And this is a kind of triumph which only such an artist as
Shakespeare in poetry or as Balzac in prose can achieve.
Alice Arden, if she be indeed a daughter of Shakespeare's, is the eldest
born of that group to which Lady Macbeth and Dionyza belong by right of
weird sisterhood. The wives of the thane of Glamis and the governor of
Tharsus, it need hardly be said, are both of them creations of a much
later date--if not of the very latest discernible or definable stage in
the art of Shakespeare. Deeply dyed as she is in bloodguiltiness, the
wife of Arden is much less of a born criminal than these. To her, at
once the agent and the patient of her crime, the victim and the
instrument of sacrifice and blood-offering to Venus Libitina, goddess of
love and death,--to her, even in the deepest pit of her deliberate
wickedness, remorse is natural and redemption conceivable. Like the
Phaedra of Racine, and herein so nobly unlike the Phaedra of Euripides,
she is capable of the deepest and bitterest penitence,--incapable of
dying with a hideous and homicidal falsehood on her long polluted lips.
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