The Tell-Tale Heart - The Pioneer, January 1843 — reading text

tears is nearer the sur- the undefinable shadow, whose presence we face. The drifting sands of a life, which our feel, but toward which we dare not turn our own selfishness makes a desert, slowly choke heads. Pathos clings close to the body, and it as we grow older, till at last that which was death is one of its favorite and most moving once a gentle outlet of the crowded heart, be- themes. ‘The interest of tragedy is one with comes in itself a more bitter agony. Beauti- life, and touches us through our sense of im- ful, therefore, and blessed is the power of mortality. ‘Tragedy has to do with the deep- calling forth these pledges of a tenderest purity est and holiest part of our nature, and breathes which lingers life-long, fluttering anear its over strings which echo dimly far away in scattered nest, and will not be scared away. the infinite and eternal. It lifts us above the How more beautiful and blessed is it so to pent-up horizon of the body, and unfolds to us summon them as that they shall give back to wider and more spiritual relations, so that we us, though only for a moment, those holy wonder not when Prometheus calls upon the impulses and gracious instincts of which they sea for sympathy, or when Lear finds a huma- were once both the proof and the fulfilment. nity in the elements, and in that gray heaven And this last belongs wholly to tragedy, — which, like himself, was full of years. Disease wherein we weep rather for the universal than poverty, death which tears away from us the the particular — for the blight which we some- body of those whom we had loved, — that times in madness think to fall always on the body round which our spirits had twined them- purest aspiration and the tenderest faith, — for selves, hiding it with their luxuriant leaves that blindness and weakness which we find also and tendrils, till we believed that it could not in our own hearts, ready at any moment to but partake somewhat of that deathless es- mislead us into unconscious sin, or to give way, sence, —these and many more woes is our (for in our greatest strength we are readiest to frail humanity incident to ; but there are an- lean upon reeds,) and to plunge us headlong guishes of our immortal nature deeper than and dizzy into the same dreary void with those life and death ; — Laocoén struggles with the imaginary woes which so move us. But the entwining folds of destiny, — doubts that hurry wounds which Nature gives us are always to to and fro in bewildered hopelessness, —- loss of free us from some morbid humor ; and tragedy faith in good, and seemingly forced belief in in proving to us the weakness of humanity, an overruling evil, when ‘Truth shows but as a shows us at the same time its glorious painted mask over the stony face of Falsehood, strength, and that if lower, we are but a little when a damp mist of despair swathes the beau- lower than the angels, —a majestic height, tiful in its icy shroud, and Love, which we where we may poise serenely, if we clog not had deemed unchangeable, hides its eyes from our silver plumes with clay. In tragedy, us, —- and these belong to Tragedy, which al- moreover, Destiny always hangs like a thunder- ways shows us that the finite can never be an cloud, vague and huge, upon the horizon, with independent existence, but is ever overruled by an awful grandeur, and we hear afar its omi- the infinite, to which it is knit by unseen but nous mutterings, and see its lightning reflected never to be sundered bands. ‘To write a good on the blue craggy mass which it reveals to us, tragedy, therefore, demands, if not the greatest hanging dimly over our own heads. Shapes of poets, certainly. some of the highest elements float around us, and voices are heard from of one. another life, and we are awed into an unwilling The plot of ‘‘ The Changeling,’’ the most consciousness of the workings of an unseen powerful of Middleton’s tragedies, is briefly and inscrutable power. But in writings strictly this. De Flores, a deformed and ugly villain, pathetic, our sympathies are moved either for loves Beatrice, the heroine of the play, who has the individual suffering, or against the power an unconquerable loathing of him. She has (always a definite one,) which inflicts it un- been betrothed by Vermandero her father, to justly. Pathos deals with unnatural causes; Alonzo de Piracquo, a noble gentleman, but tragedy with those mysterious exceptions to the whom she cannot love, having already given all laws of nature which are no less natural than her heart to Alsemero. De Flores first tempts those laws themselves with which they make her to the murder of Piraequo, and then offers such seeming discord. Pathos is wholly the himself as the instrument of that hideous guilt. more outward of the two; it may be founded The murder is successfully accomplished with- on the elegancies or conventionalities of life, out the knowledge of Alsemero, and Beatrice, on the vices and wrongs of a wholly artificial no obstacle now remaining, is married to him. system of society. But tragedy can only take On the day of her wedding she deems it high root in the deepest and most earnest realities of time to get De Flores out of the way, but he a nature common to us all, the same in Cidi- refuses any other reward than the satiation of ee ee  THE PLAYS OF THOMAS MIDDLETON 35 his hellish passion for Beatrice, to the gratifica- benignity which broods forever on its chosen nest tion of which he compels her by a threat of in the soul of man, giving life to all beauty and disclosing all to her husband. Alsemero at all strength. We go apart from the society of length is led to suspect his wife, the whole men that we may hold converse with our self- ghastly story is laid bare, and De Flores, after invoked and self-created tempter. Always at slaying his unwilling paramour, prevents the our backs it dogs us, looming every hour higher revenging steel of 'Tomaso, Piracquo’s brother, and higher, till the damp gloom of its shadow by stabbing himself to the heart. The tragedy hems us wholly in. We feel it behind us like takes its name from the chief character in an the fearful presence of a huge hand stretched under-plot, which, as is usually the case in the forth to gripe us and force us to its withering old drama, has nothing whatever to do with the will. One by one the dark, vague fingers close action of the piece. around us, and at last we render ourselves to In the opening of the play, Beatrice thus its fancied bidding in a gush of wild despair strongly expresses her aversion to De Flores. which vibrates in us with a horrible delight.* We sign our deeds of sale to the fiend with a ———. ’tis my infirmity; feather self-torn from our own wings. It is Nor can I other reason render you the curse of Adam in us that we can no longer Than his or hers of some particular thing They must ahandon as a deadly poison, interpret the tongue of angels, and too often Which to a thousand other tastes were ‘wholesome ; mistake the tender forethought of our good Such to mine eyes is that same fellow there, spirit concerning us, for the foul promptings The same that report speaks of the basilisk. of an evil demon which we wouki fain believe is permitted to have dominion over us. In It was a fine thought in our author thus to another place Beatrice says of De Flores, give a dim foreshadowing of that bloody eclipse of her better nature which Beatrice was to I never see this fellow but I think Of some harm towards me; danger’s in my mind suffer from De Flores. It is always an unac- still; knowledged sense of our own weaknesses that I scarce leave trembling for an hour after. gives birth to those1 vague feelings and presenti- ments which warn us of an approaching calam- Here we have a still clearer omen of what is to ity, and when the blow has fallen, we soothe follow. our wounded self-respect by calling it Fate. Our poet drops a few “lilies in the mouth of We cheat our sterner reason into a belief that his 'Tartarus,’’ but there is ever a dark sprig of some higher power has interfered to bring nightshade among them. In the scene we next about that blight in us whose steady growth quote, the bloody dawning of the thought of always circles outward from some hidden mean- Piracquo’s murder in the soul of Beatrice, blots ness in our own souls. Our woes are our own out luridly the tender morning-star of love neater offspring, and we feed our hungry brood, as which still trembles there, making us feel yet was once fabled of the pelican, with our best more thrillingly the swiftly nearing horrors sg blood ;— alas, they never become fledg- which it betokens. ‘The scene is between Be-