66 The small their world appears in the mirror of his ironical mind! 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 soul and the world; and in the order of the soul itself there are 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, 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 descrtion, 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 kowledge 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 for 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 fixed The 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 zerstört 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 larger 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." He In the presence of his father the old life is rekindled within him: filial awe and affection, unquestioned obedience, daring resolve. will "sweep to his revenge," "And thy commandment all alone shall live Within the book and volume of my brain, And this commandment had forbidden him to taint his mind against his mother. But what is his first exclamation when he is released from the 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 it 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 humour, 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!" By no means. He There is no hesita Does Hamlet slight the command of the Ghost? never repudiates it or even calls it in question. tion, cavil, or debate in the acceptance of it as a duty. But the purpose cools. It cools even on the platform. him is hardly a process of thought, otherwise some intimation of it would be given in his numerous self-communings. But there is a What passes within What 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! 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!" There is, therefore, 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." 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 recita tion. Suddenly he sees tears in the actors' eyes. He hurries them away, and when he is alone breaks out— 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 pseudoactivity 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 |