hat he would have
done who spoke to the human heart through their voices. All men, I
believe, have Macbeth's instinct for making 'assurance doubly
sure,' and I cannot imagine the man who, entangled as you were in a
net of conflicting evidence--the evidence of the spiritual and the
evidence of the natural world--would not, if the question were that
of averting a curse from acting on a beloved mistress, have done as
you did. That paralysis of Hamlet's will which followed when the
evidence of two worlds hung in equipoise before him, no one can
possibly understand better than I.

Several critics have asked me to explain these words. Of course,
however, the question is much too big and much too important to
discuss here. I will merely say that Shakespeare having decided in
the case of 'Macbeth' to adopt the machinery he found in Holinslied,
and in the case of 'Hamlet' the machinery he found in the old
'Hamlet,' seems to have set himself the task of realising the
situation of a man oscillating between the evidence of two worlds,
the physical and the spiritual--a man in each case unusually
sagacious, and in each case endowed with the instinct for 'making
assurance doubly sure'--the instinct which seems, from many passages
in his dramas, to have been a special characteristic of the poet's
own, such for instance as the words in _Pericles_:

For truth can never be confirm'd enough,
Though doubts did ever sleep.

Why is it that, in this story, Hamlet, the moody moraliser upon
charnel-houses and mouldy bones, is identified with the jolly companion
of the Mermaid, the wine-bibbing joker of the Falcon, and the Apollo
saloon? It is because Hamlet is the most elaborately-painted character
in literature. It is because the springs of his actions are so
profoundly touched, the workings of his soul so thoroughly laid bare,
that we seem to know him more completely than we know our most intimate
friends. It is because the sea which washes between personality and
personality is here, for once, rolled away, and we and this Hamlet
touch, soul to soul. That is why we ask whether such a character can
be the mere evolvement of the artistic mind at work. That is why we
exclaim: 'The man who painted Hamlet must have been painting himself.'
The perfection of the dramatist's work betrays him. For, really and
truly, no man can paint another, but only himself, and what we call
'character painting' is, at the best, but a poor