II.

Hamlet was an enthusiast.

His love for his father was not an
He was to him the

ordinary filial affection, it was a hero-worship.

type of sovereignty

"The front of Jove himself;

An eye like Mars, to threaten and comman1;"

a link between earth and heaven

"A combination, and a form, indeed,

Where every god did seem to set his seal,
To give the world assurance of a man."

To Hamlet, this "assurance of a man" was the great reality. which made other things real, which gave meaning to life, and substauce to the world. That his love for his mother was equally intense, is clearly discernible in the inverted characters of his rage and grief. In her he reverenced wifehood and womanhood. sees the rose on

"the fair forehead of an innocent love."

And of his mother we are told

"The queen his mother Lives almost by his looks."

He

But this enthusiasm was connected with a habit of thought that was rather critical than sentimental. Hamlet had a shrewd judgment, a lively and caustic wit, an exacting standard, and a turn for satire. He was fond of question and debate, an enemy to all illusion, impatient of dulness, and not indisposed to alarm and bewilder it; and he had brought with him from Wittenberg a philosophy half stoical and half transcendental, with whose eccentricities he would torment the wisdom of the Court. He looked upon the machinery of power as part of the comedy of life, and would be more amused than impressed by the equipage of office, its chains and titles, the frowns of authority, and the smiles of imaginary greatness. He therefore of all men needed a personal centre in which faith and affection could unite to give seriousness and dignity to life; and this he had found from his childhood in the sovereign virtues of the King and Queen. So that his criticism in these earlier days was but the fastidiousness of love, that disparages all other excellence in comparison with its own ideal; his philosophy was a disallowance of all other reality; and his negations only defined and brightened his faith. Doubt, question and speculation, mystery and anomaly, the illusions of sense, the instability of natures, all that was irrational in life, with its certainties of logic and hazards of chance, all that was unproven in religion, dubious in received opinion, obscure in the destiny of man, were but glimpses of a larger unity, vistas of truth unexplored.

Hamlet's thinking is always marked by that quality of penetration into and through the thoughts of others, that is called free-thinking. The discovery, as he moved in the spiritual world of established ideas and settled doctrines, apparently immovable, that they were of the same stuff as his own thoughts-were pliant and yielding, and could be readily unwoven by the logic that wove them, would tempt him to move and displace, and build and construct, until he might have a collection of opinions large enough to be termed a philosophy. But it would be gathered rather in the joy of intellectual activity, realizing its own energy, and ravelling up to its own form the woof of other minds, than with any practical bearing on life. All this was a work in another sphere

"of no allowance to his bosom's truth."

The light of a sovereign manhood and womanhood was reflected on the world around him, and afar on the world of thought-their greatness reconciled all the contradictions of life. And in pure submission to their control all the various activities of his versatile nature, its irony and its earnestness, its shrewdness and its fancy, its piety and its free-thinking, harmonized like sweet bells not yet. jangled or untuned. He lived at peace with all, in fellowship with all; he could rally Polonius without malice, and mimic Osric without contempt.

It is plain that Hamlet looked forward to a life of activity under his father's guidance. He was no dreamer-we hear of "the great love the general gender bear him," and the people are not fond of dreamers. In truth, the Germans have had too much their own way with Hamlet, and have read into him something of their own laboriousness and phlegm. But Hamlet was more of a poet than a professor. He had the temperament of a man of genius-impatient, animated, eager, swift to feel, to like or dislike, praise or resent-with a character of rapidity in all his actions, and even in his meditation, of which he is conscious when he says, as swift as meditation." He did not live apart as a student, but in public as a prince

"the observed of all observers;"

he was of a free, open, unsuspicious temper

"remiss,

Most generous and free from all contriving.

He was fond of all martial exercises and expert in the use of the sword. He was a soldier first, a scholar afterwards; a soldier in his alacrity to fight

a soldier even to

"Until his eyelids would no longer wag;"

"The glass of fashion, and the mould of form;"

and, above all, a soldier in his sensibility on the point of honour, one who would think it well

"Greatly to find quarrel in a straw,
When honour is at stake."

And Fortinbras, type of the man of action, recognized in him a kindred spirit—

"Bear Hamlet, like a soldier, to the stage;
For he was likely, had he been put on,
To have proved most royally;"

while Hamlet eyed Fortinbras with the envious longing of one who had missed his career. What must have been the felicity of life to such a man, whose vivacity no stress of calamity, no accumulation of sorrow could tame, whose enthusiasm embraced Nature, art, and literature, and whose delight was always fresh and new, "in this excellent canopy the air, in this brave o'erhanging firmament," and in the spectacle of man "so excellent in faculty, in form and moving so express and admirable, in action how like an angel, in apprehension how like a god?"

Without a warning the blow fell. His father was suddenly struck down; and while he was indulging a grief, poignant and profound indeed, but natural, wholesome, manly, his uncle usurped the crown. This second blow would be acutely felt, but it would rather rouse than prostrate his energies. There is no passion in Hamlet when there has been no love. And he had always held his uncle in slight esteem-foreboded something from his smiling insincerity. He never mentions him without an expression of contempt, hardly acknowledges him as king; he is a thing-of nothing-a farcical monarch -"a peacock”—and, in this particular act, no dread usurper, but a "cut-purse of the realm." Whether he designed to wait or was prepared to strike, his future was still intact, his energy unimpaired. His mother remained to him, now doubly dear and doubly great, and with her the tradition of the past. She was, as he gathered from her silence, like himself, retired from the world, absorbed in grief; but he was assured of her constancy and truth. Even the kind of distance between them in age and sex, in mind and character, was no barrier to this sympathetic relation. She was there with the expectation that makes heroism possible; she was there to watch, if not to further his enterprise, and to give it lustre with her praise. We are often quite unconscious of the commanding influence exerted on our life by those who are least in contact with it. To be cognizant of one steadfast and stainless soul is to have encouragement in difficulty and support in pain. The mere knowledge of its existence is a light within the mind, and a secret incentive to the best action.

Though silent and apart, it is the witness of what is great, and our life is always seeking to rise within its sphere; while, by a secret transference-for souls are not retentive of their own goodness-our standards of living and thinking are maintained at their highest level, like water fed by a distant spring. All this and infinitely more than this was the Queen his mother to Hamlet. It is impossible, therefore, to measure the effect upon him of her marriage with his uncle. The shock of it is ever fresh throughout the play. In the third Act the whole frame of nature is still aghast at it :—

"Heaven's face doth glow;

Yea, this solidity and compound mass,
With tristful visage, as against the doom,
Is thought-sick at the act."

And this was not only after the revelation of the Ghost, but after the confirmation of its truth by the test Hamlet had himself applied. Even then the first paroxysm has hardly subsided. You see the whole being measured by it, the mind stretched to give it utterance, the world called as a witness to its enormity:

III.

But it is at an earlier stage of this impression, when the thought of this profanation of the sacredness of life and the sanctity of love chills the life-blood of his heart, and then rushes burning through it like the shame of a personal insult, that he first stands before us in the palace of the King. In appearance nothing is changed. He sees the same crowd, the same obsequious attitudes, the same decorous forms; the trumpets with their usual flourish announce the arrival of the King and Queen; the Ministers of State precede them, and the Court ladies; the pretentious gravity of Polonius' brow; the dreamy innocence of Ophelia. The sovereigns seat themselves, the Queen looks smilingly around her as of old. All is easy, bright, and festive. All goes on as if this horrible revolution were the most natural thing in the world. Oh, that he could avoid the sight of it! Oh, that he could be quit of it all!

"Oh! that this too too solid flesh would melt,
Thaw, and resolve itself into a dew;

Or that the Everlasting had not fixed

His canon 'gainst self-slaughter!"

Although the nervous horror of his address to the Ghost is greater, there is no speech in which Hamlet betrays so deep an agitation as in this. He struggles for utterance, repeats himself, mingles oaths and axioms, confuses and then annihilates time in the breathless

tumult of his soul.

"Why, she, even she. O Heaven!" What can "A beast

he say? what is vile enough?

"that wants discourse of reason,

Would have mourned longer-married with my uncle.”

In this opening speech we see at once the immediate relation of the feeling of life-weariness so prevalent throughout the play to this supreme emotion; we see also his comprehensive criticism of the world branching from the same root

and

"How weary, stale, flat, and unprofitable
Seems to me all the uses of this world!
Fie, on't! O fie! 'tis an unweeded garden;"

"Frailty, thy name is woman."

These themes are developed Act by Act, we can follow them to the graveyard scene, and to the moment before death.

And it is not unnatural that Hamlet's grief should assume a comprehensive form. The Queen had drawn the world in her train. Nobles and people, councillors and courtiers, the honoured statesman, the artless maiden, had joined her, had connived, were her accomplices. They had, parted among them, all the vices appropriate to her Court, her people. The world was betrayed to Hamlet in all its meanness and littleness: and he looked at it to see if he could discover the secret of his mother's treason, as Lear would anatomize the heart of Regan to account for her ingratitude. In attacking it he is attacking her guilt, in its inferior forms and obscure disguises. It is the nest of her depravity, and the small vices are but hers in the shell, and the whole is a vast confederacy of evil. Here are no "superfluous activities," no desultory talk; Hamlet's preoccupation is one throughout. He alternates between the desire to escape from so vile a world, and the pleasure of exposing its vice and fraud. The one gives us soliloquies, the other dialogues. Now he looks out at an obscure eternity from a time that was more obscure, and now the tension of the mind relieves the tension of the heart. On the one side we have all passages of life-weariness, whether as the issue of long meditation, or as the outcome of familiar talk; and on the other we have the brilliant and discursive criticism of man and Nature continued throughout the play. All this is so closely connected with the treason of his mother, that we see the very attachment of the feeling to the thought.

This explains the particular bitterness with which he attacks the Ministers and parasites of the Court. As soon as he sees them he crosses the current of their talk, commits them to an argument, confuses them with the evolutions of a logic too rapid for their senses to follow, and makes their bewilderment a sport. How