of the heroine—­the character of her paramour.  A viler figure was never sketched by Balzac; a viler figure was seldom drawn by Thackeray.  But as with Balzac, so with the author of this play, the masterful will combining with the masterly art of the creator who fashions out of the worst kind of human clay the breathing likeness of a creature so hatefully pitiful and so pitifully hateful overcomes, absorbs, annihilates all sense of such abhorrence and repulsion as would prove the work which excited them no high or even true work of art.  Even the wonderful touch of dastardly brutality and pitiful self-pity with which Mosbie at once receives and repels the condolence of his mistress on his wound—­

   Alice.—­Sweet Mosbie, hide thine arm, it kills my heart.

   Mosbie.—­Ay, Mistress Arden, this is your favour.—­

even this does not make unendurable the scenic representation of what in actual life would be unendurable for any man to witness.  Such an exhibition of currish cowardice and sullen bullying spite increases rather our wondering pity for its victim than our wondering sense of her degradation.  And this is a kind of triumph which only such an artist as Shakespeare in poetry or as Balzac in prose can achieve.

Alice Arden, if she be indeed a daughter of Shakespeare’s, is the eldest born of that group to which Lady Macbeth and Dionyza belong by right of weird sisterhood.  The wives of the thane of Glamis and the governor of Tharsus, it need hardly be said, are both of them creations of a much later date—­if not of the very latest discernible or definable stage in the art of Shakespeare.  Deeply dyed as she is in bloodguiltiness, the wife of Arden is much less of a born criminal than these.  To her, at once the agent and the patient of her crime, the victim and the instrument of sacrifice and blood-offering to Venus Libitina, goddess of love and death,—­to her, even in the deepest pit of her deliberate wickedness, remorse is natural and redemption conceivable.  Like the Phaedra of Racine, and herein so nobly unlike the Phaedra of Euripides, she is capable of the deepest and bitterest penitence,—­incapable of dying with a hideous and homicidal falsehood on her long polluted lips.  Her latest breath is not a lie but a prayer.

Considering, then, in conclusion, the various and marvellous gifts displayed for the first time on our stage by the great poet, the great dramatist, the strong and subtle searcher of hearts, the just and merciful judge and painter of human passions, who gave this tragedy to the new-born literature of our drama; taking into account the really wonderful skill, the absoluteness of intuition and inspiration, with which every stroke is put in that touches off character or tones down effect, even in the sketching and grouping of such minor figures as the ruffianly hireling Black Will, the passionate artist without pity or conscience, {141} and above all the “unimitated, inimitable”