Soliloquies in England, and Later Soliloquies. George Santayana

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      8

      HAMLET'S QUESTION

      To be born is painful, and the profit of it so uncertain that we need not wonder if sometimes the mind as well as the body seems to hold back. The winds of February are not colder to a featherless chick than are the surprises which nature and truth bring to our dreaming egotism. It was warm and safe in the egg; exciting enough, too, to feel a new organ throbbing here or a fresh limb growing out there. No suspicion visited the happy creature that these budding domestic functions were but preparations for foreign wars and omens of a disastrous death, to overtake it sooner or later in a barbarous, militant, incomprehensible world. Of death, and even of birth (its ominous counterpart) the embryo had no idea. It believed simply in the tight spherical universe which it knew, and was confident of living in it for ever. It would have thought heaven had fallen if its shell had cracked. How should life be possible in a world of uncertain dimensions, where incalculable blows might fall upon us at any time from any quarter? What a wild philosophy, to invent objects and dangers of which there was absolutely no experience! And yet for us now, accustomed to the buffets and ambitions of life in the open, that pre-natal vegetative dream seems worthless and contemptible, and hardly deserving the name of existence.

      Could we have debated Hamlet's question before we were conceived, the answer might well have been doubtful; or rather reason, not serving any prior instinct, could have expressed no preference and must have left the decision to chance. Birth and death are the right moments for absolute courage. But when once the die is cast and we exist, so that Hamlet's question can be put to us, the answer is already given; nature in forming us has compelled us to prejudge the case. She has decreed that all the beasts and many a man should propagate without knowing what they are about; and the infant soul for its part, when once begotten, is constitutionally bent on working out its powers and daring the adventure of life. To have made the great refusal at the beginning, for fear of what shocks and hardships might come, seems to us, now that we are launched, morose and cowardly. Our soul, with its fluttering hopes and alarmed curiosity, is made to flee from death, and seems to think, if we judge by its action, that to miss experience altogether is worse and sadder than any life, however troubled or short. If nature has fooled us in this, she doubtless saw no harm in doing so, and thought it quite compatible with heartily loving us in her rough way. She merely yielded to a tendency to tease which is strangely prevalent among nurses. With a sort of tyrannical fondness, to make us show our paces, she dangled this exciting and unsatisfactory bauble of life before us for a moment, only to laugh at us, and kiss us, and presently lay our head again on her appeasing breast.

      The fear which children feel at being left in the dark or alone or among strangers goes somewhat beyond what a useful instinct would require; for they are likely to be still pretty well embosomed and protected, not to say smothered. It is as if the happy inmate of some model gad took alarm at the opening of his cell door, thinking he was to be driven out and forced to take his chances again in this rough wide world, when, in fact, all was well and he was only being invited to walk in the prison garden. Just so when the young mind hears the perilous summons to think, it is usually a false alarm. In its philosophical excursions it is likely to remain well blanketed from the truth and comfortably muffled in its own atmosphere. Groping and empirical in its habits, it will continue in the path it happens to have turned into; for in a fog how should it otherwise choose its direction? Its natural preference is to be guided by touch and smell, but it sometimes finds it convenient to use its eyes and ears as a substitute. So long as the reference to the vegetative soul and its comforts remains dominant, this substitution is harmless. Sights and sounds will then be but flowers in the prisoner's garden, and intelligence a maze through which at best he will find his way home again. Some danger there always is, even in such an outing; for this walled garden has gates into the fields, which by chance may be left open. Sight and sound, in their useful ministrations, may create a new interest, and run into sheer music and star-gazing. The life the senses were meant to serve will then be forgotten; the psychic atmosphere—which of course is indispensable—will be pierced, discounted, and used as a pleasant vehicle to things and to truths; and the motherly soul, having unintentionally given birth to the intellect, will grumble at her runaway and thankless child. As for the truant himself, Hamlet's question will lapse from his view altogether, not because nature has answered it for him beforehand, but because his own disinterestedness and rapture have robbed it of all urgency. Intellect is passionate, and natural, and human enough, as singing is; it is all the purer and keener for having emancipated itself, like singing, from its uses, if it ever had any, and having become a delight in itself. But it is not concerned with its own organs or their longevity; it cannot understand why its mother, the earthly soul, thinks all the good and evil things that happen in this world are of no consequence, if they do not happen to her.