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:
His philosophy, if the word is to be used, was, like Shakespeare’s own, the immediate product of the wondering and meditating mind; and such thoughts as that celebrated one, ‘There is nothing either good or bad but thinking makes it so,’ surely needed no special training to produce them. Or does Portia’s remark, ‘Nothing is good without respect,’ i.e. out of relation, prove that she had studied metaphysics?
Still Hamlet had speculative genius without being a philosopher, just as he had imaginative genius without being a poet. Doubtless in happier days he was a close and constant observer of men and manners, noting his results in those tables which he afterwards snatched from his breast to make in wild irony his last note of all, that one may smile and smile and be a villain. Again and again we remark that passion for generalisation which so occupied him, for instance, in reflections suggested by the King’s drunkenness that he quite forgot what it was he was waiting to meet upon the battlements. Doubtless, too, he was always considering things,
- ↑ Of course ‘your’ does not mean Horatio’s philosophy in particular. ‘Your’ is used as the Gravedigger uses it when he says that ‘your water is a sore decayer of your . . . dead body.'
