CHAPTER II.

HAMLET.

AS TYPE OF THE TEUTONIC RACE.

1. THIS masterpiece of Shakespeare as a portrait, not a play, has been already claimed as an ideal of the Gothic race; and the likeness is attested by the native admiration. The English poet must have best painted what he had studied most; the English public must, through sympathy, have most admired its own resemblance. But German critics, who were first perhaps to speculate on the relation, should not have kept to the fair side, and sought to hide the blind profile. It was especially an outrage on the author criticised, whom they proportionably crowned with flowers for what they caricatured in fact. They lauded Shakespeare in proportion (and perhaps also in compensation) as they eluded or disguised the harsh fidelity of his portraiture. But English writers will never hesitate between such puerile prepossessions, and the complete illustration of the genius of their national poet. Beside, the bias would be repugnant to enquiry, which proposes to identify the true Hamlet described by Shakespeare with the race called the Teutonic as shaped by nature and shewn by history.

the purpose of this

The leading marks of this powerful race will be admitted to be these. In the highest or mental order, the faculty of Reflection as distinguished from the passive receptivity of the senses. In morality, the test of Conscience as against religious tradition. In politics, the strife of Liberty in opposition to authority, and of the interests of the person against the interests of the public. In philosophy, Metaphysics, as contrasted with scholastics, or, in the native phrase, the subjective in preference to the objective. In fine, in body, the Muscularity befitting this complex struggle, and in manners a correlative degree of roughness and insensibility. In all things an organical introversion upon Self, in opposition to the Roman race, whose gaze was outward upon nature.

On the other hand, and corresponding to these invaluable qualities, there is a drawback of defects or of excesses thence resulting. In reflection, which seeks the differences, the negations, the particulars, the excess is a disorderly and blind empiricism, or the mere visions of the mind itself when it endeavours to produce some order; the defect is a debility of ratiocinative combination. The test of conscience has a like tendency to dissolution of moral rule, since everybody should respect but his own monitor, and for the moment: hence the ludicrous profession, that each conscience must be right, and at the same time that all are right, on the same principle, though all be different; hence, in conduct, a licentiousness of censure and invective which this monitor commissions against all things that do not suit it, and a vagueness of resolution, for want of principles fixed exteriorly, while the difficulty is contemplated, and till obtruded physically. The excess incident to liberty is too disputed to be made a

test. The foible of metaphysics is a sickly psychicality which constitutes the universe upon its human apex, and then explores it, à rebours, with a microscopical minutenes that tends to the destruction of all coherence in thought itself. The muscularity and bluntness sink to brow-beating and brutality, and the concentrated personality into an all-engrossing selfishThese various properties, good and evil, consort like sections of the same sphere, and therefore need no nice detachment, as they answer for each other mutually. The thesis is, that they supply the true and full interpretation of the character of Hamlet and the composition of Shakespeare.

ness.

2. The character is early outlined in the chiding of the uncle, a man of "witchcraft in his wit," and all the means of observation, and before either could be influenced by suspicion or simulation.

King.

But to persevere

In obstinate condolement is a course

Of impious stubbornness; 'tis unmanly grief:

It shews a will most incorrect to heaven;

A heart unfortified or mind impatient;
An understanding simple and unschooled:
For what we know must be and is as common
As any the most vulgar thing to sense,
Why should we, in our peevish
opposition,
Take it to heart? Fye! 'tis a fault to heaven,
A fault against the dead, a fault to nature,
To reason most absurd.

Act i. sc. 2.

The traits denoted by italics consort strictly with the programme. The obstinacy indicates a limited intelligence, and is accordingly habitual to old age and adolescence. Muscu

larity is the concomitant, when not the cause, of “impious stubbornness," as is attested by the myth of the Titan warfare against heaven; and self-indulgence, in even grief, resembles woman in her weakness. The wailing of Achilles on the death of Patroclus, with other features of his conduct, illustrates typically all these qualities; for he is known to be a type of the muscular or warrior character. Accordingly Horatio is the Patroclus of Hamlet, and for the same reason of a contrast in the characters. So that the hero of the play reveals himself, by this rule of contraries, in the encomiums which his conscious weakness bestows enviously upon the friend:

As one, in suffering all, that suffers nothing;

A man that fortune's buffets and rewards

Has ta'en with equal thanks: and blest are those
Whose blood and JUDGMENT are so well co-mingled,
That they are not a pipe for Fortune's finger

To sound what stop she please. Give me the man

That is not passion's slave, and I will wear him
In my heart's core, &c.
Act iii. sc. 2.

Just so, for then that heart would feel supplied in its defects. And so of the other commendations-the judgment, fortitude, self-control, and resignation to the course of nature-towards their opposite infirmities. Achilles, in a moment of meditation, or rather moodiness-for in such natures it is moodiness alone that ever meditates; it is the precise contrast of reflection with reason, the self-recoil of a being of passion and muscularity, reduced to impotenceAchilles, in his tent, and abandoned by the Myrmidons, would have been made by Homer to treat Patroclus in the same strain.

Proceeding with the uncle's portraiture, the "will most

incorrect to heaven," meaning to dogmatic religion, imports the religion of conscience. The lack of fortitude and mental patience follows also from this fickle prompter, which makes, says Hamlet, all men cowards, and gives to thought the hue of sickness. The "understanding simple and unschooled" is as conformable. It means devoid of ratiocinative aptitude and organization-for a scholar he knew Hamlet to be in acquisition; a want of recognition of the rights of others and the laws of nature, which defect is of the essence of one engrossed with himself alone: for such a character (as Shakespeare so emphatically signalizes it) is blind to “even the most vulgar truth of sense that contravenes it ; and excusably, its only rule of judgment being itself. Then the "peevish opposition" is an offshoot of the same stock: the wholesale, vehement, and acrid railing of Hamlet, is the fruit, as is the cross-grained and reformatory querulousness of the Useful also, for in this world the constant fault-finder must tell much truth; and, in fact, socially, the analytic function of this race. The dereliction, in fine, to heaven, to nature, and to reason, depicts the absence of the reasoning powers or the predominance of the reflective, of which the object, as the inspiration, is the ego and its interests.

race.

The illustration may now advance into the details of this outline, as filled up throughout the play, by the same masterhand that limned it; confronting severally the criteria, and commencing with the mental member.

3. But here arises a previous question as to the madness of Hamlet for to conclude of the native reasoning power of one who played the madman, would not augur very fairly for