As in such slipshod
housekeeping men are their own largest creditors, they find it easy to
stave off utter bankruptcy of conscience by taking up one unpaid promise
with another larger, and at heavier interest, till such self-swindling
becomes habitual and by degrees almost painless. How did Coleridge
discount his own notes of this kind with less and less specie as the
figures lengthened on the paper! As with Hamlet, so it is with Ophelia
and Laertes. The father's feebleness comes up again in the wasting
heartbreak and gentle lunacy of the daughter, while the son shows it in a
rashness of impulse and act, a kind of crankiness, of whose essential
feebleness we are all the more sensible as contrasted with a nature so
steady on its keel, and drawing so much water, as that of Horatio,--the
foil at once, in different ways, to both him and Hamlet. It was natural,
also, that the daughter of self-conceited old Polonius should have her
softness stiffened with a fibre of obstinacy; for there are two kinds of
weakness, that which breaks, and that which bends. Ophelia's is of the
former kind; Hero is her counterpart, giving way before calamity, and
rising again so soon as the pressure is removed.
I find two passages in Dante that contain the exactest possible
definition of that habit or quality of Hamlet's mind which justifies the
tragic turn of the play, and renders it natural and unavoidable from the
beginning.
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