Page:The Psychology of Shakespeare.pdf/120

Rh been formed. We are indeed so constituted, that clearly

formed desires tend naturally to transmute themselves into action, and the idea of a being at once intellectual and emo tional, in whom circumstances have entirely prevented the development of the habit of action, has more the character of a metaphysical speculation than of a possible reality. Still the immense influence of habit upon the power of action is un

questionable, and the want of this habit appears to have been one chief cause of Hamlet's inert and dilatory conduct, and of the contention between that meditative cast of thought, which he in vain strove to screw up to the point of action, and the desire to discharge that repulsive duty which his uncle's villanies had laid upon him. That the time was out of joint would have been for him a subject of painful reflection only, but for the accursed spite which had laid it upon him to set it right, and which was the cause of that fierce moral strife between duty and disposition, which forms the innermost web of the piece. The rash execution of an unpremeditated action is entirely consistent with this sensitive motive-weighing inability to act upon mature resolve.

The least resolute men are often the

most rash ; as quick spasm in feeble muscles is substituted for healthy, regular, and prolonged exertion. Hamlet praises rashness in the instance in which it served him, but he would

scarcely have been able to have done so when it led him to slay Polonius in mistake for the King ; and the incidents of the drama, no more than the incidents of real life, justify us in rough-hewing our purposes with rashness, though the Divinity may shape the ends even of our most politic arrange mentS.

This reasoning melancholiac, disgusted with the world, and especially disgusted with the repulsive duty which a hard fate has laid upon him, is not less different to the Hamlet of the past, to him who had been “The expectancy and rose of the fair state,”