lete) did actually occur which the genius of Shakspeare had
invented: and all good judges and the most eminent dilettanti
acknowledged the felicity of Shakspeare's suggestion as soon as it was
actually realized. Here then was a fresh proof that I had been right
in relying on my own feeling in opposition to my understanding; and
again I set myself to study the problem: at length I solved it to my
own satisfaction; and my solution is this. Murder in ordinary cases,
where the sympathy is wholly directed to the case of the murdered
person, is an incident of coarse and vulgar horror; and for this
reason--that it flings the interest exclusively upon the natural but
ignoble instinct by which we cleave to life; an instinct which, as
being indispensable to the primal law of self-preservation, is the
same in kind (though different in degree) amongst all living
creatures; this instinct therefore, because it annihilates all
distinctions, and degrades the greatest of men to the level of "the
poor beetle that we tread on," exhibits human nature in its most
abject and humiliating attitude. Such an attitude would little suit
the purposes of the poet. What then must he do? He must throw the
interest on the murderer: our sympathy must be with _him_; (of course
I mean a sympathy of comprehension, a sympathy by which we enter into
his feelings, and are made to understand them,--not a sympathy[47] of
pity or approbation:) in the murdered person all strife of thought,
all flux and reflux of passion and of purpose, are crushed by one
overwhelming panic: the fear of instant death smites him "with its
petrific mace." [Footnote 47: It seems almost ludicrous to guard and
explain my use of a word in a situation where it should naturally
explain itself. But it has become necessary to do so, in consequence
of the unscholarlike use of the word sympathy, at present so general,
by which, instead of taking it in its proper use, as the act of
reproducing in our minds the feelings of another, whether for hatred,
indignation, love, pity, or approbation, it is made a mere synonyme of
the word _pity_; and hence, instead of saying, "sympathy _with_
another," many writers adopt the monstrous barbarism of "sympathy
_for_ another."] But in the murderer, such a murderer as a poet will
condescend to, there must be raging some great storm of
passion,--jealousy, ambition, vengeance, hatred,--which will create a
hell within him; and into this hell we are to look. In M