But break, my heart, for I must hold my tongue!

He can do nothing.  He must lock in his heart, not any suspicion of his uncle that moves obscurely there, but that horror and loathing; and if his heart ever found relief, it was when those feelings, mingled with the love that never died out in him, poured themselves forth in a flood as he stood in his mother’s chamber beside his father’s marriage-bed.[45]

If we still wonder, and ask why the effect of this shock should be so tremendous, let us observe that now the conditions have arisen under which Hamlet’s highest endowments, his moral sensibility and his genius, become his enemies.  A nature morally blunter would have felt even so dreadful a revelation less keenly.  A slower and more limited and positive mind might not have extended so widely through its world the disgust and disbelief that have entered it.  But Hamlet has the imagination which, for evil as well as good, feels and sees all things in one.  Thought is the element of his life, and his thought is infected.  He cannot prevent himself from probing and lacerating the wound in his soul.  One idea, full of peril, holds him fast, and he cries out in agony at it, but is impotent to free himself (’Must I remember?’ ’Let me not think on’t’).  And when, with the fading of his passion, the vividness of this idea abates, it does so only to leave behind a boundless weariness and a sick longing for death.

And this is the time which his fate chooses.  In this hour of uttermost weakness, this sinking of his whole being towards annihilation, there comes on him, bursting the bounds of the natural world with a shock of astonishment and terror, the revelation of his mother’s adultery and his father’s murder, and, with this, the demand on him, in the name of everything dearest and most sacred, to arise and act.  And for a moment, though his brain reels and totters,[46] his soul leaps up in passion to answer this demand.  But it comes too late.  It does but strike home the last rivet in the melancholy which holds him bound.

     The time is out of joint!  O cursed spite
     That ever I was born to set it right,—­

so he mutters within an hour of the moment when he vowed to give his life to the duty of revenge; and the rest of the story exhibits his vain efforts to fulfil this duty, his unconscious self-excuses and unavailing self-reproaches, and the tragic results of his delay.

4

‘Melancholy,’ I said, not dejection, nor yet insanity.  That Hamlet was not far from insanity is very probable.  His adoption of the pretence of madness may well have been due in part to fear of the reality; to an instinct of self-preservation, a fore-feeling that the pretence would enable him to give some utterance to the load that pressed on his heart and brain, and a fear that he would be unable altogether to repress such utterance.  And if the pathologist calls his state melancholia, and even