Yet, beyond all question, magnificent
as is that monologue on suicide and doubt which has passed from a proverb
into a byword, it is actually eclipsed and distanced at once on
philosophic and on poetical grounds by the later soliloquy on reason and
resolution.
That Shakespeare was in the genuine sense--that is, in the best and
highest and widest meaning of the term--a free thinker, this otherwise
practically and avowedly superfluous effusion of all inmost thought
appears to me to supply full and sufficient evidence for the conviction
of every candid and rational man. To that loftiest and most righteous
title which any just and reasoning soul can ever deserve to claim, the
greatest save one of all poetic thinkers has thus made good his right for
ever.
I trust it will be taken as no breach of my past pledge to abstain from
all intrusion on the sacred ground of Gigadibs and the Germans, if I
venture to indicate a touch inserted by Shakespeare for no other
perceptible or conceivable purpose than to obviate by anticipation the
indomitable and ineradicable fallacy of criticism which would find the
keynote of Hamlet's character in the quality of irresolution.
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