Page:The Psychology of Shakespeare.pdf/18

Rh glory of this country, the greatest poet of all ages, and pre-eminently the most truthful analyst of human action. Shakespeare not only possesses more psychological insight than all other poets, but than all other writers, the sacred writings alone excepted. He has been aptly called, "a nature humanized." He has above all men the faculty of unravelling the motives of human action. Compared with his profound knowledge of the surface and depths of the human soul, the information of other great minds, even of such wondrously vigorous intelligences as those of Plato and Bacon, were obscure and fragmentary. Had he not been a poet, what might he not have been as a philosopher? What essays might he not have written? What Socratic dialogues, sparkling with wit, seething with humour, saturated with truth, might he not have written upon politics and philosophy? Some American writer has lately started the idea that Shakespeare's plays were written by Bacon! Verily, were it not for the want of power of imagination and verbal euphony which is displayed in Bacon's Essays, one might rather think that they were some of Shakespeare's own rough memoranda on men and motives, which had strayed from his desk.

Although Macbeth is less pervaded with the idea of mental disease than its great rival tragedies of Hamlet and Lear, and contains but one short scene in which a phase of insanity is actually represented, it is not only replete with passages of deep psychological interest, but in the mental development of the bloody-handed hero and of his terrible mate, it affords a study scarcely less instructive than the wild and passionate madness of Lear, or the metaphysical motive-weighing melancholy of the Prince of Denmark.

It is not within the scope of our intention to comment upon the artistic perfection of this work. This has already been done, and done well, by professed writers of dramatic criti-