That immediate and eternal vengeance upon crime, and that inner reward
of well-doing, never fail in nature or in Shakspere, appear as such a
matter of course that they hardly look like design either in nature or
in the mirror which he holds up to her. The secret is that, in the
ideal, habit and design are one.
Most authors seem anxious to round off and finish everything in full
sight. Most of Shakspere's tragedies compel our thoughts to follow their
_persons_ across the bourn. They need, as Jean Paul says, a piece of the
next world painted in to complete the picture, And this is surely
nature: but it need not therefore be no design. What could be done with
Hamlet, but send him into a region where he has some chance of finding
his difficulties solved; where he will know that his reverence for God,
which was the sole stay left him in the flood of human worthlessness,
has not been in vain; that the skies are not "a foul and pestilent
congregation of vapours;" that there are noble women, though his mother
was false and Ophelia weak; and that there are noble men, although his
uncle and Laertes were villains and his old companions traitors? If
Hamlet is not to die, the whole of the play must perish under the
accusation that the hero of it is left at last with only a superadded
misery, a fresh demand for action, namely, to rule a worthless people,
as they seem to him, when action has for him become impossible; that he
has to live on, forsaken even of death, which will not come though the
cup of misery is at the brim.
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