And the negative side of his idealism, the aversion to evil, is perhaps even more developed in the hero of the tragedy than in the Hamlet of earlier days.  It is intensely characteristic.  Nothing, I believe, is to be found elsewhere in Shakespeare (unless in the rage of the disillusioned idealist Timon) of quite the same kind as Hamlet’s disgust at his uncle’s drunkenness, his loathing of his mother’s sensuality, his astonishment and horror at her shallowness, his contempt for everything pretentious or false, his indifference to everything merely external.  This last characteristic appears in his choice of the friend of his heart, and in a certain impatience of distinctions of rank or wealth.  When Horatio calls his father ‘a goodly king,’ he answers, surely with an emphasis on ‘man,’

     He was a man, take him for all in all,
     I shall not look upon his like again.

He will not listen to talk of Horatio being his ‘servant.’  When the others speak of their ‘duty’ to him, he answers, ’Your love, as mine to you.’  He speaks to the actor precisely as he does to an honest courtier.  He is not in the least a revolutionary, but still, in effect, a king and a beggar are all one to him.  He cares for nothing but human worth, and his pitilessness towards Polonius and Osric and his ‘school-fellows’ is not wholly due to morbidity, but belongs in part to his original character.

Now, in Hamlet’s moral sensibility there undoubtedly lay a danger.  Any great shock that life might inflict on it would be felt with extreme intensity.  Such a shock might even produce tragic results.  And, in fact, Hamlet deserves the title ‘tragedy of moral idealism’ quite as much as the title ‘tragedy of reflection.’

(3) With this temperament and this sensibility we find, lastly, in the Hamlet of earlier days, as of later, intellectual genius.  It is chiefly this that makes him so different from all those about him, good and bad alike, and hardly less different from most of Shakespeare’s other heroes.  And this, though on the whole the most important trait in his nature, is also so obvious and so famous that I need not dwell on it at length.  But against one prevalent misconception I must say a word of warning.  Hamlet’s intellectual power is not a specific gift, like a genius for music or mathematics or philosophy.  It shows itself, fitfully, in the affairs of life as unusual quickness of perception, great agility in shifting the mental attitude, a striking rapidity and fertility in resource; so that, when his natural belief in others does not make him unwary, Hamlet easily sees through them and masters them, and no one can be much less like the typical helpless dreamer.  It shows itself in conversation chiefly in the form of wit or humour; and, alike in conversation and in soliloquy, it shows itself in the form of imagination quite as much as in that of thought in the stricter sense.  Further, where it takes the latter shape, as it very often does, it is not philosophic in the technical meaning of the word.  There is really nothing in the play to show that Hamlet ever was ’a student of philosophies,’ unless it be the famous lines which, comically enough, exhibit this supposed victim of philosophy as its critic: