Page:Four and Twenty Minds.djvu/208

192 of the story and the stage. The fundamental failure is in the justification of all these terrible and funereal events. The soul of the tragedy is false, the psychology of the protagonists is incoherent, the most striking pensées are merely banalities in disguise. Something is rotten even in the art of Shakespeare.

Hamlet’s case is simple and well known. He had loved his father, and his father has been murdered. He desires to slay the murderer; and after a series of weaknesses and waverings he succeeds in doing so at the moment of his own death.

We are then in the realm of the elementary and savage law of retribution: an eye for an eye, a life for a life. But Prince Hamlet is by no means a primitive man. He has studied philosophy; he has spent the best years of his life amid the wisdom of Wittenberg; he is capable of general ideas. He therefore colors his vengeance with the motive of justice, and seeks to act not as a rabid brute, but as a man pure in the assurance and the majesty of his right. Yet here his error starts. For justice is by no means the same thing as vengeance: it is infinitely more subtle and more vast. Justice involves