But ‘ideas of treachery’!  Into what cloud cuckoo land have we been beguiled by Coleridge’s laudanum trances?  A limbo—­of this we are confident—­where Shakespeare never set foot at any moment in his life, and where no robust critical intelligence can endure for a moment.  We must save ourselves from this insidious disintegration by keeping our eye upon the object, and the object is just a good (not a very good) play.  Not an Ibsen, a Hauptmann, a Shaw, or a Masefield play, where the influence and ravages of these ‘ideas’ are certainly perceptible, but merely a Shakespeare play, one of those works of true poetic genius which can only be produced by a mind strong enough to resist every attempt at invasion by the ’idea’-bacillus.

In considering a Shakespeare play the word ‘idea’ had best be kept out of the argument altogether; but there are two senses in which it might be intelligibly used.  You might call the dramatic skeleton Shakespeare’s idea of the play.  It is the half-mechanical, half-organic factor in the work of poetic creation—­the necessary means by which a poet can conveniently explicate and express his manifold aesthetic intuitions.  This dramatic skeleton is governed by laws of its own, which were first and most brilliantly formulated by Aristotle in terms that, in essentials, hold good for all time.  You may investigate this skeleton, seize, if you can, upon the peculiarity by which it is differentiated from all other skeletons; you may say, for instance, that Othello is a tragedy of jealousy, or Hamlet of the inhibition of self-consciousness.  But if your ‘idea’ is to have any substance it must be moulded very closely upon the particular object with which you are dealing; and in the end you will find yourself reduced to the analysis of individual characters.

On the other hand, the word ‘idea’ might be intelligibly used of Shakespeare’s whole attitude to the material of his contemplation, the centre of comprehension from which he worked, the aspect under which he viewed the universe of his interest.  There is no reason to rest content with Coleridge’s application of the epithet ‘myriad-minded,’ which is, at the best, an evasion of a vital question.  The problem is to see Shakespeare’s mind sub specie unitatis.  It can be done; there never has been and never will be a human mind which can resist such an inquiry if it is pursued with sufficient perseverance and understanding.  What chiefly stands in the way is that tradition of Shakespeariolatry which Coleridge so powerfully inaugurated, not least by the epithet ‘myriad-minded.’

But of ‘ideas’ in any other senses than these—­and in neither of these cases is ‘idea’ the best word for the object of search—­let us beware as we would of the plague, in criticism of Shakespeare or any other great poet.  Poets do not have ‘ideas’; they have perceptions.  They do not have an ‘idea’; they have comprehension.  Their creation is aesthetic,