His moral nature is equally praiseworthy. Ordinarily strong of will, “most generous and free from all contriving,”[146:2] though probably at times inclined to be passionate and on occasions headstrong to excess, he was certainly not the man to procrastinate through “losing himself in labyrinths of thought” as Schlegel asserts him to have done.
If we would find the key to this mystery, Hamlet himself will give it us in his first soliloquy. He meditates suicide, from which he is only kept by the fact that “the Everlasting” has “fix’d His canon ’gainst self-slaughter.”[146:3] Then he explains why everything to him is “weary, stale, flat and unprofitable”—it is the terrible shock of his mother’s incestuous marriage following that of the death of his father, and the suspicious circumstances which attended it, that has given rise to this abnormal state of mind. His melancholy is augmented by the nature of the command laid on him by the Ghost and the consequent secrecy which he must put upon himself:
“But break, my heart, for I must hold my tongue.”[146:4]
This is Melancholy True—a state of mind which
cannot be thrown off like a cloak, yet which is abnormal. It is an excellent case for the pathologist. Truly conceived, it furnishes the only satisfying explanation of the strange phases of Hamlet’s so-called “character”—the depression, the self-weariness, the irritability, the violence, the satisfaction at the smallest thing achieved, the impossibility of carrying out the original purpose—all these things are the natural outcome of melancholia.
A two-fold objection to this view has to be met. It will be said that such a conception of Hamlet destroys the moral lesson of the play. And would that it did! It is unfortunate that certain critics are unable to pick up a play without looking at once for the moral. Those who have done this with “Hamlet” have succeeded in shifting the centre of gravity from the author to themselves. They say that the play shews how wrong it is to procrastinate, and how by procrastination we lose far more than we gain. It is, according to these critics, a mere sermon preached on the text
“That we would do
We should do when we would.”[147:1]
How, they say, can this sermon be preached if the chief illustration—the man by whom we are all to be warned—is exculpated from blame by illness?
They know little of tragedy—or at least of Shakespeare’s tragedy—who hold a view like this. What Shakespeare habitually does is to shew us a man, by nature fitted to be a hero of tragedy, with a fatal defect, the consequences of which are worked out in the play. Looked at from this point of view, the sentimental objection at once vanishes, and the second objection arises. It is a more serious one: Can a man suffering from melancholia—to put the thing in its most prosaic form—any more than a man suffering from any other form of insanity, be admitted as a tragic hero? The answer is that he can. And this partly because his exact state of mind is not determined, partly because it is a condition not generally recognised as one of disease, and tragedy has always to be considered from the point of view, not of the doctor, but of the author and the audience. As Dr. Bradley, who very ably sums up the question, says in his Lectures on Shakespearean Tragedy: “The man who suffers as Hamlet suffers—and thousands go about their business suffering thus in greater or less degree—is considered irresponsible neither by other people nor by himself: he is only too keenly conscious of his responsibility. . . . . Hamlet’s state is not one which a healthy mind is unable sufficiently to imagine. It is probably not further from average experience, nor more difficult to realise, than the