Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 17.djvu/75

 world to rights—by one whose blood and judgment were so well commingled that every thought is not only wise and just but also briefly precedent to action.

Now, what has our Shakespeare done in this masterpiece of dramatic composition, but allied all these untoward events and Tempestuous emotions of a great, grieved soul to a body physically unadapted to success?

This is the "mystery of Hamlet," and the world has been long making the discovery.

Hamlet's "too too solid flesh" caused him to procrastinate. Had it not been for that weight of adipose substance he "were simply the most active fellow in Europe"; but the inertia of fat was like gyves upon his hands and feet, and could not be overcome except under extraordinary provocation, and then, the sudden impulse subsided, flagged again, mastered by the chronic habit of (let us give the right word, though the heavens fall!)—laziness!—the result of his "fatty degeneration."

We know that we have to encounter the settled prejudices of the world against us in this view of the character of Hamlet. We certainly had our own preconceived notions to conquer before arriving at this conviction; but a close examination of the text undoubtedly bears it out, and indeed we can see no other satisfactory solution of the problem offered, by the contradictions of the clear reasonings and the muddled deeds of the Prince of Denmark.

That the above scientific but simple explanation has not been previously reached by some one of the many keen and learned critics of the play, is only to be accounted for by the transcendent attraction of the intellectual traits displayed therein. The pivotal point in nearly all these discussions being the question whether the dramatist really intended to portray an assumed or real insanity—and certainly, ignoring the theory we now propound, that must ever remain a mooted point; but, admitting the dominant power of his "too solid flesh," every apparent inconsistency is accounted for.

In the very first scene of the first act we get an intimation, though no description, of Hamlet's physical temperament. Why, we may well ask, should the poet represent the Ghost as first appearing to certain officers of the guard, to whom it had no communication to make, and to whom none was necessary, unless it was to show a certain lack of sensitiveness to spiritual influences in the Prince, an absence of that refinement of nerve which originates, by attraction, spiritual influences? This preliminary stalking suggests a certain grossness of material texture in the Prince not present, for instance, in Horatio. The son of the royal Dane needed, it seems, a better attuned medium to put him en rapport with his own father's spirit. Here we have the first intimation, a sort of prelude as it were, amply borne out by the succeeding events, that in everything which was to be really