re no "superfluous activities," no
desultory talk; Hamlet's preoccupation is one throughout. He alternates
between the desire to escape from so vile a world, and the pleasure of
exposing its vice and fraud. The one gives us soliloquies, the other
dialogues. Now he looks out at an obscure eternity from a time that was
more obscure, and now the tension of the mind relieves the tension of
the heart. On the one side we have all passages of life-weariness,
whether as the issue of long meditation, or as the outcome of familiar
talk; and on the other we have the brilliant and discursive criticism of
man and Nature continued throughout the play. All this is so closely
connected with the treason of his mother, that we see the very
attachment of the feeling to the thought.

This explains the particular bitterness with which he attacks the
Ministers and parasites of the Court. As soon as he sees them he crosses
the current of their talk, commits them to an argument, confuses them
with the evolutions of a logic too rapid for their senses to follow, and
makes their bewilderment a sport. How small their world appears in the
mirror of his ironical mind! The state-craft, the love-making, the
"absurd pomp," the "heavy-headed revels," the women that "jig and amble
and lisp," the nobles that are "spacious in the possession of dirt," the
sovereign that is a "king of shreds and patches;" as for their opinions,
"do but blow; them to their trials, and the bubbles are out;" as for
their ideas of prosperity, it is to act as "sponges and soak up the
king's countenance, his rewards and authorities;" as for their standard
of worth, "let a beast be a lord of beasts, and his crib shall stand at
the king's table." It is a disgrace to live in such a world, and
contemptible to share its pleasures and prizes.

But his quarrel with it does not end here. The flaw runs through the
whole constitution of things; there is no possible equation between the
anomalies and dislocations on which he turns the dry light of that
sceptical philosophy which has usurped the place of faith. Thought is
good and action is good, but they will not work together. Our reason is
our glory, but our indiscretions serve us best--we must either be
cowards or fools. We have a perception of infinite goodness, just
sufficient to make us conclude that we are "arrant knaves, all of us,"
and just enough belief in immortality "to perplex our wills." There is
nothing but disagreement and d