If self-consciousness be alien to the one, it is just as
truly the happiness of the other. Like a musician distrustful of himself,
he is forever tuning his instrument, first overstraining this cord a
little, and then that, but unable to bring them into unison, or to profit
by it if he could.
We do not believe that Horatio ever thought he "was not a pipe for
Fortune's finger to play what stop she please," till Hamlet told him so.
That was Fortune's affair, not his; let her try it, if she liked. He is
unconscious of his own peculiar qualities, as men of decision commonly
are, or they would not be men of decision. When there is a thing to be
done, they go straight at it, and for the time there is nothing for them
in the whole universe but themselves and their object. Hamlet, on the
other hand, is always studying himself. This world and the other, too,
are always present to his mind, and there in the corner is the little
black kobold of a doubt making mouths at him. He breaks down the bridges
before him, not behind him, as a man of action would do; but there is
something more than this. He is an ingrained sceptic; though his is the
scepticism, not of reason, but of feeling, whose root is want of faith in
himself. In him it is passive, a malady rather than a function of the
mind.
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