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HAMLET.

CONTINUED FROM PAGE 99.

"THE spirit 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."

flicting of death, themselves spring from a worse death than he has power to inflict. It is thus that Hamlet is distracted with a purpose which he is at once too good a son to dismiss, and too good a man to perform. Under an injunction with which he knows not what to do, he casts about, now for excuses, now for censures, of his non-performance; and religion prevents him from doing what filial piety reproves him for omitting. While he dare not abandon the design of killing the king, he is at the same time morally incapable of forming any plan for doing it. He can only do it, and he does only attempt it, under a sudden frenzy of excitement, caused by some immediate provocation; not so much acting as being acted upon; as an instrument of Providence, rather than as a self-determining agent.

Thus the hope that the ghost's tale may be false, and the fear that it may be true, unite to send him in quest of other proofs. The probability seems at once too strong to justify the abandonment, and too weak to justify the execution of the deed. The truth is, the ghost develops Hamlet, and the development it works within him is at war with the injunction it lays upon him. Its supernatural revelations bring forth into clearer apprehension some moral ideas which before were but dim presentiments within him; and its requisitions are thwarted by the very truths which it sugAnd this view of Hamlet is rather congests and unfolds to him, and by the train of reflections which it sets a-going in his firmed than otherwise by the motives which mind. Under the disclosures made to him he assigns for sparing the king, when he from beyond the grave, his mind attains a finds him praying. That these motives, kind or degree of development not orditoo horrible even for a fiend to entertain, narily vouchsafed to our earthly being. It It are not his real motives, is evident from is as if he were born into the other world their extravagance; for if such motives before dying out of this. But the words would keep him from doing the deed then, from that other world must be confirmed by assuredly no motives could have kept him facts from this, before he can bring him- from doing it before. These motives are self to trust in them; and therefore but the excuses wherewith he quiets his filial feelings without violating his conscience. He thus effects a compromise between his religion and his affection, by adjourning a purpose which the one will not suffer him to execute, nor the other to abandon. The question, "Is it not perfect conscience to quit him with this arm?" which he afterwards puts to Horatio, while relating the king's plot against his own life, proves that he had not even then overcome his moral repugnance to the deed.

"The play's the thing Wherein he'll catch the conscience of the king."

When, however, he has caught the king's conscience; when, by holding the mirror up to his soul, he has forced "his occulted guilt" to "unkennel itself;" along with certainty of the crime, he gains food for still further reflection. The demonstration of his uncle's guilt arrests the very purpose for which that demonstration was sought. His own conscience is but startled into a dread of the retribution he has disclosed in the conscience of another. He has sought grounds of punishment in the manifestations of remorse; and the very proofs which, to his mind, justify the in

VOL. I. NO. II. NEW SERIES.

9

Properly speaking, therefore, Hamlet lacks not force of will, as some have argued, but only force of self-will; that is, his will is strictly subjected to his reason and conscience, and is of course powerless when it comes in conflict with them; where they impede not his volitions, he seems, as

hath been said, all will. We are apt to estimate men's force of will according to what they do; but we ought often to estimate it according to what they do not do; for to hold still often require smuch greater strength of will, than to go ahead; and the peculiarity of this representation consists in the hero's being so placed, that his will has its proper exercise not so much in acting as in thinking. In this way the working of his whole mind is rendered as anomalous as his situation; and this is just what the subject demands. Moreover, in the perfect harmony of the will and the reason, force of will would naturally disappear altogether; for in that case, the will being entirely subject to the law, nothing but the law would be visible in our conduct. And yet, to preserve or restore this harmony of will and reason, is undoubtedly the greatest achievement in human power. Thus the highest possible exercise of will is in renouncing itself, and taking the law instead; so that, paradoxical as it may seem, he may be justly said to have most strength of will, who has, or rather shows, none at all. Hamlet is equal to the performance of any duty, but not to the reconciliation of incompatible duties; and he cannot act for the simple reason, that he has equal "respect unto all" the duties of his situation. In a word, his inability is purely of a moral, not of a complexional kind; and this inability is only another name for the highest sort of power.

Hence, doubtless, as some one has remarked, Hamlet would seem greater, were he not so great. In his thoughts, and In his thoughts, and feelings, and principles, he soars so far above our ordinary standards of greatness, as to dwarf himself by the distance. He who ruleth his spirit is greater than he who taketh a city, but he who taketh a city seems greater than he who ruleth his spirit. We, in our littleness, estimate greatness by the noise it makes: true greatness moves in harmony, false greatness in conflict, with the moral order of things; the conflict is loud, but the harmony is still. Why, Christianity, when first published, made infinitely less noise than the last French novel: the former came from heaven, the latter came from nowhere, or from a worse place; that has evolutionized the world, this has done

and can do nothing but kill time, or rather, kill mind awhile, and then die itself. Who strives only to do what he ought, is silent even in his achievements; he whose only strife is to do what he can, is noisy even in his failures: his noise indeed is a sign he is failing; if he were going to succeed, he would be sure to keep still about it, because, in order to succeed, he must work in depths where the ear cannot pene

trate. It is what acts on the surface that makes a noise; it is what works in the centre that does something. Who has ever heard the sun shine? who has not heard a straw-fire blaze?

"Rightly to be great, Is, not to stir without great argument; But greatly to find quarrel in a straw, When honor's at the stake."

Such, it seems to us, is Hamlet's greatness, and not the less truly his, because he disclaims it. Hamlet, indeed, is emphatically greater than he knows. The man that is not greater than he knows is a very small affair!

Hamlet, it is true, is continually charging the fault of his situation on himself. Herein is involved one of the finest strokes in the whole delineation. True virtue never publishes itself; it does not even know itself. Radiating from the heart through all the functions of life, its transpirations are so free, and smooth, and deep, as to escape the ear of consciousness. Hence people are generally aware of their virtue in proportion as they have it not. We are apt to estimate the merit of our good deeds according to the struggles we make in doing them; whereas, the greater our virtue, the less we shall have to struggle in order to do them, and it is purely the weakness and imperfection of our virtue that makes it so hard for us to do well. Accordingly we find that he who does no duty without being goaded up to it, is conscious of much more virtue than he has ; while he who does every duty as a thing of course and a matter of delight, is unconscious of his virtue simply because he has so much of it.

Moreover, in his conflict of duties, Hamlet naturally thinks he is taking the wrong one; for the calls of the claim he meets are hushed by satisfaction, while the calls of

the claim he neglects are increased by disappointment. Thus the motives which he resists out-tongue those which he obeys, so that he hears nothing but the voice of the duty he omits. We are of course insensible of the current with which we move; but we are made sensible of the current against which we move by the very struggle it costs. In this way Hamlet comes to mistake his scruples of conscience for want of conscience, and from his very sensitiveness of principle, tries to reason himself into a conviction of guilt. If, however, he were really guilty of what he accuses himself, he would be trying to find or make excuses wherewith to opiate his conscience. For the bad naturally try to hide their badness, the good their goodness, from themselves; for which cause the former seek narcotics, the latter stimulants, for their consciences. The good man is apt to think he has not conscience enough, because it does not trouble him; the bad man naturally thinks he has more conscience than he needs, because it troubles him all the while; which accounts for the well-known readiness of bad men to supply their neighbors with conscience. Of this sort were those men we read of, whose tenderness of conscience was such that they could not bear to take civil oaths, though they did not scruple to break those they had already taken.

And yet Hamlet "thinks meet to put an antic disposition on." This, if, indeed, it be not rather the anticipation of a real than the pre-announcement of a feigned insanity, seems to us a profound artifice of honesty. Hamlet cannot kill his uncle, and disdains to conciliate him; and apparent madness is the only practicable outlet of thoughts and feelings which he scorns to hide. Towards the king as a fratricide, a regicide, and a usurper, as the thief of his father's life, and crown, and queen, he feels the deepest abhorrence. The Lord Chamberlain, as a skillful but unprincipled tool of sovereignty, reckless whom, and caring only for what, he serves, Hamlet regards with the contempt which a man of noble qualities naturally feels for a man of merely useful qualities. To express his sentiments to these in his real character, would be but to defeat his purpose and endanger his life. Since, therefore, in his true character he can only express false

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feelings, he assumes a false character to express his true feelings. Thus his apparent mental insanity becomes the triumph of his moral sanity. Such, then, appears the true moral aspect and explanation of Hamlet's madness. It is the spontaneous effort of his mind to be true to itself. He resorts to formal hypocrisy as the only available refuge from essential hypocrisy. Moreover, Hamlet sees that in this way he can tent the king's conscience to the quick with impunity. Accordingly it is not till pierced by the shaft, that the king discovers Hamlet's aim; and this discovery is a perfeet demonstration of his own guilt. Thus Hamlet turns the very disturbance with which his soul is struggling into a means at once of safety to himself and of punishment to the king. In the uneasy suspicions and remorses which his antics awaken in the king, Hamlet has at the same time proof of his guilt and revenge for his crime; and the setting a wicked man's conscience to biting and stinging him, is always a lawful and even a laudable kind of revenge. Herein Hamlet shows his profound cunning, when he will stoop to cunning. He so lays his plan, that the king cannot possibly detect him, without betraying himself. From the nature of the case, the moment the king shows that he suspects what Hamlet is about, that moment Hamlet knows infallibly what the king has been about.

Of all the perplexities, however, involved in this play, the question of Hamlet's madness is perhaps the hardest of solution. Whether his insanity be real or feigned, or whether it be a species of intermittent insanity, or whether it be sometimes real, sometimes feigned, are questions which, like many that arise on similar points in actual life, can never be fully and finally settled one way or the other. Aside from the ordinary impossibility of deciding precisely where sanity ends and insanity begins, there are, as there naturally must be, peculiarities in Hamlet's character and conduct, resulting from the minglings of the preternatural in his situation, which, as they lie beyond the compass of our common experience, so they can never be reduced to anything more than probable conjecture. If sanity consists in a certain harmony and sympathy between a man's actions and his circumstances, it must be

difficult indeed to say what would be insanity in a man so circumstanced, as Hamlet. Of course our own view in this matter will pass for just what it is worth.

bendings and swayings of his faculties beneath an overload of thought, to keep them from breaking. Amid overpowering excitements of his reason and his blood, his intellect is neither crippled by disease nor enthralled by illusion, but distracted with conflicting duties, and hurried away into antics and eccentricities. His mind being deeply disturbed, agitated to its centre, but not disorganized, those irregularities are rather a throwing off of that disturb

celebrated illustration, therefore, though almost too beautiful not to be true, seems entirely irrelevant and inadmissible. "Here," says he, "is an oak planted in a china vase, proper to receive only the most delicate flowers; the roots strike out, and the vessel flies to pieces." If Hamlet's mind were really disorganized, broken in fragments, as this expression implies, we do not see how it could alternate, as it unquestionably does, between integrity and unsoundness; between the most exquisite harmony and the most jarring dissonance.

Many of us, no doubt, have experienced in ourselves or observed in others an almost irrepressible tendency, in times of great depression, to fly off into extravagant humors and eccentricities. We have ourselves known people, in hours of extreme despondency, to throw their most intimate friends into consternation by their pro-ance than a giving way to it. Goethe's digious extravagances; their minds being in a very paroxysm of frolic, when they almost felt like hanging themselves. Such symptoms of wildness and insanity are often but the natural, though perhaps spasmodic, reaction of the mind against the weight that oppresses it. The mind thus spontaneously becomes eccentric, in order to recover or preserve its centre; voluntarily departs from its orbit, to escape what might else throw it from its orbit. This is especially apt to be the case with minds which, like Hamlet's, unite great intellectual power with exceeding fineness and fullness of sensibility. The truth is, almost Now the expressions of mirth which all extreme emotions naturally express come from extreme depression, are obvithemselves by their opposites: extreme ously neither the reality nor the affectation sorrow often utters itself in laughter; ex- of mirth. People, when overwhelmed by treme joy, in tears; utter despair sometimes despair, certainly are not in a condition to breaks out in a voice of mirth; a wounded feel merry, and they are as little in a conspirit, in gushes of humor. Hence Shak-dition to feign mirth; yet, though neither speare, with a depth of nature which has often puzzled both readers and critics, has heightened the effect of some of his awfullest catastrophes by making the persons indulge in flashes of merriment: for there is nothing so appalling as a person laughing in distress; it shows that the spirit is loaded to the utmost extent of its endurance. And the same thing often occurs in actual life. Sir Thomas More's wit upon the scaffold, " than the bare axe more luminous and keen," is an instance of this kind, familiar perhaps to us all. It is not to be presumed, we take it, that More's playfulness on this awful occasion sprung from merry feelings; on the contrary, it must have sprung, one would think, from the other extreme of feeling-a man smiling and playing from excess of anguish and terror. In like manner Hamlet's mental aberrations seem to spring, not from deficiency, but from excess of intellectual strength; the conscious, half-voluntary

feeling nor feigning it, they do, nevertheless, sometimes express it. The truth is, such extremes naturally and spontaneously express themselves by their opposites; the very contradiction between the passion and expression best revealing the unutterable intensity of the passion. In like manner Hamlet's madness, paradoxical and contradictory as the statement may appear, is, it seems to us, neither real nor affected, but a sort of natural and spontaneous imitation of madness, resulting from the successful, though convulsive, efforts of an overburdened mind to brace and stay itself under the burden. The triumphs of his reason over his passion naturally express themselves in the tokens of insanity, just as the agonies of despair naturally vent themselves in flashes of merriment. It is not so correct, therefore, to say that Hamlet puts an antic on, as that he lets it on; and his pre-announcement of it seems to spring rather from foresight of

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