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 would think that murdering the head of one's family was a sort of family festivity or family joke; a gay and innocent indulgence into which the young prince would naturally have thrown himself with thoughtless exuberance, were it not for the dark and secretive thoughts that had given him an unaccountable distaste for it. Suppose it were borne in upon one of these modern middle-class critics, of my own rank and routine of life (possibly through his confidence in the messages at a Spiritualist séance) that it was his business to go home to Brompton or Surbiton and stick the carving-knife into Uncle William, who had poisoned somebody and was beyond the reach of the law. It is possible that the critic's first thought would be that it was a happy way of spending a half-holiday; and that only in the critic's subconsciousness the suspicion would stir that there was something unhappy about the whole business. But it seems also possible that the regret might not be confined to his subconsciousness, but might swim almost to the surface of his consciousness. In plain words, this sort of criticism has lost the last rags of common sense. Hamlet requires no such subconscious explanation, for he explains himself, and was perhaps rather too fond of doing so. He was a man to whom duty had come in a very dreadful and repulsive form, and to aman not fitted for that form of duty. There was a conflict, but he was conscious of it from beginning to end. He was not an unconscious person; but a far too conscious one.

Strangely enough, this theory of subconscious repulsion in the dramatic character is itself an example of subconscious repulsion in the modern critic. It is the critic who has a sort of subliminal 29