There really are many indications which bear out the praise of the commentators, that this world was not large enough for his genius. His spirits, magicians, monsters, and ghosts, are evidences of it. Other writers have resorted to these materials before him, but only as a mode of acting on human feelings. It was reserved for Shakspeare to make us as well acquainted with the secret heart of a ghost as of a mortal. Hamlet’s spectre not only frightens and startles us—he touches our feelings. We see into that unearthly mind—that solitary, disembodied being—revisiting the scene of its mortal life, but indicating, fearfully, by its stealthy dim night walks—the solemn march with which it goes slow and stately by—its allusions to things too frightful for human ears—its guilty starting at the crowing of the cock, and its hurrying back to its nameless and awful task—its anguish-stricken bewailings over the earthly state of peace and happiness from which it was so ruthlessly hurled—indicating by all these and many more expressive tokens, the dark and sublime load of woe it bears, and appealing to our sympathy with terrible power. Ulrici may have found, in this scene, grounds for his theory.
The character of the unhappy exile from earth to the secret and impenetrable abode of spirits, is drawn with as much reality as that of Hamlet or the grave digger. There are two or three touches of individuality which invest it with a singular attraction. It is not only a ghost; it is the ghost of a particular individual—of a majestic, noble, benevolent, affectionate king, overwhelmed by a mighty calamity: the victim of the most shameful lewdness—the blackest treachery that ever was seen—and deploring, “in fire,” the “foul crimes” done in his “days of nature.” We are not to presume he had been a peculiarly wicked man, but he was suddenly called to his account before he could prepare himself to die.
What a sublime hint of Christianity is this, and how fraught with a tremendous lesson to all mankind. Death itself is not the misfortune; it is death to an unprepared spirit. That he was
“Sleeping, by a brother’s hand
Of life, of crown, of queen, at once despatched,”
is not so terrible as that he was cut off even in the blossoms of his sins—
“Unhousel’d, disappointed, unaneal’d:
No reckoning made, but sent to my account
With all my imperfections on my head.”
I have always thought this one of the sublimest and most terrible reaches of our author’s genius. All earthly misfortunes, regarded in their temporary consequences are, of course, unworthy to be placed in comparison with the misfortune of the immortal disembodied soul. The wreck of old Lear’s mind, the agonizing fall of Othello from bliss, the banishment and murder of Coriolanus, the stern fate of the sweet Juliet and her tender Romeo—all fall short of the horror of this spectral lamentation, coming up from the central caves of the earth, or the yet more unimaginable caverns of hell itself, and deploring in the “dead waste and middle of the night,” the vast, dire and unnameable wo it suffers from its unreflecting manner of living while yet a mortal tenant of the globe, and when the means of making its reckoning were yet within its power, and had been so unwisely neglected. Had this unhappy creature been a thinking and pious person, the sudden blow would not have found it unprepared. It would not have been wasting the precious hours of age in the blossoms of its sin. It would not have deferred the imperative duty of making its peace with the creator, and of endeavoring, (before the condemnation “to fast in fire”) to purify itself from earthliness—from the enervating and selfish tendencies of luxury and royal power, and from the soils and weaknesses of youthful passions, uncurbed, and the follies—perhaps we may also with justice term them “foul crimes”—which all mortals commit in a greater or less degree.