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132 upon it and through it, and to trace the wanderings and the falls of the erring, misled, spirit; but never, for one moment, does he lose his own sharp and accurate faculty of distinguishing realities and moral probabilities. In his hands the development of an insane character is as strictly amenable to law, as that of the most matter-of-fact and common-place sanity. In his hands the laws of mental aberration are as sure as those of the most regular development; nay, they often tend to illustrate the latter, as in the hands of a botanist a green petal proves the development of the flower from the leaf. It is on the development of insanity, the gradual loosening of the mind from the props and supports of reason and of fact, the gradual transition of the feelings from their old habitudes and relations to morbid and perverted excess, the gradual exaggeration of some feelings and the extinction of others and the utter loss of mental balance resulting therefrom; it is in this passage from the state of man when reason is on its throne to a state when the royal insignia of his preeminence among God's creatures are defaced, that the great dramatist delights to dwell. Other poets and dramatists have represented the developed state, either in features so repulsive, that, like Cibber's statues of madness at Bethlem, they need to be curtained from the vulgar gaze, or like Gray's

they combine in an absurd manner qualities which neither in the sane man nor the maniac can possibly co-exist.

Cervantes, indeed, has painted with exquisite skill the half-lights of one form of insanity; but Shakespeare alone has described the transition period and the state of resistance. It is remarkable within how small a compass all that Shakespeare has written on perfected madness may be