:

tive than others, misfortune suddenly falls, extreme, overwhelming, of the very kind to destroy all faith and every motive for action with one glance he has seen all the vileness of humanity; and this insight is given him in his mother. His mind is yet intact; but judge from the violence of his style, the crudity of his exact details, the terrible tension of the whole nervous machine, whether he has not already one foot on the verge of madness:

"O that this too, too solid flesh would melt,

Thaw and resolve itself into a dew!

Or that the Everlasting had not fix'd

His canon 'gainst self-slaughter! O God! God!

How weary, stale, flat and unprofitable,

Seem to me all the uses of this world!

Fie on't! ah fie! 'tis an unweeded garden,

That grows to seed; things rank and gross in nature
Possess it merely. That it should come to this!
But two months dead: nay, not so much, not two:
So excellent a king, so loving to my mother
That he might not let e'en the winds of heaven
Visit her face too roughly. Heaven and earth!
And yet, within a month,-
Let me not think on't-Frailty, thy name is woman!-
A little month, or ere those shoes were old
With which she follow'd my poor father's body,
Ere yet the salt of most unrighteous tears
Had left the flushing in her galled eyes,

She married. O, most wicked speed, to post

...

With such dexterity to incestuous sheets!

It is not nor it cannot come to good!

But break, my heart; for I must hold my tongue! "1

"Hold, hold, my heart;

And you my sinews, grow not instant old,

1 Hamlet, i. 2.

Here already are contortions of thought, a beginning of hallucination, the symptoms of what is to come after. In the middle of conversation the image of his father rises before his mind. He thinks he sees him. How then will it be when the "canonised bones have burst their cerements," "the sepulchre hath oped his ponderous and marble jaws," and when the ghost comes in the night, upon a high "platform" of land, to tell him of the tortures of his prison of fire, and of the fratricide, who has driven him thither? Hamlet grows faint, but grief strengthens him, and he has a desire for living:

But bear me stiffly up! Remember thee!

Ay, thou poor ghost, while memory holds a seat
In this distracted globe.-Remember thee?
Yea, from the table of my memory

I'll wipe away all trivial fond records,

All saws of books, all forms, all pressures past,
And thy commandment all alone shall live.

O villain, villain, smiling, damned villain !
My tables,-meet it is I set it down,

"" 1

(Writing.)

That one may smile, and smile, and be a villain; At least I'm sure it may be so in Denmark: So, uncle, there you are." This convulsive outburst, this fevered writing hand, this frenzy of intentness, prelude the approach of a kind of monomania. When his friends come up, he treats them with the speeches of a child or an idiot. He is no longer master of his words; hollow phrases whirl in his brain, and fall from his mouth as in a dream. They call him; he answers by imitating the cry of a sportsman whistling to his falcon: "Hillo, ho, ho, boy! come, bird, come." Whilst he is in the act of swearing them to secrecy, the ghost below repeats "Swear." Hamlet cries, with a nervous excitement and a fitful gaiety:

...

"Ah ha, boy! say'st thou so? art thou there, truepenny?
Come on-you hear this fellow in the cellarage,-

Consent to swear.

Ghost (beneath). Swear.

Hamlet. Hic et ubique? then we'll shift our ground.
Come hither, gentlemen. Swear by my sword.

Ghost (beneath). Swear.

Ham. Well said, old mole! canst work i' the earth so fast? A worthy pioner!" 2

Understand that as he says this his teeth chatter, "pale as his shirt, his knees knocking each other." Intense anguish ends with a kind of laughter, which is nothing else than a spasm. Thenceforth Hamlet speaks as though he had a continuous nervous attack. His madness is feigned, I admit; but his mind, as a door whose hinges are twisted, swings and bangs with every wind with a mad haste and with a discordant noise. He has no need to search for the strange ideas, apparent incoherencies, exaggerations, the deluge of sarcasms which he accumulates. He finds them within him; he does himself no violence, he simply gives

2 Ibid.

1 Hamlet, i. 5.

himself up to himself. When he has the piece played which is to unmask his uncle, he raises himself, lounges on the floor, lays his head in Ophelia's lap; he addresses the actors, and comments on the piece to the spectators; his nerves are strung, his excited thought is like a surging and crackling flame, and cannot find fuel enough in the multitude of objects surrounding it, upon all of which it seizes. When the king rises unmasked and troubled, Hamlet sings, and says, "Would not this, sir, and a forest of feathers-if the rest of my fortunes turn Turk with me-with two Provincial roses on my razed shoes, get me a fellowship in a cry of players, sir!" And he laughs terribly, for he is resolved on murder. It is clear that this state is a disease, and that the man will not survive it.

1

In a soul so ardent of thought, and so mighty of feeling, what is left but disgust and despair? We tinge all nature with the color of our thoughts; we shape the world according to our own ideas; when our soul is sick, we see nothing but sickness in the universe:

"This goodly frame, the earth, seems to me a sterile promontory, this most excellent canopy, the air, look you, this brave o’erhanging firmament, this majestical roof fretted with golden fire, why, it appears no other thing to me than a foul and pestilent congregation of vapours. What a piece of work is a man! how noble in reason! how infinite in faculty! in form and. moving how express and admirable! in action how like an angel! in apprehension how like a god! the beauty of the world! the paragon of animals! And yet, to me, what is this quintessence of dust? man delights not me: no, nor woman neither." 2

Henceforth his thought sullies whatever it touches. He rails bitterly before Ophelia against marriage and love. Beauty! Innocence! Beauty is but a means of prostituting innocence: "Get thee to a nunnery: why wouldst thou be a breeder of sinners? ... What should such fellows as I do crawling between earth and heaven? We are arrant knaves, all; believe none of

" 3

us.

When he has killed Polonius by accident, he hardly repents it; it is one fool less. He jeers lugubriously:

"King. Now Hamlet, where's Polonius?

Hamlet. At supper.

K. At supper! where?

1 Hamlet, iii. 2.

2 Ibid. ii. 2.

3 Ibid. iii. 1.

H. Not where he eats, but where he is eaten: a certain convocation of politic worms are e'en at him." 1

And he repeats in five or six fashions these gravedigger jests.
His thoughts already inhabit a churchyard; to this hopeless
philosophy a genuine man is a corpse. Public functions, honors,
passions, pleasures, projects, science, all this is but a borrowed
mask, which death removes, so that people may see what we are,
an evil-smelling and grinning skull. It is this sight he goes to
see by Ophelia's grave. He counts the skulls which the grave-
digger turns up; this was a lawyer's, that a courtier's. What
bows, intrigues, pretensions, arrogance! And here now is a
clown knocking it about with his spade, and playing "at loggats
with 'em." Cæsar and Alexander have turned to clay and make
the earth fat; the masters of the world have served to "patch a
wall." "Now get you to my lady's chamber, and tell her, let
her paint an inch thick, to this favour she must come; make her
laugh at that." 2
When a man has come to this, there is nothing
left but to die.

This heated imagination, which explains Hamlet's nervous disease and his moral poisoning, explains also his conduct. If he hesitates to kill his uncle, it is not from horror of blood or from our modern scruples. He belongs to the sixteenth century. On board ship he wrote the order to behead Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, and to do so without giving them "shriving-time." He killed Polonius, he caused Ophelia's death, and has no great remorse for it. If for once he spared his uncle, it was because he found him praying, and was afraid of sending him to heaven. He thought he was killing him when he killed Polonius. What his imagination robs him of, is the coolness and strength to go. quietly and with premeditation to plunge a sword into a breast. He can only do the thing on a sudden suggestion; he must have a moment of enthusiasm; he must think the king is behind the arras, or else, seeing that he himself is poisoned, he must find his victim under his foil's point. He is not master of his acts; opportunity dictates them; he cannot plan a murder, but must improvise it. A too lively imagination exhausts the will, by the strength of images which it heaps up, and by the fury of intentness which absorbs it. You recognize in him a poet's soul, made

1 Hamlet, iv. 3.

2 Hamlet, v. I.

not to act, but to dream, which is lost in contemplating the phantoms of its creation, which sees the imaginary world too clearly to play a part in the real world; an artist whom evil chance has made a prince, whom worse chance has made an avenger of crime, and who, destined by nature for genius, is condemned by fortune to madness and unhappiness. Hamlet is Shakespeare, and, at the close of this gallery of portraits which have all some features of his own, Shakespeare has painted himself in the most striking of all.

If Racine or Corneille had framed a psychology, they would have said, with Descartes: Man is an incorporeal soul, served by organs, endowed with reason and will, dwelling in palaces or porticos, made for conversation and society, whose harmonious and ideal action is developed by discourse and replies, in a world constructed by logic beyond the realms of time and place.

If Shakespeare had framed a psychology, he would have said, with Esquirol:1 Man is a nervous machine, governed by a mood, disposed to hallucinations, carried away by unbridled passions, essentially unreasoning, a mixture of animal and poet, having instead of mind rapture, instead of virtue sensibility, imagination for prompter and guide, and led at random, by the most determinate and complex circumstances, to sorrow, crime, madness, and death.

IX.

Could such a poet always confine himself to the imitation of nature? Will this poetical world which is going on in his brain never break loose from the laws of the world of reality? Is he not powerful enough to follow his own laws? He is; and the poetry of Shakespeare naturally finds an outlet in the fantastical. This is the highest grade of unreasoning and creative imagination. Despising ordinary logic, it creates another; it unites facts and ideas in a new order, apparently absurd, in reality regular; it lays open the land of dreams, and its dreams seem to us the truth.

When we enter upon Shakespeare's comedies, and even his half-dramas,2 it is as though we met him on the threshold, like

1 A French physician (1772-1844), celebrated for his endeavors to improve the treatment of the insane.-TR.

2 Twelfth Night, As you Like it, Tempest, Winter's Tale, etc., Cymbeline, Merchant of Venice, etc.