There is the same insensibility in Hamlet’s language about the fate of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern; and, observe, their deaths were not in the least required by his purpose.  Grant, again, that his cruelty to Ophelia was partly due to misunderstanding, partly forced on him, partly feigned; still one surely cannot altogether so account for it, and still less can one so account for the disgusting and insulting grossness of his language to her in the play-scene.  I know this is said to be merely an example of the custom of Shakespeare’s time.  But it is not so.  It is such language as you will find addressed to a woman by no other hero of Shakespeare’s, not even in that dreadful scene where Othello accuses Desdemona.  It is a great mistake to ignore these things, or to try to soften the impression which they naturally make on one.  That this embitterment, callousness, grossness, brutality, should be induced on a soul so pure and noble is profoundly tragic; and Shakespeare’s business was to show this tragedy, not to paint an ideally beautiful soul unstained and undisturbed by the evil of the world and the anguish of conscious failure.[37]

(4) There remains, finally, that class of view which may be named after Schlegel and Coleridge.  According to this, Hamlet is the tragedy of reflection.  The cause of the hero’s delay is irresolution; and the cause of this irresolution is excess of the reflective or speculative habit of mind.  He has a general intention to obey the Ghost, but ’the native hue of resolution is sicklied o’er with the pale cast of thought.’  He is ‘thought-sick.’  ‘The whole,’ says Schlegel, ’is intended to show how a calculating consideration which aims at exhausting, so far as human foresight can, all the relations and possible consequences of a deed, cripples[38] the power of acting....  Hamlet is a hypocrite towards himself; his far-fetched scruples are often mere pretexts to cover his want of determination....  He has no firm belief in himself or in anything else....  He loses himself in labyrinths of thought.’  So Coleridge finds in Hamlet ’an almost enormous intellectual activity and a proportionate aversion to real action consequent upon it’ (the aversion, that is to say, is consequent on the activity).  Professor Dowden objects to this view, very justly, that it neglects the emotional side of Hamlet’s character, ’which is quite as important as the intellectual’; but, with this supplement, he appears on the whole to adopt it.  Hamlet, he says, ’loses a sense of fact because with him each object and event transforms and expands itself into an idea....  He cannot steadily keep alive within himself a sense of the importance of any positive, limited thing,—­a deed, for example.’  And Professor Dowden explains this condition by reference to Hamlet’s life.  ’When the play opens he has reached the age of thirty years ... and he has received culture of every kind except the culture of active life.  During the reign of the strong-willed elder Hamlet there was no call to action for his meditative son.  He has slipped on into years of full manhood still a haunter of the university, a student of philosophies, an amateur in art, a ponderer on the things of life and death, who has never formed a resolution or executed a deed’ (Shakspere, his Mind and Art, 4th ed., pp. 132, 133).