made up. He is an adherent of old superstitions and dogmas; he believes
in Purgatory, a Hell, and a Devil, and in the miraculous powers of
confession, holy communion, and the extreme unction. Yet, to some
degree, he is a Humanist, and would fain grant to Nature certain
rights. Scarcely has he yielded to the impulses of his blood, than
doubts begin to rise in him, and he begins to fear the Devil, who
might lure him into perdition. This inner discord, creating, as it does,
a mistrust in his own self, induces him, in the most important task of
his life, to appeal to Horatio. To him he says that, if the King's
occulted guilt does not come out ('unkennel itself'), he (Hamlet) will
look upon the apparition as a damned ghost, and (this is new) will
think that his 'imaginations are as foul as Vulcan's stithy.' [38]
By the interlude, Hamlet--and in this he is confirmed by Horatio--becomes
convinced of the King's guilt. All that he thereupon does is--to recite
a little ditty!
We have already made the acquaintance of Montaigne the soft-hearted,
who, as above mentioned, always was touched when seeing innocent
animals hunted to death, and who felt much emotion _at the tears
of the hart asking us for mercy_. At the same time we have
directed the reader's attention to the fact of his having said that
the 'common weal requires some to betray, some to lie, and some to
massacre,' [39] and that this task must be left to those who are
ready to sacrifice their honour and their conscience, and that men
who do not feel up to such deeds must leave their commission to the
stronger ones. This French nobleman naïvely avows that he has resolved
upon withdrawing into private life, not because he is averse to
public life--for the latter, he says, would 'perhaps equally suit
him'--but because, by doing so, he hopes to serve his Prince all the
more joyfully and all the more sincerely, thus following the free
choice of his own judgment and reason, and not submitting to any
restraint (_obligation particulière_), which he hates in every
shape. And he adds the following curious moral doctrine:--'This is
the way of the world. We let the laws and precepts follow their way,
but we keep another course.' [40]
Who could mistake Shakspere's satire against this sentimental nobleman,
who fights shy of action, in making Hamlet recite a little ditty at a
moment when he has become convinced of the King's guilt:--
Why, let the stricken deer go weep,
The hart ungalled play;
For some must watch, while some must sleep:
Thus runs the world away.
This gifted Frenchman, Montaigne, was a new, a strange, phenomenon
in the eyes of Shakspere and his active and energetic countrymen.
A man, a nobleman too, who lives for no higher aim; who allows himself
to be driven about, rudderless, by his feelings and inclinations;
who even boasts of this mental disposition of his, and sends a vain
book about it into the world! What is it to teach? What good is it
to do? It gives mere words, behind which there is no manly character.
Are there yet more _beaux esprits_ to arise who, in Epicurean
fashion, enjoy the beautiful thoughts of others, whilst they themselves
remain incapable for action, letting the time go out of joint?
Let us further study the character of Hamlet, and we shall find that
the satire against Montaigne becomes more and more striking--a veritable
hit.
The Queen asks for her son. Before he fulfils her wish and comes to her,
he utters a lullaby of superstition (these lines are new), wherewith to
tide over the excitement of his nature:--
'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.
Hamlet, always shrinking back from the impulses of his blood, fears
that the Devil might once more gain power over him:--
Soft! now to my mother!
O heart, lose not thy nature!
This nature of his, inclining to mildness and gentleness, he wishes
to preserve, and he resolves upon being 'cruel, not unnatural.' In
vain one seeks here for logic, and for the boundary between two words
which to ordinary common sense appear synonymous. In Montaigne,
however, we discover the clue of such a senseless argumentation.
In one of his Essays, [41] which contains a confusion of ideas that
might well make the humane Shakspere shudder, he writes:--
'Our condition, both public and private, is full of imperfections;
yet there is nothing useless in Nature, not even uselessness
itself.... Our being is cemented with sickly qualities: ambition,
jealousy, envy, vengeance, superstition, despair dwell in us, and
hold there so natural a possession that their counterfeit is also
recognised in beasts; for instance, cruelty--so unnatural a vice.
Yet he who would root out the seed of these qualities from the human
breast would destroy the fundamental conditions of our life.'
Now, Hamlet's resolution to be 'cruel, but not unnatural,' is but a
fresh satire against Montaigne's train of thoughts, who would fain be
a Humanist, but who does not break with the reasoning of Loyola and
of the Church, by which he permits himself to be guided as by
the competent authority, and which tolerates cruelty--nay, orders its
being employed for the furtherance of what it calls the 'good aim.'
The idea that cruelty is a necessary but useful evil, no doubt
induced Montaigne [42] to declare that to kill a man from a feeling
of revenge is tantamount to our protecting him, for we thus 'withdraw
him from our attacks.' Furthermore, this Humanist argues that revenge
is to be regretted if its object does not feel its intention; for,
even as he who takes revenge intends to derive pleasure from
it, so he upon whom revenge is taken must perceive that intention,
in order to be harrowed with feelings of pain and repentance. 'To kill
him, is to render further attacks against him impossible; not to
revenge what he has done.'
Shakspere already gives Hamlet an opportunity in the following scene
to prove to us that there is no boundary between cruel and unnatural
conduct; and that one cannot be cruel and yet remain natural. In
the most telling words, the cause of Hamlet's want of energy is
substantiated. Fate gives the criminal, the King, into the hands of
Hamlet. It is the most important moment of the drama. A stroke of
the sword would be enough to do the deed of revenge. The cause
which makes Hamlet hesitate is, that the criminal is engaged in
prayer, and that--
He took my father grossly, full of bread,
With all his crimes broad-blown, as flush as May;
And how his audit stands, who knows save Heaven?
Does Hamlet, then, _not_ act with refined cruelty?
Here, a new thought is inserted, which we mentioned already in the
beginning, and which turns the balance at the decisive moment:--
But in our circumstance and course of thought
It is heavy with him. [43]
A Shaksperean hero, with drawn sword, allows himself to be restrained
from action by the thought that, because 'it is heavy' with his own
murdered father, who is suffering in Purgatory, he (Hamlet) ought not
to kill the criminal now, but later on, when the latter is deeply
wading in sin--
When he is drunk asleep, or in his rage, ...
And that his soul may be as damn'd and black
As Hell, whereto it goes.
Hamlet has been called a philosopher whose energy has been paralysed
by too great a range of thought. For the sovereignty of human reason
this is a most dangerous premiss. Do we not owe to the full and free
use of that reason everything great which mankind has created?
History speaks of a thousand heroes (only think of Alexander, of Julius
Caesar, of Frederick the Great!) whose doings convince us that a strong
power of thought and action can go hand in hand, nay, that the latter
cannot be successful without the former.
But, on the other hand, there is a way of thinking with preconceived
supernatural conclusions--or rather, we must call it an absence of
thinking--when men allow themselves to be moved by the circumstances
of a traditional course of thought. Against such intellectual
slavery the great century of the Reformation rose. And the greatest
Humanist, Shakspere, scourges that slavery in the catharsis of his
powerful drama.
Questions of religion were not permitted to be treated on the stage.
But not merely the one deeply intelligent person for whom Shakspere
asks the players to act, and for whom the great master certainly
endeavoured to write--no, the public at large, too, will have
understood that the 'course of thought' which induced Hamlet to forego
action from a subtle refinement of cruelty, was not the course of
thought prevalent on this side of the Channel, and held up, in this
important scene, as that of a hero to be admired.
Hamlet resolved upon keeping out the soul of Nero from his 'firm bosom.'
(What a satire there is in this adjective 'firm'!) He means to be cruel,
but not unnatural; he will 'speak daggers, but use none.' A man who
lets himself be moved by extraneous circumstances is not his own
master. In cruel, unnatural manner, for no object whatever, he
murders poor Polonius. Then he begins to speak daggers in such a
manner as to get into a perfect ecstasy. Nor need any priest have
been ashamed of the sermon he preaches to his own mother.
In the first edition of 'Hamlet,' the scene between mother and son is
rather like a sketch in which most things are merely indicated, not
worked out. Only the part of the Ghost, with the exception of the line:--
Conceit in weakest bodies strongest works,
which is wanting in the first edition, and Hamlet's address to the
Ghost, are in both quartos the same. Even as in the first act, so this
time also, Hamlet, on seeing the Ghost, calls upon the saints:--
Save me, and hover o'er me with your wings,
You heavenly guards!
This was the usual course on the occasion of such doubtful apparitions,
of which one did not know whether they were 'airs of heaven' or 'blasts
from hell.'
A new intercalation is (in the first quarto there is no vestige of it),
that Hamlet reproaches his mother with having degraded 'sweet religion'
to 'a rhapsody of words;' that he says 'the Devil hath conquered her at
hoodman blind ;' that she should confess herself to Heaven, and 'assume
a virtue if she have it not;' that 'virtue itself of vice must pardon
beg in the fatness of these pursy times, yea, curb and woo, for leave
to do him good.' So also is the Queen's question new:--
Ay me, what act,
That roars so loud, and thunders in the _index_? [44]
There is no trace, in the first quarto, of the following most
characteristic thoughts:--
For, use almost can change the stamp of Nature [45]
And either curb (?) the Devil, or throw him out
With wondrous potency....
And when you are desirous to be blest,
I'll blessing beg of you.
Let us figure to ourselves before what public Hamlet first saw the
wanderer from Purgatory; before what youth he bade Ophelia go to
a nunnery; before what men he remained inactive at the critical
moment simply because the criminal is engaged in his prayers,
whilst his own murdered father died without Holy Communion, without
having confessed and received the Extreme Unction. Let us remember
before what audience he purposely made the thunders of the Index
roar so loud; at what place he gets into ecstasy; and where he first
preaches to his mother that the Devil may be mastered and thrown out.
Here, certainly, we have questions of religion!
Shakspere's genius has known how to transport these most important
questions of his time, away from the shrill contact with contemporary
disputes, into the harmonious domain of the Muses. He, and his friends
and patrons, did not look upon the subjects discussed in this tragedy
with the passionless, indifferent eyes of our century. Many men, no
doubt, were filled with the thought, to which Bacon soon gave a
scientific form, that the human mind can only make true progress if
it turns towards the inquiry into Nature, keeping far away from the
hampering influence of transcendental dogmas. The liberal, intellectual
tendencies of the Reformation were not yet fettered in England with
the new dogmatic strait waistcoat of a narrow-minded, melancholy sect.
And Shakspere's views, which he has embodied in 'Hamlet,' were not in
divinatory advance of his age; they were easily comprehensible to the
best of his time.
Our chief argument will be contained in the chapter in which we shall
hear Shakspere's adversaries launch out furiously against the tendency
of this drama. Meanwhile, we will exhaust the course of its action.
Hamlet has already come very near to that point of view where Reason
at last ceases to guide his conduct, and where he becomes convinced that
indiscretion often is of better service than deep planning.
Now in Montaigne's Essay [46] already mentioned we read:--'When an
urgent circumstance, or any violent or unexpected accident of State
necessity, induces a Prince to break his word and faith, or otherwise
forces him out of his ordinary duty, he is to ascribe that compulsion
to a lash of God's rod.'
The passage in which Hamlet consoles himself in regard to the murder
committed against Polonius is new:--
I do repent: but heaven hath pleased it so,
To punish me with this, and this with me,
That I must be their scourge and minister.
Hamlet, beholding the victim of his indiscretion, excuses himself thus:--
I must be cruel, only to be kind.
The cruel deed he has done, he palliates with the remark that
lovingkindness has forced him to it. Love of her God also forced
Catherine of Medicis to the massacre of St. Bartholomew.
Thus bad begins, and worse remains behind.
Yes; worse is coming! Hamlet knows that he is to be sent to England;
that the letters are sealed; that his two schoolfellows whom he trusts
as he will adders, bear the mandate. What does he do to prevent further
misfortune?
He rejoices that--
they must sweep my way,
And marshall me to knavery. [47]
He enjoys, in advance, the sweet presentiment of revenge which he
intends taking upon them. He lets things go without hindrance:--
Let it work!
For 'tis sport to have the engineer
Hoist with his own petard.
He enjoys his own crafty policy which shall blow his school-friends,
Rosencrantz and Guildenstern (who yet, so far as he knows, have not
been guilty in any way towards him!) 'at the moon:'--
O, 'tis most sweet
When in one line two crafts directly meet.
Because Hamlet gives utterance to high-sounding thoughts, to
sentimental dreams, and melancholy subtleties, it has been assumed
that his character is one nourished with the poet's own heart's blood.
A thousand times the noble sentiment of duty has been dwelt upon,
which it is alleged he is inspired with; and on account of his fine
words he has been more taken a fancy to than any other Shaksperian
figure. But that was not the poet's object. Great deeds were more
to him than the finest words. His contemporaries understood him;
for Montaigne--as we shall prove--was given over to the lowest scorn
of the age through 'Hamlet,' because the whole reasoning of Hamlet not
only was a fruitless, but a pernicious one.
In the fourth scene of the fourth act, the poet describes the frame of
mind of the hero before he steps on board ship. 'Excitements of his
reason and his blood' once more call him to revenge. This monologue,
in which Hamlet gives expression to his feelings and thoughts, is only
in the quarto of 1604. The folio of 1623 does not contain it. Shakspere,
in later years, may have thought that the soul-struggle of his hero had
been ended; and so he may have regarded the passage as a superfluous one,
in which Hamlet's better self once more asks him to seize the reins of
destiny with his own hands.
He sees how young Fortinbras, the delicate and tender prince, 'puff'd
with divine ambition, mouthes the invisible event for a piece of land not
large enough to hide the slain.' Hamlet philosophises that the man who
uses not his god-like reason is but a beast; for--
--He that made us with such large discourse
Looking before and after, gave us not
That capability and god-like reason,
To fust in us unused.
We further hear how Hamlet reasons about the question as to how 'to
be rightly great.' All the thoughts he produces, seem to flow from
the pen of the French philosopher. In Essay III. (13) of Montaigne
we read the beautiful words that 'the noblest master-work of man is to
live for a purpose (yivre d fropos),' and:--'The greatness of the soul
does not consist so much in drawing upwards, and haling forwards,
than in knowing how to range and to circumscribe itself. It holds
everything to be great, which is sufficient in itself. It shows
its superiority in more loving humble things than eminent ones.'
To the majesty of the human reason also, Montaigne, in spite of his so
often condemning it, knows how to render justice. In Essay I. (40)
he remarks: 'Shall we then dare to say that this advantage of reason
at which we rejoice so very much, and out of respect for which
we hold ourselves to be lords and emperors of all other creatures, has
been put into us for our torment? Why strive for the knowledge of things
if we become more cowardly thereby? if we lose, through it, the rest and
the tranquillity in which we should be without it? ... Shall we use the
intellect that has been given to us for our greatest good, to effect
our ruin; combating the designs of Nature and the general order of
things which implies that everyone should use his tools and means for
his own convenience?'
Noble thoughts! But it is not enough to play an aesthetic game with
them. The energetic English genius wishes that they should regulate
our life; that we should act in accordance with them, so that no tragic
complication should form itself, which could only be solved by the ruin
and death of the innocent together with the guilty. The monologue
concludes thus:--
O, from this time forth,
My thoughts be bloody, or be nothing worth!
Nevertheless, Hamlet continues his voyage.
The reader will remember that Montaigne spoke of an instinctive impulse
of the will--a daimon--by which he often, and to his final advantage,
had allowed himself to be guided, so much so that such strong impulses
might be attributed to divine inspiration. A daimon of this kind,
under whose influence Hamlet acts, is described in the second scene of
the fifth act. The passage is wanting in the first quarto. [48] Hamlet
tells Horatio how he lay in the ship, and how in his heart there was a
kind of fighting which would not let him sleep. This harassing condition,
the result of his unmanly indecision, he depicts in these words:--
Methought I lay
Worse than the mutines in the bilboes.
Then all at once (how could an impulsive manner of action be better
described?), before he could 'make a prologue to his brains,' Hamlet
lets himself be overcome by such a daimonic influence. He breaks open
the grand commission of others, forges a seal with a signet in his
possession, becomes a murderer of two innocent men, and draws the evil
conclusion therefrom:--
Let us know,
Our indiscretion sometimes serves us well,
When our deep plots do pall; and that should learn us,
There's a divinity that shapes our ends,
Rough-hew them how we will.
This view we have already quoted from Essay III. (12). In Florio's
translation (632):--'Therefore do our dessigns so often miscarry....
The heavens are angry, and I may say envious of the extension
and large privilege we ascribe to human wisdome, to the prejudice of
theirs: and abridge them so more unto us, by so much more we endeavour
to amplifie them.'
Hamlet takes the twofold murder committed against Rosencrantz and
Guildenstern as little to heart as the 'indiscreet' deed by which
Polonius was killed. Then the consolation was sufficient for him that
lovingkindness had forced him to be cruel. This time, his conscience
is not touched, because--
't is dangerous when the baser nature comes
Between the pass and fell incensed points
Of mighty opposites.
With such argumentation every tyranny may be palliated, especially by
those who, like Hamlet, think that--
A man's life 's no more than to say 'One.'
Yet another peculiarity of Montaigne's complex being is depicted by
Shakspere in the graveyard scene. He shows us every side of this
whimsical character who says of himself that he has no staying power
for any standpoint, but that he is driven about by incalculable
emergencies.
Let us read a passage in Essay II (12), and compare it with Hamlet's
enigmatic conduct towards Laertes. Montaigne describes himself in
these sentences:--'Being of a soft and somewhat heavy temperament, I
have no great experience of those violent agitations which mostly
come like a surprise upon our mind without allowing it leisure to
collect itself.' In spite of the resistance--he further says--which
he endeavoured to offer, even he, however, was occasionally thus
seized. He felt these agitations rising and growing in, and becoming
master over, himself. As in drunkenness, things then appeared to him
otherwise than he usually saw them. 'I manifestly saw the advantages
of the object which I sought after, augmenting and growing; and I felt
them becoming greater and swelling by the wind of my imagination.
I felt the difficulties of my enterprise becoming easier and simpler,
my reasoning and my conscience drawing back. But, that fire being gone,
all of a sudden, as with the flash of lightning, my mind resumed another
view, another condition, another judgment.'
In this manner Hamlet conducts himself towards Laertes. A great grief
takes possession of him when he hears of the death of Ophelia: he leaps,
like Laertes, into her grave; he grapples with him; he warns him that,
though 'not splenetive and rash,' he (Hamlet) yet has 'something
dangerous' in him. (He means the daimon which so fatally impelled
him against Rosencrantz and Guildenstern.) Hamlet and Laertes wrestle,
but they are parted by the attendants. Hamlet begins boasting, in
high-flown language, of what great things he would be able to do.
The Queen describes Hamlet's rage in these words:--
And thus awhile the fit will work on him;
Anon, as patient as the female dove,
When that her golden couplets are disclosed,
His silence will sit drooping. [49]
In the meantime, the fire with which Hamlet's soul had been seized,
is gone, like a flash of lightning. He changes to another point of
view--probably that one according to which everything goes its way
in compliance with a heavenly decree. The little verse he recites in
parting:--
Let Hercules himself do what he may,
The cat will mew and dog will have his day,
quite corresponds to such a passive philosophy which has gained the
mastery over him, and to which he soon falls a victim.
We are approaching the conclusion of the great drama. Here, again, in
order to explain Hamlet's action, or rather his yielding to influences
around him, we have to direct the attention of the reader to Essay
(III. 10), in which Montaigne tells how easily he protects himself
against the dangers of inward agitation by dropping the subject which
threatens to become troublesome to him before he is drawn on and carried
along by it. The doughty nobleman says that he has escaped from
many difficulties by not staking frivolously, like others, happiness
and honour, life and everything, on his 'rapier and his dagger.' [50]
There may be some truth in Montaigne's charge that the cause of not a
few struggles he has seen, was often of truly pitiful origin, and that
such struggles were only carried on from a mistaken feeling of
self-respect. It may be true also that it is a bad habit--as he
maintains--to proceed still further in affairs of this kind simply
because one is implicated. But how strange a confession of a nobleman
from whom we at all times expect bravery: 'For want of judgement our
hearte fails us.' [51]
Hamlet is engaged in such a struggle with Laertes through the graveyard
scene. The King, who has had good cause to study Hamlet's character
more deeply than anyone else, reckons upon his vanity in order to
decide him to the fencing-match. 'Rapier and dagger' are forced upon
weak-willed Hamlet by Osric. [52] How subtle is this satire! For
appearance' sake, in order to outshine Laertes, the Prince accepts
the challenge. [53] Happiness and life, which he ought long ago to
have risked for the purpose of avenging his father and his honour,
are now staked from sheer vanity. The 'want of prudence' Hamlet displays
in accepting a challenge which he must 'carry out from a (mistaken)
feeling of self-respect,' has the 'intolerable' consequence that,
shortly before he crosses swords with Laertes, he confesses to
Horatio:--'But thou would'st not think how ill all's here about my
heart.'