Titus. O de ma passion fureur desesperée!
Brutus of Voltaire, act 3. sc. 6.
What other are the foregoing instances than describing the passion another feels?
An example is given above of remorse and despair expressed by genuine and natural sentiments. In the fourth book of Paradise Lost, Satan is made to express his remorse and despair in sentiments, which though beautiful, are not altogether natural. They are rather the sentiments of a spectator, than of a person who actually is tormented with these passions.
The fourth class is of sentiments introduced too early or too late.
Some examples mentioned above belong to this class. Add the following from Venice preserv’d, act 5. at the close of the scene betwixt Belvidera and her father Priuli. The account given by Belvidera of the danger she was in, and of her husband’s threatening to murder her, ought naturally to have alarmed her relenting father, and to have made him express the most perturbed sentiments. Instead of which he dissolves into tenderness and love for his daughter, as if he had already delivered her from danger, and as if there were a perfect tranquillity.
Canst thou forgive me all my follies past?
I’ll henceforth be indeed a father; never,
Never more thus expose, but cherish thee,
Dear as the vital warmth that feeds my life,
Dear as these eyes that weep in fondness o’er thee:
Peace to thy heart.
Immoral sentiments exposed in their native colours, instead of being concealed or disguised, compose the fifth class.
The Lady Macbeth projecting the death of the King, has the following soliloquy:
—————— The raven himself’s not hoarse
That croaks the fatal entrance of Duncan
Under my battlements. Come all you spirits
That tend on mortal thoughts, unsex me here,
And fill me from the crown to th’ toe, top-full
Of direct cruelty; make thick my blood,
Stop up th’ access and passage to remorse
That no compunctious visitings of nature
Shake my fell purpose.
Macbeth, act 1. sc. 7.
This speech is not natural. Murder under trust was never perpetrated even by the most hardened miscreant without compunction. And that the lady here must have been in horrible agitation appears, from her invoking the infernal spirits to fill her with cruelty, and to stop up all avenues to remorse. But in this state of mind, it is a never-failing device of self-deceit, to draw the thickest veil over the wicked action, and to extenuate it by all circumstances that imagination can suggest. And if the crime cannot bear disguise, the next attempt is, to thrust it out of mind altogether, and to rush on to action without thought. This last was the husband’s method.