SHAKESPEARE AND PSYCHOGNOSIS 23I 



I have named the situation in which Antonio hates and would murder 

 his brother the Cain motif, in order to emphasize its classical, rather 

 than its inventive, merit. The sun rises every morning, and the night 

 comes on after sunset; but sunhght and spring and youth and night 

 and winter and death are never called trite or stale or platitudinous. 

 When the right genius comes to his own, these are still the supreme 

 notes in Hterature, but, as the Ars Poetica has so well said, let no third- 

 rater attempt the tale of Troy. What greater platitude than Crossing 

 the Bar, but who thinks of that, or asks for originahty? It is when 

 Tupper writes of death that we yawn. 



It was Samuel Johnson himself who found this Cain story of Antonio 

 tedious. And who will say it is not so, if we once lose hold upon the 

 whole tragi-comedy as a mythology of human nature ? But once become 

 seized of the idea that Shakespeare is charting the world of men, draw- 

 ing with a sure hand of a Greek architect the whole parallelogram of 

 human social forces, and the more common the type, the more eager 

 the reader. It is some similar reflection that finally makes Milton's 

 great syntagma of names seem suddenly, not arid pedantry, but a glori- 

 ous illumination of history. Our tediousness comes, not from the great 

 poets, but from ourselves. 



It would be a work of supererogation to suggest the broad typical 

 value of the Cain motij, and it is no part of our purpose to trace the 

 legend genetically. What Antonio is in human character the Cain motij 

 is in human environment. The deadly animosities of social, professional, 

 and family hf e ; the ruinous hatred of commercial, municipal, and poHti- 

 cal life ; the unscrupulous wars between nations for purposes of aggran- 

 dizement, vanity, and lust of conquest, make a great part of every biog- 

 raphy and history obscure or famous. Wherever the bonds of sympathy 

 or justice have snapped we find the story of Cain repeated. 



3. The Exile Motij. — The art of this most Greek of Gothic dramas 

 is so repressed that the pathos of the exile of Prospero might easily be 

 missed. In the story of Dante we may read this phase of Prospero. 

 The loneliness of idealists has been sung over and over in modem 

 romantic writing — by Coleridge in the Ancient Mariner, by Byron in the 

 Childe Harold, by Emerson; indeed, by nearly every poet of modem 



