228 UNIVERSITY OF COLORADO STUDIES 



one will agree that the philosopher, the mystic, the skeptic, the poet, the 

 man 0} the world, and the writer, are immensely significant types. But 

 contrast these with the group in The Tempest, and one feels that a general 

 and proportioned chart of psychognosis is the last thing in Emerson's 

 mind. Then, again, are men like Plato, Swedenborg, Montaigne, 

 Shakespeare, Napoleon, and Goethe, really types at all, or are they quite 

 unique and exceptional men who reject the characters of all groups, 

 not least of their own special groups, to be themselves ? And yet this 

 also is unsatisfactory, because manifestly each does represent a very 

 large group distributed about an average, as all groups are, whose pur- 

 poses and aspirations, qualities and defects, are quite clear only in the 

 light of these victorious examples. The doctrine that a type represents 

 an average example of a group certainly seems to fail when appUed to 

 literature; for, however intent a poet or novelist may be in making a 

 generalized example of a group, it is in the very nature of art to intensify 

 and heighten the quaUties represented. Then again, art is above all 

 selective. A "bad memory" is a special need of the artist, and this is 

 true even of the realist. In creating ideal types all those characters of 

 a type which are irrelevant to its representative quality are omitted. 



Antonio represents intellectual egoism, yet he is far more able, intense, 

 cruel, and selfish than the average egoist; indeed, in history, we find 

 only a few who approach him in emphasis. In dealing with types of 

 situation we should find the same truth. The situations are extreme 

 rather than average types. But their supreme value is in their general 

 proportions, the truth of the whole set of them to the whole- world picture. 

 I agree with those who hold that enlightened men of our day have little 

 to learn from Shakespeare concerning particular cases of human psychol- 

 ogy; his peculiar gift to us is not his modem and specialized, but his 

 classical and proportioned, quaUty. Ibsen can describe Peer Gynt; 

 Tolstoi, Anna Karenina; but none of these recent geniuses can offer 

 us a proportioned valuation of Ufe. 



But even Shakespeare seldom endeavors to give us a complete poetic 

 Weltanschauung. When he tells a tale of jealousy, the types are selected 

 with reference to that important, but still quite narrow, phase of human 

 interest. In the Midsummer Night's Dream he did perhaps aim at 



