Page:The Psychology of Shakespeare.pdf/110

Rh “For use alone can change the stamp of nature, And either curb the devil, or throw him out,

With wondrous potency.” Custom, therefore, brazes the heart in vice; custom fortifies the body in habits of virtue ; it also blunts the sensibilities of the mind; so that grave-making becomes “a property of easiness.”

“Ham. 'Tis even so : the hand of little employment hath the daintier sense.”

This, however, is but half truth.

The “hand of little em

ployment” hath not always “the daintier sense” in use. Does custom blunt the fingers of a watchmaker, the eyes of a printer, or the auditory nerve of a musician Did the grave-digger do his own sombre work with less skill because

he had been accustomed to it for thirty years? Custom blunts our sensations to those impressions which we do not attend to, and sharpens them to those which we do.

Custom,

in Hamlet himself, had sharpened the speculative faculties which he exercised, while it had dulled the active powers, which depend upon that resolution which he did not practise. Hamlet's comments upon the skulls, upon the politicians, who could circumvent God, on the courtiers, who praised my lord Such-a-one's horse when he meant to beg it, on the lawyers, whose fine of fines is to have his fine pate full of fine dirt, and whose vouchers vouch him for no more of his pur chases than the length and breadth of a pair of indentures, are the quaint prosaic expression of his melancholy, his

gloomy view of the nothingness of life, combined with his peculiar speculations upon death as the mere corruption of the body. He revolts at the idea of this ignoble life, as he thinks it, ending in annihilation, and he equally recoils at the idea that it may end in bad dreams. He thinks that if death is an eternal sleep, such an end of the ills of life is a consummation devoutly to be wished, but the fear that it is