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Hamlet : A Crisis of the Evolving Soul
THE consciousness that rules over the tragedy of Hamlet, the destiny that works itself out in the play of the forces portrayed in that great drama, are the consciousness and the destiny of the human soul at a most fateful crisis, a crucial turning-point in the course of its evolution. The soul, lodged in the human embodiment, moves forward and upward, towards a greater and greater self-expression and self-expansion, a continual heightening and widening of its consciousness, a constant sublimation and transfiguration of its mode of being and living. And in the progressive gradient so pursued, there are certain stages or level-crossings that can be clearly marked out in view of their importance and significance. Shakespeare himself records, in two other of his major dramas, the mystery of two such stages preceding the one he deals with in Hamlet: one in Macbeth and the other in King Lear. Indeed these three mighty creations form a triology with the Karma of the human soul at different crises as its theme. King Lear represents human consciousness low down in the scale of evolution, almost at its start – a nature primitive and barbarian. We seem to go back into a prehistoric world, a paleolithic age – the domain of utter ignorance, of vulgar greed and hunger, where one sees the rank play of a raw and crude and aboriginal nature. Man is here simply the eater, a true brother of the rest of the animal kind, one in blood with the tiger and the wolf. He is the sheer biological or vital being – the Rakshasa – into whom the light of the Mind has not yet descended, at least not to the extent of effecting an appreciable change in his original and primitive texture. It is a world ruled by the mode of tamas. * ----------
*The angelic Cordelia is a ray
that has strayed down from some higher region, page – 185 In Macbeth we move up one step farther; human consciousness attains here a higher level. Something of the mental being enters into the purely vital creature: instead of the Eater, the man with the mere stomach, we have here the Ruler, the Tyrant, the human being with its will – and its arms that execute the will: the dominating motive is no longer hunger and greed and cruelty for cruelty's sake, but power and position and lordship, and the driving force, not blind passion and dark fury – sheer unconsciousness – but deliberate resolution, foreseeing calculation and steady purposiveness; the Rakshasa gives place to the Asura. The Asura is the incarnation of conscious egotism, the will to dominate, to be the sole master and monarch; he is the self-aggrandising ‘vaulting ambition’. He does not seek to possess things for their own sake, not so much to enjoy them as to hold them as symbols of his royalty, of his personal worth and majesty. In Macbeth we have the world of the Asura-a creation of the mode of rajas. Hamlet is the third stage; it is a vision of sattva-guna and a creation attempted by that vision. The human consciousness that was imprisoned in the vital mind, is released here into the higher or pure mind. The soul escapes from its sheath of sheer hunger and desire and egoism and self-aggrandisement – yearns for light, more light. Lear is a dark mass of unconsciousness, crude and violent, even like the naked and raging elements into whose arms he is thrown; Macbeth is the beginning of consciousness in which one is conscious of one's own self alone, and keenly and deliberately attached to it, – here light has dawned, but a lurid light. Hamlet is consciousness that is seeking to transcend the barrier of the little self and its narrow and vulgar 'appetites and impulses. Man here comes into touch with something that is impersonal, other-regarding, afar; he has grown interests that are not merely mundane, utilitarian, pragmatic, self-centred, but abstract, metaphysical, beyond the individual's own and immediate concern: he has now ideals and aspirations – he is a seeker of the true, the
------------------- to evolve hereafter, not for immediate fruition and fulfilment. It is the Light that shines always even in this naughty world, a spark of the Grace that still relieves the blight that mars an otherwise sinful earth. She is the symbol of a promise or prophecy that will justify itself sometime in the future, but for the moment the burden of the gloom is too much upon her and she is engulfed in it and sacrificed. Page – 186 good, the beautiful. He has been initiated into the divine – daiva – nature. Culture, refinement, sensibility, understanding – all the graces of a truly rational being make Hamlet the very flower of an evolving humanity. Over against the personality of Hamlet stands another which represents false height, the wrong perfection, the counterfeit ideal. Polonius is humanity arrested in its path of straight development and deviated into a cut-de-sac of self-conceit and surface urbanity, apparent cleverness and success and pretentious and copy-book morality. When one has outgrown the barbarian, one runs the risk of becoming a snob or philistine. It is a side table-land, as it were, on mid-heights, the standard perhaps of a commoner humanity, but which the younger ideal has to transcend or avoid or even to destroy, so that it may find itself and live its own life. To the philistine too the mere biological man is a taboo, but he seeks to confine human nature into a scheme of codes and maxims and lifeless injunctions and prohibitions. He is also the man of Reason but without the higher inflatus, the living and creative Something More – the poetry, the vision, the dream that would transfigure the merely pragmatic, practical, worldly wise – the bourgeois – into the princely aristocratic idealist, elevate the drab terre à terre To-day into the glory of a soaring To-morrow.
What is the crisis that confronts the ascending visionary soul? What is the obstacle that the Idealist has to face, the danger zone that he has to traverse in order to arrive at- the realisation of his ideal? In Hamlet we have a dreamer, an ardent optimist, a young enthusiast who has lived so long in his own rosy world, in his tour d'ivoire, and thought that that was the only world, even the world as it is outside. Also in the simplicity of his faith he dedicated all his love and admiration, all his yearning for a sweet and glorious ideal, to a child of common humanity who appeared to him to be an emblem and promise of Realisation. Alas, the promise had not attained the strength and force that would lead inevitably to maturity and fruition, the child was yet too loyal to its origin to cut away from its moorings and soar with him. Page – 187 The crisis then is the revelation to the aspiring dream-lifted soul that the original and aboriginal humanity that seemed to have been traversed and transcended and left far behind is not wholly obliterated; indeed it is still there in its stark reality. The light and air and space and colour of the high dreamland are reared upon dark and dingy abysses, "this brave o’erhanging firmament, this majestical roof fretted with golden fire" is none other than" a foul and pestilent congregation of vapours.‹ All the wisdom and culture and virtue and apparent beauty in human nature cannot prevent a man from becoming an arrant knave and a woman from being a whore, even if she were one's own mother. This disillusionment is the crisis at which the soul has arrived-this tearing down of the painted arras that hid the naked horror of man's beastly nature and the ugly vanity and stagy show that the world is. The revelation was so sudden and stunning to the innocent and aspiring soul that it lost for the moment all its bearings, its natural strength and capacity and will, and fell from its high status into the slough of dark and despondent impotency. Another person – Laertes – placed in an analogous situation but not worried by the promptings of idealism and the sense of discrepancy between the ideal and the real, takes the world as it is, considers it all right and moves straight to his purpose; he is not a divided being, but in full and integral possession of himself and of his instruments of action-even though this solid pragmatism does not avail him much in the end. The crisis in Hamlet reminds us of another somewhat similar one, that is the basis and starting-point of the great episode in the Mahabharata – the Gita. Arjuna, the ideal hero and man of action, in absolute self-confidence and certitude, with no doubt or hesitation about anything in the world, advances into the very thick of the bloody strife – and lo! all is changed as with a magic wand! What was to him a moment before a clear duty, an evident act of righteousness, the noblest of deeds, now appears nothing less than an inglorious slaughter. The bow of victory slips from the hand of the mighty warrior and, all nerve and tremor, he sinks down in gloom and dejection and complete confusion.
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¹Hamlet, Act II, Sc.
2.
Page –
188
Arjuna tided over the crisis as he could avail himself
of the knowledge of the way out and the necessary help that was given
by the Divine Guide. Hamlet bears the full crash of doom upon his
head and makes others also share its consequences with him. At one
point, however, he seemed to make just a move towards the right
solution of the difficulty. He finds that the avoidance of the Evil
by self-destruction – which is a common and natural temptation in
like situations-is no solution: it may lead you into a still greater
evil. One has to face the evil, stand and fight it. Once this is
decided, the right course for the hero (the Aryan fighter, as the
Gita would say) would be to live As one, in suffering all, that suffers nothing; A man that Fortune’s buffets and rewards
Has ta’en with equal thanks – ² Hamlet thus seems to fall upon the teaching of samata – equanimity – with which the Gita begins Arjuna's initiation into the secret of Deliverance. He has had a glimpse of the divine portals from a distance; but he did not know how to proceed in the straight and narrow path; he is diverted into an Asuric handling of the forces of lower nature and is himself broken in the process. A poignant vision or experience of evil in God's world which otherwise appears so work living in, the perception of the canker in the rose, has been the turning-point of many a destiny. It has been the occasion of the birth of saints and sages, souls that have traversed beyond and found the solution of the enigma. It has also hurled back into confusion and ruin souls that faced the Sphinx but could not answer her riddle – such, for example, as were Hamlet and Faust.
In these latter the human consciousness has reached its
high water-mark of normal development. They are the finest expression
of man’s capacities and powers in the ordinary nature. Here we have
the play of the higher, even perhaps the highest ranges of the Mind –
the mind, that is to say, of the poet and the philosopher. But here
also stands revealed the counterfoil, the obverse of that high
achievement – the feet ------------------------
²Hamlet, Act III, Sc.
2.
Page –
189 of clay on which is reared the head of gold, the flesh that is tied irrevocably to the spirit.
The human soul, as represented in Hamlet, has evolved so
far as to stand on a summit from where it can contemplate the entire
creation. It has attained a kind of universal consciousness and has
the vision of a global movement of nature – even as Arjuna had of
the Lord's universal body, and like him is awed and overwhelmed – a
harsh world, in which one draws one's breath in pain. But this is a
mental summit, and the contradiction that is revealed here can be
resolved only by passing beyond into a higher domain of
consciousness. Page – 190
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