I am confronted now with Villiers de l'Isle Adam in his conjectures in regard to certain questions--never yet settled--in _Hamlet._ A modern man of taste might ask what Shakespeare would have answered if the actor who played Hamlet's part were to interrogate the Specter "escaped from hideous Night" as to whether he had seen God's face, whether he wanted to be concerned with, not the eternal mysteries, but with what he had seen in hell and what he hated seeing on earth; and, if he had come only to utter absurdities, really, why need he have died at all? The Ghost, by the mere fact of being there, seems, at first sight, an absurdity; but if he has really seen God and the Absolute and if he has entered into them--which is impossible--the sublimity of his words might seem to be superfluous; and yet the incoherencies that he utters are all the more terrifying because of their incomprehensibility. "The secret of the Absolute cannot be expressed with syntax, and therefore one cannot ask the ghost to produce more than an _impression._" The Specter, for Shakespeare, is not a human being: he is obsession. Had he wanted Hamlet really to perceive the ghost and had he thought this dramatic effect ought to seize on the imagination of the audience, it was because he was certain that every one of them, in the ghost perceived by Hamlet, would see the familiar ghost that actually haunts himself. Hamlet's soliloquy "To be or not to be" is a magnificent disavowal--on the part of Shakespeare. And if one excuses the contradiction by supposing that Hamlet tried to deliver himself from the obsession, to doubt, one can only reply that he never doubts the Ghost itself, but the nature of this ghost; for he says at the end of the second act: The spirit I have seen May be the devil: and the devil hath power To assume a pleasing shape; yea, and perhaps, Out of my weakness and my melancholy, (As he is very potent with such spirits), Abuses me to damn me. Therefore if we compare the motive and the spirit of those sickly phrases with those of the soliloquy, we shall realize that this has _no relation whatsoever_ with the superstitious character of Hamlet; even more so, because every single word of them is in flagrant contradiction with the entire drama.