The Psychology of Shakespeare

Extract

This book may be classed at once as on the sane side in Shakespeare research. It is also on the side of the humaner letters, beautifully written and excellently produced, and striking a golden mean between Textual Criticism and Higher Criticism, begetter of so much futility and freak. Monsignor Kolbe prefaces his analyses of the plays with some simple and profound general remarks on the analogy between great pictures and great dramas. Both alike, he says, display the subconsciousness of the artist, appealing to the subconsciousness of the onlooker. Modern thought is much handicapped by a wilful ignorance of what ancient thought took for granted, and is perpetually bewrayed with startling discoveries of what everyone knew when the world was comparatively young, or at least unstaled. They, the ancients, knew that each man keeps a treasure-house of his experiences organic or mental, and that some have a larger and better store, some a choice and ordered store, and others a parti-coloured rag-bag. And this they called Memoria. Samuel Butler alone and early, rediscovered this mysterious mother of the Muses to be the mother of specific differences in organic matter, and the author of instinct; in one pregnant phrase undoing, or at least gainsaying, the disastrous error of Darwin, who stressed environment as one of the parents of specific differentiation.