The artless nature solicits confidence: its still air disarms and dissipates the unrelenting irony. Then we see that Hamlet was naturally more inclined to that use of satire which indicates an ideal far lifted above the methods by which men live. He puts that fine sense into the skulls of the politician, the courtier, and the lawyer, and we acknowledge the satirical tone of an exalted mind. And this lends to that scene a feeling that in it Hamlet recurs to himself, and resumes the usual tone which always advertised him to his friends. To them his long maintenance of ironical behavior, broken by so few sallies of his healthy satire, was additional confirmation of his madness because it was so unusual with him. Old friends remembered nothing of the kind; they were first puzzled, then convinced, and we saw that Polonius hurried to show his insapiency by attributing the craze to love for his daughter. 'Tis very likely, they all thought, for they could refer to no other probable cause for it.
It is by unconsciously remanding Hamlet to Irony that Shakspeare has expressed the effect of an apparition, and of the disenchanting news it brought, upon a mind of that firm yet subtle temper. Lear's noble mind tottered with age before grief struck it into the abyss of madness. Constance stands before us, like Niobe, all tears, or sits with sorrow; but she was a too finely tempered woman to drip into craziness, till health, hope, and life broke up. Shakspeare has not represented any of his mature and well-constructed natures as capable of being overthrown by passion the most exigent or events the most heart-rending. They preserve their sanity to suffer, as all great souls must do to make us worship them with tears. So Hamlet, being incapable of madness and lifted above the necessity of feigning it, gives to every thing the complexion of the news which has revolted his moral sense,--that is, the King, his uncle, is not what he seems; his own mother's husband does not appear to be a murderer. The State of Denmark is rotten with this irony. No wonder that his brain took on the color of the leaf on which it fed. Oh, every thing is not what it appears to be, but only an indication of its opposite, and must be phrased by contradiction! He is really in love with Ophelia, but this irony conceals it. With the mood into which he has been plunged, his own love is no more worth being seriously treated than is old Polonius, whom he knows excellent well,--he is a fishmonger; that is, not that he is a person sent to fish out his secrets, as Coleridge would explain it, but that he is a dealer in staleness, and yet not so honest as those who only vend stale fish.