No More Learning

He
makes himself the spy of his proper actions, and listening to his own
words knows them to be but 'words, words, words. ' Instead of trying to
be the hero of his own history, he seeks to be the spectator of his own
tragedy. He disbelieves in everything, including himself, and yet his
doubt helps him not, as it comes not from scepticism but from a divided
will.

Of all this Guildenstern and Rosencrantz realise nothing. They bow and
smirk and smile, and what the one says the other echoes with sickliest
intonation. When, at last, by means of the play within the play, and the
puppets in their dalliance, Hamlet 'catches the conscience' of the King,
and drives the wretched man in terror from his throne, Guildenstern and
Rosencrantz see no more in his conduct than a rather painful breach of
Court etiquette. That is as far as they can attain to in 'the
contemplation of the spectacle of life with appropriate emotions. ' They
are close to his very secret and know nothing of it. Nor would there be
any use in telling them. They are the little cups that can hold so much
and no more. Towards the close it is suggested that, caught in a cunning
spring set for another, they have met, or may meet, with a violent and
sudden death. But a tragic ending of this kind, though touched by
Hamlet's humour with something of the surprise and justice of comedy, is
really not for such as they. They never die. Horatio, who in order to
'report Hamlet and his cause aright to the unsatisfied,'

'Absents him from felicity a while,
And in this harsh world draws his breath in pain,'

dies, but Guildenstern and Rosencrantz are as immortal as Angelo and
Tartuffe, and should rank with them. They are what modern life has
contributed to the antique ideal of friendship.
He who writes a new _De
Amicitia_ must find a niche for them, and praise them in Tusculan prose.
They are types fixed for all time. To censure them would show 'a lack of
appreciation. ' They are merely out of their sphere: that is all. In
sublimity of soul there is no contagion. High thoughts and high emotions
are by their very existence isolated.

* * * * *

I am to be released, if all goes well with me, towards the end of May,
and hope to go at once to some little sea-side village abroad with R---
and M---.

The sea, as Euripides says in one of his plays about Iphigeneia, washes
away the stains and wounds of the world.

I hope to be at least a month with my friends, and to gain peace and
balance, and a less troubled heart, and a sweeter mood. I have a strange
longing for the great simple primeval things, such as the sea, to me no
less of a mother than the Earth. It seems to me that we all look at
Nature too much, and live with her too little. I discern great sanity in
the Greek attitude. They never chattered about sunsets, or discussed
whether the shadows on the grass were really mauve or not. But they saw
that the sea was for the swimmer, and the sand for the feet of the
runner. They loved the trees for the shadow that they cast, and the
forest for its silence at noon. The vineyard-dresser wreathed his hair
with ivy that he might keep off the rays of the sun as he stooped over
the young shoots, and for the artist and the athlete, the two types that
Greece gave us, they plaited with garlands the leaves of the bitter
laurel and of the wild parsley, which else had been of no service to men.