Why should the poor be flattered? No, let the candied tongue lick absurd pomp, And crook the pregnant hinges of the knee, Where thrift may follow fawning.
Discretion, pushed to extremes, ends in _vacillation_, and this is the leading trait in Hamlet’s character. His father’s ghost appears, tells how he was “sleeping, by a brother’s hand cut off,” and enjoins on him, as a solemn duty to avenge his death. Hamlet acknowledges the duty, and resolves to perform it; he feels himself “prompted to his revenge by heaven and hell,” and yet he shows from the first a painful consciousness of his own infirmity of purpose.
The time is out of Joint; O cursed spite, That ever I was born to set it right.
His numerous soliloquies are accordingly for the most part mere developments of this trait of his character; and illustrations of the inevitable tendency of meditation to beget inaction. The narrow or bigoted mind, which either can not or will not see more than a single feature of a subject, may well be prompt and decided; but whoever is capable and willing to survey any great question in all its aspects, will reach a firm conclusion,—if he reach it at all,—only by slow and painful steps. Laertes, who is little better than a ranting madcap, no sooner conceives a purpose, than he hastens to execute it; whilst Hamlet, who is a calm philosopher, ponders, and procrastinates, and does nothing.
In the last scene of act second, Hamlet, after having listened to the recitation of a player, compares his own “motive and cue for passion,” with that of a fellow, who spoke merely “in a fiction, in a dream of passion;” and reproaches himself for coldness and inaction; but ends at last in the conclusion that the spirit he had seen may be a devil, and that he must have “grounds more relative than this.”
The next scene contains the great soliloquy on death. “To be or not to be,” etc. On a former occasion Hamlet had exclaimed:
O that the Everlasting had not fixed His canon ’gainst self-slaughter!
And he now concludes that the most profound meditation on the subject merely
Puzzles the will, And makes us rather bear those ills we have, Than fly to others that we know not of.
This soliloquy has sometimes been condemned as taking an unworthy and inadequate view of the great subjects of death, and “that undiscovered country” beyond the grave; and if it had been Shakspeare’s purpose to _discuss_ these subjects, the criticism would undoubtedly be just. But let us bear in mind that his object in this passage was simply to illustrate “vacillation of mind” in connection with the highest subjects of human contemplation, and we shall find that he has accomplished all he undertook in a manner entirely worthy of himself.