Or take all these supreme lines away and leave me but that one by the same hand, 'The soul of Adonaïs like a star,' and I am not sure that I am not richer by that, than by many biographical chapters.
It has always seemed to me that the best possible biographer, even including the immortal Boswell, would have been Horatio. Ophelia might have been better still had she kept her poor senses. Even having lost them, she seems to do no less than draw back a shimmering veil from the soul and life of Hamlet in the few remarks she makes concerning him: 'Where is the beauteous majesty of Denmark?'
Horatio, never having dreamed, certainly, of writing an account of Hamlet's life at all, yet seems to set forth in his few words more of Hamlet than is to be found in all the commentaries. What is there not revealed in his 'Here, sweet lord, at your service,' and his 'O my dear lord!'
There is further evidence of his qualification, of course, in Hamlet's unforgettable words concerning him:--
'Horatio, thou art e'en as just a man As e'r my conversation coped withal.'
'Horatio, I am dead, Thou livest; report me and my cause aright To the unsatisfied.'
But that which fits Horatio more than all, it seems to me, to bring report to others concerning the life, the motives and character of his 'sweet lord,' is that he had long been aware of those fearful and familiar hauntings of his lord's mind--hauntings which, for the purposes of the play, must be dramatized into the very form of a ghost, but which were in reality something far subtler still, and less bodied. It was of these delicate and awful visitings that Horatio was, more than the rest, aware and sensitively expectant.
It is such an eagerness, such an expectancy, and such an ability as well, I take it, that are needed by him who would understand the life of any great man and would hope to interpret it to others. He who would give us an adequate study of any life whatsoever must, it would seem, reckon on and investigate those subtle hauntings of mind and spirit of which the biographers have as yet, apparently, taken so little account, having left such investigations to be followed, and that only along somewhat morbid lines, by the psychiatrists and psycho-analysts.