ART. III. -"HAMLET"-A CHARACTER SKETCH. THE whole range of literature furnishes nothing more difficult than the intelligent study and interpretation of " Hamlet.” It is a strange, weird, and subtle work. It has been styled an enigma of character; but it is more than that, it is a mystery baffling all attempts to a complete or generally accepted solution. Here are blended "the heartaches" and the thousand natural shocks flesh is heir to, human infirmities, human afflictions, and supernatural agency. Here are intertangled questions of melancholy, pathology, metaphysics, and demonology. Here are thoughts of life, death, the secrets of the grave, the dread hereafter, the dreams it may bring, and the illimitable and well-nigh omnipotent powers within us. Here the student of intense thought, of earnest love, and of superior grasp of imagination is thrilled by more than kindred inspirations; and sometimes he is even visited by dreams and is not unblessed by visions. Here on every page are disclosed vast treasures of knowledge and lines of reflection that "sadden the heart, cloud the mind, and fire the brain."

It is not easy to measure the magnitude and complexity of the work. It is difficult to describe a great mountain, the thousandth part of whose surface cannot be traversed or seen in an hour, while in its bowels are inexhaustible quarries and mines. The resources and mysteries of "Hamlet" will account for the extent and variety of criticism and interpretation. The number of commentators is well-nigh illimitable; they are of many countries, every grade of society, men bred to different vocations and living in different generations of the world's history. But all these many attempts to reveal its treasures have failed to quiet the questionings of intelligent students. We venture to say that criticism will never be complete until some master spirit like the author himself shall be breathed through the commentary. So ideal and so real an existence as Hamlet cannot be shadowed forth by the critic's pen. Yet it is highly proper that every generation and every student should attempt his own interpretation. By becoming lost in its mazes of thought we realize more of its wealth, and 58-FIFTH SERIES, VOL. XIV.

gain loftier conceptions and a deeper insight into the wonders of human nature.

"Hamlet" is the leading production of the leading class of Shakespeare's compositions, and differs in some respects from all others. The tragedies to which it belongs differ from the historical plays in that they are chiefly conceived of from the standpoint of thought and feeling. In the tragedies we are concerned with what man is; in the histories, with what he does. The tragedies treat of the infinite issues of life and death, the historical plays of the finite issues of failure and success and the achievements of practical ends. The former deal with the deep mysteries of being; the latter, with a real and firm grasp on the actual world. So there is a like separative gulf between the tragedies and the comedies. The former are concerned with the ruin or restoration of the soul, their subject is the struggle of good and evil in the world; the latter in comparison play upon the mere surface of human life, and scarcely reach the real depth of human experience. But even among the tragedies there is a sense in which "Hamlet" stands alone. While it is of the same order as "Othello," "Macbeth," and "King Lear," it is not of the same substance or essence. "Hamlet" differs from others emphatically in this, that it is the study of an individual life. The heart of the composition is not the representation of a theory or of an idea; it is not a fragment of political philosophy, nor the dramatic study of some period in the history of civilization, but it is the expression of the author's profound sympathy with an individual soul, a representation of the individual man, not men; and for that representation the wonderful creation came into being. It is the sum of the musings of the great author on the life we live here. And so the essence of this play, and especially of its hero, is the human soul, mind, reason, understanding, willpower, and passion.

This then is clear, that the play of "Hamlet" is Hamlet. There are other not insignificant characters. Horatio is the scholar, the perfect gentleman, the untarnished life, the faithful friend. Claudius is a man of no ordinary cast; some of his speeches have a ring of majesty in them. Laertes is not without commendable traits of character. Ophelia is sufficient to

fill the eye, and to make the heart beat and tremble within itself. Even Gertrude has some redeeming touches of nature. But the whole plot hinges upon the character of Hamlet. It has been well said that the author's conception of him is the "ovum out of which the whole organism is hatched." When he is on the boards our interest is intense, and we are satisfied; when he is off we are impatient. From his acts and feelings everything in the drama takes its color and pursues its course. This play, more than any other production from the pen of Shakespeare, exists, awakens interest, challenges criticism in the character of its hero. In the other dramas the story makes a part of the conception, but in "Hamlet" the deep and abiding interest is Hamlet himself. We love Hamlet not because he is witty or melancholy or filial, but because he is himself; because he is an intense conception of individual human life, and because he is a being whose springs of action, thought, and feeling are deeper than we can search. In him is concentrated all human interest, the elements of frailty and of grandeur. Let us study then, as best we can, the hero; let our thoughts cluster around this individual life. Let us consider him as if he were a real character, present to the eye as well as to the mind, a recently deceased acquaintance.

When introduced into the drama he is supposed to have been thirty years of age. In personal appearance Goethe would have us believe he was a fair-haired, blue-eyed youth, and, inasmuch as the fencing wearies him and he becomes easily heated by exercise, that he must have been well-conditioned, or, according to the queen's remark, "fat and scant of breath;" that his melancholy, alleged inactivity, soft sorrows, perpetual indecision, lack of determination and resolution necessarily demand the complexion and temper here indicated. But we are disposed to figure to ourselves a princely form, one that outshone all others in manly beauty, and to adorn it with all liberal accomplishments. We can behold in every look and gesture, every action, the future king,

The courtier's, soldier's, scholar's eye, tongue, and sword;

The expectancy and woe of the fair state,

The glass of fashion and the mold of form,

The observed of all observers.

When Hamlet first appears everything is to his praise; although there is evidence of natural melancholy there is no predisposition to morbid feeling or faulty temperament and no question of sanity. He is the esteemed of Fortinbras, the friend of Horatio, and the beloved of Ophelia. During the life of his father he is sheltered from any rough contact with the world, as well as restrained therefrom by natural tastes. He has lived through youth and come into the years of manhood, and is still a hunter of the university, a student of philosophy, an amateur in art, and a ponderer on the things of life and death; and it may be said he has never been compelled to form a resolution or execute a deed. He has passed these years in manly thought and manly arts; his habits have been those of retirement, study, and meditation. He has been at school at Wittenberg, and the hint that he is to return thither shows with what ardor and enthusiasm he surrenders himself to the intellectual research. But in all this devotion to study and to the university, as Mr. Hudson has said, he has kept undimmed the vision and faculty divine which nature has planted within him. So that he still apprehends more things in heaven and in earth than are dreamed of in our philosophy. In activity and force of intellectual powers, in breadth and variety of acquisitions, and in ardor and enthusiasm of research he is superior. Morally he is upright, honest, pure. His aims are lofty, his motives and impulses generous. He seems to have been in an unimpassioned search for what is beautiful and right. Up to this time he has been sheltered from the active world where human nature reveals itself as it is; and, as he has been accustomed to think and judge of the world by the honesty and purity of his own spirit, he has not yet found in men or in the world anything to bar or quench his impulse of trust. His strong-willed, selfreliant, and affectionate father has been to him an ideal character, and whatever ideas and images of beauty and strength he has gathered from study he associates with his father's name. He has borne the relation of son, prince, gentleman, scholar, lover, and friend, and has endeavored to be true to all these relations and to approve himself accomplished and capable. His expectations are such as to kindle and enlist his

noblest powers; his plans and preparations for life are to succeed his father on the throne. Thus, when he first appears in the drama he stands before us a richly endowed, generous, pure nature one of lofty aims. Fortune has smiled upon his pathway. In his inheritance, education, social position, royal connection, and expectation he is a prince of fortune.

It

Before we proceed to inquire after the further developments and tendencies of his life we must here consider the effects of this education and this previous training. First, they serve to make Hamlet more conversant with ideas than with facts. is said that Romeo loses sight of facts because everything melts away into a delicious emotion; but Hamlet expands and transforms everything into an idea. It would seem that up to this time he has received every kind of culture but the culture of an active life. Perhaps Shakespeare meant to show, as Coleridge suggests, "the moral necessity of a due balance between our attention to objects of our senses and to the working of our own minds, so that an equilibrium may be preserved between the real and imaginary worlds." In Hamlet this balance is disturbed; his thoughts and the images of his fancy are far more vivid than his actual perceptions, and even his natural perceptions are changed into unnatural forms and colors when brought under the influence of contemplations. There is great intellectual activity, great energy of resolve, but an aversion to some forms of real action. This aversion has usually been attributed to a natural disinclination to do, a mere theoretical education, and to subsequent paralyzing environment of his life. We shall inquire, a little further on, if this view does not need modification. A second defect in his education is found in an impaired capacity for belief. Belief is in part the result of will-power, and that he has not well developed. He seems unable to adjust the finite and the infinite. He has great difficulty in his attempts to make real to himself the actual world. Actual phenomena flit before him as something accidental and unreal. Sometimes the mistaken notion has crept into the world that the material hinders, does not help, belief. We all recall how at times Hamlet wavers between spiritualism and materialism, between his belief in immortality and unbelief, between a reliance on Providence and a yielding to fate.