Page:Wit, humor, and Shakspeare. Twelve essays (IA cu31924013161223).pdf/195

 feeling, which has gained a temporary relief, is able to take up again the awful clew, and to wait during Macbeth's feigned unconsciousness till Macduff bursts upon us with his horror. Moreover, the carousing which the Porter mentions was the cover to Macbeth's opportunity, and just keeps the night alive in our memory, while we think how innocently drunk the whole household was to provide a human weakness for an act of death. Macbeth enters, whose wife conceived the stratagem of the drinking, and soon the result of it arrives. An after-clap of Hell settles back on the Porter's traces; but he has performed his function by letting life and human nature in upon the sexless and monstrous scene, and may now vacate his post.

Still, the Porter is conventionally vulgar, and cannot be accepted by a taste that is more fastidious than the world itself is. But, if the world chooses to be vulgar, why needed Shakspeare to have imported this base touch of realism into his art? Only by the permission of Humor, and the justification of an exigency to drag our feelings back to life by the handiest strand, however coarse it may be. And after he had invented that thrilling moment of the knocking at the gate, he cannot get along without the house-porter, who is the only one awake enough to let honest Nature in. So we must take him as he is, and admire the poet who did not send the Muse of Tragedy to draw the bolt.

The Agamemnon of Æschylus reaches a breathless moment of suspense, when Clytemnestra has left the scene to plan the murder of her husband, and the