Page:The Psychology of Shakespeare.pdf/64

Rh “My fate cries out,

And makes each petty artery in this body As hardy as the Nemean lion's nerve.” y Horatio says, “He waxes desperate with imagination ;” but his state really appears to be that of high-wrought yet reasonable courage. After following the Ghost to some dis tance, he'll “go no further;” but if this is said with any touch of fear, it soon becomes pity: “Alas, poor Ghost " And this, again, changes to revengeful resolution. He demands quickly to know the author of his father's murder, that he

“May sweep to his revenge.” But when the Ghost has told his terrible tale, and has disap peared, with the solemn farewell, “Adieu, adieu, adieu ! remember me,” the reaction comes. Then it is that Hamlet feels his sinews fail their function, and invokes them to bear

him stiffly up ; then he recognises a feeling of distraction in the globe of his brain; then he vows forgetfulness of all

things but the motive of revenge.

He becomes wild at the

thoughts of the “smiling damned villain,” who had wrought all this woe ; and then, passing from the terrible to the trivial, he sets down in his tables a moral platitude. “My tables; meet it is, I set it down,

That one may smile, and smile, and be a villain ; At least, I am sure, it may be so in Denmark.” We regard this climax of the terrible in the trivial, this

transition of mighty emotion into lowliness of action, as one of the finest psychological touches anywhere to be found in the poet. There is something like it in Tennyson's noble poem, Maud. When the hero has shot the brother of his mistress in a duel, he passes from intense passion to trivial observation :

“Strange that the mind, when fraught With a passion so intense, One would think that it well

Might drown all life in the eye, E