tary and economic force. Because, if the student can not do this, he can never hope to understand anything at all about Shakespeare. You must remember that Shakespeare is not only the greatest, but also the most difficult of authors to understand. This does not mean that his language is difficult, or that his thoughts are difficult; the difficulty lies in the comprehension of the depths of his characters-that is to say, the depth of his knowledge of human nature. The great Shakespearean riddle, in other words, is this: "How did Shakespeare know?" Here is a man who has created hundreds of living figures or characters, every one of which is essentially and totally different from every other, and all of which are perfectly real, perfectly alive, perfectly interesting, never under any circumstances unnatural. To create one such character in common literature is to make a classic, is to achieve a reputation for hundreds of years, is to perform a feat almost divine; like the work of a god, it is a creation of life. But Shakespeare created hundreds of characters. I can not repeat this too often; because you will not observe the whole meaning of it until I have assured you that the other great English dramatists did not create any characters at all. They gave us moving and speaking figures which resemble living persons only as ghosts or dreams resemble living persons. The more you become acquainted with them, the less real do you find them. Sometimes they actually melt into each other like clouds, like vapours. They are phantoms. After having read all the plays of Ben Jonson, all the plays of Webster, all the plays of Beaumont and Fletcher, all the plays of any other dramatist, you will find that they do not remain distinct in your memory. Not only do you forget them, but you confuse them one with another. Never does this happen in the case of Shakespeare. Every figure in Shakespeare can be touched, heard, and made familiar like an old acquaintance; put your hand upon its breast, and you will feel the heart beat. I will even say one thing stronger than this—it is

more easy to forget living persons whom you have really known than it is to forget one of Shakespeare's great char

acters.

Let me say here that I shall have to ask your patience, as some of what I am going to say may seem to you a little tiresome; but I think it is necessary in order that you may get a general idea of the meaning of the difference between Shakespeare and other men. I do not wish to tell you what you can find in books, but only what you will not find in books about Shakespeare.

This said, let us try to understand the secret of the force of Shakespeare's characters. Every one of you have seen a cat. You have seen it not once, but perhaps a thousand times; and as children you have certainly played with kittens, so that you had a good opportunity to study every part of the animal's body. Now how many of you, in spite of that experience, can draw a correct picture of a cat from memory? Perhaps one or two of you can. But can you draw the cat in more than one position? Perhaps one of you can draw it in two or even three positions. There, I imagine, your power stops. It is very doubtful whether you have ever known a man who could draw a cat from memory in any position. I might have said a horse, just as well; but a horse would really be much more difficult.

Now some of you can certainly draw very much better than others. You recognise among yourselves this superior ability on the part of one or two individuals, and you call it talent, or cleverness, or something of that kind. But have you ever stopped to think what this talent or cleverness means? Why should one of you be able to draw from memory better than any of the rest? It is because he has superior faculties; but what are the faculties? One is memory,―memory of that special form which we call the representative faculty. To put the matter very shortly and in very simple language, one of you can draw a cat from memory better than the rest, not so much because of manual

dexterity, as because, when he thinks of a cat, there immediately shapes itself in his brain a much more vivid and correct image of the animal than that which the memories of the rest of you are capable of forming. But we are not yet more than half-way toward the explanation of this extremely simple fact. Why should the brain of one student be capable of forming mental images much more exact than any of which other brains are capable? It must mean that there is some physiological difference. This physiological difference is like a difference in what is called the "sensitivity" of photographic plates. Some plates, you know, will photograph anything in one-fiftieth, one-seventy-fifth or one-hundredth of a second, while other plates work very slowly, requiring three or four seconds to define an image,— and the chances always are that during long exposure the images may become blurred or spoiled by accident. I do not wish to carry this comparison as far as it might be carried; the illustration is sufficient. Now this superior "sensitivity" of brain is found to be always coincident with a very high development of what is called in physiology nervous-tissue. I do not mean that this high development necessarily extends to all parts of the brain of the man distinguished by a special talent. The more the talent is special, the more certain it is that the nervous sensitivity is also special-that is, confined to some particular part of the cerebral structure. We can not go much farther than this. If you should ask the reason of such differences between individual and individual, I should answer hereditary accumulation; but when we trace the thing back as far as human knowledge permits us, we are stopped by the infinite mystery which lies beyond all life and which it is quite useless for us to try to understand.

I need scarcely tell you that it would be incomparably more difficult to draw from memory the correct picture of a human face in six or seven different moods than it would be to draw the head of an animal in several different at

titudes. Still this is no very great feat. But to draw a character, the play of moral feeling which makes a character, and to do this in four or five different moods, is not a little feat but a very great feat indeed. Very few men are able even to express one of their own moods truthfully and impressively-much less to objectify it. Imagine, then, the gigantic power of the brain that could create thousands of different moods as expressed by hundreds of different characters of every age and sex.

The problem of Shakespeare is therefore a psychological problem; and if it took the world some hundreds of years to understand Shakespeare, this was only because Shakespeare was himself in advance of humanity several hundred years by virtue of intellectual superiority. A human brain, immensely developed beyond the average, can not be imagined by the average. The existence of such a brain may constitute a danger to the human race. Very much depends upon the direction given to its faculties. One such brain came into existence shortly before the beginning of the present century; and in the short space of eleven years— from 1804 to 1815-the working of that brain resulted in the destruction of 3,700,000 human lives (Taine, “La Régime Moderne," vol. 1, p. 115). For a long time after the accession of Napoleon to power the world attributed his ascendency to good fortune; there was no suspicion of the enormous range of the faculties of that mind-the mind that complained of the smallness of the population of Europe, and that dreamed of a conquest of the Orient, where it could use five or six hundred millions of lives for its operations. But when the suspicion did come at last, the existence of that individual was felt to be a danger to the human race, and by a desperate coalition against him, the nations of Europe succeeded in isolating him until the time of his death. The faculties of Napoleon were bent in the direction of war, economics, finance, and all forms of administration. Unfortunately the destructive tendencies domi

nated the constructive. Now I would compare the brain of Shakespeare to Napoleon's; but the development of his faculties was altogether in a constructive and creative direction. In more than one respect we find points of resemblance, nevertheless, between the two minds. The most noticeable of the prodigious qualities of both was memory; and in both cases the faculties were hereditary, not developed by education. In Shakespeare as in Napoleon, the language faculty, although immense, was in a comparatively low state of cultivation. The compositions of both were marked by extraordinary faults-faults of form, faults of all kinds; yet the faculties in either case were almost incomparable. We know, for example, that Shakespeare's composition was not made like the compositions of other men. He never rewrote or changed his manuscript, if we are to believe the actors who played with him; and yet, thus flung down upon paper, his thoughts now fill the world.

I have compared the mnemonic faculty of Shakespeare with that of Napoleon; but only by way of general illustration. Really the memory power was very different in either case. In Shakespeare it takes a form so extraordinary that it is still a psychological puzzle. Attributing his knowledge of character to purely personal experience, we should have to say that he had the power of representing with absolute accuracy every feeling that he had ever known in any situation. No doubt a very considerable amount of personal feeling has been reproduced in his unapproachable dramas. But the experience of fifty lifetimes could not account for everything in them. Beyond experience, what could have given him the knowledge of his hundreds of characters? There is only one name commonly given to the power which enabled him to be so unrivalled a creator; and that faculty is intuition. But what is intuition? You may

say that you believe that it is imagination in the form of instinct. And what is instinct? Instinct, the man of science will tell you, is inherited knowledge-is, in a certain