ble instruments of Karma, will break into Dunsinane Castle and do their duty. And when we hear him answering the Doctor's report of Lady Macbeth's condition with that famous query of his, that query which is no less anxious because it is expressed ironically

Canst thou not minister to a mind diseas'd; Pluck from the memory a rooted sorrow; Raze out the written troubles of the brain; And with some sweet oblivious antidote Cleanse the stuff'd bosom of that perilous stuff

Which weighs upon the heart?

--can we help grieving for the terrible loss that is coming upon him in the hour of his sorest need? Some of the finest poetry that Shakespeare ever wrote is uttered by this blood-stained regicide. And this reminds me that in my essay upon Hamlet in Harper's Magazine for May, 1904, I promised to show that Shakespeare, who, on occasion, allowed his own personality to declare itself, in many scenes of many plays, was especially liable to do this in Macbeth. "Never," says Richter, "does a man portray his own character more vividly than in his manner of portraying another." But "this does not apply to dramatists of the first class," says the Shakespeariolator; "it does not apply to Shakespeare. If in Shakespeare's plays the names of the characters were omitted, I could tell who were the speakers." A certain overconfident critic really did say this. Could he perform this feat? Let us imagine a reader of average intelligence reading Shakespeare for the first time; and, further, let us imagine him reading Shakespeare in some emended version edited in folio with his usual industry by the late Mr. Perkins-Collier-edited with various passages from various plays transposed. Let us suppose the student coming upon the following soliloquy by the young Prince of Denmark in the churchyard of Elsinore:

To-morrow and to-morrow and to-morrow
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day
To the last syllable of recorded time,
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief
candle!

Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player That struts and frets his hour upon the stage,

And then is heard no more; it is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.

"How thoroughly dramatic!" we can hear our virgin Shakespearian exclaim. "Who but Shakespeare would or could have put these words into the only mouth that could have uttered themthe mouth of his great metaphysical character, Hamlet?"

Or let us suppose the same student coming upon those before-quoted Hamletian lines which follow the evanishment of the dagger in the second act of Macbeth, and let us suppose them put by Perkins-Collier into Hamlet's mouth at midnight on the Elsinore platform.

"How wonderfully, how superbly dramatic!" would exclaim the virgin Shakespearian. "Who but Shakespeare would or could have written so dramatically as this? An inferior dramatist of these degenerate days would be sure to put such words, if he could only write them, into the wrong mouth-into Claudio's mouth or perhaps into Prospero's, or— for there is no limit to the contemporary dramatist's ineptitude-into the mouth of Macbeth himself as he stands at Duncan's bedroom door, dagger in hand, waiting till Lady Macbeth 'strike upon the bell.' But to put them into the mouth of a character like Hamlet—a dreamer whose imagination actualizes, poetizes the dry syllogisms of the mere metaphysician- a dreamer of whose peculiar temper such lines as,

We are such stuff

As dreams are made on, and our little life Is rounded by a sleep,

and such lines as,

To die and go we know not where, and such lines as,

To be or not to be,

are the key-notes-to do this a Shakespeare is required."

Just as there is a good deal of human nature in man, so there is a good deal of Shakespeare in Shakespeare's characters, especially in Hamlet and Macbeth. Not that Shakespeare ever killed a king, nor did Macbeth, for the matter of that. The true Macbeth, the Mac

beth of history, was no more a hero en mal than was Shakespeare himself. But that does not in the least signify when a great poet condescends to make use of a king to work out the tragic mischief of a play.

come

Shakespeare has lately been denounced as a snob, and I am afraid that affair of the bogus coat of arms shows that he was not entirely free from the snobbery of feudalism, but no one knew better than he no one felt more strongly than he that above all monarchs sits a great suzerain, the Lord of the Pen, who uses kings and who utters truths or lies according to his pleasure. When Charles the Twelfth wanted his librarian to hand from the library a volume of history, he used to say, Give me my liar." And well he might. But if you to the fine accomplishment of lying, what is the mere jog-trot muse of history to the muse of poetry, against whose slanderous utterances there is no appeal? Supposing that in the unknown country of shadows which lies beyond the stars the shade of King Macbethad, son of Finnlaech (who fell at the battle of Lumphanon, after having for seventeen years reigned over Scotlandreigned with so generous a hand that he was called "Macbethad the Liberal") -supposing that this wronged hero en bien should happen to meet the shade of the author of Macbeth, and suppose that the warrior-king should protest, with the meekness that becomes a king in confronting a poet, against the wrong done to his memory-suppose he should ask the poet what was his justification for having depicted him as the protagonist of assassins-him who never killed a man in his life save in open battle, while Duncan, his supposed victim, really did succeed to the Scottish throne because his path had been somehow made clear for him by a family murder-suppose Macbeth should presume to ask such a question of the poet, what reply would the shade of the suzerain make? Would he deign to make any reply at all, or would he simply beckon to the shade of Raphael Holinshed (from whose chronicle the story of Macbeth is drawn) to relieve him from the irksomeness of answering idle questions?

I have said that Macbeth and Lady Macbeth are the only two characters who are not in some degree plot-ridden; but so complete is the marriage bond between them that we get here two characters who make together but one hero en mal. And this is strange, that the most perfect spiritual marriage in poetry is between two of poetry's greatest criminals.

But in order to make myself clear I am obliged to repeat a certain dialogue on the subject that I wrote on a former occasion: "I remember being much struck once by some words of Pascal's, 'Il y a des héros en mal comme en bien.' Now, did it ever occur to you that since the tragic mischief of drama ceased to be Fate, the hero en mal has been a very important personage in a drama or story, more important sometimes than even the hero en bien himself?"

"Certainly; that is so in Walter Scott's that stories, where it frequently occurs the hero en bien is just a 'washed out walking gentleman,'-the heroes en mal, Rob Roy and Roshley Osbaldistone, interest us in everything they do and say; and, again, what character in Vanity Fair interests us as Becky Sharp does?" "Just so; and it is only so long as the hero en bien makes an effective foil to the hero en mal that he can be called a success." "I suppose that the protagonist of all heroes en mal is Macbeth." "You forget that Macbeth and Lady Macbeth make one hero en mal. The idea of man's dual nature, of which literature, especially Oriental literature, is so full, is expressed by Shakespeare once for all in his characterization of Macbeth and Lady Macbeth, which represents the marriage state in its ideal form.' "Really whatever subject you take up flashes out at once under a new light." "When the double-souled hero en mal rushes, dagger in hand, into the chamber of the hero en bien, Duncan, for whom is it that we hold our breath? Is it on account of the hero en bien, who we know is going to be stuck like a pig? Not a bit of it: it is on account of the hero en mal. And when there comes the terrible knocking at the gate, is it through our sympathy with the hero en bien, who we know is just now lying murdered, that the pulsations of our

hearts are arrested? Not a bit of it: it is our sympathy with the picturesque hero en mal, who has lifted assassination to the highest poetry."

With regard to this famous scene, however, there is something more to say.

Was it not De Quincey's forgetfulness of the importance of the hero en mal in drama that led him to write his famous essay on "the knocking at the gate in Macbeth"? He there seeks to explain the startling effect of the knocking which follows the murder of Duncan by some far-sought theory about the breaking in of the "real" world upon that "imaginary" world into which the poet has taken us. Like so many of Shakespeare's critics, he is much too acute to understand such a stupid creature as man, therefore much too acute to understand such a truthful delineator of man as Shakespeare. A little less acuteness would have shown him that the startling effect of that knocking is caused by the fact that our sympathy is with the hero en mal when he has entered the murder-chamber, and that we have identified ourselves with him, and we, the audience, are that hero; and when the knocking comes upon us, with our hands steeped in the blood of the bero en bien, we stand appalled lest our crime should be discovered. For the honor of human nature, however, let me hasten to suggest that this is not because we love assassination, but because there is some deep law in imaginative illusion whereby the identification of the spectator's personality is with the active character in most dramatic actions rather than with the passive.

I have before asked the question, Was Eschylus conscious of such a law of the human mind when he made Agamemnon fall under the hand of Clytemnestra, though the poet of the Odyssey had distinctly declared that it was her paltry paramour Ægisthus who struck the blow? For note how enormously more powerful is the play made by this change. The mention of Clytemnestra brings me naturally to Lady Macbeth. For in studying her character it seems impossible to avoid comparing her with the great heroine en mal of Eschylus. Which is the greater creation of these two it would be difficult to say.

Undoubtedly, however, there are finer touches of humanity and femininity in Clytemnestra than in Lady Macbeth. There is nothing so fine in this line in the speeches that Shakespeare puts into the mouth of Lady Macbeth as Clytem

nestra's allusion to Agamemnon's sacrificing for his own ambition their daughter Iphigenia. Nor is there in the character of Lady Macbeth anything so human or womanly as that speech in the Agamemnon towards the end of the play where Clytemnestra checks the bloodthirstiness of Ægisthus and bids him not perpetrate any further ills.

Of course, seeing that this allusion to her daughter comes in after the assassination, and not before it, it may be taken as an open question whether or not the allusion is self-sophisticatory or self-justificatory, but whichever way we read it, it seems to humanize Clytemnestra, and this alone is sufficient to place her above Lady Macbeth, considered as a separate entity and not as a moiety of one and the same hero en mal. But to say the truth, the character of Lady Macbeth has been so often discussed and discussed, and my space here is so limited, that I will in conclusion turn to a branch of the subject upon which there is more opportunity of saying something new. I mean the Porter's speech during the knocking.

Of this speech Coleridge said that he believes it to have been written for the mob, and written by some other hand than Shakespeare's. But why? Now I am going to show that one of the most important differences between classic and romantic tragedy is involved in this apparently simple question of who wrote the Porter's speech. Nothing is more effective in giving that warmth, vitality, and reality which Shakespeare always seeks in his tragedies than the humorous scenes-sometimes broad enough, to be sure-which he introduces into them. The power of humor for securing illusion, whether it be absolute humor as in the case of Shakespeare or relative humor as in the case of Ben Jonson, is far greater than is generally supposed. The secret of it seems to lie near the heart of the human enigma itself. Perhaps it was because the eighteenth century-the age of acceptance which preceded the Renascence of Wonderignored that enigma that humor was banished from tragedy. But if we consider what would be the illusion of Hamlet, or Macbeth, or Lear, or Goethe's Faust without this element of humor