XIII
HAMLET[1]
I
Shakespeare died just three centuries ago, on the twenty-third of April, 1616. He died—and was forgotten, we may say, for a century, until in 1709 and 1710 Nicholas Rowe published the first approximately complete edition of his works. Then he came to life again, to a life more intense and more vivid than the life he had lived in the rough, confused age of the Virgin Queen. This new life of his has endured for two hundred years. It was initiated by a pre-Romantic impulse; it was carried to universal fame on that wave of Romanticism whose ripples have not yet subsided, that wave whereby Shakespeare was made to seem a fellow-citizen of Goethe, a brother of Schlegel, a contemporary of Victor Hugo.
But now a second night hangs over Shakespeare; this third centenary is perhaps the beginning of a second and a truer death. Today, silencing for a moment, with the arrogance of fame, the furious reveilles of the world-wide war, he is finding in England and elsewhere men and women to repeat the centenary formulas of love and admiration, each according to his rite and his power, by erudition or exclamation, by rhetoric or anecdote. But we are by no means sure that a hundred years from now Shakespeare will be as dominant in human consciousness as habit and tradition have made him for our own generation.
Nor does it avail to say that Shakespeare is modern and eternal, that his restlessness is our restlessness, that his fear is our fear. For we are changing, and those who are to come after us will change still more. Day by day we are becoming harder to satisfy, more refined, more discontented. Fewer things give us pleasure, and fewer still will please us as time goes on: a painful condition, but a condition that is inevitable if we are to create more than we have found, if we are to add new treasure to the inheritance we have received from those who, though dead, are yet immortal.
We are growing away from Shakespeare. That terrible old dramatic world of his, compact of grandeur and nocturnal dread, is beginning to make us smile. There is too much machinery and scene-painting in his work. We of today want things in essence. His fancy, even when it soars most wildly, is fashioned and controlled by the specific social forms of theatrical action. His lyric, even when it seems to win an independent life, is the poetry of an alchemist—ornate, Parnassian. It tends toward the madrigal and the tour de force. And we want things in their essence. The drama is composite. It is the first historic form of spoken art—it derives from magic pantomimes, from primitive ceremonies, from sacred mysteries—and it is therefore the most limited and the least legitimate of arts. It carries with it so many social, external, material, and mythical weights and motives that it cannot completely absorb us and convince us. Tragedy presupposes faith—some sort of faith, whatsoever it may be, even an irreligious faith—it presupposes a system of morality, a system of law, and the possibility of opposition between life and law and between life and faith. Death and tragedy spring from the clash between passion and discipline. But today we have lost faith and morality. We have no law, no discipline: the myths and divinities of all the ages are dead and turned to clay. We are beyond struggle, beyond stageable tragedy, beyond the capacity for sharing with eager passion in the old dramatic antitheses. The drama is receding from us, and with it Shakespeare too recedes. The very qualities that have brought him greatness and glory hitherto will hereafter bring forgetfulness and disesteem. We of today feel poetry, that poetry which is absolutely poetic and intimately alive even in its unspoken implications—we feel the lyric. Other forms of literary art, narrative or dramatic, will doubtless appeal for centuries to the higher and lower castes of the incompetent, but as the generations pass they will find less and less approval from those few sensitive minds which after all are the only ones that count, since they are the only ones able to create poetry or understand it.
Shakespeare, a portent of dead ages, is not great enough or pure enough in his lyricism to entitle him to immortality even in anthologies: he moves within the sphere of dramatic action and suffering, in those ambiguous, impure, and external forms which are steadily sinking in esteem. For us the death of Shakespeare is beginning now.
II
But Shakespeare is still great, so devotees and conservatives will reply, in his power of penetrating and representing the human soul, of revealing—through the torments of his characters—the infamy of man, the blind ferocity of fate, the depths and the terrors of life. Such is, or should be, the judgment of those (and they are in the majority) who have not yet reached the most radical conclusions, the most lacerating and irremediable solutions. But Shakespeare’s psychology and philosophy no longer have their former power for one who has undergone the desolation of the modern spiritual hell, and has won back for himself, stone by stone, and blade of grass by blade of grass, a corner in the cold and cruel paradise of perfect knowledge. Yet the majority of mankind has not yet come even to the point which Shakespeare reached, and is content therefore to wonder and to worship. For the development of the human spirit does not proceed in lines of contemporary parallelism: brutes of the Neanderthal were at large in the very years when Plato lifted his youthful eyes to the face of Socrates and listened to his holy virtuosities.
I am thinking in particular of Hamlet. Hamlet has been regarded by critics and by the public as the most profound of Shakespeare’s plays. Historians, actors, and dilettantes consider it his masterpiece. I, too, many years ago, had a languid fondness for the Prince of Denmark, who returned my affection. How many nights we spent in each other’s company! How many fantastic and exciting conversations we enjoyed which are not to be found in any printed text! Hamlet was a brother to me, more than a brother. Side by side we delved, and side by side discovered some of those mysteries that are not dreamt of in human philosophies.
But of late, thinking of Shakespeare’s death, I have reread Hamlet. The beloved brother had disappeared, and in his place I found a fat neurasthenic, half evil, half imbecile.
More than ever before the dramatic machinery annoys me. The legendary and murderous intrigue that supports and justifies the action, the barbaric events and manners, among which the semi-barbaric Hamlet moves as an intellectualist dispensing justice, repel me without stirring me. It is such a tragedy as people seek when they go to the theatre to laugh or tremble. Here there is bait a-plenty for those who need blood and miracles to stir their torpid sensibility.
In Hamlet nine of the characters are killed. One is killed before the curtain rises; but he stalks, a vindictive and oratorical spectre, through two acts of the play. A second, Polonius, is killed through an error of the nervous Hamlet. A third, Ophelia, kills herself through the fault of the tender Hamlet. Two others, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, are killed in a distant city through the fault of the astute Hamlet. The other four die at the end of the last act: the mother a suicide by mistake, Laertes and Claudius at Hamlet’s hand. Hamlet is the evil genius of himself and of the others. To avenge one corpse he puts eight by its side. And at least six of the eight are innocent.
But this excess might be attributed to the necessities of the story and the stage. The fundamental failure is in the justification of all these terrible and funereal events. The soul of the tragedy is false, the psychology of the protagonists is incoherent, the most striking pensées are merely banalities in disguise. Something is rotten even in the art of Shakespeare.
III
Hamlet’s case is simple and well known. He had loved his father, and his father has been murdered. He desires to slay the murderer; and after a series of weaknesses and waverings he succeeds in doing so at the moment of his own death.
We are then in the realm of the elementary and savage law of retribution: an eye for an eye, a life for a life. But Prince Hamlet is by no means a primitive man. He has studied philosophy; he has spent the best years of his life amid the wisdom of Wittenberg; he is capable of general ideas. He therefore colors his vengeance with the motive of justice, and seeks to act not as a rabid brute, but as a man pure in the assurance and the majesty of his right. Yet here his error starts. For justice is by no means the same thing as vengeance: it is infinitely more subtle and more vast. Justice involves intelligence and reflection: it is no mere unruly mania for private slaughter. There is a justice, human and divine, within whose course even crimes may serve as just and necessary acts. Hamlet’s father confesses his own damnation: he must be punished for certain “foul crimes done in my days of nature.” In these foul crimes lies the first justification of Claudius—not in his own eyes, or in those of Hamlet, but from the viewpoint of universal justice. So then a guilty man has slain a guilty man; and to appease the shadow of the guilty man who has been slain, others, guilty and innocent, must die. And an apparent and material justice engenders sad and irrevocable injustices.
If Hamlet were in reality a man of exceptional intelligence, as he seems at times to be, he would not fix upon the idea of vengeance, or at the least he would hesitate to do so. But all the uncertainties of Hamlet have reference not to the legitimacy of vengeance in itself—on this point he decides once and forever—but merely to the choice of the means and the moment for vengeance.
And yet, if he were really capable of thinking more clearly than his fellows, vengeance should have seemed to him a terribly complicated and a brutally useless thing. Vengeance cures nothing; usually, as in this case, it adds worse ills to ills already irreparable. His madness, half feigned, half real, swaying between epilepsy and imbecility, drives him to slay six human beings by his own or by another hand, though his father had asked as sacrifice but a single life. He destroys two families, a dynasty, his love, himself; and from all this death not a single principle of life comes forth.
He knows that his father was a guilty man; he knows that he himself is base, vicious, and homicidal. Within the drama he appears to us as a deceiver, a slayer of souls and bodies. Had he the right to heap up so much torture when his father was not innocent, when he himself was not innocent? A savage, a primitive man, would have hastened to Claudius and killed him immediately on receiving the command to avenge. Hamlet requires proof, that is, reflection. But his reflection yields merely a restless play of shrewdness, a comedy of fits and starts, through which there gleams a deep filial piety and, at the end, a refined cruelty. He even spares Claudius when he might safely kill him, merely because he finds him kneeling and in a state of grace. He toys with his tempestuous despair.
His inner experience is utterly illogical. Even before he has spoken with the spectre he feels repugnance for his mother and hatred for his uncle. Yet even after the terrible revelation he is not fully convinced. He devises the scene of the Murder of Gonzago in order to obtain a definite certainty, and he does not even trust his own powers of observation, but brings Horatio in as witness. And when he is certain he wavers still. He slays Polonius through error, and passively agrees to go to England instead of acting at once and resolutely.
We cannot tell what he seeks at sea: perhaps merely another pretext to delay action. And when he returns, after he has sent the two courtiers to die in his place, he philosophizes in cemeteries instead of digging the grave of the only man he has a right to strike. Only at the last, when he has killed his friend and sees his mother and himself in the death agony, does he, with his dying arm, take the one life the savage spectre had demanded.
No less incomprehensible is his behavior toward Ophelia, whom his feigned madness brings to real madness and to piteous death in the indifferent stream. He loves Ophelia truly, and his love continues even after her death. Might he not have spared her in his tragic comedy? Might he not have given her some word that would have enabled her to wait and understand? “I cannot now be yours nor think of tenderness. When I have fulfilled my duty I will come to you again; and if I then can smile, my first smile shall be for your white face, for your maidenly blushes. Marvel not though I seem strange in word and deed. Another Hamlet has perforce entered life; but the Hamlet that you knew is not dead—he that spoke to you so sweetly, as his heart overflowing with adoration bade him speak—and he will be with you in thought forever, even though he disappear.”
The killing of Ophelia is the most useless and the most monstrous of all the cruelties of Hamlet. I cannot understand how a single soul can have forgiven him for this. His rambling frenzy at her tomb does not suffice to obliterate the crime. She, at least, was pure and innocent; yet through the fault of him who loved her there came to her the greatest unhappiness and the most unjust fate. To her, the one pure being, the one innocent heart—and her only fault was that she had trusted love!
IV
The other persons of the drama are as incoherent as the Prince. Claudius is at heart a cowardly moralist who sins through blindness and terror—yet knows that he is sinning, and is capable of remorse. Gertrude is still more inexplicable. Either she was so wicked as to have formed the resolve to be the accomplice and wife of the assassin—and in that case one cannot understand her dismay at the first harsh words of Hamlet—or she was at heart weak and affectionate—and in that case one cannot understand why she obeyed Claudius and allowed the death of a loving husband whom she loved. The little that we can infer from the conversation of this sinister pair leads us to think that Hamlet would have wreaked a nobler and a far more terrible vengeance if he had let them live with their memories and their fears, guarding himself against their terror, but letting them realize that he knew and judged.
Poor Polonius, a ridiculous victim, despite his skeptical and time-serving courtly wit, does not know what the pother is all about, and persists in regarding Hamlet’s madness as an impossible amatory delusion.
Nor can we save the famous thoughts of Hamlet—not even that “To be or not to be” which, after all, amounts merely to this superficial commonplace: life is evil, and if we were sure that the other life is not worse, we would do well to commit suicide. What better can one say of his banal reflections in the cemetery—the matter of men’s bodies is but dust, and may return to foul places and to base uses—and his easy, vulgar invective against the falseness of woman?
Never has any rereading been for me so sad as this—appropriate in its very sadness to the natural melancholy of a commemoration. For me today not only is Shakespeare dead, but in my spirit his restless son has died also.
- ↑ Written in 1916, for the third centenary of Shakespeare’s death.