Miscellaneous Essays | Page 3

Thomas De Quincey
of
suspended life. Or, if the reader has ever been present in a vast
metropolis, on the day when some great national idol was carried in
funeral pomp to his grave, and chancing to walk near the course
through which it passed, has felt powerfully, in the silence and
desertion of the streets and in the stagnation of ordinary business, the
deep interest which at that moment was possessing the heart of man,--if
all at once he should hear the death-like stillness broken up by the
sound of wheels rattling away from the scene, and making known that
the transitory vision was dissolved, he will be aware that at no moment
was his sense of the complete suspension and pause in ordinary human
concerns so full and affecting, as at that moment when the suspension
ceases, and the goings-on of human life are suddenly resumed. All
action in any direction is best expounded, measured, and made
apprehensible, by reaction. Now apply this to the case in Macbeth.
Here, as I have said, the retiring of the human heart and the entrance of
the fiendish heart was to be expressed and made sensible. Another
world has stepped in; and the murderers are taken out of the region of
human things, human purposes, human desires. They are transfigured:

Lady Macbeth is "unsexed;" Macbeth has forgot that he was born of
woman; both are conformed to the image of devils; and the world of
devils is suddenly revealed. But how shall this be conveyed and made
palpable? In order that a new world may step in, this world must for a
time disappear. The murderers, and the murder, must be insulated--cut
off by an immeasurable gulph from the ordinary tide and succession of
human affairs--locked up and sequestered in some deep recess; we
must be made sensible that the world of ordinary life is suddenly
arrested--laid asleep--tranced--racked into a dread armistice: time must
be annihilated; relation to things without abolished; and all must pass
self-withdrawn into a deep syncope and suspension of earthly passion.
Hence it is, that when the deed is done, when the work of darkness is
perfect, then the world of darkness passes away like a pageantry in the
clouds: the knocking at the gate is heard; and it makes known audibly
that the reaction has commenced: the human has made its reflux upon
the fiendish; the pulses of life are beginning to beat again; and the
re-establishment of the goings-on of the world in which we live, first
makes us profoundly sensible of the awful parenthesis that had
suspended them.
O, mighty poet! Thy works are not as those of other men, simply and
merely great works of art; but are also like the phenomena of nature,
like the sun and the sea, the stars and the flowers,--like frost and snow,
rain and dew, hail-storm and thunder, which are to be studied with
entire submission of our own faculties, and in the perfect faith that in
them there can be no too much or too little, nothing useless or inert--but
that, the further we press in our discoveries, the more we shall see
proofs of design and self-supporting arrangement where the careless
eye had seen nothing but accident!

ON MURDER,
CONSIDERED AS ONE OF THE FINE ARTS.
TO THE EDITOR OF BLACKWOOD'S MAGAZINE.
SIR,--We have all heard of a Society for the Promotion of Vice, of the
Hell-Fire Club, &c. At Brighton, I think it was, that a Society was
formed for the Suppression of Virtue. That society was itself
suppressed--but I am sorry to say that another exists in London, of a
character still more atrocious. In tendency, it may be denominated a

Society for the Encouragement of Murder; but, according to their own
delicate [Greek: euphaemismos], it is styled--The Society of
Connoisseurs in Murder. They profess to be curious in homicide;
amateurs and dilettanti in the various modes of bloodshed; and, in short,
Murder-Fanciers. Every fresh atrocity of that class, which the police
annals of Europe bring up, they meet and criticise as they would a
picture, statue, or other work of art. But I need not trouble myself with
any attempt to describe the spirit of their proceedings, as you will
collect that much better from one of the Monthly Lectures read before
the society last year. This has fallen into my hands accidentally, in spite
of all the vigilance exercised to keep their transactions from the public
eye. The publication of it will alarm them; and my purpose is that it
should. For I would much rather put them down quietly, by an appeal
to public opinion through you, than by such an exposure of names as
would follow an appeal to Bow Street; which last appeal, however, if
this should fail, I must positively resort
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