consequence of a tragical event which has passed before our eyes, and which took from the persons their native freedom and led to that catastrophe. And Ophelia ? With her, as with them, madness ensues at the end of her career, and is a means to the catastrophe that overtakes her; in other words, madness comes when her freedom is overthrown in conflict with passion. But in Hamlet the career is yet to be begun, and accordingly it is inconceivable that Shakespeare has put the hero of the drama in a condition which destroys that freedom of action, and with it all soundness of mind. Indeed, the essentially tragic character of the whole would then be destroyed. . . . . The longer and the more attentively we consider this repulsive idea of assuming the rôle of a madman, the more difficult and embarrassing is the question that presses upon us: how was it possible that a finely-cultured man, the same man whose incomparable advantages we have just been considering, an honored prince, the offspring of an heroic king, a member of the regal court, could take upon himself the shame of a disordered brain? Here there certainly lies before us a riddle, which we strive in vain fully to solve, the secret of a soul into whose abyss only the greatest of poets was able to look. But what the soul of Hamlet must have suffered, what agonies it must have undergone, before it came to this fatal conclusion, at least no understanding, however keen, will be able to fathom. Every attempt, I conceive, to find an explanation in any parallel drawn from ordinary life, or by any analysis of the several faculties, be it ever so ingenious, must appear useless. We have before us an individuality, standing high above common life, and yet connected with our human nature by innumerable and most tender ties. And what forever fascinates the heart anew is, that, as we glance into this depth, all the great and elevated qualities of Hamlet, so far from being lost to sight, erased by madness, or maimed and mutilated by a morbid excitement, fashion themselves into a picture in which passion holds the reins, and our sympathy, stirred to the deepest, hears forever sounding the tones of a noble soul, notwithstanding they are jangled, out of tune, and harsh.

[Page 327.] The certainty that Hamlet is not what it is his purpose to appear; the positive certainty that he is not mad, and that he obeys his highly-endowed nature in defiance of a power which seems the more formidable because, although working similarly to madness, it does not destroy the means by which it could be mastered this is the ground upon which the profoundest tragical effect rests. There is carried on here before our eyes a combat, in which all that is most noble and most elevated in this finite human existence of ours is ranged in opposition to the decrees of an infinite power; and the combatant unceasingly hastens to his defeat, because, erring in the means chosen, by every step which ought to lead to victory his downfall is only the more accelerated. What word can be spoken in such a case but in sympathy and fear?

[Page 331.] Let us now, in conclusion, once more consider that, however our weak words may attempt to elucidate the great mystery of these world-wide compli cations (Weltgeschichten), we must nevertheless bow down before its depth and unfathomableness. What is here felt and wrought out and contemplated,-the unconscious germ of it all dwells in the still breast of universal humanity, and therefore this tragedy strikes with equal power the coarse strings of the least sensitive, as well as the finer and more tender sympathies of the more susceptible. It carries both alike too far away into the realm of the most mysterious of our feelings to leave them the power of ever expressing them. The mysterious power of a great crime, which stalks through the world like a fearful apparition, and in the vengeance

which visits it involves whole generations,-that has been felt by many who have given themselves to the study of life and the world; but that a single human mind should be able, with the power of a prophetic enchanter, to produce this feeling in us by a dramatic creation, this is the great mystery, which is here before our eyes, and which takes captive our senses in wonder, reverence, and admiration.

PROF. C. HEBLER (1864)

Aufsätze über Shakespeare. Bern, 1864, p. 83.)-There would not be such a difference of opinion about this tragedy, and especially about the hero of it, were it only borne in mind that it is a tragedy written simply for the stage. But how has the poor prince been taken to task the last ten years! He could not help it that things went all askew in Germany in 1848. Hamlet is Germany' in a most indubitable sense, in that the German attempts at elucidating Hamlet are the contemporaneous history of the German mind in miniature. It has long ago been evident that it is an error to run into æsthetics when the matters in hand are State affairs; and for a long time we have been talking politics, when the thing we have sought to understand was a work for the playhouse. But this fault must be avoided, and we must render to the State the things that are the State's, and to Hamlet the things that are Hamlet's. Only thus can Hamlet come to be understood, for where politics are mixed up with aesthetics, there will always be the danger that aesthetics will be mixed up with politics,-the very thing that is objected to in Hamlet so strongly. That our hero should have his share in this mingle, we have recently had set off against the political Hamlet a religious and Protestant Hamlet, and, for example, the words: The time is out of joint;-O cursed spite, That ever I was born to set it right are explained to have this significance, namely, 'It never should have become necessary for a party to break off from the Romish Church.' Hamlet represents the principle of Protestantism. The shame were for the Church, the sorrow for him. No; the sorrow is for the purchaser of a ticket. The opposite of this interpretation is afforded us by that romanticist, who, on the other hand, finds in the words, 'You cannot speak of reason to the Dane' [I, ii], a blow at Protestantism, and a proof that Shakespeare was a Catholic. In opposition to these judgments, that Hamlet is Germany, or Hamlet is Protestantism, there is a third, which, little as it enlightens us, appears to me to possess an undeniable advantage: Hamlet is Hamlet.

[Page 125.] When Hamlet accuses himself of timidity, or even of cowardice, he does not deserve the least credence, in view of such facts as the killing of Polonius, or the boarding of the pirate, but he merely exposes himself to the suspicion that he occasionally inclines to the opposite extreme. But, forsooth, why does energy desert him at the very moment when it can be best displayed? Or not to put it too strongly, why does it reveal itself so late? No more favorable moment could be hoped for than that immediately after the court-play; Claudius had as good as confessed his crime by the involuntary and improvised rôle that he had there enacted. . . . . Why did not Hamlet force him to repeat in words the confession that he had just made by his actions? When Claudius calls for lights, why did not Hamlet volunteer to light him home? Hamlet is not to be reproached with thinking too

This allusion can be appreciated only by reference to the German translation of these lines: 'Die Zeit ist aus den Fugen: Schmach und Gram, Dass ich zur Welt, sie einzurichten, kam.' ED.

nuch here, but rather with letting his reason fust in him unused.' Even more favorable for this view is the second opportunity, when Hamlet comes upon the criminal all ready for the death-blow, but withholds his hand at the thought that death to a man at prayer is hire and salary, not punishment. What does it concern the judge, forsooth, how a criminal stands with heaven? Furthermore, why does not he who reflects so much also reflect that there is a difference between salvation and praying, and between praying and kneeling? Meanwhile, we have presented to us what is undoubtedly a positive, but at the same time a perverted, habit of reflection, which might even be styled transcendental, since it transcends the sphere of every reasonable, practical consideration. That Hamlet should here deliberate is not to be censured,—for, after all, the opportunity is favorable chiefly in a physical sense; neither are we to blame the result of his reflecting, which holds back his sword, but rather must we blame the grounds of his inaction, which cut off all hope that he will act in the future any more practically than he acts here and now, because he does not put the question to himself thus: Shall I with any probability find another opportunity more favorable than this?' The chance was offered awhile ago before a large assembly, when the King was driven to an unequivocal confession,it is offered here again, in solitary, silent prayer. Both situations embrace, and to a certain extent represent, all possible favorable chances; Hamlet was prepared for neither. At one time cowardice and bestial oblivion,' the next time a thinking too precisely on the event;' both times a thinking' that led to nothing, but wherein the former is to be fairly inferred from the latter, and demands none the less a reference to the passionate element in the hero.

[Page 132.] No one who does not know Hamlet's strength has a right to talk about his weaknesses. Let it be that, judged by an ordinary standard, he is nothing, yet this nothing is more than something.' His critics forget that a very extraordinary task is imposed upon him, that he is in an extremely peculiar situation, and therefore he is not to be unceremoniously classed with people who have never seen a ghost, nor had a royal father to avenge. He stands, indeed, surrounded by the Danish court, almost as a human being in a circle of beasts (one or two persons excepted); it is not accidental that he repeatedly commends the peculiarly human gift, the most human thing in man, distinguishing him sharply from the brute-namely, the capacity for a disinterested devotion to an object, without which there is not merely no scientific and no artistic work, but no sound practical activity possible; this capacity it is which Hamlet possesses in an exceptional degree. In the midst of the masculine villainy of the King, the senile cunning of Polonius, the base eye-service of the court-rabble, and the boyish blustering of Laertes, there is Fortinbras alone, following only the call of honor, who could have served Hamlet in any practical sense as a model; and Fortinbras, at the close, bids him be buried like a soldier, and bears a testimony to our hero which richly indemnifies him for all our modern rough treatment.

[Page 137.] From the way Hamlet receives the commands of the Ghost, and is affected by the apparition, we should suppose that his uncle will never again see the sun. But the hero first contents himself with tying a knot in his handkerchief, i. e. makes a memorandum in his pocket-book of what has happened; for what one has down in black and white, one is comfortably sure of carrying home with him,-this he learned in his Wittenberg. Truly he could not worse travestie the Remember me' of the Ghost, or more quickly encoffin his purpose. The only fault was that he did not ask the Ghost for his address, or hand him a little leaf from his note-book. One may try to find an answer to the question, whether the poet has not here suffered his

hero to speak out his (the poet's) opinion of him too decisively and too early, as it has been objected to Shakespeare, with or without reason, that he does with his villains. He lets the prince perpetrate such sillinesses, but elsewhere only among and towards others. The actual writing in his note-book had not, to the taste of those days, the singularity which it has for us. Elsewhere Shakespeare makes use of an outward action, when a poet now-a-days would content himself with words. Thus, Richard II upon his dethronement asks for a looking-glass, to see what a countenance he has when deprived of majesty; Bolingbroke directs one to be brought,―certainly not in ridicule, but to gratify the king who makes use of it. But a little littleness the poet intends to delineate in both cases, and in the case before us it is to be considered, in connection with the disturbed state of Hamlet's mind at the time, as a dim, colorless counterfeit of the previous frenzy, and even as such is it to be justified. At the same time the poet designs, by the odd form which he gives to this folly, to intimate beforehand, in a very intelligible way, that his hero is a man with whom memory will occasionally take the place of action, and wear the appearance of a mere memorandum.

DR AUGUST DOERING (1865)

(Shakespeare's Hamlet seinem Grundgedanken und Inhalte nach erläutert. Hamm, 1865, p. 34.)—In this first soliloquy we undoubtedly have the germ of Hamlet's fault (Verschuldung), which may be termed the perversion of an undeceived idealism into an embittered and passionate pessimism. The first inciting cause of this perversion was the marriage of the Queen, the second was Ophelia's treatment of him.

[Page 49.] When Hamlet comes before Ophelia, as she was sewing in her closet, there is no attempt on his part to feign insanity. He comes in fearful excitement, forced by his anguish to assure himself whether or not her exquisitely chiselled features proclaim a noble, free soul, and in her dumb embarrassment, unrelieved by a single heart-throb of sympathy, he reads the confirmation of his fears. With that sigh that seemed to shatter all his bulk he parted from his love, and thereafter felt for Ophelia only bitter scorn.

ment.

[Page 64.] Hamlet's call for music and the recorders, after the King has fled discomfited from the court-play, is the joy which every habitual pessimist feels over a fresh confirmation that the world is really as bad and that men are really as depraved as he maintains. This perverted idealism has its origin not so much in the objective side of human nature, in the intellect, as in the subjective side of excessive sentiHis pessimism is not a conviction, but a mood; it is not the result of a universal observation, but only of a few lively impressions. Nevertheless, this mood places him in antagonism to all human kind; he shares none of their interests, but is separated by a high barrier from all their ends and aims. His sole interest is to find food for this scornful feeling, and to live in this perverted world only as long as he absolutely must. And can he mingle in the affairs of this world, where everything is bad? Can he feel tempted to avenge outwitted virtue, when there is no such thing as virtue? Shall he feel impelled to restore an interrupted moral order, when he does not recognize the continuance of any such?

[Page 68.] When Hamlet finds Claudius at prayer, his passion knows no bounds, and he longs not for a human, but for a devilish, revenge. While the most ruthless criminal code of past ages always treated its victims with tenderest reference to their

Hereafter, Hamlet wished to make his revenge eternal. In order to perceive how naturally this train of thought springs from Hamlet's disposition, we need but remember how prominent was the share that the Hereafter took in all his reflections, and furthermore, that death itself was far from being abhorrent to him, but on the contrary was vehemently longed for.

....

[Page 70.] His passion leads him to reproach his mother with killing her husband, a reproach which could have been meant as only so far true as, by her yielding to the seducer, she had, without her wish or will, inspired his impulse to commit the murder. . . . . The appearance of the Ghost in the midst of the interview is to be explained by the fact that the midnight hour was past, during which the spirit, freed from purgatorial fires, hovers around the appointed executor of revenge. He had seen how Hamlet had suffered the praying King to escape, and he comes to whet his almost blunted purpose.

[Page 72.] The Queen remains true to her promise, and gives a distorted account to the King of Hamlet's killing Polonius. She says that he was mad as the raging sea (against her better knowledge she here implies genuine insanity); and then that he heard not a human voice, but something stir behind the arras; so that, according to her report. Hamlet might readily be supposed to have made a pass at a rat. She naturally keeps back that Hamlet had supposed that he had killed the King, and she further adds, falsely, that he weeps for what he has done, &c. But the King is not deceived: It had been so with us had we been there.'

[Page 87.] The faith in Providence, with which Hamlet dared to comfort himself in recounting to Horatio his treatment of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, is by no means a symptom of a healthy tone of mind; in the whole tragedy there is no trace in Hamlet of any want of faith in the fundamental truths of religion. Rather is the appeal to this faith in this connection a proof of weakness, which finds comfort in the belief of a wonderful interposition of a higher power in cases where daring is required, and where the issue is uncertain, and where, therefore, the interposition of Providence, so far as it can be affirmed to exist at all, may just as well favor the opposite party. . . . . Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are the only persons in this tragedy who die an innocent death.

[Page 91.] The change of rapiers is to be thus explained. The same thrust with which Laertes gives Hamlet his mortal wound also disarms him,—that is, jerks Hamlet's weapon out of his hand. The courtesy of a contest merely for exercise, or as a trial of skill, obliges him who disarms his opponent to pick up the fallen weapon, and then offer both weapons to his antagonist to take which he pleases. Through this accident, on which Laertes had not counted, he was caught in his own springe, for the semblance of a trial of skill had still to be kept up. Hamlet chooses the envenomed rapier, and in the following fourth bout Nemesis overtakes Laertes.

DR E. W. SIEVERS (1866)

(William Shakespeare. Sein Leiben und Dichten. Gotha, 1866, p. 441.)-Goethe did not, in his later years, rest satisfied with his explanation. When, in the year 1828, he was looking over Retsch's Gallery of Shakespeare's Dramatic Works,' and came to Hamlet: After all is said,' he remarked, that weighs upon one's soul as a gloomy problem.' And it must be confessed that Goethe did not solve the gloomy problem,' although he came nearer to the solution than any one else. The gift of

VOL. II.-21