In the churchyard scene, we observe that Hamlet recurs unconsciously to his ordinary mental disposition, because he is alone there with Horatio, whose grave and silent friendship is congenial. It is the foil to Hamlet's restless speculation; it calls a truce to the civil war between his temper and his purpose. He is pacified in the society of Horatio, who gives him a chance to recur to his native mental habit. As he naively pours out his thoughts, how little does Horatio answer! as little as the ground beneath their feet, less laconic than the lawyer's skull. He is a continent upon which Hamlet finds that he can securely walk, the only domain in Denmark that is not honeycombed with pitfalls. Turning toward Horatio's loyal affection, he feels a response that is articulated without words. As little need the forest reply to her lover save in dumb show and in obscure reflex of feeling.
The artless nature solicits confidence: its still air disarms and dissipates the unrelenting irony. Then we see that Hamlet was naturally more inclined to that use of satire which indicates an ideal far lifted above the methods by which men live. He puts that fine sense into the skulls of the politician, the courtier, and the lawyer, and we acknowledge the satirical tone of an exalted mind. And this lends to that scene a feeling that in it Hamlet recurs to himself, and resumes the usual tone which always advertised him to his friends. To them his long maintenance of ironical behavior, broken by so few sallies of his healthy satire, was additional confirmation of his madness because it was so unusual with him. Old friends remembered nothing of the kind; they were first puzzled, then convinced, and we saw that Polonius hurried to show his insapiency by attributing the craze to love for his daughter. 'Tis very likely, they all thought, for they could refer to no other probable cause for it.
It is by unconsciously remanding Hamlet to Irony that Shakspeare has expressed the effect of an apparition, and of the disenchanting news it brought, upon a mind of that firm yet subtle temper. Lear's noble mind tottered with age before grief struck it into the abyss of madness. Constance stands before us, like Niobe, all tears, or sits with sorrow; but she was a too finely tempered woman to drip into craziness, till health, hope, and life broke up. Shakspeare has not represented any of his mature and well-constructed natures as capable of being overthrown by passion the most exigent or events the most heart-rending. They preserve their sanity to suffer, as all great souls must do to make us worship them with tears. So Hamlet, being incapable of madness and lifted above the necessity of feigning it, gives to every thing the complexion of the news which has revolted his moral sense,—that is, the King, his uncle, is not what he seems; his own mother's husband does not appear to be a murderer. The State of Denmark is rotten with this irony. No wonder that his brain took on the color of the leaf on which it fed. Oh, every thing is not what it appears to be, but only an indication of its opposite, and must be phrased by contradiction! He is really in love with Ophelia, but this irony conceals it. With the mood into which he has been plunged, his own love is no more worth being seriously treated than is old Polonius, whom he knows excellent well,—he is a fishmonger; that is, not that he is a person sent to fish out his secrets, as Coleridge would explain it, but that he is a dealer in staleness, and yet not so honest as those who only vend stale fish.
If we return to a period in the play which follows closely upon the scene of the taking of the oath, Ophelia herself will discover for us the turning mood in Hamlet's character. The time and action of the piece allow us to suppose that he soon went from the oath-taking to visit Ophelia. Naturally, he turned from that bloodless and freezing visitation to see life heaving in a dear bosom and reddening in lips which he had love's liberty to touch. The disclosures of the ghost had worked upon him like a turbid freshet which comes down from the hills to choke the running of sweet streams, deface with stains of mud all natural beauties, and bury with the washings of sunless defiles the meadows spangled with forget-me-nots. His love for Ophelia was the most mastering impulse of his life: it stretched like a broad, rich domain, down to which he came from the shadowy places of his private thought to fling himself in the unchecked sunshine, and revel in the limpid bath of feeling. How often, in hours which only over-curious brooding upon the problems of life had hitherto disquieted, had he gone to let her smile strip off the shadow of his thought, and expose him to untroubled nature! The moisture of her eyes refreshed his questioning; her phrases answered it beyond philosophy; a maidenly submission of her hand renewed his confidence; an unspoken sympathy of her reserve, that flowed into the slight hints and permissions of her body, nominated him as lover and disfranchised him as thinker; and a sun-shower seemed to pelt through him to drift his vapors off. But this open gladness has disappeared underneath the avalanche of murder which a ghostly hand had loosened. He ventures down to the place where he remembers that it used to expect him; but we know that it has disappeared. His air and behavior announce it to us. The catastrophe seems to have swept even over his person, to dishevel the apparel upon that "mould of form." In this ruin of his life Ophelia is the first one buried; for she was always more resident in his soul than maintained within a palace, and his soul is no longer habitable.
Polonius has just been giving those scandalous instructions to his pimp to waylay the Danes in Paris, and, by insinuations of ill-conduct in Laertes, worm out of them possible admissions of its truth. He wants to know how his son is spending money in the gay capital, how many times he gamed, was overtaken in drink, or visited "a house of sale." The pimp is to draw on his fellow-countrymen by pretending that Laertes is given to all these things: he knows the man; 'tis the common talk about him at home; you cannot surprise him by any thing you say. Says the old manœuvrer:
"See you now;
Your bait of falsehood takes this carp of truth:
And thus do we of wisdom and of reach,
With windlasses, and with assays of bias,
By indirections find directions out."
No wonder that Hamlet in the churchyard, kicking the pate of a politician, called it something "that would circumvent God." The state-craft of old Polonius has lived so long without a change that its garments are dropping from its limbs. Now see what an indecent forked radish it is. But the scene is eminently in its place, and has nothing incongruous with what transpires before or after; for the incident is cunningly contrived to prepare us to find him applying his principle of the windlass and indirect purchase to the relation of Hamlet with his daughter; and it breeds in us a contempt for the notion that the Prince has been made mad by love.
Ophelia enters to her father:
"Oh, my lord, my lord! I have been so affrighted!"
Then she describes Lord Hamlet entering with garments all disordered,