BOOKS.

DE. Bunswiti. ON WHAX-ESPEABE.• [masa. Nonce.] THE author of The Psychology of Shakespeare compares himself in his preface to the shoemaker who criticised the work of Apelles, and was listened to with respect so long as he confined his ob- servations within the limits of his own practical knowledge. The comparison holds good in all that it fairly implies, but it does not measure the extent of Dr. Bncknill's qualifications as a com- mentator on Shakespeare. In perfect mastery of all details per- taining to his proper calling, he is on a par with the Grecian shoemaker, but is infinitely superior to him not only as regards the kind of facts with which he is specially conversant, but also in the extra professional range of his aesthetic faculties. Had he never practised medicine, his literary taste and acumen might have enabled him to write worthily on the great works he prizes most, and to make a respectable figure amongst the expositors of Shakespeare's genius ; as it is, his place amongst them is unique. Never -before him did any writes give judgment, with so much authority, on that fidelity to nature which Shakespeare's art ex- hibits in the delineation of disordered mental action.

Dr. Bucknill has not given his book the advantage of an at- tractive title ; the word "psychology," we are afraid, will have rather a repellent sound for ordinary readers but at least it cor- rectly expresses the import of the work. The author does not use it in its etymological signification, but in that more limited sense to which it has been technically restricted of late years, as denoting "all that relates to the department of science which takes cognizance of irregularities and aberrations and diseases of the mind." It is remarkable how large a portion of Shakespeare's art this science covers ; the extent and exactness with which the two accord have " surprised and astonished" his psychological critic. He has not been led, however, by parity of reasoning, to infer that the great dramatist had some time or other been an exorcist or a keeper in Bedlam, (the only lunatic asylum in his time) as Lord Campbell inferred that he had once been a lawyer's clerk. The doctor is less venturous than the judge in straining evidence, and explains the phenomenon by supposing that abnor- mal states of mind were a favourite study of Shakespeare, and that examples of them in every variety must have come frequently under his notice, because it was not the practice of his day to shut up any but the most dangerous of the insane. Nothing can be more probable; at all events his critic finds that "in his hands the development of an insane character is as strictly amenable to law, as that of the most matter-of-fact and commonplace sanity "; that "our wonder at his profound knowledge of mental disease increases, the more carefully we study his works ; " and that often "he displays with prolific carelessness a knowledge of principles, half of which, if well advertised, would make the reputation of a modern psychologist."

Macbeth and his terrible mate, Hamlet, Ophelia, Lear, Timon, Constance, Jacques, and some others, are the characters analysed by Dr. Bucknill and many of them he extricates from the false light in which the world has been taught by great writers to re- Crathem. He sweeps away a common theory to which Coleridge sgiven the authority of his name, that Macbeth was originally a treacherous, bad man, prone to deeds of midnight murder, one who, with all his infirmity of purpose and his sentimental mouth- ings, was yet such a predetermined villain, that it was really a great error in art, an bile surplusage, to represent him as u ed to crime by outward influences most fatal in their potency-. Ihe Macbeth of these theorists would have gone on his bloody way though he had never been subjected to the direct tempting of su- pernatural beings, or to the masterdom of another human will less trammelled than his own by "compunctious visitings of nature."

Not so the Macbeth of the poet.

"His bold and fierce wife is likely to have known him far better than his metaphysical critic ; and she reading his letter, which describes the pro- phecies of the weird sisters, says :

' Glanus thou art, and Cawdor ; and shalt be What thou art promised :—Yet do I fear thy nature ; It is too full o' the milk of human kindness To catch the nearest way. Thou would'st be great ; Art not without ambition; but without The illness should attend it. What thou would'st highly.

That would'et thou horny; would'st not play false, And yet would'st surely win.'

. . . . Evidently he is a man of sanguine nervous temperament, of large capacity and ready susceptibility. The high energy and courage which guide his sword in the battles of his country are qualities of nerve force 'which future circumstances will direct to good or evil purposes. Circum- stances arise soliciting to evil ; supernatural soliciting,' the force of which, in these anti-spiritualist days, it requires an almost unattainable flight of imagination to get a glimpse of. It must be remembered that the 'drama brings Macbeth face to face with the supernatural, with that devil's brood the weird Sisters so unlike the inhabitants of earth, 'who, after a prophecy immediately 'fulfilled, 'made themselves air into which they vanished.' What would be the effect upon a man of nervous sensibility, of such appearances? Surely most profound. Well may Hazlitt say, that he can conceive no common actor to look like a man who had encountered the weird Sisters.' When they had, melted as breath into the wind,' even the firm tempered and judicious Banque exclaim :

' Were such things here as we do speak about Or have we eaten of the insane root That takes the reason prisoner '

"We may disbelieve in any manifestations of the supernatural ; but we cannot but believe that were their occurrence possible it would profoundly affect the mind. Humboldt says, that the effect of the first earthquake shock

• The Psychology of Shakespeare. By John Charles Buchnill, M.D., &c. Editor of " The Journal of Mental Science," and joint Author of the "Manual of Psycho- logical Medicine." Published by Longmans and Co,

lamest bewildering, unsettling one of the strongest articles of material faith, namely, the fixedness of the earth. Any supernatural appearance must have this effect of shaking the foundations of the mind in an infinitely greater degree. Indeed, we so fully feel that any glimpse into the spirit- world would effect in ourselves a profound mental revulsion, that we intui- tively extend to Macbeth a more indulgent opinion of his great crimes, than we should have been able to do had he been led on to their commission by the temptations of earthly incident alone."

The exquisite skill with which Shakespeare has depicted the progress of mental disorder in Macbeth is acutely indicated by his scientific analyser. The morbid action is seen in three de first in the soliloquy after the meeting with the Weird Sisters on the blasted heath, where there is the horrible picture of the imagination not transferred to the sense ; next, in the dagger scene, there is the sensual hallucination whose reality is ques- tioned and rejected ; and lastly, in the banquet scene there is the sensual hallucination whose reality is fully accepted. The soliloquy gives evidence of the extreme excitability of Macbeth's imagination.

"The supernatural soliciting of the weird Sisters suggests to him an image, not a thought merely, but an image so horrible that its contempla- tion

' does unfm my hair, And make my seated heart knock at my ribs, Against the use of nature.'

This passage was scarcely intended to describe an actual hallucination, but rather that excessive predominance of the imaginative faculty which enables some men to call at will before the mind's eye, he very appearance of the object of thought that faculty which enableda great painter to place at will in the empty chair of his studio the mental delineation of any person who had given him one sitting. It is a faculty bordering on a morbid state, and apt to pass the limit, when judgment swallowed in surmise yields her function, and the imaginary becomes to the mind as real as the true, 'and nothing is, but what is not.' This early indication of Macbeth's tenden7 to hallucination is most important in the psychological development of his character."

Banquo's ghost is seen to no one but Macbeth, and unlike the ghost of Hamlet's father it is silent ; points indicating the poet's idea of it as an hallucination not an apparition ; but Macbeth is at this juncture in a state of mind closely bordering on disease, and he believes in the hallucination.

" The reality of the air-drawn dagger he did not believe in, but referred its phenomena to their proper source, with as much truth, though not with as much phlegm, as Nicola' or any other sane subject of hallucination could have done. Unlike the hallucinations of Nicolai and Ben Johnson, it caused terror although its unreality was fully recognized, because it suited with the horror of the time' of which it was a reflex. But between this time and the appearance of Banque, the stability of Macbeth's reason had under- gone a fearful ordeal. He -lacked the season of all natures—sleep' ; or, when be did sleep, it was

' In the affliction of those terrible dreams

That shake us nightly.'

Waking, he made his companions of the sorriest fancies '; and, on the torture of the mind,' he lay in restless ectasy. Truly, the caution given by his wife was likely to become a prophecy : _

These deeds must not be thought on After these ways ; so it will make us mad.'

In the point of view of psychological criticism, this fact appears on the eve of being fulfilled by the man, when to sleepless nights and days of brooding melancholy are added that undeniable indication of insanity, a credited hal- lucination. The fear was in reality fulfilled in the instance of the woman, although, at the point we have reached, when she with clear intellect and well-balanced powers is supporting her horror-struck and hallucinated hus- band, she offers a character little likely, on her next appearance, to be the subject of profound and fatal insanity. The man on the other hand, ap- pears to be almost within the limits of mental disease. Macbeth, however, saved himself from actual insanity .by rushing from the maddening horrors

i of meditation to a course of decisive resolute action. From henceforth be gave himself no time to reflect ; he made the firstlings of his heart the firstlings of his hand ; he became a fearful tyrant to his country ; but he escaped madness. The change in him, however, effected a change in his relation to his wife, which in her had the opposite result. Up to this time, her action had been that of sustaining him ; but when he waded forward in the sea of blood, without desire of the tedious return, when his thoughts were acted ere they were scanned, then his queen found her occupation gone. Her attention, heretofore directed to her husband and to outward occurrences, was forced inwards upon thaq wreck of all content which her meditation supplied."

Coleridge discovers in Lady Macbeth "the mock fortitude of a mind deluded by ambition." According to him, "she shames her husband by a superhuman audacity of fancy which she can- not support, but sinks in the season of remorse, and dies in sui- cidal agony." Very different is the physiologist's view of her cha- racter. Less complex than that of her husband, it presents none of those balancing and contending emotions which make the cha- racter of Macbeth so wide and varied a field of study. "His fiendlike wife" goes straight to her mark with relentless deter- mination. The first idea of crime comes upon Macbeth as "a horrible imagining " ; in her it is at once a "fell purpose.." It is to be remarked that she is not exhibited as participating in her husband's crimes after the murder of Duncan : and this 18 con- sistent with her character. "Having seized upon' the golden round,' her high moral courage and self- contained nature save her from those eternal suspicions and that restlesness of imagination which lead her husband onward from crime to crime. Her want of imagination, her very want of sympathy, would save her from that perversion of sympathy, whiCh, in her husband, resulted in useless deeds of blood. There are some characters capable of committing one great crime, and of resting upon it; there are others in whom the first crime is certainly and necessarily followed by a series of crimes. A bad, cold, sel- fish, and unfeeling heart may preserve a person from that fever of wicked- ness which a more sympathizing nature is prone to run into when the sym- pathies are perverted, and the mobile organization lends itself to effect their destructive suggestions. 'We have above indicated the turning point of Lady Macbeth's madness to have been the state of inactivity into which she fell when her husband broke away from her support into that bloody, bold, and resolute career which followed the murder of Banque. We can only speculate upon her course of conduct from this time. She probably in some manner gave her contenance to her husband's career, or she would scarcely have been called his "fiend-like queen ;" for it must be remembered, that although the reader is well aware of her guilt, no suspicion of her partici- pation in Duncan's murder has been excited in the other personages of the drama. We may suppose, then, that without active participation of that career of tyranny which desolated Scotland, she looked on with frigid and cruel indifference while, her imagination having no power to throw itself outwardly, it became the prey of one engrossing emotion—that of re- morse. Giving no outward expression of it in word or deed, she verified the saying of Malcolm :

The grief that does not speak 'Whispers the o'er fraught heart and bids it break.'

Cold, stedfast, and self-contained, she could no more escape from the gnaw- ing tooth of remorse, than Prometheus, chained upon his rock, could escape from the vulture-talons for ever tearing his vitals. In Macbeth's more de- monstrative and flexible nature, passion was explosive ; in her's it was con- suming. In him the inward fires found a volcanic vent ; in her their pent- up force shook in earthquake the deep foundations of the soul."

Dr. Bucknill is severe on Mr. Maclise for having represented Lady Macbeth in his picture of the banquet scene as a brawny virago, of whose fists her husband might well be afraid. The coarse low nature of Regan or Goneril might have lodged in such a cooklike figure but Lady Macbeth was "a lady, beautiful and delicate, probably small ; for it is the smaller sort of women whose emotional fire is the most fierce," and our author imagines her "to have been a blonde Rachel, with more beauty, with grey and cruel eyes, but with the same slight dry configuration and constitution, nstinct with determined nerve power.' It is satis- factory to know that this passage was written before its author was aware that a similar opinion had been expressed by Mrs. Sid- dons and by Mrs. Jamieson.

There is one passage in the essay. on Macbeth in which Dr. Bucknill seems to us to display less than his usual discernment. He states truly that the idea of murdering Duncan arose in the minds of both man and wife without suggestion from either to the other, but then he says:

"Lady Macbeth's subsequent taunt-

. What beast was't then,

That made you break this enterprise to me I' Nor time nor place did then cohere,

And yet you would make both,'—

appears to us, though we dare hardly say it, a flaw in the plot. It is cer- tainly inconsistent with Lady Macbeth's language at her first meeting with her lord. The truthfulness of these expressions can only be saved by sup- posing them to have referred to confindences between husband and wife on Duncan's murder, before Macbeth went to the wars ; a supposition incon- sistent with the development of the wicked thought as it is pourtrayed after the meeting with the weird Sisters."

The italics in the above extract are our own. We meet the proposition thus marked by asking, Is it necessary to save the truth of the expressions in question in any way, and above all by supposing a flaw in Shakespeare's plot ? To us it appears a less violent supposition, that the lady's memory may have been in- exact, or that relying, on the inexactness of her husband's memory she wilfully pointed her upbraidings with an untruth, just as she did when she pretended to disbelieve his love for her because he recoiled from his murderous purpose-

" Was the hope drunk Wherein you dress'd yourself ? lath it slept since ? And wakes it now to look so green and pale, At what it did so freely ? From this time, Such I account thy love."

Dr. Bucknill acutely remarks that she uses this threat of dis- belief in her husband's love with the confident assurance that the love was there to give it force. We may without the least im- probability impute to her the deliberate use of a similar artifice, when she charged Macbeth with having beenthe sole prime mover as in the enterprise to which she w goad' him.