IV.

Character effects. Character of Jessica.So far, the points considered have been points of Mechanism and Plot; in the matter of Character-Interest the Jessica episode is to an even greater degree an addition to the whole effect of the play, Jessica and Lorenzo serving as a foil to Portia and Bassanio. The characters of Jessica and Lorenzoare charmingly sketched, though liable to misreading unless carefully studied. To appreciate Jessica we must in the first place assume the grossly unjust mediæval view of the Jews as social outcasts.ii.v.The dramatist has vouchsafed us a glimpse of Shylock at home, and brief as the scene is it is remarkable how much of evil is crowded into it. The breath of home life is trust, yet the one note which seems to pervade the domestic bearing of Shylock is the lowest suspiciousness.12, 16, 36.Three times as he is starting for Bassanio's supper he draws back to question the motives for which he has been invited. He is moved to a shriek of suspicion by the mere fact of his servant joining him in shouting for the absent Jessica,7.by the mention of masques, by the sight of the servant whispering to his daughter28, 44.Finally, he takes his leave with the words52.Perhaps I will return immediately,a device for keeping order in his absence which would be a low one for a nurse to use to a child, but which he is not ashamed of using to his grown-up daughter and the lady of his house. The short scene of fifty-seven lines is sufficient to give us a further reminder of Shylock's sordid house-keeping, which is glad to get rid of the good-natured Launcelot as a 'huge feeder';3, 46.and his aversion to any form of gaiety, which leads him to insist on his shutters being put up when he hears that there is a chance of a pageant in the streets28.Amidst surroundings of this type Jessica has grown up, a motherless girl, mingling only with harsh men (for we nowhere see a trace of female companionship for her):ii.iii. 20.it can hardly be objected against her that she should long for a Christian atmosphere in which her affections might have full play. Yet even for this natural reaction she feels compunction:ii.iii. 16.Alack, what heinous sin is it in meTo be ashamed to be my father's child!But though I am a daughter to his blood,I am not to his manners.Formed amidst such influences it would be a triumph to a character if it escaped repulsiveness; Jessica, on the contrary, is full of attractions. She has a simplicity which stands to her in the place of principle. More than this she has a high degree of feminine delicacy. Delicacy will be best brought out in a person who is placed in an equivocal situation, and we see Jessica engaged, not only in an elopement, but in an elopement which,ii.iv. 30.it appears, has throughout been planned by herself and not by Lorenzo. Of course a quality like feminine delicacy is more conveyed by the bearing of the actress than by positive words; we may however notice the impression which Jessica's part in the elopement scenes makes upon those who are present.ii.iv. 30-40.When Lorenzo is obliged to make a confidant of Gratiano, and tell him how it is Jessica who has planned the whole affair, instead of feeling any necessity of apologising for her the thought of her childlike innocence moves him to enthusiasm, and it is here that he exclaims:If e'er the Jew her father come to heaven,It will be for his gentle daughter's sake.ii.vi.In the scene of the elopement itself, Jessica has steered clear of both prudishness and freedom, and when after her pretty confusion she has retired from the window, even Gratiano breaks out:ii.vi. 51.Now, by my hood, a Gentile and no Jew;while Lorenzo himself has warmed to see in her qualities he had never expected:ii.vi. 52.Beshrew me but I love her heartily;For she is wise, if I can judge of her,And fair she is, if that mine eyes be true,And true she is, as she has proved herself,And therefore, like herself, wise, fair, and true,Shall she be placed in my constant soul.So generally, all with whom she comes into contact feel her spell:ii.iii. 10.the rough Launcelot parts from her with tears he is ashamed of yet cannot keep down;iii.i. 41.Salarino—the last ofmen to take high views of women—resents as a sort of blasphemy Shylock's claiming her as his flesh and blood;iii.iv, v;v.i.while between Jessica and Portia there seems to spring in an instant an attraction as mysterious as is the tie between Antonio and Bassanio.Character of Lorenzo.Lorenzo is for the most part of a dreamy inactive nature, as may be seen in his amused tolerance of Launcelot's word-fencingiii.v. 44-75.—word-fencing being in general a challenge which none of Shakespeare's characters can resist; similarly, Jessica's enthusiasm on the subject of Portia, which in reality he shares, he prefers to meet with banter:iii.v. 75-89.Even such a husbandHast thou of me as she is for a wife.But the strong side of his character also is shown us in the play:v.i. 1-24, 54-88.he has an artist soul, and to the depth of his passion for music and for the beauty of nature we are indebted for some of the noblest passages in Shakespeare. This is the attraction which has drawn him to Jessica, her outer beauty is the index of artistic sensibility within:v.i. 69, 1-24.'she is never merry when she hears sweet music,' and the soul of rhythm is awakened in her, just as much as in her husband, by the moonlight scene. Simplicity again, is a quality they have in common, as is seen by their ignorance in money-matters,iii.i. 113, 123.and the way a valuable turquoise ring goes for a monkey—if, at least, Tubal may be believed: a carelessness of money which mitigates our dislike of the free hand Jessica lays upon her father's ducats and jewels. On the whole, however, Lorenzo's dreaminess makes a pretty contrast to Jessica's vivacity. And Lorenzo's inactivity is capable of being roused to great things. This is seen by the elopement itself:esp.ii.iv. 20, 30;ii.vi. 30. &c.for the suggestion of its incidents seems to be that Lorenzo meant at first no more than trifling with the pretty Jewess, and that he rose to the occasion as he found and appreciated Jessica's higher tone and attraction.iii.iv. 24, 32.Finally, we must see the calibre of Lorenzo's character through theeyes of Portia, who selects him at first sight as the representative to whom to commit her household in her absence, of which commission she will take no refusal.Jessica and Lorenzo a foil to Portia and Bassanio.So interpreted the characters of Jessica and Lorenzo make the whole episode of the elopement an antithesis to the main plot. To a wedded couple in the fresh happiness of their union there can hardly fall a greater luxury than to further the happiness of another couple; this luxury is granted to Portia and Bassanio, and in their reception of the fugitives what picturesque contrasts are brought together! The two pairs are a foil to one another in kind, and set one another off like gold and gems. Lorenzo and Jessica are negative characters with the one positive quality of intense capacity for enjoyment; Bassanio and Portia have everything to enjoy, yet their natures appear dormant till roused by an occasion for daring and energy. The Jewess and her husband are distinguished by the bird-like simplicity that so often goes with special art-susceptibility; Portia and Bassanio are full and rounded characters in which the whole of human nature seems concentrated. The contrast is of degree as well as kind: the weaker pair brought side by side with the stronger throw out the impression of their strength. Portia has a fulness of power which puts her in her most natural position when she is extending protection to those who are less able to stand by themselves. Still more with Bassanio: he has so little scope in the scenes of the play itself, which from the nature of the stories present him always in situations of dependence on others, that we see his strength almost entirely by the reflected light of the attitude which others hold to him; in the present instance we have no difficulty in catching the intellectual power of Lorenzo, and Lorenzo looks up to Bassanio as a superior. And the couples thus contrasted in character present an equal likeness and unlikeness in their fortunes. Both are happy for ever, and both have become so through a bold stroke. Yetin the one instance it is blind obedience, in face of all temptations, to the mere whims of a good parent, who is dead, that has been guided to the one issue so passionately desired; in the case of the other couple open rebellion, at every practical risk, against the legitimate authority of an evil father, still living, has brought them no worse fate than happiness in one another, and for their defenceless position the best of patrons.It seems, then, that the introduction of the Jessica Story is justified, not only by the purposes of construction which it serves, but by the fact that its human interest is at once a contrast and a supplement to the main story, with which it blends to produce the ordered variety of a finished picture.The Rings Episode assists the mechanism of the main stories,A few words will be sufficient to point out how the effects of the main plot are assisted by the Rings Episode, which, though rich in fun, is of a slighter character than the Jessica Story, and occupies a much smaller space in the field of view. The dramatic points of the two minor stories are similar. Like the Jessica Story the Rings Episode assists the mechanical working out of the main plot. An explanation must somehow be given to Bassanio that the lawyer is Portia in disguise; mere mechanical explanations have always an air of weakness, but the affair of the rings utilises the explanation in the present case as a source of new dramatic effects. This arrangement further assists, to a certain extent, in reducing the improbability of Portia's project. The point at which the improbability would be most felt would be, not the first appearance of the lawyer's clerk, for then we are engrossed in our anxiety for Antonio, but when the explanation of the disguise came to be made; there might be a danger lest here the surprise of Bassanio should become infectious, and the audience should awake to the improbability of the whole story: as it is, their attention is at the critical moment diverted to the perplexity of the penitenthusbands.and their interweaving;The Story of the Rings, like that of Jessica, assists the interweaving of the two main stories with one another, its subtlety suggesting to what a degree of detail this interlacing extends. Bassanio is the main point which unites the Story of the Jew and the Caskets Story; in the one he occupies the position of friend, in the other of husband.iv.i. 425-454.The affair of the rings, slight as it is, is so managed by Portia that its point becomes a test as between his friendship and his love; and so equal do these forces appear that, though his friendship finally wins and he surrenders his betrothal ring, yet it is not until after his wife has given him a hint against herself:An if your wife be not a mad-woman,And know how well I have deserved the ring,She would not hold out enemy for everFor giving it to me.The Rings Episode, even more than the Jessica Story, assists in restoring the balance between the main tales. The chief inequality between them lies in the fact that the Jew Story is complicated and resolved, while the Caskets Story is a simple progress to a goal; when, however, there springs from the latter a sub-action which has a highly comic complication and resolution the two halves of the play become dramatically on a par. And the interweaving of the dark and bright elements in the play is assisted by the fact that the Episode of the Rings not only provides a comic reaction to relieve the tragic crisis, but its whole point is a Dramatic Irony in which serious and comic are inextricably mixed.and assists in the development of Portia's character.Finally, as the Jessica Story ministers to Character effect in connection with the general ensemble of the personages, so the Episode of the Rings has a special function in bringing out the character of Portia. The secret of the charm which has won for Portia the suffrages of all readers is the perfect balance of qualities in her character: she is the meeting-point of brightness, force, and tenderness. And, to crown theunion, Shakespeare has placed her at the supreme moment of life, on the boundary line between girlhood and womanhood, when the wider aims and deeper issues of maturity find themselves in strange association with the abandon of youth. The balance thus becomes so perfect that it quivers, and dips to one side and the other.i.ii. 39.Portia is the saucy child as she sprinkles her sarcasms over Nerissa's enumeration of the suitors: in the trial she faces the world of Venice as a heroine.iii.ii. 150.She is the ideal maiden in the speech in which she surrenders herself to Bassanio:iv.i. 184.she is the ideal woman as she proclaims from the judgment seat the divinity of mercy. Now the fourth Act has kept before us too exclusively one side of this character. Not that Portia in the lawyer's gown is masculine: but the dramatist has had to dwell too long on her side of strength. He will not dismiss us with this impression, but indulges us in one more daring feat surpassing all the madcap frolics of the past. Thus the Episode of the Rings is the last flicker of girlhood in Portia before it merges in the wider life of womanhood. We have rejoiced in a great deliverance wrought by a noble woman: our enjoyment rises higher yet when the Rings Episode reminds us that this woman has not ceased to be a sportive girl.It has been shown, then, that the two inferior stories inThe Merchant of Veniceassist the main stories in the most varied manner, smoothing their mechanical working, meeting their special difficulties, drawing their mutual interweaving yet closer, and throwing their character effects into relief: the additional complexity they have brought has resulted in making emphatic points yet more prominent, and the total effect has therefore been to increase clearness and simplicity. Enough has now been said on the building up of Dramas out of Stories, which is the distinguishing feature of the Romantic Drama; the studies that follow will be applied to the more universal topics of dramatic interest, Character, Plot, and Passion.FOOTNOTES:[2]It is a difficulty of literary criticism that it has to use as technical terms words belonging to ordinary conversation, and therefore more or less indefinite in their significations. In the present work I am making a distinction between 'complex' and 'complicated': the latter is applied to the diverting a story out of its natural course with a view to its ultimate 'resolution'; 'complex' is reserved for the interweaving of stories with one another. Later on 'single' will be opposed to 'complex,' and 'simple' to 'complicated.'[3]This seems to me a reasonable view notwithstanding what Jessica says to the contrary (iii. ii. 286), that she has often heard her father swear he would rather have Antonio's flesh than twenty times the value of the bond. It is one thing to swear vengeance in private, another thing to follow it up in the face of a world in opposition. A man of overbearing temper surrounded by inferiors and dependants often utters threats, and seems to find a pleasure in uttering them, which both he and his hearers know he will never carry out.IV.A picture of Ideal Villainy in Richard III.A Study in Character-Interpretation.Villainy as a subject for art-treatment.I HOPE that the subject of the present study will not be considered by any reader forbidding. On the contrary, there is surely attractiveness in the thought that nothing is so repulsive or so uninteresting in the world of fact but in some way or other it may be brought under the dominion of art-beauty. The author ofL'Allegroshows by the companion poem that he could find inspiration in a rainy morning; and the great master in English poetry is followed by a great master in English painting who wins his chief triumphs by his handling of fog and mist. Long ago the masterpiece of Virgil consecrated agricultural toil; Murillo's pictures have taught us that there is a beauty in rags and dirt; rustic commonplaces gave a life passion to Wordsworth, and were the cause of a revolution in poetry; while Dickens has penetrated into the still less promising region of low London life, and cast a halo around the colourless routine of poverty. Men's evil passions have given Tragedy to art, crime is beautified by being linked to Nemesis, meanness is the natural source for brilliant comic effects, ugliness has reserved for it a special form of art in the grotesque, and pain becomes attractive in the light of the heroism that suffers and the devotion that watches. In the infancy of modern English poetry Drayton found a poetic side to topography and maps, and Phineas Fletcher idealised anatomy; while of the twogreatest imaginations belonging to the modern world Milton produced his masterpiece in the delineation of a fiend, and Dante in a picture of hell. The final triumph of good over evil seems to have been already anticipated by art.The villainy of Richard ideal in its scale,The portrait of Richard satisfies a first condition of ideality in the scale of the whole picture. The sphere in which he is placed is not private life, but the world of history, in which moral responsibility is the highest: if, therefore, the quality of other villainies be as fine, here the issues are deeper.and in its fulness of development.As another element of the ideal, the villainy of Richard is presented to us fully developed and complete. Often an artist of crime will rely—as notably in the portraiture of Tito Melema—mainly on the succession of steps by which a character, starting from full possession of the reader's sympathies, arrives by the most natural gradations at a height of evil which shocks. In the present case all idea of growth is kept outside the field of this particular play; the opening soliloquy announces a completed process:i.i. 30.I am determined to prove a villain.What does appear of Richard's past, seen through the favourable medium of a mother's description, only seems to extend the completeness to earlier stages:iv.iv. 167.A grievous burthen was thy birth to me;Tetchy and wayward was thy infancy;Thy school-days frightful, desperate, wild, and furious,Thy prime of manhood daring, bold, and venturous,Thy age confirm'd, proud, subtle, bloody, treacherous,More mild, but yet more harmful, kind in hatred.So in the details of the play there is nowhere a note of the hesitation that betrays tentative action. When even Buckingham is puzzled as to what can be done if Hastings should resist, Richard answers:iii.i. 193.Chop off his head, man; somewhat we will do.His choice is only between different modes of villainy, never between villainy and honesty.It has no sufficient motive.Again, it is to be observed that there is no suggestion ofimpelling motive or other explanation for the villainy of Richard. He does not labour under any sense of personal injury, such as Iago felt in believing, however groundlessly,Othello:i.iii. 392, &c.that his enemies had wronged him through his wife;Lear:i.ii. 1-22.or Edmund, whose soliloquies display him as conscious that his birth has made his whole life an injury. Nor have we in this case the morbid enjoyment of suffering which we associate with Mephistopheles, and which Dickens has worked up into one of his most powerful portraits in Quilp. Richard never turns aside to gloat over the agonies of his victims; it is not so much the details as the grand schemes of villainy, the handling of large combinations of crime, that have an interest for him: he is a strategist in villainy, not a tactician. Nor can we point to ambition as a sufficient motive. He is ambitious in a sense which belongs to all vigorous natures; he has the workman's impulse to rise by his work. But ambition as a determining force in character must imply more than this; it is a sort of moral dazzling, its symptom is a fascination by ends which blinds to the ruinous means leading up to these ends. Such an ambition was Macbeth's; but in Richard the symptoms are wanting, and in all his long soliloquies he is never found dwelling upon the prize in view. A nearer approach to an explanation would be Richard's sense of bodily deformity. Not only do all who come in contact with him shrink from the 'bottled spider,'i.iii. 242, 228;iv.iv. 81, &c.but he himself gives a conspicuous place in his meditations to the thought of his ugliness; from the outset he connects his criminal career with the reflection that he 'is not shaped for sportive tricks:'i.i. 14.Deform'd, unfinish'd, sent before my timeInto this breathing world, scarce half made up,And that so lamely and unfashionableThat dogs bark at me as I halt by them;Why, I, in this weak piping time of peace,Have no delight to pass away the time,Unless to spy my shadow in the sunAnd descant on mine own deformity.Still, it would be going too far to call this the motive of his crimes: the spirit of this and similar passages is more accurately expressed by saying that he has a morbid pleasure in contemplating physical ugliness analogous to his morbid pleasure in contemplating moral baseness.esp.i.ii. 252-264.Villainy has become to Richard an end in itself.There appears, then, no sufficient explanation and motive for the villainy of Richard: the general impression conveyed is that to Richard villainy has become an end in itself needing no special motive. This is one of the simplest principles of human development—that a means to an end tends to become in time an end in itself. The miser who began accumulating to provide comforts for his old age finds the process itself of accumulating gain firmer and firmer hold upon him, until, when old age has come, he sticks to accumulating and foregoes comfort. So in previous plays Gloster may have been impelled by ambition to his crimes:compare3 Henry VI:iii.ii. 165-181.by the time the present play is reached crime itself becomes to him the dearer of the two, and the ambitious end drops out of sight. This leads directly to one of the two main features of Shakespeare's portrait: Richard is anartist in villainy.Richard an artist in villainy.What form and colour are to the painter, what rhythm and imagery are to the poet, that crime is to Richard: it is the medium in which his soul frames its conceptions of the beautiful. The gulf that separates between Shakespeare's Richard and the rest of humanity is no gross perversion of sentiment, nor the development of abnormal passions, nor a notable surrender in the struggle between interest and right. It is that he approaches villainy as a thing of pure intellect, a region of moral indifference in which sentiment and passion have no place, attraction to which implies no more motive than the simplest impulse to exercise a native talent in its natural sphere.Richard lacks the emotions naturally attending crime.Of the various barriers that exist against crime, the most powerful are the checks that come from human emotions. Itis easier for a criminal to resist the objections his reason interposes to evildoing than to overcome these emotional restraints: either his own emotions, woven by generations of hereditary transmission into the very framework of his nature, which make his hand tremble in the act of sinning; or the emotions his crimes excite in others, such as will cause hardened wretches, who can die calmly on the scaffold, to cower before the menaces of a mob. Crime becomes possible only because these emotions can be counteracted by more powerful emotions on the other side, by greed, by thirst for vengeance, by inflamed hatred. In Richard, however, when he is surveying his works, we find no such evil emotions raised, no gratified vengeance or triumphant hatred. The reason is that there is in him no restraining emotion to be overcome. Horror at the unnatural is not subdued, but absent;i.ii.his attitude to atrocity is the passionless attitude of the artist who recognises that the tyrant's cruelty can be set to as good music as the martyr's heroism. Readers are shocked at the scene in which Richard wooes Lady Anne beside the bier of the parent he has murdered, and wonder that so perfect an intriguer should not choose a more favourable time. But the repugnance of the reader has no place in Richard's feelings: the circumstances of the scene are so manyobjections, to be met by so much skill of treatment. A single detail in the play illustrates perfectly this neutral attitude to horror. Tyrrel comes to bring the news of the princes' murder; Richard answers:iv.iii. 31.Come to me, Tyrrel, soon at after supper,And thou shalt tell the process of their death.Quilp could not have waited for his gloating till after supper; other villains would have put the deed out of sight when done; the epicure in villainy reserves hisbonbouchetill he has leisure to do it justice. Callous to his own emotions, he is equally callous to the emotions he rouses in others. When Queen Margaret is pouring a flood of curses which make the innocentcourtiers' hair stand on end, and the heaviest curse of all, which she has reserved for Richard himself,i.iii. 216-239.is rolling on its climax,Thou slander of thy mother's heavy womb!Thou loathed issue of thy father's loins!Thou rag of honour! thou detested—he adroitly slips in the word 'Margaret' in place of the intended 'Richard,' and thus, with the coolness of a schoolboy's small joke, disconcerts her tragic passion in a way that gives a moral wrench to the whole scene.iv.iv, from 136.His own mother's curse moves him not even to anger; he caps its clauses with bantering repartees, until he seizes an opportunity for a pun, and begins to move off:ii.ii. 109.he treats her curse, as in a previous scene he had treated her blessing, with a sort of gentle impatience as if tired of a fond yet somewhat troublesome parent. Finally, there is an instinct which serves as resultant to all the complex forces, emotional or rational, which sway us between right and wrong; this instinct of conscience is formally disavowed by Richard:v.iii. 309.Conscience is but a word that cowards use,Devised at first to keep the strong in awe.But he regards villainy with the intellectual enthusiasm of the artist.But, if the natural heat of emotion is wanting, there is, on the other hand, the full intellectual warmth of an artist's enthusiasm, whenever Richard turns to survey the game he is playing. He reflects with a relish how he does the wrong and first begins the brawl, how he sets secret mischief abroach and charges it on to others, beweeping his own victims to simple gulls, and,i.iii, from 324.when these begin to cry for vengeance, quoting Scripture against returning evil for evil, and thus seeming a saint when most he plays the devil. The great master is known by his appreciation of details, in the least of which he can see the play of great principles: so the magnificence of Richard's villainy does not make him insensible to commonplaces of crime. When in the longusurpation conspiracy there is a moment's breathing space just before the Lord Mayor enters,iii.vi. 1-11.Richard and Buckingham utilise it for a burst of hilarity over the deep hypocrisy with which they are playing their parts; how they can counterfeit the deep tragedian, murder their breath in the middle of a word, tremble and start at wagging of a straw:—here we have the musician's flourish upon his instrument from very wantonness of skill. Again:i.i. 118.Simple, plain Clarence! I do love thee soThat I will shortly send thy soul to heaven—is the composer's pleasure at hitting upon a readily workable theme. Richard appreciates his murderers as a workman appreciates good tools:i.iii. 354.Your eyes drop millstones, when fools' eyes drop tears:I like you, lads.i.ii, from 228.And at the conclusion of the scene with Lady Anne we have the artist's enjoyment of his own masterpiece:Was ever woman in this humour woo'd?Was ever woman in this humour won?...What! I, that kill'd her husband and his father,To take her in her heart's extremest hate,With curses in her mouth, tears in her eyes,The bleeding witness of her hatred by;Having God, her conscience, and these bars against me,And I nothing to back my suit at all,But the plain devil and dissembling looks,And yet to win her, all the world to nothing!The tone in this passage is of the highest: it is the tone of a musician fresh from a triumph of his art, the sweetest point in which has been that he has condescended to no adventitious aids, no assistance of patronage or concessions to popular tastes; it has been won by pure music. So the artist in villainy celebrates a triumph ofplain devil!The villainy ideal in success: a fascination of irresistibility in Richard.This view of Richard as an artist in crime is sufficient to explain the hold which villainy has on Richard himself: butideal villainy must be ideal also in its success; and on this side of the analysis another conception in Shakespeare's portraiture becomes of first importance. It is obvious enough that Richard has all the elements of success which can be reduced to the form of skill: but he has something more. No theory of human action will be complete which does not recognise a dominion of will over will operating by mere contact, without further explanation so far as conscious influence is concerned. What is it that takes the bird into the jaws of the serpent? No persuasion or other influence on the bird's consciousness, for it struggles to keep back; we can only recognise the attraction as a force, and give it a name, fascination. In Richard there is a similar Fascination of Irresistibility, which also operates by his mere presence, and which fights for him in the same way in which the idea of their invincibility fought for conquerors like Napoleon, and was on occasions as good to them as an extra twenty or thirty thousand men. A consideration like this will be appreciated in the case oftours de forcelike the Wooing of Lady Anne, which is a stumblingblock to many readers—a widow beside the bier of her murdered husband's murdered father wooed and won by the man who makes no secret that he is the murderer of them both. The analysis of ordinary human motives would make it appear that Anne would not yield at points at which the scene represents her as yielding; some other force is wanted to explain her surrender, and it is found in this secret force of irresistible will which Richard bears about with him. But, it will be asked, in what does this fascination appear? The answer is that the idea of it is furnished to us by the other scenes of the play. Such a consideration illustrates the distinction between real and ideal. An ideal incident is not an incident of real life simply clothed in beauty of expression; nor, on the other hand, is an ideal incident divorced from the laws of real possibility. Ideal implies that the transcendental has been made possible by treatment: thatan incident (for example) which might be impossible in itself becomes possible through other incidents with which it is associated, just as in actual life the action of a public personage which may have appeared strange at the time becomes intelligible when at his death we can review his life as a whole. Such a scene as the Wooing Scene might be impossible as a fragment; it becomes possible enough in the play, where it has to be taken in connection with the rest of the plot, throughout which the irresistibility of the hero is prominent as one of the chief threads of connection.The fascination is to be conveyed in the acting.Nor is it any objection that the Wooing Scene comes early in the action. The play is not the book, but the actor's interpretation on the stage, and the actor will have collected even from the latest scenes elements of the interpretation he throws into the earliest: the actor is a lens for concentrating the light of the whole play upon every single detail. The fascination of irresistibility, then, which is to act by instinct in every scene, may be arrived at analytically when we survey the play as a whole—when we see how by Richard's innate genius, by the reversal in him of the ordinary relation of human nature to crime, especially by his perfect mastery of the successive situations as they arise, the dramatist steadily builds up an irresistibility which becomes a secret force clinging to Richard's presence, and through the operation of which his feats are half accomplished by the fact of his attempting them.The irresistibility analysed. Unlikely means.To begin with: the sense of irresistible power is brought out by the way in which the unlikeliest things are continually drawn into his schemes and utilised as means.i.i, from 42.Not to speak of his regular affectation of blunt sincerity, he makes use of the simple brotherly confidence of Clarence as an engine of fratricide,iii.iv; esp. 76 compared withiii.i. 184.and founds on the frank familiarity existing between himself and Hastings a plot by which he brings him to the block. The Queen's compunction at the thought of leaving Clarence out of thegeneral reconciliation around the dying king's bedside is the fruit of a conscience tenderer than her neighbours':ii.i, from 73: cf. 134.Richard adroitly seizes it as an opportunity for shifting on to the Queen and her friends the suspicion of the duke's murder.iii.i. 154.The childish prattle of little York Richard manages to suggest to the bystanders as dangerous treason;ii.i. 52-72.the solemnity of the king's deathbed he turns to his own purposes by outdoing all the rest in Christian forgiveness and humility;iii.v. 99, &c.and he selects devout meditation as the card to play with the Lord Mayor and citizens. On the other hand, amongst other devices for the usurpation conspiracy, he starts a slander upon his own mother's purity;iii.v. 75-94.and further—by one of the greatest strokes in the whole play—makes capital in the Wooing Scene out of his own heartlessness,i.ii. 156-167.describing in a burst of startling eloquence the scenes of horror he has passed through, the only man unmoved to tears, in order to add:And what these sorrows could not thence exhale,Thy beauty hath, and made them blind with weeping.There are things which are too sacred for villainy to touch, and there are things which are protected by their own foulness: both alike are made useful by Richard.The sensation produced by one crime made to bring about others.Similarly it is to be noticed how Richard can utilise the very sensation produced by one crime as a means to bring about more; as when he interrupts the King's dying moments to announce the death of Clarence in such a connection as must give a shock to the most unconcerned spectator,ii.i, from 77; cf. 134.and then draws attention to the pale faces of the Queen's friends as marks of guilt. He thus makes one crime beget another without further effort on his part, reversing the natural law by which each criminal act, through its drawing more suspicion to the villain, tends to limit his power for further mischief.Richard's own plans foisted on to others.It is to the same purpose that Richard chooses sometimes instead of acting himself to foist his own schemes on to others; as when he inspires Buckingham with theidea of the young king's arrest, and, when Buckingham seizes the idea as his own, meekly accepts it from him:ii.ii. 112-154; esp. 149.I, like a child, will go by thy direction.There is in all this a dreadfuleconomyof crime: not the economy of prudence seeking to reduce its amount, but the artist's economy which delights in bringing the largest number of effects out of a single device. Such skill opens up a vista of evil which is boundless.No signs of effort in Richard: imperturbability of mind.The sense of irresistible power is again brought out by his perfect imperturbability of mind: villainy never ruffles his spirits. He never misses the irony that starts up in the circumstances around him, and says to Clarence:i.i. 111.This deep disgrace in brotherhoodTouchesme deeply.While taking his part in entertaining the precocious King he treats us to continual asides—iii.i. 79, 94.So wise so young, they say, do never live long—showing how he can stop to criticise the scenes in which he is an actor.iii.iv. 24.He can delay the conspiracy on which his chance of the crown depends by coming late to the council,iii.iv. 32.and then while waiting the moment for turning upon his victim is cool enough to recollect the Bishop of Ely's strawberries.humour;But more than all these examples is to be noted Richard'shumour. This ispar excellencethe sign of a mind at ease with itself: scorn, contempt, bitter jest belong to the storm of passion, but humour is the sunshine of the soul. Yet Shakespeare has ventured to endow Richard with unquestionable humour.i.i. 151-156.Thus, in one of his earliest meditations, he prays, 'God take King Edward to his mercy,' for then he will marry Warwick's youngest daughter:What though I kill'd her husband and her father!The readiest way to make the wench amendsIs to become her husband and her father!e.g.i.i. 118;ii.ii. 109;iv.iii. 38, 43;i.iii. 142;ii.i. 72;iii.vii. 51-54, &c.And all through there perpetually occur little turns of languageinto which the actor can throw a tone of humorous enjoyment; notably, when he complains of being 'too childish-foolish for this world,' and where he nearly ruins the effect of his edifying penitence in the Reconciliation Scene, by being unable to resist one final stroke:

Character effects. Character of Jessica.

So far, the points considered have been points of Mechanism and Plot; in the matter of Character-Interest the Jessica episode is to an even greater degree an addition to the whole effect of the play, Jessica and Lorenzo serving as a foil to Portia and Bassanio. The characters of Jessica and Lorenzoare charmingly sketched, though liable to misreading unless carefully studied. To appreciate Jessica we must in the first place assume the grossly unjust mediæval view of the Jews as social outcasts.ii.v.The dramatist has vouchsafed us a glimpse of Shylock at home, and brief as the scene is it is remarkable how much of evil is crowded into it. The breath of home life is trust, yet the one note which seems to pervade the domestic bearing of Shylock is the lowest suspiciousness.12, 16, 36.Three times as he is starting for Bassanio's supper he draws back to question the motives for which he has been invited. He is moved to a shriek of suspicion by the mere fact of his servant joining him in shouting for the absent Jessica,7.by the mention of masques, by the sight of the servant whispering to his daughter28, 44.Finally, he takes his leave with the words

52.

Perhaps I will return immediately,

a device for keeping order in his absence which would be a low one for a nurse to use to a child, but which he is not ashamed of using to his grown-up daughter and the lady of his house. The short scene of fifty-seven lines is sufficient to give us a further reminder of Shylock's sordid house-keeping, which is glad to get rid of the good-natured Launcelot as a 'huge feeder';3, 46.and his aversion to any form of gaiety, which leads him to insist on his shutters being put up when he hears that there is a chance of a pageant in the streets28.Amidst surroundings of this type Jessica has grown up, a motherless girl, mingling only with harsh men (for we nowhere see a trace of female companionship for her):ii.iii. 20.it can hardly be objected against her that she should long for a Christian atmosphere in which her affections might have full play. Yet even for this natural reaction she feels compunction:

ii.iii. 16.

Alack, what heinous sin is it in meTo be ashamed to be my father's child!But though I am a daughter to his blood,I am not to his manners.

Alack, what heinous sin is it in me

To be ashamed to be my father's child!

But though I am a daughter to his blood,

I am not to his manners.

Formed amidst such influences it would be a triumph to a character if it escaped repulsiveness; Jessica, on the contrary, is full of attractions. She has a simplicity which stands to her in the place of principle. More than this she has a high degree of feminine delicacy. Delicacy will be best brought out in a person who is placed in an equivocal situation, and we see Jessica engaged, not only in an elopement, but in an elopement which,ii.iv. 30.it appears, has throughout been planned by herself and not by Lorenzo. Of course a quality like feminine delicacy is more conveyed by the bearing of the actress than by positive words; we may however notice the impression which Jessica's part in the elopement scenes makes upon those who are present.ii.iv. 30-40.When Lorenzo is obliged to make a confidant of Gratiano, and tell him how it is Jessica who has planned the whole affair, instead of feeling any necessity of apologising for her the thought of her childlike innocence moves him to enthusiasm, and it is here that he exclaims:

If e'er the Jew her father come to heaven,It will be for his gentle daughter's sake.

If e'er the Jew her father come to heaven,

It will be for his gentle daughter's sake.

ii.vi.

In the scene of the elopement itself, Jessica has steered clear of both prudishness and freedom, and when after her pretty confusion she has retired from the window, even Gratiano breaks out:

ii.vi. 51.

Now, by my hood, a Gentile and no Jew;

while Lorenzo himself has warmed to see in her qualities he had never expected:

ii.vi. 52.

Beshrew me but I love her heartily;For she is wise, if I can judge of her,And fair she is, if that mine eyes be true,And true she is, as she has proved herself,And therefore, like herself, wise, fair, and true,Shall she be placed in my constant soul.

Beshrew me but I love her heartily;

For she is wise, if I can judge of her,

And fair she is, if that mine eyes be true,

And true she is, as she has proved herself,

And therefore, like herself, wise, fair, and true,

Shall she be placed in my constant soul.

So generally, all with whom she comes into contact feel her spell:ii.iii. 10.the rough Launcelot parts from her with tears he is ashamed of yet cannot keep down;iii.i. 41.Salarino—the last ofmen to take high views of women—resents as a sort of blasphemy Shylock's claiming her as his flesh and blood;iii.iv, v;v.i.while between Jessica and Portia there seems to spring in an instant an attraction as mysterious as is the tie between Antonio and Bassanio.

Character of Lorenzo.

Lorenzo is for the most part of a dreamy inactive nature, as may be seen in his amused tolerance of Launcelot's word-fencingiii.v. 44-75.—word-fencing being in general a challenge which none of Shakespeare's characters can resist; similarly, Jessica's enthusiasm on the subject of Portia, which in reality he shares, he prefers to meet with banter:

iii.v. 75-89.

Even such a husbandHast thou of me as she is for a wife.

Even such a husband

Hast thou of me as she is for a wife.

But the strong side of his character also is shown us in the play:v.i. 1-24, 54-88.he has an artist soul, and to the depth of his passion for music and for the beauty of nature we are indebted for some of the noblest passages in Shakespeare. This is the attraction which has drawn him to Jessica, her outer beauty is the index of artistic sensibility within:v.i. 69, 1-24.'she is never merry when she hears sweet music,' and the soul of rhythm is awakened in her, just as much as in her husband, by the moonlight scene. Simplicity again, is a quality they have in common, as is seen by their ignorance in money-matters,iii.i. 113, 123.and the way a valuable turquoise ring goes for a monkey—if, at least, Tubal may be believed: a carelessness of money which mitigates our dislike of the free hand Jessica lays upon her father's ducats and jewels. On the whole, however, Lorenzo's dreaminess makes a pretty contrast to Jessica's vivacity. And Lorenzo's inactivity is capable of being roused to great things. This is seen by the elopement itself:esp.ii.iv. 20, 30;ii.vi. 30. &c.for the suggestion of its incidents seems to be that Lorenzo meant at first no more than trifling with the pretty Jewess, and that he rose to the occasion as he found and appreciated Jessica's higher tone and attraction.iii.iv. 24, 32.Finally, we must see the calibre of Lorenzo's character through theeyes of Portia, who selects him at first sight as the representative to whom to commit her household in her absence, of which commission she will take no refusal.

Jessica and Lorenzo a foil to Portia and Bassanio.

So interpreted the characters of Jessica and Lorenzo make the whole episode of the elopement an antithesis to the main plot. To a wedded couple in the fresh happiness of their union there can hardly fall a greater luxury than to further the happiness of another couple; this luxury is granted to Portia and Bassanio, and in their reception of the fugitives what picturesque contrasts are brought together! The two pairs are a foil to one another in kind, and set one another off like gold and gems. Lorenzo and Jessica are negative characters with the one positive quality of intense capacity for enjoyment; Bassanio and Portia have everything to enjoy, yet their natures appear dormant till roused by an occasion for daring and energy. The Jewess and her husband are distinguished by the bird-like simplicity that so often goes with special art-susceptibility; Portia and Bassanio are full and rounded characters in which the whole of human nature seems concentrated. The contrast is of degree as well as kind: the weaker pair brought side by side with the stronger throw out the impression of their strength. Portia has a fulness of power which puts her in her most natural position when she is extending protection to those who are less able to stand by themselves. Still more with Bassanio: he has so little scope in the scenes of the play itself, which from the nature of the stories present him always in situations of dependence on others, that we see his strength almost entirely by the reflected light of the attitude which others hold to him; in the present instance we have no difficulty in catching the intellectual power of Lorenzo, and Lorenzo looks up to Bassanio as a superior. And the couples thus contrasted in character present an equal likeness and unlikeness in their fortunes. Both are happy for ever, and both have become so through a bold stroke. Yetin the one instance it is blind obedience, in face of all temptations, to the mere whims of a good parent, who is dead, that has been guided to the one issue so passionately desired; in the case of the other couple open rebellion, at every practical risk, against the legitimate authority of an evil father, still living, has brought them no worse fate than happiness in one another, and for their defenceless position the best of patrons.

It seems, then, that the introduction of the Jessica Story is justified, not only by the purposes of construction which it serves, but by the fact that its human interest is at once a contrast and a supplement to the main story, with which it blends to produce the ordered variety of a finished picture.

The Rings Episode assists the mechanism of the main stories,

A few words will be sufficient to point out how the effects of the main plot are assisted by the Rings Episode, which, though rich in fun, is of a slighter character than the Jessica Story, and occupies a much smaller space in the field of view. The dramatic points of the two minor stories are similar. Like the Jessica Story the Rings Episode assists the mechanical working out of the main plot. An explanation must somehow be given to Bassanio that the lawyer is Portia in disguise; mere mechanical explanations have always an air of weakness, but the affair of the rings utilises the explanation in the present case as a source of new dramatic effects. This arrangement further assists, to a certain extent, in reducing the improbability of Portia's project. The point at which the improbability would be most felt would be, not the first appearance of the lawyer's clerk, for then we are engrossed in our anxiety for Antonio, but when the explanation of the disguise came to be made; there might be a danger lest here the surprise of Bassanio should become infectious, and the audience should awake to the improbability of the whole story: as it is, their attention is at the critical moment diverted to the perplexity of the penitenthusbands.and their interweaving;The Story of the Rings, like that of Jessica, assists the interweaving of the two main stories with one another, its subtlety suggesting to what a degree of detail this interlacing extends. Bassanio is the main point which unites the Story of the Jew and the Caskets Story; in the one he occupies the position of friend, in the other of husband.iv.i. 425-454.The affair of the rings, slight as it is, is so managed by Portia that its point becomes a test as between his friendship and his love; and so equal do these forces appear that, though his friendship finally wins and he surrenders his betrothal ring, yet it is not until after his wife has given him a hint against herself:

An if your wife be not a mad-woman,And know how well I have deserved the ring,She would not hold out enemy for everFor giving it to me.

An if your wife be not a mad-woman,

And know how well I have deserved the ring,

She would not hold out enemy for ever

For giving it to me.

The Rings Episode, even more than the Jessica Story, assists in restoring the balance between the main tales. The chief inequality between them lies in the fact that the Jew Story is complicated and resolved, while the Caskets Story is a simple progress to a goal; when, however, there springs from the latter a sub-action which has a highly comic complication and resolution the two halves of the play become dramatically on a par. And the interweaving of the dark and bright elements in the play is assisted by the fact that the Episode of the Rings not only provides a comic reaction to relieve the tragic crisis, but its whole point is a Dramatic Irony in which serious and comic are inextricably mixed.

and assists in the development of Portia's character.

Finally, as the Jessica Story ministers to Character effect in connection with the general ensemble of the personages, so the Episode of the Rings has a special function in bringing out the character of Portia. The secret of the charm which has won for Portia the suffrages of all readers is the perfect balance of qualities in her character: she is the meeting-point of brightness, force, and tenderness. And, to crown theunion, Shakespeare has placed her at the supreme moment of life, on the boundary line between girlhood and womanhood, when the wider aims and deeper issues of maturity find themselves in strange association with the abandon of youth. The balance thus becomes so perfect that it quivers, and dips to one side and the other.i.ii. 39.Portia is the saucy child as she sprinkles her sarcasms over Nerissa's enumeration of the suitors: in the trial she faces the world of Venice as a heroine.iii.ii. 150.She is the ideal maiden in the speech in which she surrenders herself to Bassanio:iv.i. 184.she is the ideal woman as she proclaims from the judgment seat the divinity of mercy. Now the fourth Act has kept before us too exclusively one side of this character. Not that Portia in the lawyer's gown is masculine: but the dramatist has had to dwell too long on her side of strength. He will not dismiss us with this impression, but indulges us in one more daring feat surpassing all the madcap frolics of the past. Thus the Episode of the Rings is the last flicker of girlhood in Portia before it merges in the wider life of womanhood. We have rejoiced in a great deliverance wrought by a noble woman: our enjoyment rises higher yet when the Rings Episode reminds us that this woman has not ceased to be a sportive girl.

It has been shown, then, that the two inferior stories inThe Merchant of Veniceassist the main stories in the most varied manner, smoothing their mechanical working, meeting their special difficulties, drawing their mutual interweaving yet closer, and throwing their character effects into relief: the additional complexity they have brought has resulted in making emphatic points yet more prominent, and the total effect has therefore been to increase clearness and simplicity. Enough has now been said on the building up of Dramas out of Stories, which is the distinguishing feature of the Romantic Drama; the studies that follow will be applied to the more universal topics of dramatic interest, Character, Plot, and Passion.

FOOTNOTES:[2]It is a difficulty of literary criticism that it has to use as technical terms words belonging to ordinary conversation, and therefore more or less indefinite in their significations. In the present work I am making a distinction between 'complex' and 'complicated': the latter is applied to the diverting a story out of its natural course with a view to its ultimate 'resolution'; 'complex' is reserved for the interweaving of stories with one another. Later on 'single' will be opposed to 'complex,' and 'simple' to 'complicated.'[3]This seems to me a reasonable view notwithstanding what Jessica says to the contrary (iii. ii. 286), that she has often heard her father swear he would rather have Antonio's flesh than twenty times the value of the bond. It is one thing to swear vengeance in private, another thing to follow it up in the face of a world in opposition. A man of overbearing temper surrounded by inferiors and dependants often utters threats, and seems to find a pleasure in uttering them, which both he and his hearers know he will never carry out.

[2]It is a difficulty of literary criticism that it has to use as technical terms words belonging to ordinary conversation, and therefore more or less indefinite in their significations. In the present work I am making a distinction between 'complex' and 'complicated': the latter is applied to the diverting a story out of its natural course with a view to its ultimate 'resolution'; 'complex' is reserved for the interweaving of stories with one another. Later on 'single' will be opposed to 'complex,' and 'simple' to 'complicated.'

[3]This seems to me a reasonable view notwithstanding what Jessica says to the contrary (iii. ii. 286), that she has often heard her father swear he would rather have Antonio's flesh than twenty times the value of the bond. It is one thing to swear vengeance in private, another thing to follow it up in the face of a world in opposition. A man of overbearing temper surrounded by inferiors and dependants often utters threats, and seems to find a pleasure in uttering them, which both he and his hearers know he will never carry out.

A picture of Ideal Villainy in Richard III.

A Study in Character-Interpretation.

Villainy as a subject for art-treatment.

I HOPE that the subject of the present study will not be considered by any reader forbidding. On the contrary, there is surely attractiveness in the thought that nothing is so repulsive or so uninteresting in the world of fact but in some way or other it may be brought under the dominion of art-beauty. The author ofL'Allegroshows by the companion poem that he could find inspiration in a rainy morning; and the great master in English poetry is followed by a great master in English painting who wins his chief triumphs by his handling of fog and mist. Long ago the masterpiece of Virgil consecrated agricultural toil; Murillo's pictures have taught us that there is a beauty in rags and dirt; rustic commonplaces gave a life passion to Wordsworth, and were the cause of a revolution in poetry; while Dickens has penetrated into the still less promising region of low London life, and cast a halo around the colourless routine of poverty. Men's evil passions have given Tragedy to art, crime is beautified by being linked to Nemesis, meanness is the natural source for brilliant comic effects, ugliness has reserved for it a special form of art in the grotesque, and pain becomes attractive in the light of the heroism that suffers and the devotion that watches. In the infancy of modern English poetry Drayton found a poetic side to topography and maps, and Phineas Fletcher idealised anatomy; while of the twogreatest imaginations belonging to the modern world Milton produced his masterpiece in the delineation of a fiend, and Dante in a picture of hell. The final triumph of good over evil seems to have been already anticipated by art.

The villainy of Richard ideal in its scale,

The portrait of Richard satisfies a first condition of ideality in the scale of the whole picture. The sphere in which he is placed is not private life, but the world of history, in which moral responsibility is the highest: if, therefore, the quality of other villainies be as fine, here the issues are deeper.and in its fulness of development.As another element of the ideal, the villainy of Richard is presented to us fully developed and complete. Often an artist of crime will rely—as notably in the portraiture of Tito Melema—mainly on the succession of steps by which a character, starting from full possession of the reader's sympathies, arrives by the most natural gradations at a height of evil which shocks. In the present case all idea of growth is kept outside the field of this particular play; the opening soliloquy announces a completed process:

i.i. 30.

I am determined to prove a villain.

What does appear of Richard's past, seen through the favourable medium of a mother's description, only seems to extend the completeness to earlier stages:

iv.iv. 167.

A grievous burthen was thy birth to me;Tetchy and wayward was thy infancy;Thy school-days frightful, desperate, wild, and furious,Thy prime of manhood daring, bold, and venturous,Thy age confirm'd, proud, subtle, bloody, treacherous,More mild, but yet more harmful, kind in hatred.

A grievous burthen was thy birth to me;

Tetchy and wayward was thy infancy;

Thy school-days frightful, desperate, wild, and furious,

Thy prime of manhood daring, bold, and venturous,

Thy age confirm'd, proud, subtle, bloody, treacherous,

More mild, but yet more harmful, kind in hatred.

So in the details of the play there is nowhere a note of the hesitation that betrays tentative action. When even Buckingham is puzzled as to what can be done if Hastings should resist, Richard answers:

iii.i. 193.

Chop off his head, man; somewhat we will do.

His choice is only between different modes of villainy, never between villainy and honesty.

It has no sufficient motive.

Again, it is to be observed that there is no suggestion ofimpelling motive or other explanation for the villainy of Richard. He does not labour under any sense of personal injury, such as Iago felt in believing, however groundlessly,Othello:i.iii. 392, &c.that his enemies had wronged him through his wife;Lear:i.ii. 1-22.or Edmund, whose soliloquies display him as conscious that his birth has made his whole life an injury. Nor have we in this case the morbid enjoyment of suffering which we associate with Mephistopheles, and which Dickens has worked up into one of his most powerful portraits in Quilp. Richard never turns aside to gloat over the agonies of his victims; it is not so much the details as the grand schemes of villainy, the handling of large combinations of crime, that have an interest for him: he is a strategist in villainy, not a tactician. Nor can we point to ambition as a sufficient motive. He is ambitious in a sense which belongs to all vigorous natures; he has the workman's impulse to rise by his work. But ambition as a determining force in character must imply more than this; it is a sort of moral dazzling, its symptom is a fascination by ends which blinds to the ruinous means leading up to these ends. Such an ambition was Macbeth's; but in Richard the symptoms are wanting, and in all his long soliloquies he is never found dwelling upon the prize in view. A nearer approach to an explanation would be Richard's sense of bodily deformity. Not only do all who come in contact with him shrink from the 'bottled spider,'i.iii. 242, 228;iv.iv. 81, &c.but he himself gives a conspicuous place in his meditations to the thought of his ugliness; from the outset he connects his criminal career with the reflection that he 'is not shaped for sportive tricks:'

i.i. 14.

Deform'd, unfinish'd, sent before my timeInto this breathing world, scarce half made up,And that so lamely and unfashionableThat dogs bark at me as I halt by them;Why, I, in this weak piping time of peace,Have no delight to pass away the time,Unless to spy my shadow in the sunAnd descant on mine own deformity.

Deform'd, unfinish'd, sent before my time

Into this breathing world, scarce half made up,

And that so lamely and unfashionable

That dogs bark at me as I halt by them;

Why, I, in this weak piping time of peace,

Have no delight to pass away the time,

Unless to spy my shadow in the sun

And descant on mine own deformity.

Still, it would be going too far to call this the motive of his crimes: the spirit of this and similar passages is more accurately expressed by saying that he has a morbid pleasure in contemplating physical ugliness analogous to his morbid pleasure in contemplating moral baseness.

esp.i.ii. 252-264.

Villainy has become to Richard an end in itself.

There appears, then, no sufficient explanation and motive for the villainy of Richard: the general impression conveyed is that to Richard villainy has become an end in itself needing no special motive. This is one of the simplest principles of human development—that a means to an end tends to become in time an end in itself. The miser who began accumulating to provide comforts for his old age finds the process itself of accumulating gain firmer and firmer hold upon him, until, when old age has come, he sticks to accumulating and foregoes comfort. So in previous plays Gloster may have been impelled by ambition to his crimes:compare3 Henry VI:iii.ii. 165-181.by the time the present play is reached crime itself becomes to him the dearer of the two, and the ambitious end drops out of sight. This leads directly to one of the two main features of Shakespeare's portrait: Richard is anartist in villainy.Richard an artist in villainy.What form and colour are to the painter, what rhythm and imagery are to the poet, that crime is to Richard: it is the medium in which his soul frames its conceptions of the beautiful. The gulf that separates between Shakespeare's Richard and the rest of humanity is no gross perversion of sentiment, nor the development of abnormal passions, nor a notable surrender in the struggle between interest and right. It is that he approaches villainy as a thing of pure intellect, a region of moral indifference in which sentiment and passion have no place, attraction to which implies no more motive than the simplest impulse to exercise a native talent in its natural sphere.

Richard lacks the emotions naturally attending crime.

Of the various barriers that exist against crime, the most powerful are the checks that come from human emotions. Itis easier for a criminal to resist the objections his reason interposes to evildoing than to overcome these emotional restraints: either his own emotions, woven by generations of hereditary transmission into the very framework of his nature, which make his hand tremble in the act of sinning; or the emotions his crimes excite in others, such as will cause hardened wretches, who can die calmly on the scaffold, to cower before the menaces of a mob. Crime becomes possible only because these emotions can be counteracted by more powerful emotions on the other side, by greed, by thirst for vengeance, by inflamed hatred. In Richard, however, when he is surveying his works, we find no such evil emotions raised, no gratified vengeance or triumphant hatred. The reason is that there is in him no restraining emotion to be overcome. Horror at the unnatural is not subdued, but absent;i.ii.his attitude to atrocity is the passionless attitude of the artist who recognises that the tyrant's cruelty can be set to as good music as the martyr's heroism. Readers are shocked at the scene in which Richard wooes Lady Anne beside the bier of the parent he has murdered, and wonder that so perfect an intriguer should not choose a more favourable time. But the repugnance of the reader has no place in Richard's feelings: the circumstances of the scene are so manyobjections, to be met by so much skill of treatment. A single detail in the play illustrates perfectly this neutral attitude to horror. Tyrrel comes to bring the news of the princes' murder; Richard answers:

iv.iii. 31.

Come to me, Tyrrel, soon at after supper,And thou shalt tell the process of their death.

Come to me, Tyrrel, soon at after supper,

And thou shalt tell the process of their death.

Quilp could not have waited for his gloating till after supper; other villains would have put the deed out of sight when done; the epicure in villainy reserves hisbonbouchetill he has leisure to do it justice. Callous to his own emotions, he is equally callous to the emotions he rouses in others. When Queen Margaret is pouring a flood of curses which make the innocentcourtiers' hair stand on end, and the heaviest curse of all, which she has reserved for Richard himself,i.iii. 216-239.is rolling on its climax,

Thou slander of thy mother's heavy womb!Thou loathed issue of thy father's loins!Thou rag of honour! thou detested—

Thou slander of thy mother's heavy womb!

Thou loathed issue of thy father's loins!

Thou rag of honour! thou detested—

he adroitly slips in the word 'Margaret' in place of the intended 'Richard,' and thus, with the coolness of a schoolboy's small joke, disconcerts her tragic passion in a way that gives a moral wrench to the whole scene.iv.iv, from 136.His own mother's curse moves him not even to anger; he caps its clauses with bantering repartees, until he seizes an opportunity for a pun, and begins to move off:ii.ii. 109.he treats her curse, as in a previous scene he had treated her blessing, with a sort of gentle impatience as if tired of a fond yet somewhat troublesome parent. Finally, there is an instinct which serves as resultant to all the complex forces, emotional or rational, which sway us between right and wrong; this instinct of conscience is formally disavowed by Richard:

v.iii. 309.

Conscience is but a word that cowards use,Devised at first to keep the strong in awe.

Conscience is but a word that cowards use,

Devised at first to keep the strong in awe.

But he regards villainy with the intellectual enthusiasm of the artist.

But, if the natural heat of emotion is wanting, there is, on the other hand, the full intellectual warmth of an artist's enthusiasm, whenever Richard turns to survey the game he is playing. He reflects with a relish how he does the wrong and first begins the brawl, how he sets secret mischief abroach and charges it on to others, beweeping his own victims to simple gulls, and,i.iii, from 324.when these begin to cry for vengeance, quoting Scripture against returning evil for evil, and thus seeming a saint when most he plays the devil. The great master is known by his appreciation of details, in the least of which he can see the play of great principles: so the magnificence of Richard's villainy does not make him insensible to commonplaces of crime. When in the longusurpation conspiracy there is a moment's breathing space just before the Lord Mayor enters,iii.vi. 1-11.Richard and Buckingham utilise it for a burst of hilarity over the deep hypocrisy with which they are playing their parts; how they can counterfeit the deep tragedian, murder their breath in the middle of a word, tremble and start at wagging of a straw:—here we have the musician's flourish upon his instrument from very wantonness of skill. Again:

i.i. 118.

Simple, plain Clarence! I do love thee soThat I will shortly send thy soul to heaven—

Simple, plain Clarence! I do love thee so

That I will shortly send thy soul to heaven—

is the composer's pleasure at hitting upon a readily workable theme. Richard appreciates his murderers as a workman appreciates good tools:

i.iii. 354.

Your eyes drop millstones, when fools' eyes drop tears:I like you, lads.

Your eyes drop millstones, when fools' eyes drop tears:

I like you, lads.

i.ii, from 228.

And at the conclusion of the scene with Lady Anne we have the artist's enjoyment of his own masterpiece:

Was ever woman in this humour woo'd?Was ever woman in this humour won?...What! I, that kill'd her husband and his father,To take her in her heart's extremest hate,With curses in her mouth, tears in her eyes,The bleeding witness of her hatred by;Having God, her conscience, and these bars against me,And I nothing to back my suit at all,But the plain devil and dissembling looks,And yet to win her, all the world to nothing!

Was ever woman in this humour woo'd?

Was ever woman in this humour won?...

What! I, that kill'd her husband and his father,

To take her in her heart's extremest hate,

With curses in her mouth, tears in her eyes,

The bleeding witness of her hatred by;

Having God, her conscience, and these bars against me,

And I nothing to back my suit at all,

But the plain devil and dissembling looks,

And yet to win her, all the world to nothing!

The tone in this passage is of the highest: it is the tone of a musician fresh from a triumph of his art, the sweetest point in which has been that he has condescended to no adventitious aids, no assistance of patronage or concessions to popular tastes; it has been won by pure music. So the artist in villainy celebrates a triumph ofplain devil!

The villainy ideal in success: a fascination of irresistibility in Richard.

This view of Richard as an artist in crime is sufficient to explain the hold which villainy has on Richard himself: butideal villainy must be ideal also in its success; and on this side of the analysis another conception in Shakespeare's portraiture becomes of first importance. It is obvious enough that Richard has all the elements of success which can be reduced to the form of skill: but he has something more. No theory of human action will be complete which does not recognise a dominion of will over will operating by mere contact, without further explanation so far as conscious influence is concerned. What is it that takes the bird into the jaws of the serpent? No persuasion or other influence on the bird's consciousness, for it struggles to keep back; we can only recognise the attraction as a force, and give it a name, fascination. In Richard there is a similar Fascination of Irresistibility, which also operates by his mere presence, and which fights for him in the same way in which the idea of their invincibility fought for conquerors like Napoleon, and was on occasions as good to them as an extra twenty or thirty thousand men. A consideration like this will be appreciated in the case oftours de forcelike the Wooing of Lady Anne, which is a stumblingblock to many readers—a widow beside the bier of her murdered husband's murdered father wooed and won by the man who makes no secret that he is the murderer of them both. The analysis of ordinary human motives would make it appear that Anne would not yield at points at which the scene represents her as yielding; some other force is wanted to explain her surrender, and it is found in this secret force of irresistible will which Richard bears about with him. But, it will be asked, in what does this fascination appear? The answer is that the idea of it is furnished to us by the other scenes of the play. Such a consideration illustrates the distinction between real and ideal. An ideal incident is not an incident of real life simply clothed in beauty of expression; nor, on the other hand, is an ideal incident divorced from the laws of real possibility. Ideal implies that the transcendental has been made possible by treatment: thatan incident (for example) which might be impossible in itself becomes possible through other incidents with which it is associated, just as in actual life the action of a public personage which may have appeared strange at the time becomes intelligible when at his death we can review his life as a whole. Such a scene as the Wooing Scene might be impossible as a fragment; it becomes possible enough in the play, where it has to be taken in connection with the rest of the plot, throughout which the irresistibility of the hero is prominent as one of the chief threads of connection.The fascination is to be conveyed in the acting.Nor is it any objection that the Wooing Scene comes early in the action. The play is not the book, but the actor's interpretation on the stage, and the actor will have collected even from the latest scenes elements of the interpretation he throws into the earliest: the actor is a lens for concentrating the light of the whole play upon every single detail. The fascination of irresistibility, then, which is to act by instinct in every scene, may be arrived at analytically when we survey the play as a whole—when we see how by Richard's innate genius, by the reversal in him of the ordinary relation of human nature to crime, especially by his perfect mastery of the successive situations as they arise, the dramatist steadily builds up an irresistibility which becomes a secret force clinging to Richard's presence, and through the operation of which his feats are half accomplished by the fact of his attempting them.

The irresistibility analysed. Unlikely means.

To begin with: the sense of irresistible power is brought out by the way in which the unlikeliest things are continually drawn into his schemes and utilised as means.i.i, from 42.Not to speak of his regular affectation of blunt sincerity, he makes use of the simple brotherly confidence of Clarence as an engine of fratricide,iii.iv; esp. 76 compared withiii.i. 184.and founds on the frank familiarity existing between himself and Hastings a plot by which he brings him to the block. The Queen's compunction at the thought of leaving Clarence out of thegeneral reconciliation around the dying king's bedside is the fruit of a conscience tenderer than her neighbours':ii.i, from 73: cf. 134.Richard adroitly seizes it as an opportunity for shifting on to the Queen and her friends the suspicion of the duke's murder.iii.i. 154.The childish prattle of little York Richard manages to suggest to the bystanders as dangerous treason;ii.i. 52-72.the solemnity of the king's deathbed he turns to his own purposes by outdoing all the rest in Christian forgiveness and humility;iii.v. 99, &c.and he selects devout meditation as the card to play with the Lord Mayor and citizens. On the other hand, amongst other devices for the usurpation conspiracy, he starts a slander upon his own mother's purity;iii.v. 75-94.and further—by one of the greatest strokes in the whole play—makes capital in the Wooing Scene out of his own heartlessness,i.ii. 156-167.describing in a burst of startling eloquence the scenes of horror he has passed through, the only man unmoved to tears, in order to add:

And what these sorrows could not thence exhale,Thy beauty hath, and made them blind with weeping.

And what these sorrows could not thence exhale,

Thy beauty hath, and made them blind with weeping.

There are things which are too sacred for villainy to touch, and there are things which are protected by their own foulness: both alike are made useful by Richard.

The sensation produced by one crime made to bring about others.

Similarly it is to be noticed how Richard can utilise the very sensation produced by one crime as a means to bring about more; as when he interrupts the King's dying moments to announce the death of Clarence in such a connection as must give a shock to the most unconcerned spectator,ii.i, from 77; cf. 134.and then draws attention to the pale faces of the Queen's friends as marks of guilt. He thus makes one crime beget another without further effort on his part, reversing the natural law by which each criminal act, through its drawing more suspicion to the villain, tends to limit his power for further mischief.Richard's own plans foisted on to others.It is to the same purpose that Richard chooses sometimes instead of acting himself to foist his own schemes on to others; as when he inspires Buckingham with theidea of the young king's arrest, and, when Buckingham seizes the idea as his own, meekly accepts it from him:

ii.ii. 112-154; esp. 149.

I, like a child, will go by thy direction.

There is in all this a dreadfuleconomyof crime: not the economy of prudence seeking to reduce its amount, but the artist's economy which delights in bringing the largest number of effects out of a single device. Such skill opens up a vista of evil which is boundless.

No signs of effort in Richard: imperturbability of mind.

The sense of irresistible power is again brought out by his perfect imperturbability of mind: villainy never ruffles his spirits. He never misses the irony that starts up in the circumstances around him, and says to Clarence:

i.i. 111.

This deep disgrace in brotherhoodTouchesme deeply.

This deep disgrace in brotherhood

Touchesme deeply.

While taking his part in entertaining the precocious King he treats us to continual asides—

iii.i. 79, 94.

So wise so young, they say, do never live long—

showing how he can stop to criticise the scenes in which he is an actor.iii.iv. 24.He can delay the conspiracy on which his chance of the crown depends by coming late to the council,iii.iv. 32.and then while waiting the moment for turning upon his victim is cool enough to recollect the Bishop of Ely's strawberries.humour;But more than all these examples is to be noted Richard'shumour. This ispar excellencethe sign of a mind at ease with itself: scorn, contempt, bitter jest belong to the storm of passion, but humour is the sunshine of the soul. Yet Shakespeare has ventured to endow Richard with unquestionable humour.i.i. 151-156.Thus, in one of his earliest meditations, he prays, 'God take King Edward to his mercy,' for then he will marry Warwick's youngest daughter:

What though I kill'd her husband and her father!The readiest way to make the wench amendsIs to become her husband and her father!

What though I kill'd her husband and her father!

The readiest way to make the wench amends

Is to become her husband and her father!

e.g.i.i. 118;ii.ii. 109;iv.iii. 38, 43;i.iii. 142;ii.i. 72;iii.vii. 51-54, &c.

And all through there perpetually occur little turns of languageinto which the actor can throw a tone of humorous enjoyment; notably, when he complains of being 'too childish-foolish for this world,' and where he nearly ruins the effect of his edifying penitence in the Reconciliation Scene, by being unable to resist one final stroke:

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