Shakspere and Montaigne Part 7

Hamlet then pictures his mental condition in words of deepest sincerity.

In order to fully understand this description, we have once more to refer to an Essay of Montaigne, [18] in which he a.s.serts that man is not furthered by his reason, his speculations, his pa.s.sions; that they give him no advantage over other creatures. A divinely appointed authority--the Church--confers upon him 'those great advantages and odds he supposes to have over other creatures.' It is she that seals to him the patent and privilege which authorises him to 'keep account both of the receipts and layings-out of the world.' Ay, it is she who convinces him that '_this admirable swinging-round of the heavenly vaults, the eternal light of those constellations rolling so n.o.bly over our heads_, the terrible commotions of this infinite ocean, were established, and have continued for so many ages, for his advantage and his service.' To her authority he must wholly surrender himself; by her he must allow himself to be guided. And in doing so, it is 'better for us to have a weak judgment than a strong one; better to be smitten with blindness than to have one's eyes open and clear-sighted.'

Striving to live up to similar views, Hamlet 'lost all his mirth.'

This is the cause of his heavy disposition; of his having 'foregone all custom of exercise'--so 'that this goodly frame, the earth,' seems to him 'a sterile promontory,' a mere place of preparation for gaining the next world through penance and prayer. Verily, '_this brave o'erhanging firmament, this majestical roof fretted with golden fire_,' appears to him no better 'than a foul and pestilent congregation of vapours.' Quite in accordance with such tenets which we need not qualify by name, Man, to him, is but a 'quintessence of dust.'

Both man, and still more sinful woman, displease Hamlet. Yet he has not succeeded in so wholly subjugating Nature within himself as to be fully secured against her importunate claims. Now we would point out here that Montaigne [19] mentions a tyrant of antiquity who 'could not bear seeing tragedies acted in the theatre, from fear that his subjects should see him sob at the misfortunes of Hecuba and Andromache--him who, without pity, caused daily so many people to be cruelly killed.'

Again, Montaigne [20] speaks of actors, mentioned by Quinctilian, who were 'so deeply engaged in a sorrowful part that they wept even after having returned to their lodgings;' whilst Quinctilian reports of himself that, 'having undertaken to move a certain pa.s.sion in others, he had entered so far into his part as to find himself surprised, not only with the shedding of tears, but also with a paleness of countenance and the behaviour of a man truly weighed down with grief.'

Hamlet has listened to the player. In the concluding monologue of the second act--which is twice as long in the new quarto--we are told of the effect produced upon his mind when seeing that an actor, who merely holds a mirror up to Nature--

... but in a fiction, in a dream of pa.s.sion, Could force his soul so to his own conceit That from her working all his visage wann'd....

... And all for nothing!--For Hecuba?

whilst he (Hamlet), 'a dull and muddy-mettled rascal,' [21] like John-a-dreams, in spite of his strong 'motive and the cue for pa.s.sion,'

mistrusts them and is afraid of being guided by them.

All at once, Hamlet feels the weight and pressure of a mode of thought which declares war against the impulses of Nature, calling man a born sinner.

Who calls me villain? ...

... Gives me the lie i' the throat, As deep as to the lungs? Who does me this?

Ha!

'S wounds,[1] I should take it: for it cannot be.

But I am pigeon-liver'd, and lack gall To make oppression bitter; or ere this I should have fatted all the region kites With this slave's offal. [22]

The feelings of Hamlet, until then forcibly kept down, now get the mastery over him. He gives vent to them in oaths of which he is himself at last ashamed, when he compares himself to 'a very drab, a scullion,'

who 'must fall a-cursing.'

He now will set to work and get more natural evidence of the King's guilt. He begins to entertain doubts as to those mystic views by which he meant to be guided. He mistrusts the apparition which he had called an honest ghost ('true-penny'):--

The spirit that I have seen May be the Devil: and the Devil hath power To a.s.sume a pleasing shape. Yea, perhaps Out of my weakness and my melancholy, As he is very potent with such spirits, Abuses me to d.a.m.n me: I'll have grounds More relative than this. [23]

Over weakness the Devil is potent; all flesh is weak. What mode of thought is this? What philosophy taught this doctrine? Hamlet's weakness, if we may believe Polonius, [24] has been brought on by fasting and watching.

Over melancholy, too, the Devil is powerful. Are we not here in the sombre atmosphere of those who turn away their reason from ideal aspirations; who denounce the impulses of nature as sinful excitements; who would fain look upon the earth as 'a sterile promontory'--having dark death more before their mind's eye than beautiful life? Are such thoughts not the forerunners of melancholy?

Hamlet's incessant thoughts of death are the same as those of his model, Montaigne. In an Essay, [25] ent.i.tled 'That to Philosophise is to Learn how to Die,' the latter explains that the Christian religion has no surer basis than the contempt for the present life, and that we are in this world only to prepare ourselves for death.

His imagination, he says, has occupied itself with these thoughts of death more than with anything else. Referring to a saying of Lykurgos, he approves of graveyards being laid out close to churches and in the most frequented places of a city, so as to accustom the common people, women, and children not to be scared at the sight of a dead person, and to forewarn everyone, by this continual spectacle of bones, tombs, and funerals, as to our real condition.

Montaigne also, like Hamlet, ponders over suicide. He devotes a whole Essay [26] to it. Life, he observes, would be a tyranny if the liberty to die were wanting. For this liberty, he thinks, we have to thank Nature, as for the most favourable gift which, indeed, deprives us of all right to complain of our condition. If--as Boiocal, the German chieftain, [27] said--earth is wanting to us whereon to live, earth is never wanting to us for death. [28]

That is the wisdom of Montaigne, the admirer of antiquity. But Montaigne, the modern man, introduces the Essay in which he dares to utter such bold thoughts with the following restriction:--

'If, as it is said, to philosophise be to doubt, with much more reason to play pranks (_niaiser_) and to rave, as I do, must be to doubt.

For, to inquire and to discuss, behoves the disciples. The decision belongs to the chairman (_cathedrant_). My chairman is the authority of the divine will which regulates us without contradiction, and which occupies its rank above those human and vain disputes.'

This chairman, as often observed, by which Montaigne's thoughts are to be guided, is an ecclesiastic authority.

In 'Hamlet,' also, it is a 'canon' [29] fixed against self-slaughter, which restrains him from leaving, out of his own impulse, this whilom paradise, this 'unweeded garden' of life.

Montaigne, whose philosophy aims at making us conversant with death as with a friend, is yet terrified by it. Altogether, he says, he would fain pa.s.s his life at his ease; and if he could escape from blows, even by taking refuge under a calf's skin, [30] he would not be the man who would shrink from it.

In a few graphic words Shakspere brands this cowardly clinging to life.

In the scene where Hamlet gives to Polonius nothing more willingly than his leave, the new quarto (in every other respect the conclusion of this scene is identical in both editions) contains these additional words:--'Except my life, except my life, except my life.' Of the 'calf's skin' we hear in the first scene of act v., where those are called sheep and calves, who seek out a.s.surance in parchments which are made of sheep-skins and of calves-skins too.

Montaigne, who does not cease pondering over the pale fellow, Death, looks for consolation from the ancients. He takes Sokrates as the model of all great qualities; and he reproduces, in his own manner, the speech this sage, who was fearless of death, made before his judges. First of all, he makes him say that the qualities of death are unknown to him, as he has never seen anybody who could instruct him in them. 'Those who fear death, presuppose that they know it....

Perhaps death may be an indifferent thing; perhaps a desirable one.

However, one may believe that, if it be a transmigration from one place to another, it will be an amelioration ... and free us from having any more to do with wicked and corrupt judges. If it be a consummation (_aneantiss.e.m.e.nt_) [31] of our being, it is also an amelioration to enter into a long and quiet night. We find nothing so sweet in life as a quiet rest--a tranquil and profound sleep without dreams.'

Now compare the monologue, 'To be or not to be,' of the first quarto with the one contained in the second. It will then be seen that those Sokratic ideas, rendered by Montaigne in his own manner, have been worked into the first quarto. In the latter we hear nothing at all about the end of our being (a complete destruction or _consummation_) producing an amelioration. [32] Shakspere expresses this thought by the words that if we could say that, by a sleep, we 'end the heartache and the thousand natural shocks that flesh is heir to--'tis a consummation devoutly to be wished.' [33]

Keen commentators have pointed out the contradiction in Hamlet's monologue, where he speaks of--

The undiscovered country from whose bourn No traveller returns,

whilst he saw such a traveller in his father's ghost. Certainly there were then, even as there are now, besides the logical thinkers, also a considerable number of inconsistent persons who believed in supernaturally revealed messages, and who, nevertheless, now and then, felt contradictory thoughts rising within themselves. Why should the great master, who exhausted in his dramatic personages almost all types of human nature, not have put such a character also on the stage?

To the poet, whose object it was to show 'to the very age and body of time his form and pressure' (this pa.s.sage is wanting in the first quarto), the presentation of such a psychological problem of contradictory thoughts must have been of far greater attraction than an antic.i.p.atory description of a metaphysician aching under the heavy burden of his philosophic speculations. The latter is the character attributed, by some, to Hamlet. But we think that such an utterly strange modern creature would have been altogether incomprehensible to the energetic English mind of this period.

In the course of the drama, Shakspere makes it sufficiently clear that the thoughts by which Hamlet's 'native hue of resolution is sicklied o'er,' have come from the narrow cells of a superst.i.tious Christianity, not from the free use of his reason. According to Montaigne, however, we ought to 'use our reason only for strengthening our belief.'

Hamlet, with Purgatory and h.e.l.l, into which he has cast a glance, before his eyes, would fain fly, like Montaigne, from them. In his Essay I. 19 [34] the latter says that our soul must be steeled against the powers of death; 'for, as long as Death frightens us, how is it possible to make a single step without feverish agitation?'

Hamlet as little attains this condition of quiet equanimity as the pensive and pondering Montaigne. The latter, however, speaks of souls that know no fear. It is true, he has to go to the ancients in order to meet with this frame of mind. Quoting Horace [35]--

Non vultus instantis tyranni Mente quat.i.t solida, neque Auster, Dux inquieti turbidus Adriae, Nec fulminantis magna Jovis ma.n.u.s--

he describes such a soul as being made '_mistress over her pa.s.sions and concupiscence; having become proof against poverty and disgrace, and all the other injuries of fortune_. Let those who can, gain this advantage. Herein lies true and sovereign freedom that allows us to scorn force and injustice, and to deride prisons and fetters.'

To a friend with such a soul, to a living Horace or Horatio, Hamlet addresses himself. Horatio also is his fellow-student and friend from the University days at Wittenberg, and he has made the views of the new philosophical school quite his own. He does not tremble before the fire of Purgatory and h.e.l.l. Despising death, he wishes, in the last scene, to empty the cup of poison from which his friend Hamlet has drunk, in order to follow him. When the latter keeps him back, Horatio makes answer--

I am more an antique Roman than a Dane.

Hamlet, trusting more to this firmer and truly antique character than to his own, requests Horatio to aid him during the play-scene in watching the King, so as to procure more natural evidence of his guilt.

This school-friend--how often may he have philosophised with him!--is to him

as just a man As e'er my conversation coped withal.

The following pa.s.sage, [36] in which Horatio's character is described by Hamlet, is wanting in the first quarto:--

Since my dear soul was mistress of her choice, And could of men distinguish, her election Hath seal'd thee for herself; for thou hast been As one, in suffering all, that suffers nothing; A man that fortune's buffets and rewards Hath ta'en with equal thanks: and blest are those Whose blood and judgment are so well commingled That they are not a pipe for Fortune's finger To sound what stop she please. Give me that man That is not pa.s.sion's slave, and I will wear him In my heart's core, ay, in my heart of heart, As I do thee.

How near these words of Shakspere come to those with which Montaigne describes an intrepid man after the poem of Horace!

But, in spite of subtle reasoning, the French philosopher cannot fathom the cause why he himself does not attain any mind's ease, and why he has no plain and straightforward faculty (_nulle faculte simple_) within himself. He once [37] uses the expression, 'We trouble death with the care of life, and life with the care of death;' but he does not succeed in firmly attaching himself to life with all the fibres of his nature, and gathering strength from the mother-earth, like Antaeus.

He oscillates between two antagonistic views, and feels unable to decide for either the one or the other.

We have explained the elements of which Hamlet's complex character is made up. He is an adherent of old superst.i.tions and dogmas; he believes in Purgatory, a h.e.l.l, and a Devil, and in the miraculous powers of confession, holy communion, and the extreme unction. Yet, to some degree, he is a Humanist, and would fain grant to Nature certain rights. Scarcely has he yielded to the impulses of his blood, than doubts begin to rise in him, and he begins to fear the Devil, who might lure him into perdition. This inner discord, creating, as it does, a mistrust in his own self, induces him, in the most important task of his life, to appeal to Horatio. To him he says that, if the King's occulted guilt does not come out ('unkennel itself'), he (Hamlet) will look upon the apparition as a d.a.m.ned ghost, and (this is new) will think that his 'imaginations are as foul as Vulcan's st.i.thy.' [38]

By the interlude, Hamlet--and in this he is confirmed by Horatio--becomes convinced of the King's guilt. All that he thereupon does is--to recite a little ditty!