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To match that one must go to Thomas Hardy, to the eloquent passage describing the terrors of infinite space in Two on a Tower. However, Conrad is not often given to such Hamlet-like moods. The shock and recoil of circumstances, the fatalities of chance, and the vagaries of human conduct intrigue his intention more than the night side of the soul.
With this Russian, his Hamlet-like introspection becomes vertigo, and life itself fades into a dream compounded of febrile melancholy or blood lust. It was not without warrant that he allows Rogoszin, in The Idiot, to murder Nastasia Philipovna, because of her physical charms. The aura of the man foredoomed to morbid crime is unmistakable.
Thought is anguish to the masses of men, any drug is precious, and to escape from its misery the soul conspires against her own excellence and the perfection of Nature. Even in 1802 Napoleon in his Hamlet-like musings in the Tuileries despaired of Liberty as the safety of the world, and in his tragic course this despair adds a metaphysical touch to his doom.
As against a censorious disposition, he sets up the pleasure of the benevolent sentiments; he enjoins candour with respect to the motives of others, and a devoted attachment to truth and virtue for their intrinsic excellence; and warns us, that the causes that alienate our affections from our fellow-creatures, suggest gloomy and Hamlet-like conceptions of the order of the universe.
A doctrine which advocates indifference to wealth and to the comforts of life, and a contempt for suffering and death, is quite unintelligible to the vast majority of men, since that majority has never known wealth or the comforts of life; and to despise suffering would mean to it despising life itself, since the whole existence of man is made up of the sensations of hunger, cold, injury, and a Hamlet-like dread of death.
"Oh, all the troubles of all people on the face of the earth," said Dorothea, lifting her arms to the back of her head. "Dear me, Dodo, are you going to have a scheme for them?" said Celia, a little uneasy at this Hamlet-like raving.
It was a typical forted village, such as the frontiersmen built everywhere in the west and southwest during the years that they were pushing their way across the continent in the teeth of fierce and harassing warfare; in some features it was not unlike the hamlet-like "tun" in which the forefathers of these same pioneers dwelt, long centuries before, when they still lived by the sluggish waters of the lower Rhine, or had just crossed to the eastern coast of Britain.
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