for he asks whether his plot would not any day get him a fellowship in a company of players. Again, with what a calm deliberation and congenial cunning -no feeling of disgust at an unpleasant necessity-does this man who rails so bitterly against his uncle's treachery proceed to open the letter which his companions carried, ruthlessly substituting their names for his own, though there was no evidence that they were privy to the plot against his life. ery, that sincerity of nature, which justifies Laertes in describing him as free from all contriving;" and as a heritage also, he has that faculty for dissimulation which is evident in his character. Explain it how we may, it is certain that a self-feeling mortal who, as far as conscious life is concerned, is perfectly sincere, who energetically rebels against the deceit or wrong-doing of others, is sometimes over-mastered and deceived by his unconscious nature, so that he is an actual unwitting hypocrite as regards his own life. Hamlet is free from all contriving with selfish aim to injure others, but he feigns with sustained method, with a skill which could never be learnt, for his own protection. Had he lived, we may believe that, as years went on, he would have more and more clearly displayed the virtues of his paternal antecedent. "He was likely, had he been put upon, to have proved most royally." Strange as it may seem, we not uncommonly observe the character of the mother, with her emotional impulses and subtle but scarce conscious shifts, in the individual when young, while the calm deliberation and conscious determination of the father come out more plainly as he grows older. Setting aside any necessity which Shakspeare might think himself under to follow the old play, it is in Hamlet's inherited disposition to dissimulation that we find the only explanation of his deliberately feigning madness when, to all appear ances, policy would have been much better served if he had not so feign- And when Polonius, with senile vanity ed. But he has a love of the secret and doting garrulity, sets forth what he way for its own sake; to hoist the en- deems to be the very cause of Hamlet's gineer with his own petard is to him a lunacy, and with a lying invention runs most attractive prospect; and he breaks through the stages of its invasion, the out into positive exultation at the idea short answers and abiding doubts of the of outwitting Rosencrantz and Guilden-king prove that he did not believe the stern, with whom he was to go to Eng-old man's story: "How may we try it land: "It shall go hard But I will delve one yard below their mines, And blow them at the moon: O'tis most sweet, When in one line two crafts directly meet !" The first words which he utters, again, after the success of the play which he had devised to catch the king, are, as Gervinus has pointed out, not words of gratification at the result, but words of admiration of his own constructive skill; NEW SERIES-VOL. I., No. 4. Some people are so constituted that they must do things in a secret manner when there is no possible advantage to be gained by secrecy. Burrowing under ground like moles, they are all the time as blind as moles are wrongly said to be, and usually seem to think that everybody else is so too. Hamlet did not deceive the crafty king by his feigned madness; and had not a stronger power than human will been on his side, it would have gone hard with him. If, as he professed, he essentially was not mad, but mad in craft, it was verily a most mad kind of craft. The king suspects from the first that there is some unknown cause more than his father's death which thus afflicts him, and is anxious to discover it; he speaks also of "Hamlet's transformation," not of his madness, in the first scene with Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. Again, in the next scene he asks: "And can you by no drift of conference Get from him, why he puts on this confu sion?" further?" He will in company with 30 Was not like madness. There's something | leaving him no time for reflection. Even in his soul O'er which his melancholy sits on brood; And I do doubt the hatch and the disclose Will be some danger." Quickly he resolves that Hamlet shall go to England; and wisely does he do so, considering the words which he had just overheard: "I say we will have no more marriages; those that are married already, all but one, shall live; the rest shall keep as they are." The insanity, then, which Hamlet exhibits is not of a simple character. There is actual feigning, as he himself confesses, as the vigorous coherence of his profound soliloquies and his unfeigned speeches proves, as the king plainly recognizes, and as the deep significance of his wilful extravagances-the "method in his madness" - testifies; but there is beneath all that a real melancholic mood of mind, a genuine morbid subjectivity, of which he is himself keenly conscious, and which he has admirably described: "I have of late (but wherefore I know not) lost all my mirth, foregone all custom of exercise; and, indeed, it goes so heavily with my disposition, that this goodly frame, the earth, seems to me a sterile promontory; this most excellent canopy, the air, look you this brave overhanging firmament; this majestical roof fretted with golden fire-why, it appears no other thing to me than a foul and pestilent congregation of vapors. What a piece in the feigned exhibitions of madness, there are sincere outbreaks of his excitable disposition. When he would feign, he is so genuinely moved that he falls out of his character, and speaks with such sincerity and significance, that the king rightly suspects a plot. He spoils the part which he should play because he is too much interested in the events, and cannot lay aside his personality. Marvellous beyond all explanation is the subtle and artistic skill with which Shakspeare has thus preserved the consistency of Hamlet's real character amidst all the extravagant displays of his assumed character. He exhibits Hamlet in spite of himself-his unconscious nature overpowering his conscious dissimulation. It marks, again, the intellectual preponderance which was so special a feature of Hamlet's character, that he can reason so well about his own morbid feeling, and take deliberate steps to test the extent of his infirmity. In such a miserable mood of mind there is great cause of self-distrust; the ghost which he has seen may be a coinage of the brain, a subjective bodiless creation, which ecstacy is very cunning in." "The spirit that I have seen May be a devil; and the devil hath power To assume a pleasing shape; yea, and, perhaps, Out of my weakness and my melancholy (As he is very potent with such spirits) Abuses me to damn me." of work is man! How noble in reason! how infinite in faculties! in form and moving how express and admirable! in action, how like an angel! in apprehension, how like a god! It is with deliberation, therefore, that the beauty of the world! the paragon of an- he seeks for a means of testing his conimals! And yet to me what is this quint-dition, and with eagerness that he emessence of dust? Man delights not me, nor braces the opportunity which the arrival woman neither; though by your smiling you of the players affords him of obtaining confirmation of the ghost's story. seem to say so.' " His great natural sensibility and his very active imagination would combine to render Hamlet distrustful of himself, averse to active courses, and seemingly timid, so that he might justly describe himself as one not easily moved to anger; but that very sensibility of character would be the cause of great excitability on the occasion of a sudden event pressing unavoidably upon him, and This view, it should be added, is that which is taken by Dr. Bucknill, our first English authority on any question of insanity, in his exhaustive analysis of the character of Hamlet, in the Psychology of Shakspeare, now out of print. "If his occulted guilt Do not itself unkennel in one speech, When the behavior of the king at the play has proved that no morbid imagination has created the horrible revela tions of the ghost, then he passionately flings aside such a suggestion of his mother: "Mother, for love of grace, Lay not that flattering unction to your soul, That not your trespass, but my madness, speaks." So sure as he now is of the ghost's real- | has himself; he does not dare to specuity, still he does not act. Herein how late sufficiently on the stupidity of mandifferent does he show himself from kind. Accordingly, the successful man Laertes! The mere whispers of cal- in the practical affairs of life is he who umny excite Laertes to furious action; does not see too much, who sees dishe sends allegiance to hell, vows to the tinctly only that which he wishes, and blackest devil, dares damnation, but who, therefore, not doubting himself, will be revenged for his father's death acts with definite purpose and determined to that point he stands, let come what energy. To the conscientious man of come may. Hamlet, on the contrary, great reflective habit, it is sometimes a has the solemn evidence of a spirit from real affliction when he must definitely the dead, and the strongest possible mo- act; and he would truly do well, for his tive for revenge, but meditates so much own comfort's sake, to rush at a resoluthat he can come to no resolution. La- tion with a certain wilful blindness-to ertes is mastered by his passion, which allow, if need be, the fall of a coin to hurls him into desperate action; Hamlet determine his course; but, having once has such mastery over passion that it resolved, to work definitely with all his cannot become a sufficient motive for might to his end. Any one may delibaction-his intellectual superiority makes erate till death overtakes him before he him practically inferior. He is himself is sure, and Nature charges herself with quite aware of his deficiency, and ana- compensation. "He that observeth the lyzes his own state of mind with great winds shall not sow, and he that regardeth the clouds shall not reap." longer any one lives, the more deeply is he satisfied of the truth of the saying, that the world is governed with extremely little wisdom; he perceives that he has often given men credit for foresight where they have wisely held their peace and profited by events, and that in a matter of which he had but little knowledge he has sometimes assumed the profoundest policy in what was really a blundering accident. As the events of practical life insist upon action, the deliberative man is ultimately forced to shut, as it were, one eye-to act even when the motive does not satisfy his intellectual consciousness. Custom lends a kind of easiness to subsequent attempts, and that which was at first a painful trial becomes in time an easy habit. accuracy: "Or some craven scruple Of thinking too precisely on the eventA thought which, quartered, hath but one part wisdom, And ever three parts coward." He recognizes that rightly to be great is not to stir without great argument, but, once satisfied, to throw aside all care for consequences to make mouths at the invisible event. He reproaches himself as "a rogue and peasant slave," that, with the motive and cue for revenge which he has, he still hesitates; and yet his unconscious nature overmasters his intellectual consciousness, and he does nothing. Although we admit that Hamlet's failing was a want of power of action, it must be allowed that Hamlet's misfortune was the want of a proper sphere of action. That excess of imagination which paralyzes resolution would most likely have disappeared under a life of activity. "The hand of little employment has the daintier sense." It is the fault of minds like his that they overestimate realities; they live in an ingeniously devised, complex world of imagination rather than in the comparatively coarse, actual, external world, and balance possibilities with so great a subtlety, that there is no resultant force of will. A person of great intellectual activity is prone to attribute to others an equal penetration into things to that which he The The shortness of his allotted span, and the exigencies of life, will not permit any one the luxury of over-estimating his powers or his responsibilities; he must be content as an atom doing its inevitable work in the universe, and accepting calmly the fate of his nature, cast his follies and his wise acts with equal tranquillity into the great whole, which, under the guiding law of its des tiny, will surely shape them to their proper ends. Were a man but to think of it, the responsibility of not acting is sometimes infinitely greater than of the most rash act. Suppose that Hamlet had killed the king directly he was ap fear of something after death sicklies o'er the native hue of resolution. Imagination, not considering too curiously, may follow the noble dust of Alexander to the bung-hole, and yet Hamlet cannot but fear that death may not be a dreamless slumber from which no archangel's trump shall ever wake him. Reason as convincingly as philosophy may, it never convinces the feelings; though dismissed with excellent and unanswerable logic, they return again and again, and, like Rachel weeping for her children, they refuse to be comforted. What, indeed, does philosophy avail, "unless philoso pointed by nature the minister of its re- | be wished; and yet the unaccountable venge, what a host of calamities would have been spared! Then Ophelia had not, after a miserable madness, been drowned; her father had not been accidentally stabbed; Rosencrantz and Guildenstern would not then have been executed; and Hamlet himself, his mother, and Laertes, would not have perished in a common ruin. A catalogue of horrors was the result of Hamlet's great feeling of responsibility in the important scene wherein he played, as in humbler scenes a catalogue of mischiefs is frequently the result of an irresolution springing from an over-estimated responsibility. Let a man be never so wise, he must some-phy can make a Juliet ?" times drift at the mercy of fate, without anchorage; and let a man be never so foolhardy, fortune will sometimes bring his boat safely into the harbor. "The race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, nor yet riches to men of understanding, nor yet favor to men of skill; but time and chance happeneth to them all"-a truth which Hamlet had not failed to recognize in his experience: "Rashly, And praised be rashness for it; let us know Our indiscretion sometimes serves us well, Where our deep plots do pall; and that should teach us There's a divinity that shapes our ends, "Go to: it helps not-it prevails not. Talk no more." The appearance of the forces of young Fortinbras, and Hamlet's soliloquy after his encounter with them, have been thought by some-even by Goethe-to be needless events, which uselessly delay the action, and improperly dissipate the reader's attention. But is it not in ex act accordance with Hamlet's irresolution that the action of the drama should be delayed? Is it not well that the reader's imagination should be made to wander, and by presenting a sort of reflection of the manifold considerations of the much-meditating Hamlet, enforce How admirably throughout the play a certain sympathy with him? Not only, is exhibited the want of harmony which however, does this scene exhibit Fortinso often exists between intellectual spec- bras, who "for a fantasy and trick of ulation and the feelings which are the fame," " even for an egg-shell," is congenuine utterance or mirror of the na- tent to expose himself to danger and ture-the conscious life over which there death, as a striking contrast to Hamlet, is control, and the unconscious life which who, with the strongest motive for reso constantly overtakes and overpowers venge, can do no more than " unpack the individual! It is as if Shakspeare his heart with words, and fall a-cursing had wished to point out that, how wisely like a very drab," but it affords to Hamsoever man may reason, it is still impos- let an excellent occasion for a close selfsible for him to shake off the unreason-analysis, and seems to reveal to us a real able feelings which are deeply planted development of his character. At our in his nature. The irresolution of Ham- first meeting him it is immediately after let is in part owing to a continual oscil- his father's death, when he has just relation between these warring elements turned from college, and when we may of a nature not in harmony with itself. justly think that he has come upon his The king proves to him with convincing first serious trial in life; but in his solillogic that it is folly to indulge an un- oquy after meeting with Fortinbras, we ceasing grief for a father dead; but not- see his character as it has been developed withstanding that the arguments are uneyes under the severe but sucanswerable, Hamlet is not cheered. To cessful training of a mighty sorrow: shuffle off this mortal coil Hamlet per- "Night brings out stars, as sorrows show us ceives to be a consummation devoutly to before our truths." It is not a passionate and furious soliloquy like that which he bursts out in after his interview with the players, when he reviles himself as a rogue and peasant slave, and lashes himself into a great passion; it is not the gloomy meditation of a morbid mind, wishful to end by self-destruction the heartache and the thousand natural woes that flesh is heir to; but it is a passionless and intellectual soliloquy, at the end of which he makes a deliberate resolution. In the previous soliloquy he is violent and demonstrative, but the passion subsides, and with it the resolution vanishes. As calmness returns matters do not seem so clear: the ghost may have deceived him; action seems most desperate; and the determination-as all emotional resolves not at once carried into effect are apt to do-melts away: "What to ourselves in passion we propose, The passion ending, doth the purpose lose." But now that he has definitely resolved, after reflection, to execute the vengeance with which he is charged, he makes a deliberate resolution of the will: "O from this time forth My thoughts be bloody, or be nothing worth." Shakspeare's views of destiny very closely resemble those which are met with in Eschylus and the ancient poets. The fatal catastrophe in "Hamlet" is so contrived, as it has been said, as to appear a fulfilment of destiny rather than the result of human act; but it is the marvellous excellence of Shakspeare that he represents his characters as a part of destiny; the consummation is exhibited as the inevitable product of the individual character and the circumstances in which it was placed. Hence it is that his villains, though monstrously wicked, as Iago, or unnaturally cruel, as the bastard Edmund, do not excite unmitigated anger and disgust, but rather interest and a sort of intellectual sympathy, and that the virtues of his best characters appear not as merits but as necessary results of their natures. He always implies a difference in nature between one person and another, "wherein they are not guilty," or wherein they are not meritorious, and displays in a natural evolution the necessary result which the fate of his character and his circumstances makes for each one. How surely do all things work together in "Hamlet" to the dreadful catastrophe! The pirate-ship, appearing from unknown regions of the ocean, has its appointed part equally with the impulsive character of Hamlet in accomplishing the unavoidable destiny. The king exercises foresight, and plots desperately to ward off the evil; but the hand of fate is against him, and his deeplaid schemes are confounded by the most unexpected accident. Hamlet cannot lay down a plan of action for doing what he must do; but the hand of fate is with him and drives him on to his end. "The hour of doom arrives, and the innocent and the guilty, the erring and the avenger, all perish.' And yet, had not Hamlet accidentally stabbed Polonius behind the arras, his secret would have been betrayed to the king; had he not by chance got hold of the poisoned foil in his combat with Laertes, the king might have lived on in his sceptred guilt. In the end it was the merest chance that Hamlet did live to accomplish his revenge; for he was the first wounded by the envenomed rapier, and might easily have died before Laertes, who tells him of the king's treachery. And when he does stab the king, it is rather an impulsive act of vengeance for the last villany disclosed than from any remembrance of his father's murder or the command of his father's ghost; he becomes at last the accidental instrument of a punishment which he had long schemed but schemed in vain. But retribution for the wicked king was written down in the book of destiny; Nature sent forth a spirit from her secret realms to declare it, and human will was powerless to hasten or avert the hour of doom. With what a terrible and gradually evolving certainty, again, does the crime of the king revenge itself! The curse of his crime tracks the culprit with an unrelenting persistency; though he hide never so cunningly, turn again and again in his course, and struggle with unspeakable energy, yet it brings him down at last. All the perfumes of Arabia cannot sweeten the murderer's hand, nor all the waters in the ocean wash out that single drop of blood. |