His Life and Genius 129 



than by the persons and doings of actual life. 

 When the clown moralizes more sagely and 

 makes more witty speeches than any particular 

 clown ever did, it is not the individual clown — 

 he would have been aghast at his own wit — but 

 the universal clown-spirit which views and speaks 

 through him the comedy of life. When Lady 

 Constance, refusing to obey the King's summons, 

 seats herself on the ground and bids kings attend 

 on her unexampled grief, it is a summons to the 

 pride of humanity to bow before the spectacle of 

 its transcendent humiliation. When the over- 

 meditating Hamlet, thinking ever too precisely 

 on the event, finds excuse after excuse for not 

 doing that which, resolute to do when he broods 

 on his wrongs, he has not the will to do when he 

 might do it easily, and does at last as the un- 

 conscious instrument of destiny, it is an universal 

 instance of the influence of over-meditation to 

 paralyze action, and of the fate-wrought issue of 

 that which was to be. 



Not that over-meditation was the sole or even 

 main factor in Hamlet's irresolution to act. He 

 may well have had that constitutional indisposition 

 to decide and do which is characteristic of certain 

 natures, and the much meditation have been the 

 result and after-excuse, rather than the reason, of 

 the indecision and inability. It is wonderful to 

 see how strongly possessed over-meditative natures 

 of that kind are by a constitutional and almost 

 invincible reluctance to determine and act, whether 



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