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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 fixed
His 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 unprofitable
Seems 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 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
Die 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 live
Within 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 out
Contagion to this world: now could I drink hot blood,
And do such bitter business as the day
Would 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:

 
"Leave wringing of your hands; peace, sit you down."
 

His mother confesses her guilt. Hamlet is not appeased. He vilifies her husband with increasing vehemence; the Ghost rises as if to protect the queen. "Do not forget," he cries, although the king's name was at that moment on Hamlet's lips in terms of bitterest contempt. But it was understood between the two spirits that it was the queen's husband and not his father's murderer that he was thus denouncing. After the disappearance of the ghost, he turns again to his mother; and on leaving her almost reluctantly, without further punishment, asks pardon of his own genius—"Forgive me this my virtue," more authoritative to Hamlet than a legion of spirits.

This scene is the spiritual climax of the play, and from it the whole tragedy directly proceeds. The death of Polonius leads on the one side to the madness of Ophelia, on the other to the revenge of Laertes and the final catastrophe. Hamlet's apathy at the death of Polonius is of the same character as his oblivion of the ghost's command, and has the same origin. For there is no apathy like that of an over-mastering passion, whether it be love or jealousy, or a new faith, or a terrible doubt. It draws away the life from other duties and interests, and leaves them pale and semi-vital. Men thus possessed acknowledge the duties they evade, let slip occasion, are "lapsed in time and passion," and are surprised at their own oblivion.

This happens again to Hamlet as he is leaving Denmark. His own inaction is flashed back upon him by the sight of the gallant array of Fortinbras, and his first words—

 
"How all occasions do inform against me,"
 

disclose that the duty of revenge has its obligations and sanctions, not in the inward but the outward world; not in the genius of the man—secret, individual, detached—but in the outward mind of inherited opinion and ancestral creed, that we share with others in unreflecting fellowship. The world has charge of it, and reflects it back upon him new in the actor's tears, and now—

 
"In this army of such mass and charge,
Led by a delicate and tender prince."
 

This speech must be read, like a Spartan despatch, on the [Greek: skutalê] or counterpart of Hamlet's personality. He begins, as after the player's recitation, with a confession, and ends with an excuse. He is startled into an avowal, which he qualifies by a subtle after-thought—"What is a man," he cries, who acts as I have acted, who allows

 
"That capability and god-like reason,
To fust in him unused?"
 

"A beast, no more." But as he looks at Fortinbras and his soldiers, another thought strikes him. These men act because they do not pause to think. I must have been thinking, not too little, but too much; and with that he turns short round upon his first confession, escapes from the charge of "bestial oblivion," and takes refuge in an imaginary "thinking too precisely on the event;" which indeed, as he remembers, had more than once prevented him taking his own life. But he condemns himself without cause; he cannot now return to that earlier stage of unreasoning activity in appointed paths, and the joy and grace of unconscious obedience.

When Hamlet returns from England, he takes Horatio apart to recount his adventures and unfold the plot of the king; but before he utters a word of this his settled mood is revealed to us in the graveyard scene. Hamlet, ever prone to belittle the world, is not loth to watch the making of a grave. There is the limit and boundary of what can be done or suffered; there the triumph is ended, and there the enmity is stayed. He advances step by step to look closely at the ruins of mortality; to slight the great names of kings and follow heroes to the dust. As he sees the skull tossed out of the grave, the king is already dead to him. "How the knave jowls it to the ground, as if it were Cain's jawbone, that did the first murder. This might be the pate of a politician, which this ass now o'erreaches; one that would circumvent God, might it not?" He is not satisfied till he takes the skull in his hand, and is sarcastic on beauty and festive wit, and the base uses to which we may come; when, from the other side, the procession of Ophelia advances. The grace and allurement of Ophelia had awakened in the imaginative Hamlet a feeling stronger and warmer indeed, but of the same relation to his capacity of loving as that of Romeo for Rosaline, and as easily lost in the glow or shadow of a deeper passion. That it was without depth and sacredness is plain from his delighting to ridicule and torment her father, and from his careless and equivocal jesting with her at the play. But though not a deep experience, it was of a quality different from that of other life. And the death of Ophelia had gathered into one the records of the hours of love; the first and the last; the meetings and the partings; the gifts, and flowers, and snatches of song. On these tender memories the hollow clamour of Laertes breaks with a discord so intolerable that Hamlet, who had with his usual reserve received the news of her death with the cold exclamation, "What! the fair Ophelia!" suddenly breaks into a fury and leaps into her grave.

In this study of Hamlet in relation to the ghost-story, we have seen that the effect, both of the first recital and of its subsequent confirmation, was to whet his mind against his mother; and that the passages in which this is expressed are among the final touches of the master; that the deed of revenge is only flashed upon him from without; and that, in the intervals between such awakenings of memory, he relapses to the thought-sickness of the first soliloquy; that on the only occasion when the bitterness of his sorrow leads him to meditate self-destruction, there is no question of the ghost, the murder, or the king; that the only ungovernable bit of fury is in the presence of his mother; and that from this scene the drama is developed, and the final catastrophe ensues.