Shakespeare had made the young man go 'naturally to work,' the play
would have come to an end at once! Johnson, in like manner, notices that
'Hamlet is, through the whole piece, rather an instrument than an
agent,' but it does not occur to him that this peculiar circumstance can
be anything but a defect in Shakespeare's management of the plot.
Seeing, they saw not. Henry Mackenzie, the author of _The Man of
Feeling_, was, it would seem, the first of our critics to feel the
'indescribable charm' of Hamlet, and to divine something of
Shakespeare's intention. 'We see a man,' he writes, 'who in other
circumstances would have exercised all the moral and social virtues,
placed in a situation in which even the amiable qualities of his mind
serve but to aggravate his distress and to perplex his conduct.'[32] How
significant is the fact (if it be the fact) that it was only when the
slowly rising sun of Romance began to flush the sky that the wonder,
beauty and pathos of this most marvellous of Shakespeare's creations
began to be visible! We do not know that they were perceived even in his
own day, and perhaps those are not wholly wrong who declare that this
creation, so far from being a characteristic product of the time, was a
vision of

the prophetic soul
Of the wide world dreaming on things to come.

But the dramatic splendour of the whole tragedy is another matter, and
must have been manifest not only in Shakespeare's day but even in
Hanmer's.

It is indeed so obvious that I pass it by, and proceed at once to the
central question of Hamlet's character. And I believe time will be
saved, and a good deal of positive interpretation may be introduced, if,