But there is a process prior to thought
in which the relations of things are felt before they are defined, and a
conclusion is reached, and a disposition decided, without the mediation
of the reason. There is a vague attraction this way or that, a blind
forecast and correlation of issues, and the whole being is so influenced
that, while there is no register of result in the memory, there is a
direction of the will and a determination of conduct. From the shadow of
the future that passes thus before his spirit he shrinks averse. To
scramble for a throne--to lord it over such a crew--to be linked to them
as by chains--to return to that polluted Court--to be the centre of
intrigues and hatreds--and for what? To leave the darker deeper evil
untouched. Some process such as this may account for the change from
"sweeping to his revenge" to
"The time is out of joint;--O cursed spite!
That ever I was born to set it right!"
In the meantime, in the well-lit chambers of consciousness, no note is
taken of this shadowy logic. This may appear paradoxical: but the last
of the changes from love to indifference, from faith to doubt, is the
avowal of change. When the ties of habit and tradition are inwardly
outgrown, we bend and intend with our whole being in a new direction
without the purpose or even the desire to move. So Hamlet silently
evades the obligation he so readily undertakes, and sinks back into that
more powerful interest that almost at once regains possession of his
mind. Still, before he quits the scene of this ghastly disclosure, he
resolves to counterfeit madness--and this for two reasons: he will seem
(to himself) to be conspiring, and he will gain a license to speak his
mind without offence. This is the only use to which he puts this mask of
madness, as Coleridge has remarked. But why should he instinctively seek
to gain more latitude of speech? Because since the marriage of his
mother he had suffered from an enforced silence with regard to the
proceedings of the Court, as he distinctly tells us in the first
soliloquy--
"But break, my heart, for I must hold my tongue!"
From his first utterances after he had left the platform, we at once
infer that the mission of the Ghost had failed. There is nothing that
Hamlet would sooner part with "than his life." There is, therefore, no
prospect before his mind, no awakening energy, no latent enterprise.
With what relief, on the contrary, does he turn from the real to the
ideal world! How cordially does he welcome the players, and how
gracefully, so that we seem for the first time to make acquaintance with
his natural tone and manner. Here at least is man's world, whose reality
can never be undermined. He plies them with questions, indulges in
literary criticism, and asks for a recitation. Suddenly he sees tears
in the actors' eyes. He hurries them away, and when he is alone breaks
out--
"Oh, what a rogue and peasant slave am I!"
He is jealous of the players' tears. Here again is no debate, but simply
surprise at his own apathy. He tries to lash himself to fury but fails,
and falls back on the practical test he is about to apply to the guilt
of the king which he must appear to doubt, or this pseudo-activity
would be too obviously superfluous.
In the interval between the instruction to the players and the play,
Hamlet's mind, unless absorbed by some strong preoccupation, would
naturally turn to the issue of the plot; and he would reveal, if he
admitted us to the secret workings of his mind, if not resolution, at
least irresolution, something to mark the vacillation of which we hear
so much. But we find that the whole matter has dropped from his mind,
and that he has drifted back to the theme of--
"Oh! that this too too solid flesh would melt!"
It is now recast more in the tone of deliberate thought than of excited
feeling: he asks not which is best for him, but which is "nobler in the
mind,"--an impersonal, a profoundly human question, which so fascinates
our attention that we forget its irrelevance to the matter in hand or
what we assume to be the matter in hand. It is as if he had never seen
the Ghost. In his profound preoccupation he speaks of the "bourne from
which no traveller returns," and of "evils that we know not of,"
although the Ghost had told him "of sulphurous and tormenting flames."
Hamlet muses, "To sleep! perchance to dream,--ay, there's the rub," but
the Ghost had said--
"I am thy father's spirit,
Doomed for a certain term to walk the night,
And, for the day, confined to fast in fires."
It is plain that the "traveller" that had returned was not present at
all to his mental vision nor his tale remembered. In his former
meditation he had accepted the doctrine of the church; here he
interrogates the human spirit in its still place of judgment; and he
gives its verdict with a sigh of reluctance--
"Thus conscience does make cowards of us all."
Considering that this and the succeeding lines occur at the end of a
soliloquy on suicide,--that there is not only the absence of any
reference to the ghostly action, but positive proof that the subject was
not present to his thoughts, it is nothing less than astonishing that
this passage should be quoted as Hamlet's witness to his own
"irresolution." He would willingly take his own life; conscience forbids
it; therefore conscience makes us cowards: and then with a still
further generalization he announces the opposition of thought and
resolution, causing the failure of
"enterprises of great pith and moment."
Now the only enterprise on which lie was engaged--the testing of the
king's conscience--was in a fair way of success, and did, in fact,
ultimately succeed.
The scene with Ophelia that immediately follows is the development of
another theme in the first soliloquy, "Frailty! thy name is woman."
Ophelia is inseparably connected with the queen in Hamlet's mind. She is
a Court maiden, sheltered, guarded, cautioned, and, as we see in the
warnings of Polonius and Laertes, cautioned in a tone that is suggestive
of evil. What scenes she must have witnessed--the confusion on the death
of the king, the exclusion of Hamlet from the throne, the marriage of
the queen to the usurper! Yet she takes it all quite sweetly and
subserviently. She is as docile to events as she is to parental advice.
To such a one every circumstance is a fate, and she bows to it, as she
bows to her father: "Yes, my lord, I will obey my lord." She denies
Hamlet's access to her though he is in sorrow; though he has lost all,
she will "come in for an after loss." One would rather leave her
blameless in the sweetness of her maiden prime and the pathos of her
end, but to place her, as some do, high on the list of Shakespeare's
peerless women fastens upon Hamlet unmerited reproach. There is a love
that includes friendship, as religion includes morality, and such was
Portia's for Bassanio. There is a love whose first instinctive movement
is to share the burden of the loved one, and such was Miranda's love for
Ferdinand. And there is a love that reserves the light of its light and
the perfume of its sweetness for the shadowed heart and the sunless
mind. How would Cordelia have addressed this king and queen--how would
she have aroused the energy of Hamlet and rehabilitated his trust, with
that voice, soft and low indeed, but firmer than the voice of Cato's
daughter claiming to know her husband's cause of grief! As Hamlet talks
to Ophelia, you perceive that the marriage of his mother is more present
to him than the murder of his father. He discourses on the frailty of
woman and the corruption of the world; "Go to, it hath made me mad. We
will have no more marriages."
The play is acted. The king is "frighted with false fire," and Hamlet is
left with the feeling of a dramatic success and the proof of his uncle's
guilt. He sings snatches of song. Horatio falls in with his mood. "You
might have rhymed," he says. The only effect of the confirmation of the
ghost's story, as at its first hearing, is a fresh blaze of indignation
against his mother. When Polonius has delivered his message that the
queen would speak with him, Hamlet presently says, "Leave me, friend;"
and then his mind clouds like the mind of Macbeth before he enters the
chamber of Duncan--
"'Tis now the very witching time of night,
When churchyards yawn, and hell itself breathes out
Contagion to this world: now could I drink hot blood,
And do such bitter business as the day
Would quake to look on."
As he passes to the Queen's closet in this tense and dangerous mood, he
sees the king on his knees. His brow relaxes in a moment; he stops,
looks curiously at him, and says, familiarly--
"Now might I do it, pat, now he is praying."
He did not mean to do it, because he was on his way to his mother's
closet, but some reason must be found. The word "praying" suggests it.
"This would be scanned;" and he scans it, and decides to leave him for
another day. As he enters the closet to speak the words "like daggers,"
his quick decisive gesture and shrill peremptory tones alarm the queen.
She rises to call for help; he seizes her roughly: "Come, come, and sit
you down." Nothing can mark Hamlet's awful resentment more than his
persistence through two interruptions that would have unnerved the
bravest, and checked the most relentless spirit. As he looks at his
mother there is that in his countenance bids her cry aloud for
assistance. There is a movement behind the arras. Hamlet lunges at once.
Is it the king? No; it is but Polonius. Had it been the king, it would
not have diverted him from his purpose. He is no more afraid of killing
than he is afraid of death, and is as hard to arrest in his reproof of
his mother as in his talk with his father:
"Leave wringing of your hands; peace, sit you down."
His mother confesses her guilt. Hamlet is not appeased. He vilifies her
husband with increasing vehemence; the Ghost rises as if to protect the
queen. "Do not forget," he cries, although the king's name was at that
moment on Hamlet's lips in terms of bitterest contempt. But it was
understood between the two spirits that it was the queen's husband and
not his father's murderer that he was thus denouncing. After the
disappearance of the ghost, he turns again to his mother; and on leaving
her almost reluctantly, without further punishment, asks pardon of his
own genius--"Forgive me this my virtue," more authoritative to Hamlet
than a legion of spirits.
This scene is the spiritual climax of the play, and from it the whole
tragedy directly proceeds. The death of Polonius leads on the one side
to the madness of Ophelia, on the other to the revenge of Laertes and
the final catastrophe. Hamlet's apathy at the death of Polonius is of
the same character as his oblivion of the ghost's command, and has the
same origin. For there is no apathy like that of an over-mastering
passion, whether it be love or jealousy, or a new faith, or a terrible
doubt. It draws away the life from other duties and interests, and
leaves them pale and semi-vital. Men thus possessed acknowledge the
duties they evade, let slip occasion, are "lapsed in time and passion,"
and are surprised at their own oblivion.
This happens again to Hamlet as he is leaving Denmark. His own inaction
is flashed back upon him by the sight of the gallant array of
Fortinbras, and his first words--
"How all occasions do inform against me,"
disclose that the duty of revenge has its obligations and sanctions, not
in the inward but the outward world; not in the genius of the
man--secret, individual, detached--but in the outward mind of inherited
opinion and ancestral creed, that we share with others in unreflecting
fellowship. The world has charge of it, and reflects it back upon him
new in the actor's tears, and now--
"In this army of such mass and charge,
Led by a delicate and tender prince."
This speech must be read, like a Spartan despatch, on the [Greek:
skutalê] or counterpart of Hamlet's personality. He begins, as after the
player's recitation, with a confession, and ends with an excuse. He is
startled into an avowal, which he qualifies by a subtle
after-thought--"What is a man," he cries, who acts as I have acted, who
allows
"That capability and god-like reason,
To fust in him unused?"
"A beast, no more." But as he looks at Fortinbras and his soldiers,
another thought strikes him. These men act because they do not pause to
think. I must have been thinking, _not too little, but too much_; and
with that he turns short round upon his first confession, escapes from
the charge of "bestial oblivion," and takes refuge in an imaginary
"thinking too precisely on the event;" which indeed, as he remembers,
had more than once prevented him taking his own life. But he condemns
himself without cause; he cannot now return to that earlier stage of
unreasoning activity in appointed paths, and the joy and grace of
unconscious obedience.
When Hamlet returns from England, he takes Horatio apart to recount his
adventures and unfold the plot of the king; but before he utters a word
of this his settled mood is revealed to us in the graveyard scene.
Hamlet, ever prone to belittle the world, is not loth to watch the
making of a grave. There is the limit and boundary of what can be done
or suffered; there the triumph is ended, and there the enmity is stayed.
He advances step by step to look closely at the ruins of mortality; to
slight the great names of kings and follow heroes to the dust. As he
sees the skull tossed out of the grave, the king is already dead to him.
"How the knave jowls it to the ground, as if it were Cain's jawbone,
that did the first murder. This might be the pate of a politician, which
this ass now o'erreaches; one that would circumvent God, might it not?"
He is not satisfied till he takes the skull in his hand, and is
sarcastic on beauty and festive wit, and the base uses to which we may
come; when, from the other side, the procession of Ophelia advances. The
grace and allurement of Ophelia had awakened in the imaginative Hamlet a
feeling stronger and warmer indeed, but of the same relation to his
capacity of loving as that of Romeo for Rosaline, and as easily lost in
the glow or shadow of a deeper passion. That it was without depth and
sacredness is plain from his delighting to ridicule and torment her
father, and from his careless and equivocal jesting with her at the
play. But though not a deep experience, it was of a quality different
from that of other life. And the death of Ophelia had gathered into one
the records of the hours of love; the first and the last; the meetings
and the partings; the gifts, and flowers, and snatches of song. On these
tender memories the hollow clamour of Laertes breaks with a discord so
intolerable that Hamlet, who had with his usual reserve received the
news of her death with the cold exclamation, "What! the fair Ophelia!"
suddenly breaks into a fury and leaps into her grave.
* * * * *
In this study of Hamlet in relation to the ghost-story, we have seen
that the effect, both of the first recital and of its subsequent
confirmation, was to whet his mind against his mother; and that the
passages in which this is expressed are among the _final touches_ of the
master; that the deed of revenge is only flashed upon him from without;
and that, in the intervals between such awakenings of memory, he
relapses to the thought-sickness of the first soliloquy; that on the
only occasion when the bitterness of his sorrow leads him to meditate
self-destruction, there is no question of the ghost, the murder, or the
king; that the only ungovernable bit of fury is in the presence of his
mother; and that from this scene the drama is developed, and the final
catastrophe ensues.
V.
Supposing this "preoccupation" proved, what is the particular value and
significance of the fact? Before we can answer this we must set the
character of Hamlet in this new light clearly before us.
Shakespeare gives to him the rare nobility of feeling with the keenness
of personal pleasure and pain, the presence or absence of moral beauty.
He is one to whom public falsehood is private affliction, to whom
goodness in its purity, truth in its severity, honour in its brightness,
are the only goods worth a man's possessing, and the rest but a dream
and the shadow of a dream. Hamlet bears his private griefs with proud
composure. We have no lamentation on the death of his father, on the
defection of Ophelia, on his exclusion from the throne. Among the images
of horror and distress that crowd upon his mind in his mother's closet
there is one on which he is silent then, and throughout the play, and
that is her heartless desertion of his cause, as natural successor to
the crown. To make it entirely clear that we have here no type of morbid
weakness and excess, but the portrait of a representative man, we have
only to look at the careful way in which all the other characters are
touched and modelled so as to allow and enhance Hamlet's superiority,
This is true even of Horatio. We have already remarked that in their
scenes with the ghost the manhood of Hamlet is of a higher strain and
dignity. And not only in resolution, but in that other manly virtue of
self-reliance, his superiority is incontestable. Horatio follows Hamlet
at a distance as Lucilius follows Brutus, content if from time to time
he may stand at his side. Whatever is Hamlet's mood he reflects it, for
to him Hamlet is always great. Horatio never questions, presumes not to
give advice, echoes the scorn or laughter of his friend, is equally
contemptuous of the king, and, as he never urges to action, is, if his
friend is supposed to procrastinate, accomplice in his delay. Hamlet
detaches himself from the world and follows his own bent; he will admit
no guidance, and be subject to no dictation. He is not the man to be
hag-ridden like Macbeth, or humoured into remorseful deeds like Brutus.
The strong dramatic feature of his character, the secret of his
attraction on the stage, is his pure and independent personality. Who
has a word of solace from him, but when does he claim it? Who leaves any
mark or dint of intellectual impact on that firm and self-determined
mind? And if he is superior to Horatio, how much more to Laertes? Had
Shakespeare wished to exalt the quality of resolution at Hamlet's
expense, he would not have chosen so ignoble a representative of it as
this man. A true son of Polonius, a prater of moral maxims, while he is
all for Paris and its pleasures; violent, but weak; who, when he is told
of the tragic and untimely death of his sister, can find nothing better
to say than--
"Too much of water, hast thou, dear Ophelia?"
who, like Aufidius, has the outward habit and encounter of honour, but
is a facile tool of treacherous murder in the hands of the king. Compare
the conduct of the two when they are brought into collision, and the
final impression they leave. The readiness with which Hamlet undertakes
to fence for his uncle's wager is one of the most surprising strokes in
the play. What! with the foil in his hand, no plot, no project, not even
a word, not a look between him and Horatio that the occasion might be
improved! What absolute freedom from the malice which in another mind
is preparing his death. The treachery of Laertes is the more odious in
this, that the success of his plot depends on the generous confidence of
his victim. Polonius is handled in the same way with special reference
to Hamlet. His thinking is marked by slowness and insincerity, and when
he comes in contact with the rapid current of Hamlet's mind he is
benumbed; he can only mutter, "If this is madness, there is method in
it." What little portable wisdom was given to him in the first Act is
soon withdrawn--he stammers in his deceit, and the old indirectness
having no material of thought to work upon becomes a circumlocution of
truisms. As the play proceeds he is made, as if with a second intention,
more and more the antithesis, as he is the antipathy, of the prince. It
is the careful portrait of what Hamlet would hate--a remnant of senile
craft in the method with folly in the matter--a shy look in the dull and
glazing eye, that insults the honesty of Hamlet as much as the
shrivelled meaning with its pompous phrase insults his intelligence. So
with the other characters; they are all made to justify his demeanour
towards them. The queen is heard to confess her guilt, Ophelia is seen
to act as a decoy; his college friends attempt his death.
In as far then as Hamlet is right in his verdicts, blameless in his
aims, lofty in his ideal, and just in his resentment, he is a
representative man; and we have not the study of a special affliction,
but the fundamental drama of the soul and the world. This, whatever we
may call it, was the work at which Shakespeare laboured so long, and for
which he withdrew Hamlet from time to time for special study, every
fresh touch telling in this direction.
VI.