be more at a loss in a sudden and great practical emergency than a soldier or a lawyer.  But in all this there is no difference between a physicist, a historian, and a philosopher; and again, slowness, want of skill, and even helplessness are something totally different from the peculiar kind of irresolution that Hamlet shows.  The notion that speculative thinking specially tends to produce this is really a mere illusion.

In the second place, even if this notion were true, it has appeared that Hamlet did not live the life of a mere student, much less of a mere dreamer, and that his nature was by no means simply or even one-sidedly intellectual, but was healthily active.  Hence, granted the ordinary chances of life, there would seem to be no great danger in his intellectual tendency and his habit of speculation; and I would go further and say that there was nothing in them, taken alone, to unfit him even for the extraordinary call that was made upon him.  In fact, if the message of the Ghost had come to him within a week of his father’s death, I see no reason to doubt that he would have acted on it as decisively as Othello himself, though probably after a longer and more anxious deliberation.  And therefore the Schlegel-Coleridge view (apart from its descriptive value) seems to me fatally untrue, for it implies that Hamlet’s procrastination was the normal response of an over-speculative nature confronted with a difficult practical problem.

On the other hand, under conditions of a peculiar kind, Hamlet’s reflectiveness certainly might prove dangerous to him, and his genius might even (to exaggerate a little) become his doom.  Suppose that violent shock to his moral being of which I spoke; and suppose that under this shock, any possible action being denied to him, he began to sink into melancholy; then, no doubt, his imaginative and generalising habit of mind might extend the effects of this shock through his whole being and mental world.  And if, the state of melancholy being thus deepened and fixed, a sudden demand for difficult and decisive action in a matter connected with the melancholy arose, this state might well have for one of its symptoms an endless and futile mental dissection of the required deed.  And, finally, the futility of this process, and the shame of his delay, would further weaken him and enslave him to his melancholy still more.  Thus the speculative habit would be one indirect cause of the morbid state which hindered action; and it would also reappear in a degenerate form as one of the symptoms of this morbid state.

* * * * *

Now this is what actually happens in the play.  Turn to the first words Hamlet utters when he is alone; turn, that is to say, to the place where the author is likely to indicate his meaning most plainly.  What do you hear?