He
must not believe so profoundly in the ancients as to think it wholly out
of the question that the world has still vigor enough in its loins to
beget some one who will one of these days be as good an ancient as any of
them.
Another striking quality in Hamlet's nature is his perpetual inclination
to irony. I think this has been generally passed over too lightly, as if
it were something external and accidental, rather assumed as a mask than
part of the real nature of the man. It seems to me to go deeper, to be
something innate, and not merely factitious. It is nothing like the grave
irony of Socrates, which was the weapon of a man thoroughly in
earnest,--the _boomerang_ of argument, which one throws in the opposite
direction of what he means to hit, and which seems to be flying away from
the adversary, who will presently find himself knocked down by it. It is
not like the irony of Timon, which is but the wilful refraction of a
clear mind twisting awry whatever enters it,--or of Iago, which is the
slime that a nature essentially evil loves to trail over all beauty and
goodness to taint them with distrust: it is the half-jest, half-earnest
of an inactive temperament that has not quite made up its mind whether
life is a reality or no, whether men were not made in jest, and which
amuses itself equally with finding a deep meaning in trivial things and a
trifling one in the profoundest mysteries of being, because the want of
earnestness in its own essence infects everything else with its own
indifference.
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