cripples[38] the power of acting.... Hamlet is a hypocrite towards
himself; his far-fetched scruples are often mere pretexts to cover his
want of determination.... He has no firm belief in himself or in
anything else.... He loses himself in labyrinths of thought.' So
Coleridge finds in Hamlet 'an almost enormous intellectual activity and
a proportionate aversion to real action consequent upon it' (the
aversion, that is to say, is consequent on the activity). Professor
Dowden objects to this view, very justly, that it neglects the emotional
side of Hamlet's character, 'which is quite as important as the
intellectual'; but, with this supplement, he appears on the whole to
adopt it. Hamlet, he says, 'loses a sense of fact because with him each
object and event transforms and expands itself into an idea.... He
cannot steadily keep alive within himself a sense of the importance of
any positive, limited thing,--a deed, for example.' And Professor Dowden
explains this condition by reference to Hamlet's life. 'When the play
opens he has reached the age of thirty years ... and he has received
culture of every kind except the culture of active life. During the
reign of the strong-willed elder Hamlet there was no call to action for
his meditative son. He has slipped on into years of full manhood still a
haunter of the university, a student of philosophies, an amateur in art,
a ponderer on the things of life and death, who has never formed a
resolution or executed a deed' (_Shakspere, his Mind and Art_, 4th ed.,
pp. 132, 133).

On the whole, the Schlegel-Coleridge theory (with or without Professor
Dowden's modification and amplification) is the most widely received
view of Hamlet's character. And with it we come at last into close
contact with the text of the play. It not only answers, in some
fundamental respects, to the general impression produced by the drama,
but it can be supported by Hamlet's own words in his soliloquies--such