the play-scene with lively interest, and exults in its success, not really because it brings him nearer to his goal, but partly because it has hurt his enemy and partly because it has demonstrated his own skill (III. ii. 286-304). He looks forward almost with glee to countermining the King’s designs in sending him away (III. iv. 209), and looks back with obvious satisfaction, even with pride, to the address and vigour he displayed on the voyage (V. ii. 1–55). These were not the action on which his morbid self-feeling had centred; he feels in them his old force, and escapes in them from his disgust, (c) It accounts for the pleasure with which he meets old acquaintances, like his ‘school-fellows’ or the actors. The former observed (and we can observe) in him a ‘kind of joy’ at first, though it is followed by ‘much forcing of his disposition’ as he attempts to keep this joy and his courtesy alive in spite of the misery which so soon returns upon him and the suspicion he is forced to feel, (d) It accounts no less for the painful features of his character as seen in the play, his almost savage irritability on the one hand, and on the other his self-absorption, his callousness, his insensibility to the fates of those whom he despises, and to the feelings even of those whom he loves. These are frequent symptoms of such melancholy, and (e) they sometimes alternate, as they do in Hamlet, with bursts of transitory, almost hysterical, and quite fruitless emotion. It is to these last (of which a part of the soliloquy, ‘O what a rogue,’ gives a good example) that Hamlet alludes when, to the Ghost, he speaks of himself as ‘lapsed in passion’ and it is doubtless partly his conscious weakness in regard to them that inspires his praise of Horatio as a man who is not ‘passion’s slave.’[1]
- ↑ Hamlet’s violence at Ophelia’s grave, though probably intentionally exaggerated, is another example of this want of self-control. The Queen’s description of him (V. i. 307),
