cent courtiers' hair stand on end, and the heaviest curse of CHAP. IV. all, which she has reserved for Richard himself, is rolling on to its climax,

Thou slander of thy mother's heavy womb!

Thou loathed issue of thy father's loins!

Thou rag of honour! thou detested—

he adroitly slips in the word 'Margaret' in place of the intended Richard,' and thus, with the coolness of a school

boy's small joke, disconcerts her tragic passion in a way that

i. iii. 216239.

gives a moral wrench to the whole scene. His own mother's iv. iv, from
curse moves him not even to anger; he caps its clauses with 136.
bantering repartees, until he seizes an opportunity for a pun,
and begins to move off: he treats her curse, as in a previous
scene he had treated her blessing, with a sort of gentle im- ii. ii. 109.
patience as if tired of a fond yet somewhat troublesome
parent. Finally, there is an instinct which serves as resultant
to all the complex forces, emotional or rational, which sway
us between right and wrong; this instinct of conscience is
formally disavowed by Richard:

Conscience is but a word that cowards use,
Devised at first to keep the strong in awe.

v. iii. 309.

villainy

intellectual

artist.

But, if the natural heat of emotion is wanting, there is, on But he rethe other hand, the full intellectual warmth of an artist's gards enthusiasm, whenever Richard turns to survey the game he is with the playing. He reflects with a relish how he does the wrong enthusiasm and first begins the brawl, how he sets secret mischief of the abroach and charges it on to others, beweeping his own victims to simple gulls, and, when these begin to cry for vengeance, quoting Scripture against returning evil for evil, and thus seeming a saint when most he plays the devil. The great master is known by his appreciation of details, in the least of which he can see the play of great principles: so the

i. iii, from

324.

CHAP. IV. usurpation conspiracy there is a moment's breathing space just before the Lord Mayor enters, Richard and Buckingham iii. v. I-II. utilise it for a burst of hilarity over the deep hypocrisy with

i. i. 118.

i. iii. 354.

which they are playing their parts; how they can counterfeit
the deep tragedian, murder their breath in the middle of a
world, tremble and start at wagging of a straw :-here we
have the musician's flourish upon his instrument from very
wantonness of skill. Again:

Simple, plain Clarence! I do love thee so
That I will shortly send thy soul to heaven—

is the composer's pleasure at hitting upon a readily workable
theme. Richard appreciates his murderers as a workman
appreciates good tools :

Your eyes drop millstones, when fools' eyes drop tears:
I like you, lads.

i. ii, from And at the conclusion of the scene with Lady Anne we have the artist's enjoyment of his own masterpiece:

228.

Was ever woman in this humour woo'd?

Was ever woman in this humour won?...

What! I, that kill'd her husband and his father,

To take her in her heart's extremest hate,

With curses in her mouth, tears in her eyes,

The bleeding witness of her hatred by;

Having God, her conscience, and these bars against me,

And I nothing to back my suit at all,

But the plain devil and dissembling looks,

And yet to win her, all the world to nothing!

The tone in this passage is of the highest: it is the tone of a musician fresh from a triumph of his art, the sweetest point in which has been that he has condescended to no adventitious aids, no assistance of patronage or concessions to popular tastes; it has been won by pure music. So the artist in villainy celebrates a triumph of plain devil!

This view of Richard as an artist in crime is sufficient to bos on Richard himself; but

ideal villainy must be ideal also in its success; and on this CHAP. IV. side of the analysis another conception in Shakespeare's success: a portraiture becomes of first importance. It is obvious enough fascination that Richard has all the elements of success which can be of irresistireduced to the form of skill: but he has something more. Richard. bility in No theory of human action will be complete which does not recognise a dominion of will over will operating by mere contact, without further explanation so far as conscious influence is concerned. What is it that takes the bird into the jaws of the serpent? No persuasion or other influence on the bird's. consciousness, for it struggles to keep back; we can only recognise the attraction as a force, and give it a name, fascination. In Richard there is a similar fascination of irresistibility, which also operates by his mere presence, and which fights for him in the same way in which the idea of their invincibility fought for conquerors like Napoleon, and was on occasions as good to them as an extra twenty or thirty thousand men. A consideration like this will be appreciated in the case of tours de force like the Wooing of Lady Anne, which is a stumblingblock to many readers—a widow beside the bier of her murdered husband's murdered father wooed and won by the man who makes no secret that he is the murderer of them both. The analysis of ordinary human motives would make it appear that Anne would not yield at points at which the scene represents her as yielding; some other force is wanted to explain her surrender, and it is found in this secret force of irresistible will which Richard bears about with him. But, it will be asked, in what does this fascination appear? The answer is that the idea of it is furnished to us by the other scenes of the play. Such a consideration illustrates the distinction between real and ideal. An ideal incident is not an incident of real life simply clothed in beauty of expression; nor, on the other hand, is an ideal incident divorced from the laws of real possibility. Ideal implies that

CHAP. IV. an incident (for example) which might be impossible in itself becomes possible through other incidents with which it is associated, just as in actual life the action of a public personage which may have appeared strange at the time becomes intelligible when at his death we can review his life as a whole. Such a scene as the Wooing Scene might be impossible as a fragment; it becomes possible enough in the play, where it has to be taken in connection with the rest of the plot, throughout which the irresistibility of the hero is The fasci- prominent as one of the chief threads of connection. Nor is nation is to it any objection that the Wooing Scene comes early in the be conveyed in the action. The play is not the book, but the actor's interpretaacting.

The irre

tion on the stage, and the actor will have collected even from the latest scenes elements of the interpretation he throws into the earliest the actor is a lens for concentrating the light of the whole play upon every single detail. The fascination of irresistibility, then, which is to act by instinct in every scene, may be arrived at analytically when we survey the play as a whole-when we see how by Richard's innate genius, by the reversal in him of the ordinary relation of human nature to crime, especially by his perfect mastery of the successive situations as they arise, the dramatist steadily builds up an irresistibility which becomes a secret force clinging to Richard's presence, and through the operation of which his feats are half accomplished by the fact of his attempting them.

To begin with: the sense of irresistible power is brought sistibility out by the way in which the unlikeliest things are con

analysed.

Unlikely tinually drawn into his schemes and utilised as means.

Not

to speak of his regular affectation of blunt sincerity, he makes use of the simple brotherly confidence of Clarence as an engine of fraticide, and founds on the frank familiarity existing between himself and Hastings a plot by he brings him to the block.

The Queen's comClarence out of the

ii. i, from

73; cf. 134.

general reconciliation around the dying king's bedside is the CHAP. IV. fruit of a conscience tenderer than her neighbours': Richard adroitly seizes it as an opportunity for shifting on to the Queen and her friends the suspicion of the duke's murder. The childish prattle of little York Richard manages to sug- iii. i. 154. gest to the bystanders as dangerous treason; the solemnity

of the king's deathbed he turns to his own purposes by out- ii. i. 52-72. doing all the rest in Christian forgiveness and humility; and he selects devout meditation as the card to play with the iii. v. 99, Lord Mayor and citizens. On the other hand, amongst &c. other devices for the usurpation conspiracy, he starts a slander upon his own mother's purity; and further-by one iii. v. 75of the greatest strokes in the whole play-makes capital 94. in the Wooing Scene out of his own heartlessness, de- i. ii. 156scribing in a burst of startling eloquence the scenes of 167. horror he has passed through, the only man unmoved to tears, in order to add :

And what these sorrows could not thence exhale,

Thy beauty hath, and made them blind with weeping.

There are things which are too sacred for villainy to touch, and there are things which are protected by their own foulness: both alike are made useful by Richard.

The sensation produced by

made to

bring about

Similarly it is to be noticed how Richard can utilise the very sensation produced by one crime as a means to bring about more; as when he interrupts the King's dying moments one crime to announce the death of Clarence in such a connection as must give a shock to the most unconcerned spectator, and others. then draws attention to the pale faces of the Queen's friends ii. i, from as marks of guilt. He thus makes one crime beget another without further effort on his part, reversing the natural law by which each criminal act, through its drawing more suspicion to the villain, tends to limit his power for further mischief. It is to the same purpose that Richard chooses Richard's

77; cf. 134.