Page:The thirty-six dramatic situations (1921).djvu/116

 114 THIRTY-SIX DRAMATIC SITUATIONS Need I call attention to the small number, but the terrible beauty, of the above works? Is it necessary to indicate the infinite varieties of Remorse, according to; 1st, the fault committed (for this, enumerate all crimes and misdemeanors included in the legal code, plus those which do not fall under any law; the fault, moreover, may at the writer's pleasure be real or imag- inary, committed without intention, or intended but not committed - - which permits a "happy ending" - or both intended and committed; premeditated or not, with or without complicity, outside influences, sub- tlety, or what not); 2nd, the nature, more or less im- pressionable and nervous, of the culprit; 3rd, the sur- roundings, the circumstances, the morals which pre- pare the way for the appearance of Remorse - - that fig- ure plastic, firm and religious among the Greeks, the beneficially enervating phantasmagoria of our Middle Ages; the pious dread of a future life in recent centuries; the disturbance of the equilibrium of the social instincts and consequently of the mind according to the inferences of Zola, etc. With Remorse is connected the Fixed Idea; through its perpetual action it recalls Madness or Criminal Pas- sion. Often it is but "remorse for a desire," remorse the more keen in that the incessantly reviving desire nourishes it, mingles with it, and, growing like a sort of moral cancer, saps the soul's vitality to the point of suicide, which is itself but the most desperate of duels. "Rene," Werther," the maniac of the "Coeur Re>61a- teur" and of Berenice" (I refer to that of Edgar Poe) and especially Ibsen's "Rosmersholm," offer significant portraits of it.