How much more visible is this impassioned and unfettered genius of
Shakespeare in the great characters which sustain the whole weight of
the drama! The startling imagination, the furious velocity of the
manifold and exuberant ideas, passion let loose, rushing upon death and
crime, hallucinations, madness, all the ravages of delirium bursting
through will and reason: such are the forces and ravings which engender
them. Shall I speak of dazzling Cleopatra, who holds Antony in the
whirlwind of her devices and caprices, who fascinates and kills, who
scatters to the winds the lives of men as a handful of desert dust, the
fatal Eastern sorceress who sports with love and death, impetuous,
irresistible, child of air and fire, whose life is but a tempest, whose
thought, ever barbed and broken, is like the crackling of a lightning
flash? Of Othello, who, beset by the graphic picture of physical
adultery, cries at every word of Iago like a man on the rack; who, his
nerves hardened by twenty years of war and shipwreck, grows mad and
swoons for grief, and whose soul, poisoned by jealousy, is distracted
and disorganized in convulsions and in stupor? Or of old King Lear,
violent and weak, whose half-unseated reason is gradually toppled over
under the shocks of incredible treacheries, who presents the frightful
spectacle of madness, first increasing, then complete, of curses,
bowlings, superhuman sorrows, into which the transport of the first
access of fury carries him, and then of peaceful incoherence, chattering
imbecility, into which the shattered man subsides; a marvellous
creation, the supreme effort of pure imagination, a disease of reason,
which reason could never have conceived?[685] Amid so many portraitures
let us choose two or three to indicate the depth and nature of them all.
The critic is lost in Shakespeare, as in an immense town; he will
describe a couple of monuments, and entreat the reader to imagine the
city.
Plutarch's Coriolanus is an austere, coldly haughty patrician, a general
of the army. In Shakespeare's hands he becomes a coarse soldier, a man
of the people as to his language and manners, an athlete of war, with a
voice like a trumpet; whose eyes by contradiction are filled with a rush
of blood and anger, proud and terrible in mood, a lion's soul in the
body of a bull. The philosopher Plutarch told of him a lofty philosophic
action, saying that he had been at pains to save his landlord in the
sack of Corioli. Shakespeare's Coriolanus has indeed the same
disposition, for he is really a good fellow; but when Lartius asks him
the name of this poor Volscian, in order to secure his liberty, he yawns
out:
"By Jupiter! forgot.
I am weary; yea, my memory is tired.
Have we no wine here?"[686]
He is hot, he has been fighting, he must drink; he leaves his Volscian
in chains, and thinks no more of him. He fights like a porter, with
shouts and insults, and the cries from that deep chest are heard above
the din of the battle like the sounds from a brazen trumpet. He has
scaled the walls of Corioli, he has butchered till he is gorged with
slaughter. Instantly he turns to the army of Cominius, and arrives red
with blood, "as he were flay'd. Come I too late?" Cominius begins to
compliment him. "Come I too late?" he repeats. The battle is not yet
finished: he embraces Cominius:
"O! let me clip ye
In arms as sound as when I woo'd, in heart
As merry as when our nuptial day was done."[687]
For the battle is a real holiday to him. Such senses, such a strong
frame, need the outcry, the din of battle, the excitement of death and
wounds. This haughty and indomitable heart needs the joy of victory and
destruction. Mark the display of his patrician arrogance and his
soldier's bearing, when he is offered the tenth of the spoils:
"I thank you, general;
But cannot make my heart consent to take
A bribe to pay my sword."[688]
The soldiers cry, Marcius! Marcius! and the trumpets sound. He gets into
a passion: rates the brawlers:
"No more, I say! For that I have not wash'd
My nose that bled, or foil'd some debile wretch--
... You shout me forth
In acclamations hyperbolical;
As if I loved my little should be dieted
In praises sauced with lies."[689]
They are reduced to loading him with honors: Cominius gives him a
war-horse; decrees him the cognomen of Coriolanus; the people shout
Caius Marcius Coriolanus! He replies:
"I will go wash;
And when my face is fair, you shall perceive
Whether I blush or no: howbeit, I thank you.
I mean to stride your steed."[690]
This loud voice, loud laughter, blunt acknowledgment, of a man who can
act and shout better than speak, foretell the mode in which he will
treat the plebeians. He loads them with insults; he cannot find abuse
enough for the cobblers, tailors, envious cowards, down on their knees
for a coin. "To beg of Hob and Dick! Bid them wash their faces and
keep their teeth clean." But he must beg, if he would be consul; his
friends constrain him. It is then that the passionate soul, incapable of
self-restraint, such as Shakespeare knew how to paint, breaks forth
without hinderance. He is there in his candidate's gown, gnashing his
teeth, and getting up his lesson in this style:
"What must I say?
'I pray, sir'--Plague upon't! I cannot bring
My tongue to such a pace:--'Look, sir, my wounds!
I got them in my country's service, when
Some certain of your brethren roar'd and ran
From the noise of our own drums.'"[691]
The tribunes have no difficulty in stopping the election of a candidate
who begs in this fashion. They taunt him in full Senate, reproach him
with his speech about the corn. He repeats it, with aggravations. Once
roused, neither danger nor prayer restrains him:
"His heart's his mouth:
And, being angry, does forget that ever
He heard the name of death."[692]
He rails against the people, the tribunes, ediles, flatterers of the
plebs. "Come, enough," says his friend Menenius. "Enough, with
over-measure," says Brutus the tribune. He retorts:
"No, take more:
What may be sworn by, both divine and human,
Seal what I end withal!... At once pluck out
The multitudinous tongue; let them not lick
The sweet which is their poison."[693]
The tribune cries, Treason! and bids seize him. He cries:
"Hence, old goat!...
Hence, rotten thing! or I shall shake thy bones
Out of thy garments!"[694]
He strikes him, drives the mob off: he fancies himself amongst
Volscians. "On fair ground I could beat forty of them!" And when his
friends hurry him off, he threatens still, and
"Speak(s) o' the people
As if you (he) were a god to punish, not
A man of their infirmity."[695]
Yet he bends before his mother, for he has recognized in her a soul as
lofty and a courage as intractable as his own. He has submitted from his
infancy to the ascendancy of this pride which he admires. Volumnia
reminds him: "My praises made thee first a soldier." Without power over
himself, continually tossed on the fire of his too hot blood, he has
always been the arm, she the thought. He obeys from involuntary respect,
like a soldier before his general, but with what effort!
"_Coriolanus._ The smiles of knaves
Tent in my cheeks, and schoolboys' tears take up
The glances of my sight! a beggar's tongue
Make motion through my lips, and my arm'd knees
Who bow'd but in my stirrup, bend like his
That hath received an alms!--I will not do't....
_Volumnia._ ... Do as thou list.
Thy valiantness was mine, thou suck'dst it from me,
But owe thy pride thyself.
_Cor._ Pray, be content:
Mother, I am going to the market-place;
Chide me no more. I'll mountebank their loves,
Cog their hearts from them, and come home beloved
Of all the trades in Rome."[696]
He goes, and his friends speak for him. Except a few bitter asides, he
appears to be submissive. Then the tribunes pronounce the accusation,
and summon him to answer as a traitor:
"_Cor._ How! traitor!
_Men._ Nay, temperately: your promise.
_Cor._ The fires i' the lowest hell fold-in the people!
Call me their traitor! Thou injurious tribune!
Within thine eyes sat twenty thousand deaths,
In thy hands clutch'd as many millions, in
Thy lying tongue both numbers, I would say,
'Thou liest,' unto thee with a voice as free
As I do pray the gods."[697]
His friends surround him, entreat him: he will not listen; he foams at
the mouth, he is like a wounded lion:
"Let them pronounce the steep Tarpeian death,
Vagabond exile, flaying, pent to linger
But with a grain a day, I would not buy
Their mercy at the price of one fair word."[698]
The people vote exile, supporting by their shouts the sentence of the
tribune:
"_Cor._ You common cry of curs! whose breath I hate
As reek o' the rotten fens, whose love I prize
As the dead carcasses of unburied men
That do corrupt my air, I banish you.... Despising,
For you, the city, thus I turn my back:
There is a world elsewhere."[699]
Judge of his hatred by these raging words. It goes on increasing whilst
waiting for vengeance. We find him next with the Volscian army before
Rome. His friends kneel before him, he lets them kneel. Old Menenius,
who had loved him as a son, only comes now to be driven away. "Wife,
mother, child, I know not."[700] He knows not himself. For this strength
of hating in a noble heart is the same as the force of loving. He has
transports of tenderness as of rage, and can contain himself no more in
joy than in grief. He runs, spite of his resolution, to his wife's arms;
he bends his knee before his mother. He had summoned the Volscian chiefs
to make them witnesses of his refusals; and before them, he grants all,
and weeps. On his return to Corioli, an insulting word from Aufidius
maddens him, and drives him upon the daggers of the Volscians. Vices and
virtues, glory and misery, greatness and feebleness, the unbridled
passion which composes his nature, endowed him with all.
If the life of Coriolanus is the history of a mood, that of Macbeth is
the history of a monomania. The witches' prophecy has sunk into his mind
at once, like a fixed idea. Gradually this idea corrupts the rest, and
transforms the whole man. He is haunted by it; he forgets the thanes who
surround him and "who stay upon his leisure"; he already sees in the
future an indistinct chaos of images of blood:
"... Why do I yield to that suggestion
Whose horrid image doth unfix my hair
And make my seated heart knock at my ribs?...
My thought, whose murder yet is but fantastical,
Shakes so my single state of man that function
Is smother'd in surmise, and nothing is
But what is not."[701]
This is the language of hallucination. Macbeth's hallucination becomes
complete when his wife has persuaded him to assassinate the king. He
sees in the air a blood-stained dagger, "in form as palpable, as this
which now I draw." His whole brain is filled with grand and terrible
phantoms, which the mind of a common murderer could never have
conceived: the poetry of which indicates a generous heart, enslaved to
an idea of fate, and capable of remorse:
"... Now o'er the one half world
Nature seems dead, and wicked dreams abuse
The curtain'd sleep; witchcraft celebrates
Pale Hecate's offerings, and wither'd murder,
Alarum'd by his sentinel, the wolf,
Whose howl's his watch, thus with his stealthy pace,
With Tarquin's ravishing strides, towards his design
Moves like a ghost.... (_A bell rings._)
I go, and it is done; the bell invites me.
Hear it not, Duncan; for it is a knell
That summons thee to heaven or to hell."[702]
He has done the deed, and returns tottering, haggard, like a drunken
man. He is horrified at his bloody hands, "these hangman's hands."
Nothing now can cleanse them. The whole ocean might sweep over them, but
they would keep the hue of murder. "What hands are here? ha, they pluck
out mine eyes!" He is disturbed by a word which the sleeping
chamberlains uttered:
"One cried, 'God bless us!' and 'Amen' the other;
As they had seen me with these hangman's hands.
Listening their fear, I could not say 'Amen,'
When they did say, 'God bless us!'...
But wherefore could not I pronounce 'Amen!'
I had most need of blessing, and 'Amen'
Stuck in my throat."[703]
Then comes a strange dream; a frightful vision of the punishment that
awaits him descends upon him.
Above the beating of his heart, the tingling of the blood which seethes
in his brain, he had heard them cry:
"'Sleep no more!
Macbeth does murder sleep,' the innocent sleep,
Sleep that knits up the ravell'd sleave of care,
The death of each day's life, sore labor's bath,
Balm of hurt minds, great nature's second course,
Chief nourisher in life's feast."[704]
And the voice, like an angel's trumpet, calls him by all his titles:
"'Glamis hath murder'd sleep, and therefore Cawdor
Shall sleep no more; Macbeth shall sleep no more!'"[705]
This idea, incessantly repeated, beats in his brain, with monotonous and
quick strokes, like the tongue of a bell. Insanity begins; all the force
of his mind is occupied by keeping before him, in spite of himself, the
image of the man whom he has murdered in his sleep:
"To know my deed, 'twere best not know myself. (_Knock._)
Wake Duncan with thy knocking! I would thou couldst!"[706]
Thenceforth, in the rare intervals in which the fever of his mind is
assuaged, he is like a man worn out by a long malady. It is the sad
prostration of maniacs worn out by their fits of rage:
"Had I but died an hour before this chance,
I had lived a blessed time; for from this instant
There's nothing serious in mortality:
All is but toys: renown and grace is dead;
The wine of life is drawn, and the mere lees
Is left this vault to brag of."[707]
When rest has restored force to the human machine, the fixed idea shakes
him again, and drives him onward, like a pitiless horseman, who has left
his panting horse only for a moment, to leap again into the saddle, and
spur him over precipices. The more he has done, the more he must do:
"I am in blood
Stepp'd in so far that, should I wade no more,
Returning were as tedious as go o'er..."[708]
He kills in order to preserve the fruit of his murders. The fatal
circlet of gold attracts him like a magic jewel; and he beats down, from
a sort of blind instinct, the heads, which he sees between the crown and
him:
"But let the frame of things disjoint, both the worlds suffer,
Ere we will eat our meal in fear and sleep
In the affliction of these terrible dreams
That shake us nightly: better be with the dead,
Whom we to gain our peace, have sent to peace,
Than on the torture of the mind to lie
In restless ecstasy. Duncan is in his grave;
After life's fitful fever he sleeps well;
Treason has done his worst: nor steel, nor poison,
Malice domestic, foreign levy, nothing,
Can touch him further."[709]
Macbeth has ordered Banquo to be murdered, and in the midst of a great
feast he is informed of the success of his plan. He smiles, and proposes
Banquo's health. Suddenly, conscience-smitten, he sees the ghost of the
murdered man; for this phantom, which Shakespeare summons, is not a mere
stage-trick: we feel that here the supernatural is unnecessary, and that
Macbeth would create it even if hell would not send it. With muscles
twitching, dilated eyes, his mouth half open with deadly terror, he sees
it shake its bloody head, and cries with that hoarse voice, which is
only to be heard in maniacs' cells:
"Prithee, see there? Behold! look! lo! how say you?
Why, what care I? If thou canst nod, speak too.
If charnel-houses and our graves must send
Those that we bury back, our monuments
Shall be the maws of kites....
Blood hath been shed ere now, i' the olden time,...
Ay, and since too, murders have been perform'd
Too terrible for the ear: the times have been,
That, when the brains were out, the man would die,
And there an end; but now they rise again,
With twenty mortal murders on their crowns,
And push us from our stools:...
Avaunt! and quit my sight! let the earth hide thee!
Thy bones are marrowless, thy blood is cold;
Thou hast no speculation in those eyes
Which thou dost glare with!"[710]
His body trembling like that of an epileptic, his teeth clenched,
foaming at the mouth, he sinks on the ground, his limbs writhe, shaken
with convulsive quiverings, whilst a dull sob swells his panting breast,
and dies in his swollen throat. What joy can remain for a man beset by
such visions? The wide dark country, which he surveys from his towering
castle, is but a field of death, haunted by ominous apparitions;
Scotland, which he is depopulating, a cemetery,
"Where... the dead man's knell
Is there scarce ask'd for who; and good men's lives
Expire before the flowers in their caps.
Dying or ere they sicken."[711]
His soul is "full of scorpions." He has "supp'd full with horrors," and
the loathsome odor of blood has disgusted him with all else. He goes
stumbling over the corpses which he has heaped up, with the mechanical
and desperate smile of a maniac-murderer. Thenceforth death, life, all
is one to him; the habit of murder has placed him out of the pale of
humanity. They tell him that his wife is dead:
"_Macbeth._ She should have died hereafter;
There would have been a time for such a word.
To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow,
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day
To the last syllable of recorded time,
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!
Life's but a walking shadow; a poor player
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage,
And then is heard no more: it is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing."[712]
There remains for him the hardening of the heart in crime, the fixed
belief in destiny. Hunted down by his enemies, "bearlike, tied to a
stake," he fights, troubled only by the prediction of the witches, sure
of being invulnerable so long as the man whom they have described does
not appear. Henceforth his thoughts dwell on a supernatural world, and
to the last he walks with his eyes fixed on the dream, which has
possessed him, from the first.
The history of Hamlet, like that of Macbeth, is a story of moral
poisoning. Hamlet has a delicate soul, an impassioned imagination, like
that of Shakespeare. He has lived hitherto, occupied in noble studies,
skilful in mental and bodily exercises, with a taste for art, loved by
the noblest father, enamored of the purest and most charming girl,
confiding, generous, not yet having perceived, from the height of the
throne to which he was born, aught but the beauty, happiness, grandeur
of nature and humanity.[713] On this soul, which character and training
make more sensitive than others, misfortune suddenly falls, extreme,
overwhelming of the very kind to destroy all faith and every motive for
action: with one glance he has seen all the vileness of humanity; and
this insight is given him in his mother. His mind is yet intact; but
judge from the violence of his style, the crudity of his exact details,
the terrible tension of the whole nervous machine, whether he has not
already one foot on the verge of madness:
"O that this too, too solid flesh would melt,
Thaw and resolve itself into a dew!
Or that the Everlasting had not fix'd
His canon 'gainst self-slaughter! O God! God!
How weary, stale, flat and unprofitable,
Seem to me all the uses of this world!
Fie on't! ah fie! 'tis an unweeded garden,
That grows to seed; things rank and gross in nature
Possess it merely. That it should come to this!
But two months dead: nay, not so much, not two:
So excellent a king,... so loving to my mother
That he might not let e'en the winds of heaven
Visit her face too roughly. Heaven and earth!
... And yet, within a month--
Let me not think on't--Frailty, thy name is woman!--
A little month, or ere those shoes were old
With which she follow'd my poor father's body,...
Ere yet the salt of most unrighteous tears
Had left the flushing in her galled eyes,
She married. O, most wicked speed, to post
With such dexterity to incestuous sheets!
It is not nor it cannot come to good!
But break, my heart; for I must hold my tongue!"[714]
Here already are contortions of thought, a beginning of hallucination,
the symptoms of what is to come after. In the middle of conversation the
image of his father rises before his mind. He thinks he sees him. How
then will it be when the "canonised bones have burst their cerements,"
"the sepulchre hath oped his ponderous and marble jaws," and when the
ghost comes in the night, upon a high "platform" of land, to tell him of
the tortures of his prison of fire, and of the fratricide, who has
driven him thither? Hamlet grows faint, but grief strengthens him, and
he has a desire for living:
"Hold, hold, my heart;
And you my sinews, grow not instant old,
But bear me stiffly up! Remember thee!
Ay, thou poor ghost, while memory holds a seat
In this distracted globe.--Remember thee?
Yea, from the table of my memory
I'll wipe away all trivial fond records,
All saws of books, all forms, all pressures past,...
And thy commandment all alone shall live,...
O villain, villain, smiling, damned villain!
My tables--meet it is I set it down,
That one may smile, and smile, and be a villain;
At least I'm sure it may be so in Denmark:
So, uncle, there you are."[715] (_Writing._)
This convulsive outburst, this fevered writing hand, this frenzy of
intentness, prelude the approach of a kind of monomania. When his
friends come up, he treats them with the speeches of a child or an
idiot. He is no longer master of his words; hollow phrases whirl in his
brain, and fall from his mouth as in a dream. They call him; he answers
by imitating the cry of a sportsman whistling to his falcon: "Hillo, ho,
ho, boy! come, bird, come." Whilst he is in the act of swearing them to
secrecy, the ghost below repeats "Swear." Hamlet cries, with a nervous
excitement and a fitful gayety:
"Ah ha, boy! say'st thou so? art thou there, truepenny?
Come on--you hear this fellow in the cellarage--
Consent to swear....
_Ghost_ (_beneath_). Swear.
_Hamlet. Hic et ubique?_ then we'll shift our ground.
Come hither, gentlemen.... Swear by my sword.
_Ghost_ (_beneath_). Swear.
_Ham._ Well said, old mole! canst work i' the earth so fast?
A worthy pioneer!"[716]
Understand that as he says this his teeth chatter, "pale as his shirt,
his knees knocking each other." Intense anguish ends with a kind of
laughter, which is nothing else than a spasm. Thenceforth Hamlet speaks
as though he had a continuous nervous attack. His madness is feigned, I
admit; but his mind, as a door whose hinges are twisted, swings and
bangs with every wind with a mad haste and with a discordant noise. He
has no need to search for the strange ideas, apparent incoherencies,
exaggerations, the deluge of sarcasms which he accumulates. He finds
them within him; he does himself no violence, he simply gives himself up
to himself. When he has the piece played which is to unmask his uncle,
he raises himself, lounges on the floor, lays his head in Ophelia's lap;
he addresses the actors, and comments on the piece to the spectators;
his nerves are strung, his excited thought is like a surging and
crackling flame, and cannot find fuel enough in the multitude of objects
surrounding it, upon all of which it seizes. When the king rises
unmasked and troubled, Hamlet sings, and says, "Would not this, sir, and
a forest of feathers--if the rest of my fortunes turn Turk with me--with
two Provincial roses on my razed shoes, get me a fellowship in a cry of
players, sir!"[717] And he laughs terribly, for he is resolved on
murder. It is clear that this state is a disease, and that the man will
not survive it.
In a soul so ardent of thought, and so mighty of feeling, what is left
but disgust and despair? We tinge all nature with the color of our
thoughts; we shape the world according to our own ideas; when our soul
is sick, we see nothing but sickness in the universe:
"This goodly frame, the earth, seems to me a sterile promontory, this
most excellent canopy, the air, look you, this brave o'erhanging
firmament, this majestical roof fretted with golden fire, why, it
appears no other thing to me than a foul and pestilent congregation of
vapors. What a piece of work is a man! how noble in reason! how infinite
in faculty! in form and moving how express and admirable! in action how
like an angel! in apprehension how like a god! the beauty of the world!
the paragon of animals! And yet, to me, what is this quintessence of
dust? man delights not me: no, nor woman neither."[718]
Henceforth his thought sullies whatever it touches. He rails bitterly
before Ophelia against marriage and love. Beauty! Innocence! Beauty is
but a means of prostituting innocence: "Get thee to a nunnery: why
wouldst thou be a breeder of sinners?... What should such fellows as I
do crawling between earth and heaven? We are arrant knaves, all; believe
none of us."[719]
When he has killed Polonius by accident, he hardly repents it; it is one
fool less. He jeers lugubriously:
"_King._ Now Hamlet, where's Polonius?
_Hamlet._ At supper.
_K._ At supper! where?
_H._ Not where he eats, but where he is eaten: a certain convocation
of politic worms are e'en at him."[720]
And he repeats in five or six fashions these gravedigger jests. His
thoughts already inhabit a churchyard; to this hopeless philosophy a
genuine man is a corpse. Public functions, honors, passions, pleasures,
projects, science, all this is but a borrowed mask, which death removes,
so that people may see what we are, an evil-smelling and grinning skull.
It is this sight he goes to see by Ophelia's grave. He counts the skulls
which the gravedigger turns up; this was a lawyer's, that a countier's.
What bows, intrigues, pretensions, arrogance! And here now is a clown
knocking it about with his spade, and playing "at loggats with 'em."
Cæsar and Alexander have turned to clay and make the earth fat; the
masters of the world have served to "patch a wall. Now get you to my
lady's chamber, and tell her, let her paint an inch thick, to this favor
she must come; make her laugh at that."[721] When a man has come to
this, there is nothing left but to die.
This heated imagination, which explains Hamlet's nervous disease and his
moral poisoning, explains also his conduct. If he hesitates to kill his
uncle, it is not from horror of blood or from our modern scruples. He
belongs to the sixteenth century. On board ship he wrote the order to
behead Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, and to do so without giving them
"shriving-time." He killed Polonius, he caused Ophelia's death, and has
no great remorse for it. If for once he spared his uncle, it was because
he found him praying, and was afraid of sending him to heaven. He
thought he was killing him when he killed Polonius. What his imagination
robs him of, is the coolness and strength to go quietly and with
premeditation to plunge a sword into a breast. He can only do the thing
on a sudden suggestion; he must have a moment of enthusiasm; he must
think the king is behind the arras, or else, seeing that he himself is
poisoned, he must find his victim under his foil's point. He is not
master of his acts; opportunity dictates them; he cannot plan a murder,
but must improvise it. A too lively imagination exhausts the will, by
the strength of images which it heaps up, and by the fury of intentness
which absorbs it. You recognize in him a poet's soul, made not to act,
but to dream, which is lost in contemplating the phantoms of its
creation, which sees the imaginary world too clearly to play a part in
the real world; an artist whom evil chance has made a prince, whom worse
chance has made an avenger of crime, and who, destined by nature for
genius, is condemned by fortune to madness and unhappiness. Hamlet is
Shakespeare, and, at the close of this gallery of portraits which have
all some features of his own, Shakespeare has painted himself in the
most striking of all.
If Racine or Corneille had framed a psychology, they would have said,
with Descartes: Man is an incorporeal soul, served by organs, endowed
with reason and will, dwelling in palaces or porticos, made for
conversation and society, whose harmonious and ideal action is developed
by discourse and replies, in a world constructed by logic beyond the
realms of time and place.
If Shakespeare had framed a psychology, he would have said, with
Esquirol:[722] Man is a nervous machine, governed by a mood, disposed to
hallucinations, carried away by unbridled passions, essentially
unreasoning, a mixture of animal and poet, having instead of mind
rapture, instead of virtue sensibility, imagination for prompter and
guide, and led at random, by the most determinate and complex
circumstances, to sorrow, crime, madness, and death.