y would have been averted and we should
have had no tragedy of Hamlet. This explanation sounds rather
conventional and tract-like put into ordinary language, but, indeed,
Maeterlinck's doctrine might be compressed into a syllogism:--

All the wise are serene,
Hamlet was not serene,
Hamlet was not wise.

That is the simple syllogism by which Maeterlinck tests human nature.
But Hamlet's nature cannot be packed into a syllogism. A Theorist, who
tries to fit into his theory a peculiar nature cannot always afford to
understand that nature. The external event that froze Hamlet's soul
with horror, and deprived it of "transforming power" was a
supernatural event, not "disease, accident, or sudden death!" The
mandate laid on his soul was a supernatural mandate, and as Judge Webb
said in a suggestive and interesting paper: "The Genuine text of
Shakespeare," October number of the "National Review, 1903," "it was
utterly impossible for that soul to perform it," or it might be added,
to cast it aside. He was betrayed by the apparition "into consequences
as deep as those into which Macbeth was betrayed by the instruments of
darkness--the witches." We cannot reason about Maeterlinck's thought
that if expressed "would have arrested all the forces of murder"
because we do not know what the thought was, nor can any one gauge or
estimate rightly the power of Hamlet's soul to conquer external
events, without taking into careful account that the Vision from
another world came to Hamlet, when he was outraged at the re-marriage
of his mother and full of emotion that the sudden death of his father
called forth in his meditative mind.[4] But Maeterlinck never refers
to anything of this sort. He does not seem to realise what the effects
of the vision must have been on a complicated character--on "a great
gentleman in whom the courtier's, scholar's eye, tongue, sword, were
all united." Hamlet was _not_ an example of the normal type of the
irresolute man--but the mandate laid upon his nature, it could not
perform. The vision was his destiny--for Destiny lay in the nature of
the mandate, as well as the nature of the man, and unhappiness was
inevitable; yet Maeterlinck says, "No tragedy is inevitable, the wise
man can be superior to all circumstances by the initiative of the
soul. To be able to curb the blind force of instinct is to be able to
curb external destiny." Did not Hamlet curb his instincts of love for
Ophelia, and love for bo