Read Online Murder by Candlelight by Michael Knox Beran - Free Book Online Page A

of battle, embracing drinkand woman-flesh with ecstatic vehemence, or sailors on leave indulging themselves in a mad carouse, the evil-doers embrace their freshly recovered normality with an insane avidity. As, during the Black Death, men and women were roused, in their revulsion from the universal horror, to a frenzied love of life, copulating promiscuously in the very cemeteries in which they were soon to be laid as corpses, so Thurtell’s struggle in the death-vortex with Weare produced the voluptuous euphoria of the party in Probert’s parlor.
    It was a commonplace of Romantic thought that life is a marriage of heaven and hell; but De Quincey perhaps more accurately conceived it to be a cycle in which ordinary time is routinely punctuated by intervals of hellishness and intervals of grace. The cycle was for him an immutable law, yet he recognized that it manifests itself differently in different persons. A certain kind of soul embraces hellish experience, seeks it out, in the pursuit of sensuous ecstasy; another sort accepts suffering as an inevitable part of life which, when gone through, brings one closer to grace. For readers of English poetry, Hamlet is the exemplar of the soul which finds its way through suffering to peace. Having passed through an interval of moral horror, he again sees the stars:
    There’s a divinity that shapes our ends,
    Rough-hew them how we will. . . .
    Macbeth, on the other hand, is the pattern-figure of the soul that undertakes a hellish act in order to indulge a sensual felicity, in his case the wielding of a royal scepter. Having “done the deed” and murdered Duncan, he ascends from the world of the dead to that of the living, an ascension Shakespeare signalizes by the knocking at the gate of the castle at Glamis:
    Whence is that knocking?
    How is’t with me, when every noise appalls me?
    Eventually the clownish porter, who laughingly identifies himself with the “porter of hell-gate,” gets up and with a stream of humorous talk opens the castle gate to admit Lenox and Macduff, and with them the breath of fresh life.
    De Quincey traces the power of the scene to Shakespeare’s comprehension of what murder ultimately is, an eruption of hell in the fabric of regular existence. The “world of ordinary life,” he writes, is during the course of a murder “arrested, laid asleep, tranced, racked into a dread armistice.” Its place is taken by a hellish world, a “world of devils,” cut off by “an immeasurable gulf from the ordinary tide and succession of human affairs—locked up and sequestered in some deep recess” of perdition. The murderer himself is “conformed to the image of devils”; and a “fiendish heart” takes the place of his human one. But at length the hellishness recedes, and like the blue sky that succeeds a storm, existence resumes its wonted aspect:
    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. . . .
    The party in Probert’s parlor has roughly the same significance, in the tragedy of Thurtell, that the knocking at the gate has in the tragedy of Macbeth. Having re-entered ordinary life, Macbeth seeks pleasure in a “great feast,” much as Thurtell and his henchmen seek it in a little one. “Come, love and health to all,” Macbeth cries:
    Give me some wine; fill full.
    I drink to th’ general joy o’ th’ whole table.
    Only Macbeth deviates from the familiar pattern in feeling scarcely, or not at all, the fleeting euphoria that Thurtell and his chums feel—the “Dionysian dowry,” the life-enhancing intoxication, which Nietzsche says is characteristic of the