Page:The Psychology of Shakespeare.pdf/59

44 youth, but a man of age competent to his power of thought, . . and of the age most liable to his state of feeling. The first scene, where the Ghost appears to the sentinels on - watch, is constructed with exquisite dramatic verisimilitude, . . and is admirably adapted to prepare the mind for that contest between the materialism of sensation and that idealism of pas sion, that doubting effort to discriminate between the things which are and the things which seem, which is the mark thread in the philosophy of the piece. The Ghost appears at cold and silent midnight. “'Tis bitter cold, and I am sick at heart.” “Not a mouse stirring,” says Francisco. On this Coleridge remarks, that “in all the best attested stories of ghosts and visions, the ghost-seers were in a state of cold or chilling damp from without, and of anxiety inwardly.”. As far as visions are concerned, this ob servation might have psychological importance, as tending to indicate the conditions of the nervous system favourable to

the production of hallucination; but with regard to ghosts seen by many persons at the same time, if such things have been, it could only indicate that, escaped for a while from “sulphurous and tormenting flames,” these airy existences preferred to walk on cold nights. We cannot consent to reduce the Ghost of Hamlet to

physiological laws. “We do it wrong, being so majestical, To offer it the shew of science.” The Ghost in Hamlet can in no wise be included within

' the category of illusions or hallucinations; it is anti physiological, and must be simply accepted as a dramatic circumstance calculated to produce a certain state of mind in the hero of the piece. Hazlitt well says, that actors playing Macbeth have always appeared to him to have seen the weird sisters on the stage only.

He never had seen a Macbeth look

and act as if he had been face to face with the supernatural