f
the soul and the world.

But the tragedy of "Hamlet" includes more than this. It is not merely
the doom of suffering on a soul above a certain strain, still less is it
the accidental death of a sluggard in revenge; it is the implication of
a noble mind in the intrigues and malignities of a world it has
renounced. In vain Hamlet contracts his ambition till it is bounded by a
nutshell; he is ordered to strike for a throne. No abnegation clears him
from entanglement. The world permits not his escape, but drags him back
with those crooked hands of which Dante speaks, which pierce while they
hold. This is the tragedy in all its fulness, the involution of the
inward and outward drama to the immense advantage of both. For while the
spiritual agony of Hamlet gives an incomparable dignity to the
ghost-story, yet by the very interruptions and checkings and crossings
of it through the accidents and oppositions of the plot, its physiognomy
is more distinctly and delicately revealed. Instead of the majestic but
monotonous declamation of Timon, we have every variety of that ironical
humour (indicating some yet unconquered province of the soul) that
guards and embalms the purer strength of feeling, keeps it airy and
spiritual, and frees it from moan and heaviness. Here we have no
insistance on suffering, no literary heart-breaks, no dilettante
pessimism; but those indefinable harmonies of freedom and law, of the
ascendency of the soul and the sovereignty of fate, of Nature and the
spaces of the mind, that in the works of the great masters represent, if
they do not explain, the mystery of life.

The religion of Hamlet is that faith in God which survives after the
extinction of the faith in man. Losing the light of human worth and
dignity through which, alone the soul can reach to the idea of what is
truly divine, and with it the link between earth and heaven, Hamlet's
religion is reduced to its elements again; to the vague and fragmentary
hints of Nature, and instincts of the spirit; to intimations of
limitless power, of mysterious destiny, of a "something after death,"
of a "divinity that shapes our ends;" and with these, gleams of a
transcendent religion of humanity, for devotion to which he was
suffering; and on the other side, binding him to the stage-plot, relics
of childish superstition, half-beliefs, inherited opinions, "_our_
circumstance and course of thought," which he adopted when he
pleased,--as, for instance, when he f