“My heart doth joy, that yet in all my life
I found no man, but he was true to me.”
And then night hangs upon the weary, sleepless eyes, and we are all ready to echo Antony's marvellous valediction:
“This was the noblest Roman of them all;
- - - - - - - - - - - -
His life was gentle; and the elements
So mixed in him, that Nature might stand up
And say to all the world, 'This was a man!'”
But this Brutus was no murderer, no conspirator, no narrow republican fanatic, but simply gentle Shakespeare discovering to us his own sad heart and the sweetness which suffering had called forth in him.
CHAPTER VII. DRAMAS OF REVENGE AND JEALOUSY: HAMLET.
“A beautiful, pure and most moral nature, without the strength of nerve which makes the hero, sinks beneath a burden which it can neither bear nor throw off; every duty is holy to him,—this too hard. The impossible is required of him,—not the impossible in itself, but the impossible to him. How he winds, turns, agonizes, advances and recoils, ever reminded, ever reminding himself, and at last almost loses his purpose from his thoughts, without ever again recovering his peace of mind....”—“Hamlet” by Goethe.
Goethe's criticism of Hamlet is so much finer than any English criticism that I am glad to quote it. It will serve, I think, as a standard to distinguish the best criticism of the past from what I shall set forth in the course of this analysis. In this chapter I shall try to show what new light our knowledge of Shakespeare throws on the play, and conversely what new light the play throws on its maker.
The first moment of disillusion brought out, as we have seen in Brutus, all the kindness in Shakespeare's nature. He will believe in men in spite of experience; but the idealistic pose could not be kept up: sooner or later Shakespeare had to face the fact that he had been befooled and scorned by friend and mistress—how did he meet it? Hamlet is the answer: Shakespeare went about nursing dreams of revenge and murder. Disillusion had deeper consequences; forced to see other men as they were, he tried for a moment to see himself as he was. The outcome of that objective vision was Hamlet—a masterpiece of self-revealing.
Yet, when he wrote “Hamlet,” nothing was clear to him; the significance of the catastrophe had only dawned upon him; he had no notion how complete his soul-shipwreck was, still less did he dream of painting himself realistically in all his obsequious flunkeyism and ungovernable sensuality. He saw himself less idealistically than heretofore, and, trying to look at himself fairly, honestly, he could not but accuse himself of irresolution at the very least; he had hung on with Herbert, as the sonnets tell us, hoping to build again the confidence which had been ruined by betrayal, hoping he knew not what of gain or place, to the injury of his own self-respect; while brooding all the time on quite impossible plans of revenge, impossible, for action had been “sicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought.” Hamlet could not screw his courage to the sticking point, and so became a type for ever of the philosopher or man of letters who, by thinking, has lost the capacity for action.