No More Learning

* * * * *

I know of nothing in all drama more incomparable from the point of view
of art, nothing more suggestive in its subtlety of observation, than
Shakespeare's drawing of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. They are Hamlet's
college friends. They have been his companions. They bring with them
memories of pleasant days together. At the moment when they come across
him in the play he is staggering under the weight of a burden intolerable
to one of his temperament. The dead have come armed out of the grave to
impose on him a mission at once too great and too mean for him. He is a
dreamer, and he is called upon to act. He has the nature of the poet,
and he is asked to grapple with the common complexity of cause and
effect, with life in its practical realisation, of which he knows
nothing, not with life in its ideal essence, of which he knows so much.
He has no conception of what to do, and his folly is to feign folly.
Brutus used madness as a cloak to conceal the sword of his purpose, the
dagger of his will, but the Hamlet madness is a mere mask for the hiding
of weakness. In the making of fancies and jests he sees a chance of
delay. He keeps playing with action as an artist plays with a theory. 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.