forms a hero_, sinks
beneath a burden which it cannot bear and must not cast away.' When this
idea is isolated, developed and popularised, we get the picture of a
graceful youth, sweet and sensitive, full of delicate sympathies and
yearning aspirations, shrinking from the touch of everything gross and
earthly; but frail and weak, a kind of Werther, with a face like
Shelley's and a voice like Mr. Tree's. And then we ask in tender pity,
how could such a man perform the terrible duty laid on him?

How, indeed! And what a foolish Ghost even to suggest such a duty! But
this conception, though not without its basis in certain beautiful
traits of Hamlet's nature, is utterly untrue. It is too kind to Hamlet
on one side, and it is quite unjust to him on another. The 'conscience'
theory at any rate leaves Hamlet a great nature which you can admire and
even revere. But for the 'sentimental' Hamlet you can feel only pity not
unmingled with contempt. Whatever else he is, he is no _hero_.

But consider the text. This shrinking, flower-like youth--how could he
possibly have done what we _see_ Hamlet do? What likeness to him is
there in the Hamlet who, summoned by the Ghost, bursts from his
terrified friends with the cry:

Unhand me, gentlemen!
By heaven, I'll make a ghost of him that lets me;

the Hamlet who scarcely once speaks to the King without an insult, or to
Polonius without a gibe; the Hamlet who storms at Ophelia and speaks
daggers to his mother; the Hamlet who, hearing a cry behind the arras,
whips out his sword in an instant and runs the eavesdropper through; the
Hamlet who sends his 'school-fellows' to their death and never troubles
his head about them more; the Hamlet who is the first man to board a
pirate ship, and who fights with Laertes in the grave; the Hamlet of the
catastrophe, an omnipotent fate, before whom all the court stands
helpless, who, as the truth breaks upon him, rushes on the King, drives
his foil right through his body,[36] then seizes the poisoned cup and
forces it violently between the wretched man's lips, and in the throes
of death has force and fire enough to wrest the cup from Horatio's hand
('By heaven, I'll have it!') lest he should drink and die? This man, the
Hamlet of the play, is a heroic, terrible figure. He would have been
formidable to Othello or Macbeth. If the sentimental Hamlet had crossed
him, he would have hurled him from his path with one sweep of h