s nothing to the present
purpose. In intent she is a murderess, no less than Lucrezia Borgia or
the Marquise de Brinvilliers. And the authors have drawn her character
cleverly enough. They have shown her in the first act as a
shallow-souled materialist, and in the later acts as a vain, irritable,
sensual, unscrupulous creature. But have they given us any insight into
her psychology? No, that is just what they have not done. They have
assigned to her certain characteristics without which cruel and
cold-blooded murder would be inconceivable; but they have afforded us no
insight into the moral conditions and, mental processes which make it,
not only conceivable, but almost an everyday occurrence. For the average
human mind, I suppose, the psychology of crime, and especially of
fiendish, hypocritical murder-by-inches, has an undeniable fascination.
To most of us it seems an abhorrent miracle; and it would interest us
greatly to have it brought more or less within the range of our
comprehension, and co-ordinated with other mental phenomena which we can
and do understand. But of such illumination we find nothing in _Bella
Donna_. It leaves the working of a poisoner's mind as dark to us as
ever. So far as that goes, we might just as well have read the report of
a murder-trial, wherein the facts are stated with, perhaps, some
superficial speculation as to motive, but no attempt is made to
penetrate to underlying soul-states. Yet this is surely the highest
privilege of art--to take us behind and beneath those surfaces of things
which are apparent to the detective and the reporter, the juryman and
the judge.

Have we not here, then, the distinction between character-drawing and
psychology? Character-drawing is the presentment of human nature in its
commonly-recognized, understood, and accepted aspects; psychology is, as
it were, the exploration of character, the bringing of hitherto
unsurveyed tracts within the circle of our knowledge and comprehension.
In other words, character-drawing is synthetic, psychology analytic.
This does not mean that the one is necessarily inferior to the other.
Some of the greatest masterpieces of creative art have been achieved by
the synthesis of known elements. Falstaff, for example--there is no more
brilliant or more living character in all fiction; yet it is impossible
to say that Shakespeare has here taken us into previously unplumbed
depths of human nature, as he has in Hamlet, or in Lear. No d