from these heights (such as they are) of
philosophising, and illustrate the difference between true and false
"idealising" in Poetry by concrete example: and no two better examples
occur to me, for drawing this contrast, than Webster's _Duchess of
Malfy_ and Shakespeare's _Macbeth_. Each of these plays excites horror
and is calculated to excite horror; both have outlived three hundred
years, there or thereabouts; both may be taken as having established an
indefinitely long lease on men's admiration--but to any critical mind,
how different an admiration! Webster is an expert, a _virtuoso_ in
horrifics; in flesh-creeping effects lies his skill; and, indulging that
skill, he not only paints the lily, but repaints it and daubs it yet a
third time. There is no reason on earth--she has offended against no
moral law on earth or in the heavens--that could possibly condemn the
Duchess to the hellish tortures she is made to endure. At the worst she
has married a man beneath her in station. To punish her in Webster's
extravagant fashion every other character, with the whole story of the
play, has to be dehumanised. To me--as I penetrate the Fourth Act--the
whole business becomes ludicrous: not sanely comic, or even quite sanely
absurd: but bizarre, and ridiculously bizarre at that. It has no "idea"
at all, no relation to the Universal in the shape of any moral order,
"law," fate, doom, destiny. It is just a box of tricks, of raw heads and
bloody bones, left with the lid open. That is false "idealising";
Webster choosing his effect and "improving" it for all he was
worth--which (let it be added) was a great deal.

* * * * *

Turn from _The Duchess of Malfy_ to _Macbeth_, and you find an English
poet as sensitive of fate, doom, destiny, "law," the moral order, as
ever was Aeschylus; nay, interpreting it perhaps more effectively than
ever did Aeschylus. In the First Act we see it suggested to Macbeth by
witchcraft (which is the personified foe of moral order) that he can
achieve an ambition by an unlawful path, the ambition itself being
suggested along with the way to it and growing as the way opens. We see
them both communicated to a feminine mind, narrower, more intent and
practical; because narrower, because more intent and practical, for the
moment more courageous. (It was Eve that the Serpent, wily enough,
selected to tempt.) Both Macbeth and his lady move to the deed under a
law which--for a whi