Miscellaneous Essays | Page 2

way, I must observe, that in one respect they
have had an ill effect, by making the connoisseur in murder very
fastidious in his taste, and dissatisfied by anything that has been since
done in that line. All other murders look pale by the deep crimson of
his; and, as an amateur once said to me in a querulous tone, "There has
been absolutely nothing doing since his time, or nothing that's worth
speaking of." But this is wrong; for it is unreasonable to expect all men
to be great artists, and born with the genius of Mr. Williams. Now it
will be remembered that in the first of these murders, (that of the Marrs,)
the same incident (of a knocking at the door soon after the work of
extermination was complete) did actually occur, which the genius of

Shakspeare has invented; and all good judges, and the most eminent
dilettanti, acknowledged the felicity of Shakspeare's suggestion as soon
as it was actually realized. Here, then, was a fresh proof that I was right
in relying on my own feeling in opposition to my understanding; and I
again set myself to study the problem; at length I solved it to my own
satisfaction; and my solution is this. Murder in ordinary cases, where
the sympathy is wholly directed to the case of the murdered person, is
an incident of coarse and vulgar horror; and for this reason, that it
flings the interest exclusively upon the natural but ignoble instinct by
which we cleave to life; an instinct, which, as being indispensable to
the primal law of self-preservation, is the same in kind, (though
different in degree,) amongst all living creatures; this instinct therefore,
because it annihilates all distinctions, and degrades the greatest of men
to the level of "the poor beetle that we tread on," exhibits human nature
in its most abject and humiliating attitude. Such an attitude would little
suit the purposes of the poet. What then must he do? He must throw the
interest on the murderer. Our sympathy must be with _him_; (of course
I mean a sympathy of comprehension, a sympathy by which we enter
into his feelings, and are made to understand them,--not a sympathy[1]
of pity or approbation.) In the murdered person all strife of thought, all
flux and reflux of passion and of purpose, are crushed by one
overwhelming panic; the fear of instant death smites him "with its
petrific mace." But in the murderer, such a murderer as a poet will
condescend to, there must be raging some great storm of
passion,--jealousy, ambition, vengeance, hatred,--which will create a
hell within him; and into this hell we are to look.
[Footnote 1: It seems almost ludicrous to guard and explain my use of a
word in a situation where it would naturally explain itself. But it has
become necessary to do so, in consequence of the unscholarlike use of
the word sympathy, at present so general, by which, instead of taking it
in its proper sense, as the act of reproducing in our minds the feelings
of another, whether for hatred, indignation, love, pity, or approbation, it
is made a mere synonyme of the word _pity_; and hence, instead of
saying "sympathy with another," many writers adopt the monstrous
barbarism of "sympathy for another."]
In Macbeth, for the sake of gratifying his own enormous and teeming
faculty of creation, Shakspeare has introduced two murderers: and, as

usual in his hands, they are remarkably discriminated: but, though in
Macbeth the strife of mind is greater than in his wife, the tiger spirit not
so awake, and his feelings caught chiefly by contagion from her,--yet,
as both were finally involved in the guilt of murder, the murderous
mind of necessity is finally to be presumed in both. This was to be
expressed; and on its own account, as well as to make it a more
proportionable antagonist to the unoffending nature of their victim, "the
gracious Duncan," and adequately to expound "the deep damnation of
his taking off," this was to be expressed with peculiar energy. We were
to be made to feel that the human nature, _i.e._, the divine nature of
love and mercy, spread through the hearts of all creatures, and seldom
utterly withdrawn from man,--was gone, vanished, extinct; and that the
fiendish nature had taken its place. And, as this effect is marvellously
accomplished in the dialogues and soliloquies themselves, so it is
finally consummated by the expedient under consideration; and it is to
this that I now solicit the reader's attention. If the reader has ever
witnessed a wife, daughter, or sister, in a fainting fit, he may chance to
have observed that the most affecting moment in such a spectacle, is
that in which a sigh and a stirring announce the recommencement