That makes calamity of so long life;

For who would bear the whips and scorns of time,
The oppressor's wrong, the proud man's contumely,
The pangs of despised love, the law's delay,
The insolence of office and the spurns
That patient merit of the unworthy takes,
When he himself might his quietus make
With a bare bodkin? Who would fardels bear,
To grunt and sweat under a weary life,
But that the dread of something after death,
The undiscover'd country from whose bourn
No traveller returns, puzzles the will

And makes us rather bear those ills we have
Than fly to others that we know not of?
Thus conscience does make cowards of us all;
And thus the native hue of resolution

Is sicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought,
And enterprises of great pith and moment,
With this regard their currents turn awry,
And lose the name of action.

In this passage, so rich in thought, so prolific of reflection, the philosophy may be right; but, if so, it exposes a flaw in Shakespeare's art, which if he perceived he would not remove. Here he affirms, what all thinking men will affirm with him, that from the dreary regions of death, which he truly describes as undiscovered, no traveller returns; and yet the very foundation of the play in which this truth is uttered rests upon the supposed return of a traveller from that undiscovered country: so perilous is the attempt to reconcile superstition and philosophy.

Some portion, if not a large portion, of Shakespeare's mind was made up out of materials borrowed from Christianity, where the canon against self-slaughter is found by inference, though not by express declaration. In reality, however, suicide is forbidden by the laws of nature, though the Romans, a pre-eminently

religious people, contrived to elude the force of primitive instincts, and to reconcile the practice of selfdestruction with piety. One of the cardinal incidents in their early history is the suicide of Lucretia, whose soul, set free by the dagger, Shakespeare describes as mounting directly to Heaven:

She sheathed in her harmless breast

A harmful knife, that thence her soul unsheathed:
That blow did bail it from the deep unrest

Of that polluted prison where it breathed:

Her contrite sighs unto the clouds bequeath'd

Her winged sprite, and through her wounds doth fly
Life's lasting date from cancell'd destiny.

From that time downwards, till the noblest Roman of them all' breathed forth his soul on the field of Philippi, frequent suicides characterised the story of the masters of the world. In Shakespeare's plays, the Roman mode of unsheathing the soul is of frequent occurrence; good and bad, noble and ignoble, from Juliet and Portia to Goneril, seek death by their own hands.

ESSAY XIV

SHAKESPEARE'S EMPLOYMENT OF THE SUPERNATURAL

In the oldest religions of mankind, which grew up out of a very limited study of nature, we find, in the midst of piety, beliefs scarcely reconcilable with it. In their search into the origin of things, they discovered forces in operation, which, according to the point of view whence they were regarded, suggested ideas of good or evil. In these forces they thought they discerned intelligence, and an aptitude to enter into relations with human beings through the performance by the latter of certain ceremonies and rites which exerted a mystic efficacy. In their conception this globe of earth, of which they knew not the extent, was synonymous with Nature: the source of all being, whether human or divine, throwing forth continually, from her prolific womb, existences of all kinds instinct with spirit or intelligence. Human beings, according to this theory, are only so many external embodiments of internal forces, which, in proportion to those forces or to their nature, are linked and hold communion with the spiritual root from which they spring.

This idea was firmly fixed in the Hellenic mind, and has probably held possession more or less of all minds from the very beginning of things. To extirpate it, therefore, is impossible. Throughout all latitudes it springs up, as it were, under the feet of humanity,

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and, diffusing itself like an atmosphere, involves everything that lives and reasons in its folds. The difference between the wisest and the least wise is only one of degree, the constitution of all minds being essentially the same. Hence, at different periods of the world's history, the rapid spread of epidemic beliefs, which, through some inextricable affinity, pass from mind to mind, till whole quarters of the world are overshadowed by some new form of superstition; just as, beneath the surface of the earth, there runs round the globe a belt of earthquakes, always more or less in activity, but sometimes so violent as to make us distrust the stability of what we stand on.

Events taking place among men were, in conformity with the above theory, traced to springs lying outside of the human mind, but darting their influence into it in obedience to hidden laws of which it were vain to seek the nature.

The Greek dramatists subordinated the action of all their pieces to an influence originating beyond the sphere of humanity, but invested with that grandeur and majesty which in human apprehension belong to

the unknown.

The Northern nations, deriving their religion from the East, drew likewise from the same source that superstition, which after the introduction of Christianity they shaped into the belief in witchcraft. It would be wronging Shakespeare to suspect him of sharing in such a belief, but perceiving how widely it prevailed, and in what revered department of superstition it took its rise, he resolved to employ it for dramatic purposes. In his mind, the process appears to have been this: a council of intelligences, in their nature evil, being held, it is in it determined to

originate a series of disastrous events in the kingdom of Scotland. The plan of action is laid down, the instruments are chosen, the delusions are conceived and organised by which the calamitous process is to be completed. All this having been antecedently settled, Shakespeare's genius, accepting the decision of destiny, brings together the agents natural and supernatural, and begins his drama.

Every reader perceives that Macbeth is accosted. by the witches on the blasted heath,' in conformity with a scheme of action laid down elsewhere, without his privity or the consent of his will. I say nothing now of the ethical question, but look upon things simply as they are found in Shakespeare, though not without reference to something not found in him, but yet necessary to the completeness and comprehension of what is there found. It might be mere pedantry to attribute to the poet the design of lecturing mankind on the absurdity of their superstitions; we may suppose him intent only on producing a work of art, in which sublime conceptions, and terrible displays of guilt, overshadow a sense of hideous meanness and deformity. If he could not look into the seeds of time, he could certainly discern distinctly the nature of the ideas prevalent among his contemporaries, more particularly in the brain of the sovereign whom the English people had elected to succeed their great queen.

When the supernatural is brought into collision with the natural, it does not follow that the latter must yield to the shock; the human mind though weak, if compared with the united forces of the invisible world, is not constrained of necessity to succumb to them, although the danger of such a result may be