f the highest names in imaginative
literature--a name sometimes most improperly and absurdly inscribed on
the register of the realistic school, {137} we may say that the
difference on this point is not the difference between Balzac and Dumas,
but the distinction between Balzac and M. Zola. Let us take by way of
example the character next in importance to that 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 capa