“Hamlet (the man),” he adds, “is dominated by an emotion which is inexpressible, because it is in _excess_ of the facts as they appear.” Mr. Eliot has a curious view of the things that justify violent emotion. I should have thought that the murder of a father by his usurping brother, the infidelity of a mother and a mistress, the use of former companions to spy on him, the failure of all that had once seemed honest and fair, plots to murder him, the suicide of his beloved, might have caused considerable perturbation even in the soul of a fish. If ever there was a play in which the emotion is not in excess of the facts as they appear, that play is _Hamlet_. The emotion is “in excess” only in the sense that it expresses for us not merely the personal emotion of one man, but the emotions of generation after generation of fine and sensitive spirits caught in the gross toils of disaster. Hamlet is a universal type as well as an individual. In this he resembles such a figure as Prometheus to a degree which cannot be claimed for Lear or Macbeth or Othello. That, perhaps, is the real mystery that has bewildered Mr. Eliot. Mr. Eliot will have it, however, that Shakespeare, and not he himself, is to blame for his bewilderment. He concludes his essay: We must simply admit that here Shakespeare tackled a problem which proved too much for him. Why he attempted it at all is an insoluble puzzle; under compulsion of what experience he attempted to express the inexpressibly horrible, we cannot ever know. We need a great many facts in his biography; and we should like to know whether, and when, and after or at the same time as what personal experience, he read Montaigne, II. xii, “Apologie de Raimond Sebond.” We should have, finally, to know something which is by hypothesis unknowable, for we assume it to be an experience which, in the manner indicated, exceeded the facts. We should have to understand things which Shakespeare did not understand himself. Would it be possible to write a paragraph in which there was a greater air of intellectual pursuit and a tinier reality of intellectual achievement? It would not be easy to say more essentially irrelevant things on a great subject. Mr. Eliot is like a man dissecting--and dissecting with desperate earnestness--a corpse that isn’t there.