When the Porter lets in Macduff and Lenox, he seems to have admitted also a very garish and vulgar kind of day, that displays loosely some infirmities of men, unconscious of the more awful crime within,—a very broad and unequivocal daylight that lies sharply on all objects without toning them. The Porter's disquisition upon drinking and lechery is apparently superfluous and revolting, but it is really well conceived; for we want something to carry our mood as far as possible away from Duncan's chamber and from all thoughts about discovering the deed, because Macbeth is about to enter. "Our knocking has awaked him." Then our 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 Chorus, shuddering with its divination of the deed, expresses our expectation. All at once a stifled exclamation struggles out from the interior of the palace: the Chorus whispers, "Hush! who is it that cries out, 'A blow'?" and the play soon closes with the sombre feeling unrelieved. Nothing intervenes to assist the spectators back to life, and to the other persons whose interests implicate them so deeply in the plot. There is but one interest and one action in a Greek Tragedy, and when that is reached the nature of the scene is exhausted; the poet has no more to say, and is not conscious of any craving for variety in his listeners. His play was an artistic embodiment of the current religious ideas, and so far was secluded, as the modern pulpit is, from manifold life. It is not possible to discover a place in these solemn developments of Fate, where a feeling of Humor could intrude. The Chorus, listening to the blow, intervenes instead of a Porter. It is the voice of an audience conscious of the crime. So is a modern audience conscious of Macbeth's crime, but that consciousness is itself the Chorus, whose ancient function is distributed through the silent hearts of the spectators, who are thus permitted to mingle in every awful occurrence, and therefore need to be restored again to the ordinary world of justice and emotion.
Shakspeare exhibits the supreme nature of his genius when he meets this exigency which antique religion did not feel. He admits the free play of life into its real closeness with all our moral and pathetic emotions; but we never find that Humor weakens the religious purpose of the play, as it would if our private anguish were unseasonably interrupted by it, because our personal fortunes are not touched by the tragedy. We are implicated in the scene only by our instinct of observation and sympathy; that needs relief, but, if the blow struck us and became a "fee-grief due to each single breast," we could endure it as we do in real life, as we prefer to do, with a temper that keeps all other strings muted but sorrow. So the Humor which we would not tolerate when the tempest breaks upon our roof-tree, and is sullen within every chamber, is no unwelcome surprise when the heart is so keenly summoned by the mimic scene.
THE CLOWN IN "TWELFTH NIGHT."
The name of the Clown does not appear in the dramatis personæ, and only once in the text, Act ii. 4, where he is called Feste. All the dainty songs of the play are put into his mouth. Feste was the name of a distinguished musician and composer, probably a friend of Shakspeare. We may even surmise that he set to music one or more of his namesake's songs. There is no play which employs the element of music so frequently, or that speaks of it in the tender terms which only a lover of melody can use. It is admitted into the plot as a confidant and adviser, and allowed to sway the moods of the characters.
The Duke calls for Cesario (Viola) to repeat
"That piece of song,
That old and antique song we heard last night."
The Duke has forgotten that Feste, and not Cesario, was the singer. Fleay overlooks this touch of nature, and attributes the passage to an older play or first draught, which appears uncorrected in the present play. But the Duke is mooning about in his sentimental fashion, and vaguely recollects that Cesario was presented to him as one that could sing "and speak to him in many sorts of music." He had done so, no doubt, so that the mistake was natural to the distraught mind of the Duke, who seems to allude to it when he says immediately to Cesario,—