The Contemporary Review, January 1883

"the observed of all observers;"

he was of a free, open, unsuspicious temper—

"remiss,Most generous and free from all contriving."

He was fond of all martial exercises and expert in the use of the sword. He was a soldier first, a scholar afterwards; a soldier in his alacrity to fight

"Until his eyelids would no longer wag;"

a soldier even to

"The glass of fashion, and the mould of form;"

and, above all, a soldier in his sensibility on the point of honour, one who would think it well

"Greatly to find quarrel in a straw,When honour is at stake."

And Fortinbras, type of the man of action, recognized in him a kindred spirit—

"Bear Hamlet, like a soldier, to the stage;For he was likely, had he been put on,To have proved most royally;"

while Hamlet eyed Fortinbras with the envious longing of one who had missed his career. What must have been the felicity of life to such a man, whose vivacity no stress of calamity, no accumulation of sorrow could tame, whose enthusiasm embraced Nature, art, and literature, and whose delight was always fresh and new, "in this excellent canopy the air, in this brave o'erhanging firmament,"' and in the spectacle of man "so excellent in faculty, in form and moving so express and admirable, in action how like an angel, in apprehension how like a god?"

Without a warning the blow fell. His father was suddenly struck down; and while he was indulging a grief, poignant and profound indeed, but natural, wholesome, manly, his uncle usurped the crown. This second blow would be acutely felt, but it would rather rouse than prostrate his energies. There is no passion in Hamlet when there has been no love. And he had always held his uncle in slight esteem—foreboded something from his smiling insincerity. He never mentions him without an expression of contempt, hardly acknowledges him as king; he is a thing—of nothing—a farcical monarch—"a peacock"—and, in this particular act, no dread usurper, but a "cut-purse of the realm." Whether he designed to wait or was prepared to strike, his future was still intact, his energy unimpaired. His mother remained to him, now doubly dear and doubly great, and with her the tradition of the past. She was, as he gathered from her silence, like himself, retired from the world, absorbed in grief; but he was assured of her constancy and truth. Even the kind of distance between them in age and sex, in mind and character, was no barrier to this sympathetic relation. She was there with the expectation that makes heroism possible; she was there to watch, if not to further his enterprise, and to give it lustre with her praise. We are often quite unconscious of the commanding influence exerted on our life by those who are least in contact with it. To be cognizant of one steadfast and stainless soul is to have encouragement in difficulty and support in pain. The mere knowledge of its existence is a light within the mind, and a secret incentive to the best action. Though silent and apart, it is the witness of what is great, and our life is always seeking to rise within its sphere; while, by a secret transference—for souls are not retentive of their own goodness—our standards of living and thinking are maintained at their highest level, like water fed by a distant spring. All this and infinitely more than this was the Queen his mother to Hamlet. It is impossible, therefore, to measure the effect upon him of her marriage with his uncle. The shock of it is ever fresh throughout the play. In the third Act the whole frame of nature is still aghast at it:—

"Heaven's face doth glow;Yea, this solidity and compound mass,With tristful visage, as against the doom,Is thought-sick at the act."

And this was not only after the revelation of the Ghost, but after the confirmation of its truth by the test Hamlet had himself applied. Even then the first paroxysm has hardly subsided. You see the whole being measured by it, the mind stretched to give it utterance, the world called as a witness to its enormity:—

III

But it is at an earlier stage of this impression, when the thought of this profanation of the sacredness of life and the sanctity of love chills the life-blood of his heart, and then rushes burning through it like the shame of a personal insult, that he first stands before us in the palace of the King. In appearance nothing is changed. He sees the same crowd, the same obsequious attitudes, the same decorous forms; the trumpets with their usual flourish announce the arrival of the King and Queen; the Ministers of State precede them, and the Court ladies; the pretentious gravity of Polonius' brow; the dreamy innocence of Ophelia. The sovereigns seat themselves, the Queen looks smilingly around her as of old. All is easy, bright, and festive. All goes on as if this horrible revolution were the most natural thing in the world. Oh, that he could avoid the sight of it! Oh, that he could be quit of it all!

"Oh! that this too too solid flesh would melt,Thaw, and resolve itself into a dew;Or that the Everlasting had not fixedHis canon 'gainst self-slaughter!"

Although the nervous horror of his address to the Ghost is greater, there is no speech in which Hamlet betrays so deep an agitation as in this. He struggles for utterance, repeats himself, mingles oaths and axioms, confuses and then annihilates time in the breathless tumult of his soul. "Why, she, even she. O Heaven!" What can he say? what is vile enough? "A beast

"that wants discourse of reason,Would have mourned longer—married with my uncle."

In this opening speech we see at once the immediate relation of the feeling of life-weariness so prevalent throughout the play to this supreme emotion; we see also his comprehensive criticism of the world branching from the same root—

"How weary, stale, flat, and unprofitableSeems to me all the uses of this world!Fie, on't! O fie! 'tis an unweeded garden;"

and

"Frailty, thy name is woman."

These themes are developed Act by Act, we can follow them to the graveyard scene, and to the moment before death.

And it is not unnatural that Hamlet's grief should assume a comprehensive form. The Queen had drawn the world in her train. Nobles and people, councillors and courtiers, the honoured statesman, the artless maiden, had joined her, had connived, were her accomplices. They had, parted among them, all the vices appropriate to her Court, her people. The world was betrayed to Hamlet in all its meanness and littleness: and he looked at it to see if he could discover the secret of his mother's treason, as Lear would anatomize the heart of Regan to account for her ingratitude. In attacking it he is attacking her guilt, in its inferior forms and obscure disguises. It is the nest of her depravity, and the small vices are but hers in the shell, and the whole is a vast confederacy of evil. Here are no "superfluous activities," no desultory talk; Hamlet's preoccupation is one throughout. He alternates between the desire to escape from so vile a world, and the pleasure of exposing its vice and fraud. The one gives us soliloquies, the other dialogues. Now he looks out at an obscure eternity from a time that was more obscure, and now the tension of the mind relieves the tension of the heart. On the one side we have all passages of life-weariness, whether as the issue of long meditation, or as the outcome of familiar talk; and on the other we have the brilliant and discursive criticism of man and Nature continued throughout the play. All this is so closely connected with the treason of his mother, that we see the very attachment of the feeling to the thought.

This explains the particular bitterness with which he attacks the Ministers and parasites of the Court. As soon as he sees them he crosses the current of their talk, commits them to an argument, confuses them with the evolutions of a logic too rapid for their senses to follow, and makes their bewilderment a sport. How small their world appears in the mirror of his ironical mind! The state-craft, the love-making, the "absurd pomp," the "heavy-headed revels," the women that "jig and amble and lisp," the nobles that are "spacious in the possession of dirt," the sovereign that is a "king of shreds and patches;" as for their opinions, "do but blow; them to their trials, and the bubbles are out;" as for their ideas of prosperity, it is to act as "sponges and soak up the king's countenance, his rewards and authorities;" as for their standard of worth, "let a beast be a lord of beasts, and his crib shall stand at the king's table." It is a disgrace to live in such a world, and contemptible to share its pleasures and prizes.

But his quarrel with it does not end here. The flaw runs through the whole constitution of things; there is no possible equation between the anomalies and dislocations on which he turns the dry light of that sceptical philosophy which has usurped the place of faith. Thought is good and action is good, but they will not work together. Our reason is our glory, but our indiscretions serve us best—we must either be cowards or fools. We have a perception of infinite goodness, just sufficient to make us conclude that we are "arrant knaves, all of us," and just enough belief in immortality "to perplex our wills." There is nothing but disagreement and disproportion—a constant missing of the mark, a stretching of the hand for that which is not. How is it possible to take seriously such a life if you pause to think?

It is not only irrational but visionary. The evanescence and fluency of Nature would matter little, but man himself, with his ingenuities of wit and triumphs of ambition, is whirled from form to form in "a fine revolution if we had the trick to see it." This is a favourite idea, it lends itself so easily to the contempt of the world—

"Imperious Cæsar, dead, and turn'd to clay,Might stop a hole to keep the wind away,"

is only a variation of "a man may fish with the worm that has eat of a king, and eat of the fish that has fed on the worm."

In this collision with the world, alone and unsupported, Hamlet's natural buoyancy returns. It is the moment of isolation, but it is the moment also of intellectual freedom. It is desertion, but it is also independence. Every incongruity feeds his fanciful and inventive humour. He follows vanity and affectation with irony and mimicry, removes a mask with the point of his dexterous wit, and exposes the pretence of virtue or conceit of knowledge with sarcastic glee, while there is a savour of retribution in his chastisement of vice. The vivacity of this running comment, critical and satirical, on the ways and works of men adds much to the charm of the play, but it is a charm that properly belongs to the best comedy. And Shakespeare has marked this disengagement of his hero from the sanguinary plot by reserving the exaltation of verse to the expression of personal feeling, while the lithe and nimble movement of his prose follows with its undulating rhythm every turn of Hamlet's wayward mind, in subtlety of argument or caprice of fancy.

Such is the "preoccupation" of Hamlet, emotional and intellectual. I have purposely made it seem a separate study, as thus alone could this fatal "thought-sickness," in which Heaven and Earth seemed to partake, be treated with the requisite clearness and fulness.

We can see at once that no other claim to the command of his spirit is likely to succeed. His mind is already haunted. No Ghost can be more spiritual than his own thoughts, or more spectral than the world around him. No revelation of a particular crime can rival the revelation lately made to him of sin in the most holy place—the seat of virtue itself and heavenly purity. He may acknowledge the ties of filial obedience and the duty of revenge, but there is no place, nor obligation to hold, no world to which it may be attached, no faith or interest strong enough within him to give it vitality, no fruit of good result to be looked for without. The place is occupied:

"For where the greater malady is fixedThe lesser scarce is felt."

When Hamlet says, "There is nothing good or bad, but thinking makes it so," he confesses himself an idealist—that is, one to whom ideas are not images or opinions, but the avenues of life. They garner up happiness and they store the harvest of pain; they make the "majestical roof fretted with golden fire" and the "pestilential cloud." The basis on which Hamlet's happiness had rested had been suddenly removed, and with the sanctity of the past the promise of the future had disappeared; the sky and the earth. He could say to his mother:

"Du hast sie zerstörtDie schöne Welt;"

but the new world is built of the same materials—that is, absorbing 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 liveWithin 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 outContagion to this world: now could I drink hot blood,And do such bitter business as the dayWould 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: