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 assume a pleasing shape. Yea, perhaps
Out of my weakness and my melancholy,
As he is very potent with such spirits,
Abuses me to damn 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] entitled '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 (cathédrant). 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.
In 'Hamlet,' also, it is a 'canon' [29] fixed against self-slaughter, which restrains him from leaving, out of his own impulse, this whilom paradise, this 'unweeded garden' of life.
Montaigne, whose philosophy aims at making us conversant with death as with a friend, is yet terrified by it. Altogether, he says, he would fain pass his life at his ease; and if he could escape from blows, even by taking refuge under a calf's skin, [30] he would not be the man who would shrink from it.