He discourses admirably of suicide, but does not kill
himself; he talks daggers, but uses none. He puts by the chance to kill
the king with the excuse that he will not do it while he is praying, lest
his soul be saved thereby, though it is more than doubtful whether he
believed it himself. He allows himself to be packed off to England,
without any motive except that it would for the time take him farther
from a present duty: the more disagreeable to a nature like his because
it _was_ present, and not a mere matter for speculative consideration.
When Goethe made his famous comparison of the acorn planted in a vase
which it bursts with its growth, and says that in like manner Hamlet is a
nature which breaks down under the weight of a duty too great for it to
bear, he seems to have considered the character too much from one side.
Had Hamlet actually killed himself to escape his too onerous commission,
Goethe's conception of him would have been satisfactory enough. But
Hamlet was hardly a sentimentalist, like Werther; on the contrary, he saw
things only too clearly in the dry north-light of the intellect. It is
chance that at last brings him to his end. It would appear rather that
Shakespeare intended to show us an imaginative temperament brought face
to face with actualities, into any clear relation of sympathy with which
it cannot bring itself.
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