Page:The Psychology of Shakespeare.pdf/24

Rh evil emotion is in the heart the representation of the bad action.

The great interest of this drama is most skilfully made to depend upon the conflicting emotions of sympathy with a man struggling under fearful temptation ; horror excited by treachery and foul murder ; awful amazement at the visible grasp of the Spirit of Evil upon the human soul ; and of satisfied justice at the hell of remorse into which he is plunged. In this respect there is an obvious parallelism between Macbeth and Faust ; since in both the hero-cri

minal of the piece is not responsible as a free agent, so far as he is but the mortal instrument of the fiend in deeds of

evil. The conduct of Faust, however, is not comparable to that of the fierce and bloody Scotch tyrant, and he is saved from our utter disgust and hatred by the more immediate inter vention of the fiend in the execution of the murders, both of

Margaret's mother and her brother.

Had the action not been

thus arranged, had Faust himself poisoned the mother and

slain the brother, all sympathy with him as a human soul in the hands of fate would have been destroyed in the irrepres sible feelings which attach to a base and dastardly criminal. In Macbeth the fiercer temptation, fanned not only by the evil solicitings of the devil, but by the agency of his dark and terrible human tempter and colleague, renders it possible to commit the perpetration of crimes to his own hand, without destroying those traces of sympathy, without which any deep interest in his fate would have been impossible. The temptation of the weird Sisters has an immediate effect on Macbeth. In the presence of others, he soliloquises, and calls upon himself the remark: “Look how our partner's wrapt.” The immediate fulfilment of two parts of the prophecy come as “happy prologues to the swelling act,” and murder is