yet it is impossible to say that Shakespeare has here taken us into previously unplumbed depths of human nature, as he has in Hamlet, or in Lear.  No doubt it is often very hard to decide whether a given personage is a mere projection of the known or a divination of the unknown.  What are we to say, for example, of Cleopatra, or of Shylock, or of Macbeth?  Richard II, on the other hand, is as clearly a piece of psychology as the Nurse in Romeo and Juliet is a piece of character-drawing.  The comedy of types necessarily tends to keep within the limits of the known, and Moliere—­in spite of Alceste and Don Juan—­is characteristically a character-drawer, as Racine is characteristically a psychologist.  Ibsen is a psychologist or he is nothing.  Earl Skule and Bishop Nicholas, Hedda Gabler and John Gabriel Borkman are daring explorations of hitherto uncharted regions of the human soul.  But Ibsen, too, was a character-drawer when it suited him.  One is tempted to say that there is no psychology in Brand—­he is a mere incarnation of intransigent idealism—­while Peer Gynt is as brilliant a psychological inspiration as Don Quixote.  Dr. Stockmann is a vigorously-projected character, Hialmar Ekdal a piece of searching psychology.  Finally, my point could scarcely be better illustrated than by a comparison—­cruel but instructive —­between Rebecca in Rosmersholm and the heroine in Bella Donna.  Each is, in effect, a murderess, though it was a moral, not a mineral, poison that Rebecca employed.  But while we know nothing whatever of Mrs. Armine’s mental processes, Rebecca’s temptations, struggles, sophistries, hesitations, resolves, and revulsions of feeling are all laid bare to us, so that we feel her to be no monster, but a living woman, comprehensible to our intelligence, and, however blameworthy, not wholly beyond the range of our sympathies.  There are few greater achievements of psychology.

Among the playwrights of to-day, I should call Mr. Granville Barker above all things a psychologist.  It is his instinct to venture into untrodden fields of character, or, at any rate, to probe deeply into phenomena which others have noted but superficially, if at all.  Hence the occasional obscurity of his dialogue.  Mr. Shaw is not, primarily, either a character-drawer or a psychologist, but a dealer in personified ideas.  His leading figures are, as a rule, either his mouthpieces or his butts.  When he gives us a piece of real character-drawing, it is generally in some subordinate personage.  Mr. Galsworthy, I should say, shows himself a psychologist in Strife, a character-drawer in The Silver Box and Justice.  Sir Arthur Pinero, a character-drawer of great versatility, becomes a psychologist in some of his studies of feminine types—­in Iris, in Letty, in the luckless heroine of Mid-Channel.  Mr. Clyde Fitch had, at least, laudable ambitions in the direction of psychology.  Becky in The Truth, and Jinny in The Girl with the Green