and consciousness of moral responsibility, and you make the work devoid of human interest and leave it wholly meaningless. Such an unfortunate should not be paraded before the public gaze in defiance of the common feelings of humanity; but in all kindness, be relegated to the charitable care of some home or refuge.

In brief: Hamlet is the tragedy; deprive him of reason and there remains no tragic motive. All is, however, changed by the admission of his feigned madness. His sanity admitted, the drama becomes at once magnificent and inspiring, and, by a master-stroke of genius, shines forth in a new and wondrous light, possessing a tragic motive, supremely instructive and thrilling in the sad wreck of a nature noble and grand in soul, and rich in rare endowments of mind and body.

CHAPTER IX

Hamlet's Alleged Defect of Character

Another mystery of the tragedy that baffles many readers is the apparent vacillation which the hero exhibits in obeying the command of the ghost. Its solution has divided all commentators into two opposing subjective and objective schools. The former, which has until recent times held almost undisputed sway, attributes the reasons for Hamlet's delay solely to personal and temperamental difficulties, and maintains that any solution of the mystery must involve weakness of will as the key to the mystery. Its adherents, however, do not agree upon the precise cause of Hamlet's vacillation. Some accept the 'sentimental' theory as expounded by Goethe:

"A lovely, pure, noble, and most moral nature, without the strength of nerve which forms heroes, sinks beneath a burden which it cannot bear, and must not cast away. All duties are holy to him; the present is too hard. Impossibilities have been required of him; not in themselves impossibilities, but such for him. Shakespeare's intention was to exhibit the effects of a great action imposed as a duty upon a mind unfit for its accomplishment. A pure and highly moral disposition without energy of soul that constitutes a hero sinks under the load which it cannot support nor resolve to abandon."

The fundamental principle of this theory, says Professor Bradley,' has been so isolated, developed, and popularized as to give us a picture of a graceful youth, sweet and sensitive, full of delicate sympathies and yearning aspirations, shrinking from the touch of everything gross and earthly; but frail and weak, a kind of Werther, with a face like Shelley, and a voice like Mr. Tree's. Looking at such a picture, we feel instinctively a tender pity, and ask, how Ham1 "Shakespearean Tragedy", p. 101.

2

let can perform the terrible duty laid upon him? How foolish, indeed, was the ghost even to suggest such an idea! This theory is too kind to Hamlet on the one side, and quite unjust to him on the other. For the sentimental Hamlet the reader can feel only pity not unmingled with contempt.

Others find more acceptable the "Conscience Theory," as excogitated by Ulrici:

"In Hamlet, we should behold the Christian struggling
with the natural man, and its demand for revenge. The
natural man spurs him on to immediate action, and charges
his doubts with cowardice and irresolution; the Christian
spirit — though, indeed, as a feeling rather than as a con-
viction draws him back, though still resisting. He hesi-
tates and delays, and tortures himself with a vain attempt
to reconcile these conflicting impulses and between them to
preserve his own liberty of will and action . . the
mind of Hamlet
is throughout struggling to
retain the mastery which the judgment ought invariably
hold over the will."

992

Others prefer to follow the 'Weakness of Will Theory' as presented by Schlegel and Coleridge:

"In Hamlet, Shakespeare seems to have wished to exemplify the moral necessity of a due balance between our attention to the objects of our senses and our meditation on the working of our minds,- an equilibrium be tween the real and the imaginary worlds. In Hamlet, this balance is disturbed; hence we see a great and an almost enormous, intellectual activity, and a proportionate aversion to real action consequent upon it, with all its symptoms and accompanying qualities. This character Shakespeare places in circumstances under which it is obliged to act on the spur of the moment. Hamlet is brave and careless of death; but he vacillates from sensibility, and procrastinates from thought, and loses the power of action in the energy of resolve."

This theory has been the most widely accepted view in the English-speaking world. But against it may be very well 2 Shakespeare's Dramatische Kunst".

urged the objection of Professor Bradley. It does not satisfy merely in this or that detail, but as a whole. It is also positively misleading, and that in a most important way. Excess of reflection is not, as the theory makes it, the direct cause of the irresolution at all; nor was it the only indirect The direct cause, says the Professor, was a state of mind quite abnormal and induced by special circumstances, a state of fixed melancholy so deep and morbid as to hinder action.

cause.

3

All these theories, while diverging in accidental traits, seem to converge in the one view that Hamlet is a grand character gifted with a great mind, but with a native force of will so defective as to nullify his power of action. Against them has arisen another school, which originating in Germany with Klein has been ably defended by Werder. It maintains that the subjective school ignores the real and objective Hamlet, and reads its own subjectiveness into the Poet's delineation, and so evolves another Hamlet out of their inner consciousness. Says Werder:

"I have never been able to see in Hamlet anything like the mean and miserable lack of method and executive force which the critics in question charge him with. The main fault of the subjective school is that it tries to explain Hamlet's conduct too much on subjective grounds, and from the subjective causes, and so gives far too little attention to the real nature of his task, to the exigencies of his situation, to the circumstances of his political and social surroundings, to the strong objective reasons that stare him in the face, and force themselves upon his thoughts, and this too, because his thinking is so quick, so circumspective, so comprehensive, and so just. For his supreme desire is to think, and to do what is right-morally, socially, and politically. We must regard him as a truly heroic and honorable pattern of manhood. Surely, it cannot be but good for us to sympathize with him in his sensitive rectitude, in his delicacy and tenderness of conscience, and in his prizing above all things the sacred freehold of 'clean hands and a pure heart'."

Ibidem, p. 95.

The objective school, therefore, rejects above all the supposed vacillation and defective will in Hamlet, as an erroneous idea, which mars the character of Shakespeare's own most loved and ideal hero. He is neither a weakling in moral force of will, nor in action a halting sluggard, but, to the contrary, a hero whose intense energy and surprising executive force is revealed in an incarnation of steady purpose. Hence, the objective theory "sweeps away every vestige of Goethe's explanation, with all kindred theories. It affirms Hamlet to be a man of action, never at a loss, never wavering, but taking at once the position of affairs, adjusting himself thereto with admirable sagacity, and instantly acting with wondrous, consummate tact as occasions require."

Briefly stated, the theory places the mystery of Hamlet, not in insuperable subjective difficulties, but in real and objective obstacles of the outer world, which, because insurmountable, render the hero's efforts nugatory in the fulfilment of his task. In consequence, there arise frequent struggles between his almost over-powering natural impulse to slay and a conscientious resistance, which is prompted by a calm and deliberate judgment. It is precisely these intermittent struggles against moral restraints that illumine the obscurities found in his numerous soliloquies, and give a meaning to his impassioned self-reproaches. But this illumination and this significance are often overlooked even by critics who, while accepting the objective theory, fail to bring out clearly the fact that Hamlet's action is inspired, not by the low purpose of revenge, but by the nobler motive of justice. They, furthermore, offer no explanation of the real cause of the war between his higher and lower nature, a war in which his natural pagan impulse to slay is seen so often in rebellion against the conscientious restraints imposed by reason and his Christian faith. This most important point seems worthy of elucidation.