Of the various barriers that exist against crime, the most powerful are the checks that come from human emotions. It is easier for a criminal to resist the objections his reason interposes to evildoing than to overcome these emotional restraints: either his own emotions, woven by generations of hereditary transmission into the very framework of his nature, which make his hand tremble in the act of sinning; or the emotions his crimes excite in others, such as will cause hardened wretches, who can die calmly on the scaffold, to cower before the menaces of a mob. Crime becomes possible only because these emotions can be counteracted by more powerful emotions on the other side, by greed, by thirst for vengeance, by inflamed hatred. In Richard, however, when he is surveying his works, we find no such evil emotions raised, no gratified vengeance or triumphant hatred. The reason is that there is in him no restraining emotion to be overcome. Horror at the unnatural is not subdued, but absent; i. ii.his attitude to atrocity is the passionless attitude of the artist who recognises that the tyrant's cruelty can be set to as good music as the martyr's heroism. Readers are shocked at the scene in which Richard wooes Lady Anne beside the bier of the parent he has murdered, and wonder that so perfect an intriguer should not choose a more favourable time. But the repugnance of the reader has no place in Richard's feelings: the circumstances of the scene are so many objections, to be met by so much skill of treatment. A single detail in the play illustrates perfectly this neutral attitude to horror. Tyrrel comes to bring the news of the princes' murder; Richard answers:
iv. iii. 31.
Come to me, Tyrrel, soon at after supper,
And thou shalt tell the process of their death.
Quilp could not have waited for his gloating till after supper; other villains would have put the deed out of sight when done; the epicure in villainy reserves his bonbouche till he has leisure to do it justice. Callous to his own emotions, he is equally callous to the emotions he rouses in others. When Queen Margaret is pouring a flood of curses which make the innocent courtiers' hair stand on end, and the heaviest curse of all, which she has reserved for Richard himself, i. iii. 216-239.is rolling on its climax,
Thou slander of thy mother's heavy womb!
Thou loathed issue of thy father's loins!
Thou rag of honour! thou detested—
he adroitly slips in the word 'Margaret' in place of the intended 'Richard,' and thus, with the coolness of a schoolboy's small joke, disconcerts her tragic passion in a way that gives a moral wrench to the whole scene. iv. iv, from 136.His own mother's curse moves him not even to anger; he caps its clauses with bantering repartees, until he seizes an opportunity for a pun, and begins to move off: ii. ii. 109.he treats her curse, as in a previous scene he had treated her blessing, with a sort of gentle impatience as if tired of a fond yet somewhat troublesome parent. Finally, there is an instinct which serves as resultant to all the complex forces, emotional or rational, which sway us between right and wrong; this instinct of conscience is formally disavowed by Richard:
v. iii. 309.