and woman; just as the eternal differences of men and women constitute the chief topics of our novels and our plays. A decadent poet in decadent Munich, not so very long since, told over again the story of Adam and Eve, and fitted it — perhaps it is best not to ask just how-to the modern German stage! There are four figures: Cain and Abel, now grown; Adam, waxing old and much preoccupied in gardening; Eve, the eternal feminine, who is much younger, pretty, idle and spoiling for something to do. She flirts with both her sons there was nobody else for her to flirt with, poor dear lady — and the unhappy boys taking the matter seriously, Cain slays Abel.

The psychological interpretation of dramatic works of art, especially those of the past is apt to prove a dangerous weapon. It cuts in more ways than one. For the dramatic psycho-analyst assumes that these personages of some two hours' traffic with the stage are human beings of today, possessed of a past which he reconstructs after his own sweet will, and of a future which agnostically he has long since ceased to believe is damnation. He applies to these images of stage illusion the rigorous measurements that we habitually apply - and misapply -to actual men and women. And when his "scientific standards" fail-as fail they must- he concludes that we have in these plays of an elder age precisely the false psychology that one might expect of a self-taught, unscientific playwright; and he deplores Shakespeare's defective art and the glamour which it still seems to possess for benighted,

unscientific readers." One wonders whether the thumb-marks of Iago would have disclosed him a villain according to the Bertillon system, or whether, after all, it might not be more pertinent to ask, after a method more conservatively orthodox, for the imprint of Iago's foot.

Let me remark, parenthetically, that although now quite out of date, Zola remains the notorious example of an author who "shadowed the criminal mind as the detective shadows the criminal," dragging him into the police report, if perhaps not always into literature. Zola, much like his great Russian follower, Dostoiefsky, is marvellously true to the observed trivial fact, and often unaware of its triviality and want of artistic significance. He is full of reality; but no true realist; because he is concerned, not with life in the rule, but with life in the moral exception. Zola was much read in his day; but I do not think he was read for his facts, much less for his art; and there are other things that an author is read for. So, too, the more recent melodramatic hero of Italian Chauvinism, D'Annunzio, with all his merits, is scarcely read for his criminologist's truth alone. The ways of our kind are dear to us, especially their primrose ways. If, changing quite our point of view, there is anyone who really has preferred, let us say the dismal dramatic despair of Strindberg, or who now prefers such realities or unrealities. as our second-rate contemporary stage or our third

1912.

E. E. Stoll, "Criminals in Shakespeare," Modern Philology, July,

rate movies afford him to our old drama's hopeful, honest and open-hearted picture of life, we can only say, making allowances for modernity, that it is a matter of taste, if it be not a matter of the want of it. Of course we cannot read Shakespeare all the time, and there are plenty of other admirable things to read, both new and old. I have seen people leave Shakespeare for a catalogue of fertilizers or a comic supplement. But it would be unfair to judge a man's religion from the circumstance that he passed the church door on a fair May morning, or his politics, from the accident that it was too wet for him to get out to vote.

It has been cleverly remarked that "the man Lord Byron tried to be was the invention of Mrs. Radcliffe," Mrs. Radcliffe, the ladylike compiler of Georgian penny-dreadfuls, or rather, to be more accurate, of guinea-terribles, those ghastly, ghostly novels of much ado about nothing whatever. By this token, is it not conceivable that the ideal man of this, that or another age, the Chevalier Bayard, the Sidney, Beau Brummel or Beau Nash, each of his time, may have exercised an appreciable influence on what his fellows tried to be? Is it not equally conceivable, too, that an ideal such as that of Castiglione's Courtier, its English imitation, Euphues, or that bugaboo, a Prince according to Machiavelli, may have exerted a palpable influence on the age in which each was popular? So that a man tried to be in turn the complete gentleman, the complete fop, or the complete villain according to his taste or proclivity? Man is a mimetic animal; indeed human mimicry is almost the best argument in favor

of our simian ancestry. How well I remember how, many years ago, the excellent "grey poet," Walt Whitman, had a satellite who revolved incessantly in his orbit in a state of admiring mimicry. The poet Whitman was a large man, deliberate, not to say somewhat elephantine in his motions, partly through age. He had a splendid shock of long white hair and a beard as shaggy and noble as King Lear's. He affected ample white or grey clothing, a huge grey hat, and carried a heavy cane which his faltering steps needed. The satellite was not nearly so big, so he made it up in the looseness of his coat and in the bagginess of his trousers, to say nothing of his hat, which was enormous. He did what he could with his hair and beard, neither of which was of quite the right texture or color; and, although he was naturally brisk of movement, he affected a slow and stately step, a deliberate form of speech and, if you addressed him as "Mr. Whitman" (which we young wags sometimes did), he would love you for a week. I repeat that man is a mimetic animal. And we mimic, be it remarked, not each other's physiological psychology, but each other's manners, gait, conduct, ideals and religion. Calvinism and Machiavellism were strong enough respectively in Shakespeare's days to make men saints and sinners after a model undiscoverable in times when such ideals no longer rule the hopes and fears of men. The writers of an age that knew such saints and sinners naturally preferred a transfer of their visible traits to their poetry and drama rather than the hazardous experiment of trying to guess what the pseudo

psychologists of the twentieth century would be likely to approve or disapprove.

Another effort of " demi-science," applied to Shakespeare, is the endeavor to show how false was Shakespeare's idea of sin, evil and temptation. Mediaeval Christianity—perhaps I had better call it mediaeval Christian mythology-conceived of the world as existing as a species of bone of contention between the powers of good and evil, as a species of sketch in black and white, the raiment respectively of the legions of light and the legions of darkness, in eternal conflict for the soul of man. Still again, the mediaeval idea conceived of sin as a species of supernatural microbe, only bigger and uglier than our microscopic microbe, against which the righteous man is immune, but to whose insidious attacks the morally weak are all too liable. Now all this is very well; but does it follow that Shakespeare, the most modern of our old writers, was really governed by these notions, half of them well worn and tattered by his time? It is assuming much to affirm that all of these creations of the poet are governed by the old conception of crime as a concrete possession of the devil. Could we conceive of such a fate as Othello's and Desdemona's as wholly dependent on the machinations of Iago? Is it not what Iago's lucid tongue calls," a frail vow betwixt an erring barbarian and a super-subtle Venetian" and their defiance of social forces that discountenance such ill-assorted marriages, that make all Iago's plotting possible?

To Macbeth much attention is devoted by this dev