Noble thoughts! But it is not enough to play an aesthetic game with them. The energetic English genius wishes that they should regulate our life; that we should act in accordance with them, so that no tragic complication should form itself, which could only be solved by the ruin and death of the innocent together with the guilty. The monologue concludes thus:—
O, from this time forth,
My thoughts be bloody, or be nothing worth!
Nevertheless, Hamlet continues his voyage.
The reader will remember that Montaigne spoke of an instinctive impulse of the will—a daimon—by which he often, and to his final advantage, had allowed himself to be guided, so much so that such strong impulses might be attributed to divine inspiration. A daimon of this kind, under whose influence Hamlet acts, is described in the second scene of the fifth act. The passage is wanting in the first quarto. [48] Hamlet tells Horatio how he lay in the ship, and how in his heart there was a kind of fighting which would not let him sleep. This harassing condition, the result of his unmanly indecision, he depicts in these words:—
Methought I lay
Worse than the mutines in the bilboes.
Then all at once (how could an impulsive manner of action be better described?), before he could 'make a prologue to his brains,' Hamlet lets himself be overcome by such a daimonic influence. He breaks open the grand commission of others, forges a seal with a signet in his possession, becomes a murderer of two innocent men, and draws the evil conclusion therefrom:—
Let us know,
Our indiscretion sometimes serves us well,
When our deep plots do pall; and that should learn us,
There's a divinity that shapes our ends,
Rough-hew them how we will.
This view we have already quoted from Essay III. (12). In Florio's translation (632):—'Therefore do our dessigns so often miscarry…. The heavens are angry, and I may say envious of the extension and large privilege we ascribe to human wisdome, to the prejudice of theirs: and abridge them so more unto us, by so much more we endeavour to amplifie them.'
Hamlet takes the twofold murder committed against Rosencrantz and Guildenstern as little to heart as the 'indiscreet' deed by which Polonius was killed. Then the consolation was sufficient for him that lovingkindness had forced him to be cruel. This time, his conscience is not touched, because—
't is dangerous when the baser nature comes Between the pass and fell incensed points Of mighty opposites.