s 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.'[49]

Finally, Hamlet's melancholy accounts for two things which seem to be
explained by nothing else. The first of these is his apathy or
'lethargy.' We are bound to consider the evidence which the text
supplies of this, though it is usual to ignore it. When Hamlet mentions,
as one possible cause of his inaction, his 'thinking too precisely on
the event,' he mentions another, 'bestial oblivion'; and the thing
against which he inveighs in the greater part of that soliloquy
(IV. iv.) is not the excess or the misuse of reason (which for
him here and always is god-like), but this _bestial_ oblivion or
'_dullness_,' this 'letting all _sleep_,' this allowing of heaven-sent
reason to 'fust unused':

What is a man,
If his chief good and market of his time
Be but to _sleep_ and feed? a _beast_, no more.[50]

So, in the soliloquy in II. ii. he accuses himself of being 'a
_dull_ and muddy-mettled rascal,' who 'peaks [mopes] like John-a-dreams,
unpregnant of his cause,' dully indifferent to his cause.[51] So, when
the Ghost appears to him the second time, he accuses himself of being
tardy and lapsed in _time_; and the Ghost speaks of his purpose being
almost _blunted_, and bids him not to _forget_ (cf. 'oblivion'). And so,
what is emphasised in those undramatic but significant speeches of the
player-king and of Claudius is the mere dying away of purpose or of
love.[52] Surely what all this points to is not a condition of excessive
but useless mental activity (indeed there is, in reality, curiously
little about that in the text), but rather one of dull, apathetic,
brooding gloom, in which Hamlet, so far from analysing his duty, is not
thinking of it at all, but for the time literally _forget