Shakspere and Montaigne Part 8

We have already made the acquaintance of Montaigne the soft-hearted, who, as above mentioned, always was touched when seeing innocent animals hunted to death, and who felt much emotion _at the tears of the hart asking us for mercy_. At the same time we have directed the reader's attention to the fact of his having said that the 'common weal requires some to betray, some to lie, and some to ma.s.sacre,' [39] and that this task must be left to those who are ready to sacrifice their honour and their conscience, and that men who do not feel up to such deeds must leave their commission to the stronger ones. This French n.o.bleman navely avows that he has resolved upon withdrawing into private life, not because he is averse to public life--for the latter, he says, would 'perhaps equally suit him'--but because, by doing so, he hopes to serve his Prince all the more joyfully and all the more sincerely, thus following the free choice of his own judgment and reason, and not submitting to any restraint (_obligation particuliere_), which he hates in every shape. And he adds the following curious moral doctrine:--'This is the way of the world. We let the laws and precepts follow their way, but we keep another course.' [40]

Who could mistake Shakspere's satire against this sentimental n.o.bleman, who fights shy of action, in making Hamlet recite a little ditty at a moment when he has become convinced of the King's guilt:--

Why, let the stricken deer go weep, The hart ungalled play; For some must watch, while some must sleep: Thus runs the world away.

This gifted Frenchman, Montaigne, was a new, a strange, phenomenon in the eyes of Shakspere and his active and energetic countrymen.

A man, a n.o.bleman too, who lives for no higher aim; who allows himself to be driven about, rudderless, by his feelings and inclinations; who even boasts of this mental disposition of his, and sends a vain book about it into the world! What is it to teach? What good is it to do? It gives mere words, behind which there is no manly character.

Are there yet more _beaux esprits_ to arise who, in Epicurean fas.h.i.+on, enjoy the beautiful thoughts of others, whilst they themselves remain incapable for action, letting the time go out of joint?

Let us further study the character of Hamlet, and we shall find that the satire against Montaigne becomes more and more striking--a veritable hit.

The Queen asks for her son. Before he fulfils her wish and comes to her, he utters a lullaby of superst.i.tion (these lines are new), wherewith to tide over the excitement of his nature:--

'Tis now the very witching time of night, When churchyards yawn and h.e.l.l 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.

Hamlet, always shrinking back from the impulses of his blood, fears that the Devil might once more gain power over him:--

Soft! now to my mother!

O heart, lose not thy nature!

This nature of his, inclining to mildness and gentleness, he wishes to preserve, and he resolves upon being 'cruel, not unnatural.' In vain one seeks here for logic, and for the boundary between two words which to ordinary common sense appear synonymous. In Montaigne, however, we discover the clue of such a senseless argumentation.

In one of his Essays, [41] which contains a confusion of ideas that might well make the humane Shakspere shudder, he writes:--

'Our condition, both public and private, is full of imperfections; yet there is nothing useless in Nature, not even uselessness itself.... Our being is cemented with sickly qualities: ambition, jealousy, envy, vengeance, superst.i.tion, despair dwell in us, and hold there so natural a possession that their counterfeit is also recognised in beasts; for instance, cruelty--so unnatural a vice.

Yet he who would root out the seed of these qualities from the human breast would destroy the fundamental conditions of our life.'

Now, Hamlet's resolution to be 'cruel, but not unnatural,' is but a fresh satire against Montaigne's train of thoughts, who would fain be a Humanist, but who does not break with the reasoning of Loyola and of the Church, by which he permits himself to be guided as by the competent authority, and which tolerates cruelty--nay, orders its being employed for the furtherance of what it calls the 'good aim.'

The idea that cruelty is a necessary but useful evil, no doubt induced Montaigne [42] to declare that to kill a man from a feeling of revenge is tantamount to our protecting him, for we thus 'withdraw him from our attacks.' Furthermore, this Humanist argues that revenge is to be regretted if its object does not feel its intention; for, even as he who takes revenge intends to derive pleasure from it, so he upon whom revenge is taken must perceive that intention, in order to be harrowed with feelings of pain and repentance. 'To kill him, is to render further attacks against him impossible; not to revenge what he has done.'

Shakspere already gives Hamlet an opportunity in the following scene to prove to us that there is no boundary between cruel and unnatural conduct; and that one cannot be cruel and yet remain natural. In the most telling words, the cause of Hamlet's want of energy is substantiated. Fate gives the criminal, the King, into the hands of Hamlet. It is the most important moment of the drama. A stroke of the sword would be enough to do the deed of revenge. The cause which makes Hamlet hesitate is, that the criminal is engaged in prayer, and that--

He took my father grossly, full of bread, With all his crimes broad-blown, as flush as May; And how his audit stands, who knows save Heaven?

Does Hamlet, then, _not_ act with refined cruelty?

Here, a new thought is inserted, which we mentioned already in the beginning, and which turns the balance at the decisive moment:--

But in our circ.u.mstance and course of thought It is heavy with him. [43]

A Shaksperean hero, with drawn sword, allows himself to be restrained from action by the thought that, because 'it is heavy' with his own murdered father, who is suffering in Purgatory, he (Hamlet) ought not to kill the criminal now, but later on, when the latter is deeply wading in sin--

When he is drunk asleep, or in his rage, ...

And that his soul may be as d.a.m.n'd and black As h.e.l.l, whereto it goes.

Hamlet has been called a philosopher whose energy has been paralysed by too great a range of thought. For the sovereignty of human reason this is a most dangerous premiss. Do we not owe to the full and free use of that reason everything great which mankind has created?

History speaks of a thousand heroes (only think of Alexander, of Julius Caesar, of Frederick the Great!) whose doings convince us that a strong power of thought and action can go hand in hand, nay, that the latter cannot be successful without the former.

But, on the other hand, there is a way of thinking with preconceived supernatural conclusions--or rather, we must call it an absence of thinking--when men allow themselves to be moved by the circ.u.mstances of a traditional course of thought. Against such intellectual slavery the great century of the Reformation rose. And the greatest Humanist, Shakspere, scourges that slavery in the catharsis of his powerful drama.

Questions of religion were not permitted to be treated on the stage.

But not merely the one deeply intelligent person for whom Shakspere asks the players to act, and for whom the great master certainly endeavoured to write--no, the public at large, too, will have understood that the 'course of thought' which induced Hamlet to forego action from a subtle refinement of cruelty, was not the course of thought prevalent on this side of the Channel, and held up, in this important scene, as that of a hero to be admired.

Hamlet resolved upon keeping out the soul of Nero from his 'firm bosom.'

(What a satire there is in this adjective 'firm'!) He means to be cruel, but not unnatural; he will 'speak daggers, but use none.' A man who lets himself be moved by extraneous circ.u.mstances is not his own master. In cruel, unnatural manner, for no object whatever, he murders poor Polonius. Then he begins to speak daggers in such a manner as to get into a perfect ecstasy. Nor need any priest have been ashamed of the sermon he preaches to his own mother.

In the first edition of 'Hamlet,' the scene between mother and son is rather like a sketch in which most things are merely indicated, not worked out. Only the part of the Ghost, with the exception of the line:--

Conceit in weakest bodies strongest works,

which is wanting in the first edition, and Hamlet's address to the Ghost, are in both quartos the same. Even as in the first act, so this time also, Hamlet, on seeing the Ghost, calls upon the saints:--

Save me, and hover o'er me with your wings, You heavenly guards!

This was the usual course on the occasion of such doubtful apparitions, of which one did not know whether they were 'airs of heaven' or 'blasts from h.e.l.l.'

A new intercalation is (in the first quarto there is no vestige of it), that Hamlet reproaches his mother with having degraded 'sweet religion'

to 'a rhapsody of words;' that he says 'the Devil hath conquered her at hoodman blind ;' that she should confess herself to Heaven, and 'a.s.sume a virtue if she have it not;' that 'virtue itself of vice must pardon beg in the fatness of these pursy times, yea, curb and woo, for leave to do him good.' So also is the Queen's question new:--

Ay me, what act, That roars so loud, and thunders in the _index_? [44]

There is no trace, in the first quarto, of the following most characteristic thoughts:--

For, use almost can change the stamp of Nature [45]

And either curb (?) the Devil, or throw him out With wondrous potency....

And when you are desirous to be blest, I'll blessing beg of you.

Let us figure to ourselves before what public Hamlet first saw the wanderer from Purgatory; before what youth he bade Ophelia go to a nunnery; before what men he remained inactive at the critical moment simply because the criminal is engaged in his prayers, whilst his own murdered father died without Holy Communion, without having confessed and received the Extreme Unction. Let us remember before what audience he purposely made the thunders of the Index roar so loud; at what place he gets into ecstasy; and where he first preaches to his mother that the Devil may be mastered and thrown out.

Here, certainly, we have questions of religion!

Shakspere's genius has known how to transport these most important questions of his time, away from the shrill contact with contemporary disputes, into the harmonious domain of the Muses. He, and his friends and patrons, did not look upon the subjects discussed in this tragedy with the pa.s.sionless, indifferent eyes of our century. Many men, no doubt, were filled with the thought, to which Bacon soon gave a scientific form, that the human mind can only make true progress if it turns towards the inquiry into Nature, keeping far away from the hampering influence of transcendental dogmas. The liberal, intellectual tendencies of the Reformation were not yet fettered in England with the new dogmatic strait waistcoat of a narrow-minded, melancholy sect.

And Shakspere's views, which he has embodied in 'Hamlet,' were not in divinatory advance of his age; they were easily comprehensible to the best of his time.

Our chief argument will be contained in the chapter in which we shall hear Shakspere's adversaries launch out furiously against the tendency of this drama. Meanwhile, we will exhaust the course of its action.

Hamlet has already come very near to that point of view where Reason at last ceases to guide his conduct, and where he becomes convinced that indiscretion often is of better service than deep planning.

Now in Montaigne's Essay [46] already mentioned we read:--'When an urgent circ.u.mstance, or any violent or unexpected accident of State necessity, induces a Prince to break his word and faith, or otherwise forces him out of his ordinary duty, he is to ascribe that compulsion to a lash of G.o.d's rod.'

The pa.s.sage in which Hamlet consoles himself in regard to the murder committed against Polonius is new:--

I do repent: but heaven hath pleased it so, To punish me with this, and this with me, That I must be their scourge and minister.

Hamlet, beholding the victim of his indiscretion, excuses himself thus:--

I must be cruel, only to be kind.