law whose "seat is the bosom of God, her voice the harmony of the world." And in that case the tragic action, instead of being, to the persons concerned, in any proper sense a righteous procedure, instead of appealing to their high and sacred sympathies with justice, would be a mere stroke of brutal violence, or, at the best, an act of low, savage, personal revenge; such an act as would inevitably array their sympathies with justice against the avenger of crime, and enlist them in behalf of the criminal. Thus the proper music of the work would be utterly untuned, and for the terrible of tragic art would be substituted the horrible of untragic bungling. This were to write tragedies for the coarse theatrical sense, for the vulgar apprehension of the crowd before the curtain, and not for the inner courts of the human soul!

All through the first two Acts of the play, and until late in the second scene of the third Act, Hamlet more or less doubts the honesty of the Ghost. The old belief in ghosts held, among other things, that evil spirits sometimes walked abroad, in the likeness of deceased persons, to scare or tempt the living. To this point Halliwell quotes an apt passage from Willet's Hexapla in Exodum, 1608: "The devils do counterfeit the spirits and souls of the dead; by this means the Devil more strongly deceiveth, seeing men are ready to hear their parents and friends departed." Hamlet apprehends the possibility of its being so in this case. He therefore craves some direct and decisive confirmation of the Ghost's tale from the King's conscience. When the advent of the Players is announced, he instantly catches at the chance, thus offered, of testing the question, and the possibility, if the Ghost's tale be true, of unmasking Claudius, and of forcing or surprising him into a confession. Nothing could evince more sagacity in planning, or more swiftness in executing, than the action he takes in pursuance of this thought:

"I've heard

That guilty creatures sitting at a play
Have by the very cunning of the scene
Been struck so to the soul, that presently
They have proclaim'd their malefactions;

For murder, though it have no tongue, will speak
With most miraculous organ. I'll have these players
Play something like the murder of my father

Before mine uncle: I'll observe his looks;

I know my course. The spirit that I have seen
May be the Devil: and the Devil hath power
T'assume a pleasing shape; yea, and perhaps,
Out of my weakness and my melancholy, —
As he is very potent with such spirits, -
Abuses me to damn me. I'll have grounds
More relative than this: the play's the thing
Wherein I'll catch the conscience of the King."

The scheme, I need not say, succeeds. The King's behaviour in the interlude fully authenticates to Hamlet, perhaps also to Horatio, the Ghost's tale. Hamlet now knows that Claudius is indeed guilty. And Claudius also, as Hamlet well understands, knows that he knows it. But the evidence thus caught, however assuring to Hamlet, is nowise available for the ends of social or even dramatic justice. The Ghost's tale is still just as impossible to be proved to the mind and heart of Denmark, as it was before. But this advantage has been gained, that Claudius must now do one of two things: he must either repent and confess, or else he must try to secure himself by further measures: an attitude merely passive or defensive will no longer do. If he does not repent, there is henceforth a mortal duel between him and Hamlet: one, or the other, or both, of them must go down. As Hamlet lives but to avenge the murder, he must neither die himself nor let the King die, till that work is done. Force he has a hand to repel; fraud he has a mind to scent out, to detect, to defeat; and Claudius must get up very early, and be very busy when up, to out-craft him.

The result of the interlude excites Hamlet to the uttermost: his faculties, his sensibilities are all wrought up to their highest tension. All on fire, as he is, he may well say,

"Now could I drink hot blood,

And do such bitter business as the day
Would quake to look on."

In this state of mind he comes upon Claudius while in the act of praying. Now he has a fair chance, now, in his white-heat of rage, to deal the avenging blow: the selfconvicted fratricide is there, alone, before him, and is completely at his mercy. All through his frame the blood is boiling still his reason tells him that such a hit will be a fatal miss, and will irretrievably lose him his cause. His judgment, his prudence, his self-control are assailed and pressed by such an overwhelming stress and energy of passion, that they are all but forced to give way: SO mighty is the impulse of revenge within him, that even his iron strength of will can hardly withstand it: and, to brace his judgment against his passion, he has to summon up a counterpoising passion in aid of his judgment. Even his inexpressible hatred of the King is itself called in, to help him through the potent temptation, and to keep him from striking the King. This, I take it, is the meaning of the dreadful reasons and motives which he raves out for sparing Claudius. He will take him while in the act of committing such sins as will make sure the perdition of his soul. In all this, it seems to me, the providence of the drama is using one of Hamlet's maddest fits, to foreshadow the far deeper, fouler, more damning sins amidst which this execrable wretch ultimately falls.

Now that Hamlet is, beyond all peradventure, certified of the King's guilt, the next thing for him to do is, to come to a full and perfect understanding with his mother. He must see her by herself. He must search her breast to the bottom, he must "turn her eyes into her very soul,"

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with his burning eloquence of indignation, of shame, of reproof, of remonstrance, of expostulation: he must arouse the better feelings of the woman and the mother in her heart, and through these, if possible, must redeem her from the blasting curse of her present position: above all, he must know from her directly, either through her words or her manner, whether she was any way conspirant in the murder of his father; and he must also let her know, with an emphasis not to be resisted, both his opinion of Claudius and how matters are standing between Claudius and himself. While he is on the point of doing this; while, with his soul agitated to its innermost depths, he is talking with her; while he is standing in the room and beside the bed in which himself was born, and which she has so shockingly dishonoured; Polonius, on a sudden, raises an outcry behind the hangings: Hamlet, supposing the voice to be the King's, is surprised, snatched, swept quite away from himself with a whirlwind gust of passion: instantly, with the speed of lightning, out leaps his sword from the scabbard, as of its own accord, and kills the old intriguer.

By this instant lapse of self-control, Hamlet has lost his lead in the game, and given Claudius a great advantage over him; which advantage, however, Claudius will so use as to open a clear way for the final triumph of Hamlet's cause, though at a fearful cost of life, his own among the rest. Claudius is now to assume the offensive, and is so to carry it as to achieve his own ruin. For, indeed, his guilt is of such a kind, and is so placed, that it can have its proper retribution only through a process of further development. A dreadful safety indeed! But he will prove far unequal to the sharp exigency in which he will involve himself. Too bad to repent, and too secure in his badness to be reached by human avengement, there is, nevertheless, a Hand which he cannot elude. That Hand is to work his punishment through the springs of his own

moral constitution. Hamlet's piercing, unsleeping eye, now sharpened to its keenest edge, is to be upon him, to penetrate his secretest designs, to trace him through his darkest windings, as his evil genius. His guilt is to entangle him, by an inward law, in a series of diabolical machinations; remorse is to disconcert his judgment, and put him to desperate shifts. Thus his first, most secret, unprovable crime is to goad him on, from within, to perpetrating other crimes, crimes so open and manifest as to stand in no need of proof; and he is to go out of the world in such a transport of wickedness, lying, poisoning, murdering, that his heels shall kick at Heaven," sure enough.

Such is the stern, awful, inexorable moral logic of this mighty drama. And its great wisdom lies in nothing more than in the fact, the order, and the method of the hero's being made to serve as the unconscious organ or instrument of the providential retribution. He himself, indeed, is consciously doing the best that can be done in his situation. Meanwhile the Nemesis of the play is working out the result through him, without his knowing it, without his suspecting it. Not till the hand of death is already upon him, does it become possible for him to strike. Now, at length, the seals are opened; now, for the first time, his hands are untied, his passion, his avenging impulse, his will are set free. All this he sees instantly just as it is: instantly, consciously, he deals the stroke for which his Divine Helper has secretly prepared the way. He himself falls indeed, but falls as a pure and spotless victim, to feed the sacrificial fire of immortal hopes and aspirations in the human breast; so falls as to leave upon us the hallowed sense, that "flights of Angels sing him to his rest."

I must not dismiss the hero without adverting briefly to one or two other points. Many people, I suspect, shape their opinions and feelings about Hamlet quite too much from what Hamlet, in some of his soliloquies, says against