How, indeed!  And what a foolish Ghost even to suggest such a duty!  But this conception, though not without its basis in certain beautiful traits of Hamlet’s nature, is utterly untrue.  It is too kind to Hamlet on one side, and it is quite unjust to him on another.  The ‘conscience’ theory at any rate leaves Hamlet a great nature which you can admire and even revere.  But for the ‘sentimental’ Hamlet you can feel only pity not unmingled with contempt.  Whatever else he is, he is no hero.

But consider the text.  This shrinking, flower-like youth—­how could he possibly have done what we see Hamlet do?  What likeness to him is there in the Hamlet who, summoned by the Ghost, bursts from his terrified friends with the cry: 

                          Unhand me, gentlemen! 
     By heaven, I’ll make a ghost of him that lets me;

the Hamlet who scarcely once speaks to the King without an insult, or to Polonius without a gibe; the Hamlet who storms at Ophelia and speaks daggers to his mother; the Hamlet who, hearing a cry behind the arras, whips out his sword in an instant and runs the eavesdropper through; the Hamlet who sends his ‘school-fellows’ to their death and never troubles his head about them more; the Hamlet who is the first man to board a pirate ship, and who fights with Laertes in the grave; the Hamlet of the catastrophe, an omnipotent fate, before whom all the court stands helpless, who, as the truth breaks upon him, rushes on the King, drives his foil right through his body,[36] then seizes the poisoned cup and forces it violently between the wretched man’s lips, and in the throes of death has force and fire enough to wrest the cup from Horatio’s hand (’By heaven, I’ll have it!’) lest he should drink and die?  This man, the Hamlet of the play, is a heroic, terrible figure.  He would have been formidable to Othello or Macbeth.  If the sentimental Hamlet had crossed him, he would have hurled him from his path with one sweep of his arm.

This view, then, or any view that approaches it, is grossly unjust to Hamlet, and turns tragedy into mere pathos.  But, on the other side, it is too kind to him.  It ignores the hardness and cynicism which were indeed no part of his nature, but yet, in this crisis of his life, are indubitably present and painfully marked.  His sternness, itself left out of sight by this theory, is no defect; but he is much more than stern.  Polonius possibly deserved nothing better than the words addressed to his corpse: 

     Thou wretched, rash, intruding fool, farewell! 
     I took thee for thy better:  take thy fortune: 
     Thou find’st to be too busy is some danger;

yet this was Ophelia’s father, and, whatever he deserved, it pains us, for Hamlet’s own sake, to hear the words: 

     This man shall set me packing: 
     I’ll lug the guts into the neighbour room.