Page:The Psychology of Shakespeare.pdf/69

54 been this love which he refers to in that paroxysm of feeling at the close of the ghost scene: “Yea, from the table of my memory, I'll wipe away all trivial fond records.” Indeed, love is an autocratic passion not disposed to share the throne of the soul with other emotions of an absorbing nature. Hamlet, however, might feel his resolution, to wipe from his memory the trivial fond records of his love, strengthened into action by the conduct of Ophelia herself, who repelled his letters, and denied his access, thus taking upon herself the pain and responsibility of breaking off the relationship in which she had stood to him, and in which

with so keen a zest of pleasure she had sucked in the honey music of his vows, and the reaction from which cost her so

dear. In his interview with Ophelia, arranged by Polonius and the King, he speaks to her of his love as a thing of the past. That that love was ardent and sincere we learn from his passionate grief at the grave of his dead mistress; a grief which, on his own acknowledgment to his friend, we know to

have been no acting; but that he had forgot himself to Laertes, the bravery of whose grief had put him “into a towering passion.” It is at this time, when he had forgot himself, that he explains with passionate vehemence, “I loved Ophelia; forty thousand brothers Could not, with all their quantity of love, Make up my sum.” That Hamlet's conduct to Ophelia was unfeeling, in thus forcing upon her the painful evidence of the insanity he had assumed, can scarcely be denied. Hamlet, however, was no perfect character, and in the matter of his love there is no doubt he partook of the selfishness which is the common -

attribute of the passion wherever its glow is the warmest. His love was not of that delicate sentimental kind which

would, above all things, fear to disturb the beatitude of its