Part 7 (1/2)
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.