THE IMPEDIMENT OF ADIPOSE. 63 



Every shade of capacity and ingenuity has heen expended on the 

 consideration and explanation of Hamlet's mental traits, but unfor- 

 tunately with an essential factor left out. Not one, of all the numer- 

 ous writers who have essayed to enlighten the world on the meaning 

 and intent of this "consummate flower" of the poetic insight, has 

 thought to inquire whether the body was not that " unknown quan- 

 tity" which confounded Schlegel, and which Goethe thought he had 

 found in the lines 



" The time is out of joint ; O cursed spite ! 

 That ever I was born to set it right ! " 



that is, that the Prince was overborne by the too great pressure of an 

 Herculean task with which he was conscious he had not the ability to 

 cope. But that there was really no insufficiency of mental power ap- 

 pears patent at every forward movement of the play. He perceives 

 the situation clearly, argues about it rationally, notes all the circum- 

 stances, and acknowledges his own duty in the premises ; but he does 

 not do the thing which he sets before himself to perform. 



Why? Because "he's fat and scant of breath" in other words, 

 is weighted down with a non-executive or lymphatic temperament. 



Painters, as well as actors, have done much to foist a false Ham- 

 let upon the public imagination. He has habitually been represented 

 by both as possessing a nervous, bilious, saturnine temperament, for 

 which there is no warrant in the poet's description of him. Art- 

 ists have portrayed him as fleshless and dark-hued. Fechter, the 

 sole exception, did indeed remember his nationality to the extent of 

 introducing the novelty of a flaxen wig, which was barely tolerated 

 by the audience, so counter to the truth was the ill-taught popular 

 fancy. But who has yet dared, on canvas or on the stage, to pre- 

 sent a true Shakespearean Hamlet " grunting and sweating under his 

 weary load of life" ? so fat really as to need that "napkin" which the 

 queen offers him to wipe the perspiration from his brow.* 



Yet is this "fat" the keynote and solution of the "mystery of 

 Hamlet." 



Remembering that he was fat and scant of breath, we can readily 

 understand many things which are otherwise certainly perplexing ; 

 particularly the inconsistency between his thoughts and desires and his 

 chronic inaction. He would represent in modern life those persons 

 whose cerebral developments are put down at maximum figures by the 

 expert phrenologist, and who exhibit to admiring friends their large 

 brain-power a3 thus indicated, but who never do anything to confirm 

 the diagnosis. Again, why ? because they lack the energizing tem- 

 perament without which the brain is but a dumb mass of latent 

 possibilities. 



* Profuse perspiration is a recognized symptom of one form of heart-disease endo- 

 carditis. 



