LECTURE II.

PERCEPTIVE POWERS-CREATIVE POWERS-WIT AND HUMOUR

SENSIBILITY-ALLEGED IMMORALITY.

Or Shakspeare's life and character as a man, I finished what I had to say, in my last lecture. In this I shall attempt to speak more definitely of the combination of gifts which enabled him to produce his works. My reasons for doing so, doubtless obvious enough themselves, are these: The structure and method of Shakspeare's mind furnish, perhaps, the richest theme for psychological investigation in human history. He who fully comprehends the length, and breadth, and height, and depth of Shakspeare's endowments, has not much more to learn of the human mind. As the theme exhausts the whole science of human thought and feeling, so it is of course inexhaustible itself. The faculties, moreover, and the productions of such a mind, are mutually illustrative; a preconception of either will very much aid one in understanding the other: indeed, we must first enter into the method and working of an artist's mind, before we can do justice to his work, or his work can do justice to us.

The first thing, then, that meets us in studying Shakspeare's mind, is, his wonderful depth and clearness of vision. A most penetrating insight lies at the bottom of all his other gifts, and supports his whole intellectual

structure. In the words of Carlyle, "he does not look at a thing merely, but into it, through it, so that he constructively comprehends it, can take it asunder and put it together again; the thing melts, as it were, into light under his eye, and anew creates itself before him." His vision does not stop at the accidents or even the attributes of an object, but dives at once to its soul, its essence, and views its attributes through this. A resistless intellectual energy dwells in him, which at once strips off the husk, and rives the heart of a matter, and lays bare its living laws. And this power not only looks round and through things in their individual existence, but looks beyond them into their relations to other things; sees therefore how in any given circumstances they will act, or be acted upon; how they will affect other things, or be affected by them.

Most of us see things only in their phenomena; Shakspeare sees them in their principles: we study their history, and infer their nature; he seizes their nature, and infers their history: we learn what they are by observing what they do; he sees at once what they are, and can prophesy what they will do. Viewing effects, not as they come up in detail and succession, but in the causes that produce them, he can therefore anticipate and pre-announce them with as much essential accuracy as they can announce themselves. While, for example, we can scarce discern the form and structure of a tree when it stands full-grown before us, Shakspeare discerns its whole form and structure, as it were, in the seed from which it springs. Or take any human institution, the institution, for example, of knighthood: Shakspeare does not learn its nature by poring over

an obscure heap of historical records, but penetrates at once to the fundamental principle which built up and organized the whole fabric; and therefore can write its history in substance without studying it. In the parent germ, as it were, he discerns the whole systems of feelings, and sentiments, which will in due time grow out of it. Once more, take any given actual person; Shakspeare does not need to wander, like the rest of us, through the facts of his past life, to arrive at his character, but seizes at a glance the actuating principle of his being; and, from the inexhaustible variety of forms and images at his command, can reveal the character better, perhaps, in a few minutes, than the character can reveal itself in as many years. Disentangling, as it were, and drawing out the pure reality from the dreamy, unreal mixtures which everywhere darken and obstruct it, he bodies it forth in more transpicuous and more expressive forms. Accordingly, Goethe has compared his characters to watches with crystalline cases and plates, which, while they point out with perfect accuracy the course of the hours and minutes, at the same time disclose the whole combination of springs and wheels whereby they are moved. Therefore it is that his characters often seem more real than the characters about us, because the former are given to us cleared from the perplexities and obscurations which more or less cloud the simplest characters of real life from our vision.

Wherefore, of Shakspeare we may almost say what Dr. South has so nobly said of Adam before the fall :— "He came into the world a philosopher; could view essences in themselves, and read forms without the

comment of their respective properties: he could see consequents yet dormant in their principles, and effects yet unborn and in the womb of their causes: his understanding could almost pierce into future contingents; his conjectures improving even to prophecy and the certainties of prediction." Nor is Shakspeare altogether alone in this. Burke, in like manner, seems to have known the history of the French revolution before it occurred, and is even thought by some to have written it better than it has been written since. In the principles then at work he saw what results were coming; and his history is better than others, in that with him the results are kept in the back-ground of their principles, while with the others the principles are more or less obscure beneath their results; as springs are sometimes hidden beneath their own issues.

Phrenologists tell us, and truly no doubt, that a man's whole character is written in the exterior configuration of his head. Nay more; a man's whole character is probably written in his thumb-nail, had we but senses fine enough to read it there; but whether science can make it legible to us in either place, is another question. So, also, a man's entire character is doubtless contained in every sentence he utters, and every act he performs, had we but faculties acute enough to discern it there; and Shakspeare's faculties were to the words and actions of men, much the same as his senses would be to their physical structure, who should perceive their whole character in their thumb-nails.

Newton, as every body knows, is said to have seized, in the falling of an apple, the principle from which, with a few data gained by study and observation, he demon

strated, in the retirement of his closet, the movements and masses of the heavenly bodies. The same insight which Newton thus exercised on one subject, Shakspeare seems to have exercised on every subject that came before him. He thus dwelt in a world, not merely of material appearances, but of vital powers; the forms of nature yielded up their secret, indwelling, and outshaping life, whenever and wherever they met the glance of his eye. Upon the vital powers, too, which thus everywhere disclosed themselves to his vision, he could bring to bear a species of psychological mathematics as infinite and infallible in regard to human thought and action, as Newton's mathematics were in regard to astronomy. Wherefore, as Newton could weigh the planets and mark out their orbits from the laws that impel and control them; as he could compute the effects of the various influences around them, how their movements would modify and be modified by each other, from their powers and places in the solar system: so Shakspeare could weigh the characters and describe the movements of men, whether real or imaginary, from the principles which organize and actuate them; cold compute what influences they would originate and what they would undergo; how they would affect the objects around them from within, and be affected by those objects from without.

The natural result of this depth and ubiquity of insight, is the most extensive and accurate knowledge. He sees whatever is before him, and knows whatever he sees. The hardest problems are but playthings to him. One stroke of his intellectual arm splits asunder the knottiest subject, and discloses its inmost fibres.