that made Hamlet's life a tragedy. Whichever way he turned he was faced by a mother guilty of incest and easy in her love; an uncle who was a murderer and a hypocrite; a love that proved a disappointment; a court that was shallow and merely political. And he was incapacitated to have emotion in the face of the facts.

He was a man not only of the profoundest intellect but of the richest and finest nature. If these things had not happened there would not have been the inward tragedy. If Ophelia had turned out to meet his essential ideals of a woman (apart from any ability of hers to take part in his stern business in life) his tragedy would not have been unmitigated. But Shakespeare has taken pains to make it utter and complete; it is most systematically complete. Therefore, to regard Hamlet as still loving Ophelia, or in any way cherishing the ideal, is to work at cross-purposes to the whole intent of the play. "The fair Ophelia"- this is his casual comment to Horatio upon his first learning who it is that is being buried.

True, Laertes' emotion is not of the deepest. It is his nature to love display, to be melodramatic. Various critics have noted this with excellent discrimination. What are we then to conclude? - That Hamlet felt real emotion, true sorrow over her death; and that he jumped into the grave out of mere disdain and resentment of Laertes' exaggerated expression of

love? Are we to infer that this is a sort of æsthetic protest over a matter of bad taste? Current interpretations of the incident would leave us in just that state of mind. But this is not the point. Hamlet acted out of pure pain. This is the whole point of the tragedy. It was a pain that always haunted him, but which arose under conditions to a poignancy that was unbearable. There is in his life neither self-pity nor a cherishing of grief, but simple torture. It is a tragedy not of blood but of pain. In it death and blood are of the slightest significance. If we may attribute to it any moral as a whole it is that very frequently in this world it is the best that suffer the most.

The reader will now ask and it is a fair question—if Hamlet has been incapacitated to have emotion, how is it that he weeps after the interview with his mother and the killing of Polonius? She certainly reports that he wept; and we have no reason to doubt it, for he probably did; and most feelingly. Although I have not space in the midst of these cruxes to write an extended analysis of Hamlet, I can hardly leave this point unexplained and incomplete.

Shakespeare shows us this incapacity progressively, as a growth or piling up of the tragedy, going from the slighter manifestations to the stronger. To show this to the complete satisfaction of the reader let me call his attention to just one more instance, after which we

shall be in a position to understand Shakespeare's method.

The transformation in Hamlet's nature begins with the ghost's revelation at the end of the first act. Immediately afterward we see him talking to the soldiers. By his strange words he feels that he has offended them; and he says

I am sorry that they offend you, heartily;
Yes, faith, heartily.

Note how careful Shakespeare is to put a complete lack of heart in those words; and also to show this so immediately after the disillusioning experience. A man who felt no lack of feeling in his words would be satisfied with saying simply "I am sorry they offend you." But Hamlet adds, because he feels this lack, "heartily.” But despite this effort to have full feeling, he feels an inward lack; and so he tries it again: "Yes, faith, heartily." This is the same thing we have been noting; it is no use for Hamlet really to try to feel these things which it seems he ought to say and do.

Now there is no doubt that at this stage of his tragic experiences he would be able to feel deeply or even weep over the inconstancy of Ophelia - in fact we do find that he comes to her later in a great state of distraction and dishevelment as a result of her unwarranted and unceremonious "repelling" of his letters to her. But at this particular stage, immediately after

the ghost scene, his revelation has been that of the hypocrisy of men, and this poisons his mingling with his fellows.

It is quite probable that Hamlet wept or was at least overcome with emotion when Ophelia first showed herself inconstant and unworthy. But by the time we see him consigning her to a "nunnery" so bitterly, this is all over. He has learned another lesson; and we do not weep for the dead more than once. Hence his genuinely unfeeling harshness toward her; there has been a revulsion in his sentiments toward women. But yet his mother is left the one great relation in the world to him. This comes next in order. And naturally when he sees there is nothing in this relation, for she is a difficult case, and when the accidental killing is piled on top of it, he weeps. But never again will he weep over a killing or over a mother. He has gone through that to the uttermost depths of his soul; and only another vacancy is left. From which it will be seen that when I say he was "incapacitated to have emotion," I am referring to what Shakespeare represented, namely, that in any particular case, as it is brought forward and presented, he is incapacitated to have that particular emotion again.

Now, instead of looking at the order of the events themselves, which as we have seen are progressive and growing in power; let us look at the order of the particular passages in which

Shakespeare expresses or shows it to us. in the passages that he makes it tacit.

It is

First we see Hamlet, in a mere slight sentence, struggling with a lack of feeling in a little matter of politeness his relation to his fellow men; next we see this struggle when his dark outlook has spoiled the world in general for him it comes out in an æsthetic sort of connection with the traveling players; next it has risen in power and we see that he has lost such vital interest in human affairs themselves that he cannot react to the feeling of revenge against the king even when he imagines direct unmanly insult to spur himself on. Finally at the grave scene, the climax, he has gone through it all and he can feel no emotion at all. He makes a terrible effort to be a man among men, to feel the soft sorrow that he feels a human being should experience; but it is no use, his great effort, an extreme writhing under the pain of his condition, is a mere abortion of grief. He has run the gamut; he had sorrowed for Ophelia before. And we weep for the dead but

once.

This solves the whole question of Ophelia, the seeming inconsistency of which is so much at the bottom of the "mystery" of Hamlet. So long as critics persist in looking at Ophelia "in the round," seeing her charming points, reasoning that Hamlet loved her to the time of her death and using this as an explanation of the strange grave scene, they will