“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 books and philosophy, under pressure of the great commandment laid upon him?  He could not curb the power of his intellect—­it was too subtle and supreme, but he concealed all else.  Yet Hamlet could not escape his Destiny, by curbing his instincts.  The initiative of his soul worked against the duty he had to perform.  And it was through his “simple, tender, good,” thoughts of, and love for his father that he kept to his task, and could not “withstand his complicated destiny.”  Maeterlinck is surely wrong, too, in saying Hamlet was moved by a fanatical impulse to revenge for he spent his life in weighing pros, and cons, and in combating the idea that he must fulfil the duty laid upon him.  So unfanatical was he that he even doubted at times whether the apparition was his father’s spirit.  But supposing there had been “one brave soul to cry out the truth” (Maeterlinck does not say what the truth was); we will suppose that Hamlet had resolved to forgive fully and generously, would he, then, have gained the fortitude and serenity, which Maeterlinck evidently means by inner happiness?  Not if he kept a shred of his inner nature.  Hamlet “saw no course clear enough to satisfy his understanding.”  Could such a nature be serene?  But was it unwise?  Judicious, wise, and witty when at ease; he could not escape the dark moods that made him indifferent to the visible world.