from the malice which in another mind is preparing his death. The treachery of Laertes is the more odious in this, that the success of his plot depends on the generous confidence of his victim. Polonius is handled in the same way with special reference to Hamlet. His thinking is marked by slowness and insincerity, and when he comes in contact with the rapid current of Hamlet's mind he is benumbed; he can only mutter, "If this is madness, there is method in it." What little portable wisdom was given to him in the first Act is soon withdrawn-he stammers in his deceit, and the old indirectness having no material of thought to work upon becomes a circumlocution of truisms. As the play proceeds he is made, as if with a second intention, more and more the antithesis, as he is the antipathy, of the prince. It is the careful portrait of what Hamlet would hate—a remnant of senile craft in the method with folly in the matter-a shy look in the dull and glazing eye, that insults the honesty of Hamlet as much as the shrivelled meaning with its pompous phrase insults his intelligence. So with the other characters; they are all made to justify his demeanour towards them. The queen is heard to confess her guilt, Ophelia is seen to act as a decoy; his college friends attempt his death.

In as far then as Hamlet is right in his verdicts, blameless in his aims, lofty in his ideal, and just in his resentment, he is a representative man; and we have not the study of a special affliction, but the fundamental drama of the soul and the world. This, whatever we may call it, was the work at which Shakespeare laboured so long, and for which he withdrew Hamlet from time to time for special study, every fresh touch telling in this direction.

VI.

How far is such an interpretation consonant with the genius and method of Shakespeare? Certainly I should hardly have found courage to add another to the many studies of Hamlet had it not been for the hope of bringing out a characteristic of our great national poet that is rather unobtrusive than obscure. I mean a singular unworldliness of thought and feeling; a cherished idealism; an inborn magnanimity. Not the unworldliness of the study and the cloister, or the other-worldliness of such poets as Dante and Milton, but the unworldliness of a man of the world, the idealism that is closely allied with humour. And it is in this union and not elsewhere that the "breadth" of Shakespeare, of which we hear so much, is found. This unworldliness is elusive, ubiquitous, full of disguise. Now it is militant, and now observant; now it is fastidious in its scorn, and now it is piercing in its dissection; now it is satire, and now it is melancholy. He gives the most

knightly chivalry of friendship to a merchant, and the most exquisite fidelity of service to a fool, and makes the ingrained worldliness of Cleopatra die before her love. He not only scatters through his pages rebukes of the arrogance of power and the more pitiable pride of wealth, but makes his kings deride their own ceremo nies and mock their own state. Who has not observed the easy and effortless way in which his heroes and heroines move from one station to the other, from authority to service like Kent, from obscurity to splendour like Perdita, or to the greenwood from the palace like Rosalind. The change affects their happiness no more than the change of their position in the sky affects the brightness of the stars. It is all so truthful and clear that we grow more simple as we read. Lear utters but one cry of joy, and that is when he is entering a prison with Cordelia :

"Come, let's away to prison! We two alone will sing like birds in a cage;"

while the Queen of France has just said:

"For thee, oppressed king, am I cast down,

Myself could else outfrown false fortune's frown."

In these two lines the magnanimity of Shakespeare is pure, unveiled, as he gives us the last words of his favourite heroine: we must read them backwards and forwards to catch the portrait they enclose. We see the unconscious elevation of Cordelia's mind, not so much superior as invulnerable to mortal ills; we see this dignity and lovely pride cast down by pity and love, and then in answer to Lear's troubled and anxious look we hear in measured and steadfast tones the reassurance of perfect peace.

Remark too Shakespeare's habit of looking upon the world as a masque or pageant, not to be treated with too much respectful anxiety as if it were as real as ourselves. He who can give so perfectly the texture of common life, the solidities of common sense, likes to wave his wand over the domain of sturdy prose and incontrovertible custom, and to show how plastic it is, and how easily pierced, and how readily transformed. He has a malicious pleasure in confusing the boundaries of nature and fancy, and mocking the purblind understanding. In the "Midsummer Night's Dream" we have an ambiguous and bewildering light, with the horizon always shifting, and the boundaries of fact and fable confused with an inseparable mingling of forms; both outwardly, as when Theseus enters the forest on the skirts of the fairy crew; and inwardly in the memories of the lovers. And we are expressly told after the enchantment of the "Tempest " that this summary dealing with the solid world was not merely by way of entertainment but was a presentation of truth. And Macbeth, after grasping all that life could offer of tangible reward or palpable power, pronounces it

"such stuff as dreams are made of."

No doubt something will be said on the other side, of Shakespeare's broad and indulgent humanity, and of his toleration even of vice itself when it is convivial and amusing. It should be remembered, however, that his comedies while more realistic are not so real as his tragedies. They are, as he himself insists, entertainments; to which jovial sensuality, witty falsehood, and even hypocrisy when it is not morose are admitted, as diverting in their very aberration from the mean rule of life. So that a touch of rascality is a genuine element in comedy, as a touch of danger in sport, and the provocation of the moral sense is part of the fun. But they are all under guard. The moment they pass a certain boundary and break into reality, the moment that intemperance leads to disorder, and vice to suffering, as in real life, then suddenly Harry turns upon Falstaff, or Olivia on Sir Toby, and vice is called by its right

name.

And as life awakens and reality enters, either the grace or the sentiment or the passion of unworldliness is more and more distinctly present. And in the tragedies even the pleasant vices are scen as part of a world-wide corruption that wrongs, debases, and betrays. Shakespeare has painted every phase of antagonism to the world, from the pensive aloofness of Antonio to the impassioned misanthropy of Timon. Every excited feeling emits light into the dark places of the earth, and every suffering is a revelation of more than its own injury. It is as if the soul, fully aroused, became aware by its own light of the oppression and injustice abroad upon the earth.

But there is a more vague and general disaffection to the world than is the outcome of any particular experience. It may be called a spiritual discontent which few have felt as a passion, but many have known as a mood: when that average goodness of human nature which we have found so companionable, and to which we have so pleasantly adapted ourselves, becomes "very tolerable and not to be endured;" when the world seems to be made of our vices, and our virtues seem to be looking on, or if they enter into the fray are too tame and conventional for the selfish fire and unscrupulous industry of their rivals; and when to our excited sensibility there is a taint in the moral atmosphere, and we long to escape if only to breathe more freely. This is more than a mood with Shakespeare, and is present in those slight but distinctive touches that mark the unconscious intrusion of character in an artist's work; and is frankly confessed in one of his Sonnets:

"Tired with all these for restful death I cry;
As to behold desert a beggar born,

And needy nothing drest in jollity,

And purest faith unhappily forsworn.

Tired with all these, from these would I be gone."

We find, then, scattered through the dramas of Shakespeare a

disaffection to the world as deep-grained as it is comprehensive; and we find the various elements of it-the contempt of fortune, the ideal virtue, the disinterested passion, the mysticism, the fellowship with the oppressed, the distaste of the world's enjoyment and the weariness of its burden-concentrated in Hamlet for full and exhaustive study; thus presenting what I have called the interior or fundamental drama of 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, halfbeliefs, inherited opinions, " our circumstance and course of thought," which he adopted when he pleased, as, for instance, when he feared lest he should dismiss the murderer to heaven, or half

believed that his blameless father was tormented in sulphurous flames for having endured a horrible death. But however obscure and indefinite the religion of Hamlet may be, and partly because it is so, and hence of universal experience, it adds reach and depth to his struggle with the world. His soul flies out of bounds and away in airy liberty on these excursions to the vast unknown, and escapes at last victorious with the light through the darkness of conscious immortality, and the lamp in his hand of "the readiness is all." There is always a certain vacuity in the positive or realistic treatment of passion, in which it is confined to the area of mortality, and after a sultry strife delivered over to the mercy of its enemies. But the world cannot so beset and beleaguer the soul as to block up the access and passage of invisible allies, or intercept the communications of infinite strength and infinite charity, or follow to its distant haunts and inaccessible refuges the migrations of thought—

"In the hoar deep to colonize."

FRANKLIN LEIFCHILD.