Therefore is the opinion which Gervinus expresses so false : * This failure of
vengeance must now compel him most powerfully to act at last in earnest.' Just
the reverse is true. If anything could occur to bring him to his senses, to impress
upon him the necessity of checking the pace of his task, it is this failure, this mis-
thrust^ precisely this t Instead of Poloniu?, had it been the King whom he had
stabbed, what would he not have brought upon himself! What a disgraceful,
wretched, irretrievable blow would he have struck ! Fearfully near has he come,
out of blind rage, to ruining his whole cause, ruining it in the most shameful and
blundering manner. Accident alone, so to speak, has saved him. This consider-
ation above all things must be brought home to him by the serious mistake which
he has made, with overpowering and humiliating irony, warning him and bidding
him beware how he comes any nearer to so fatal an end; more pressingly and
emphatically than ever must he feel himself obliged to proceed gently, with re-
doubled foresight, with still more marked < procrastination ' ; he must, in fact, pro-
ceed so carefully that he must feel himself, with a shudder, driven to a stand-still,
since he has suffered himself by a senseless burst of passion to stumble over the
abyss to which he had rolled down, driven to a full pause from the shock in his
own mind, even though he perceives no circumstances forcing him thereto.
And yet forward all goes with him, rapidly forward ! And therefore is the idea,
that the error, which he has committed, must alone move him to fall at once upon
the King, doubly wrong and false.
