In an essay on Sophocles and Shakespeare, the late Professor John Churton Collins makes, about the latter's use of the motive of suicide, some striking remarks which have hitherto, I believe, been allowed to pass unchallenged. The attitude of the two dramatists toward the crime is, he says, exactly similar:“By neither of them has any glamor of sentiment been cast over it. In no case is it associated with honor, but in all cases with intemperance or ignominy, or with both. … In the suicide of Ajax, the one instance in which Sophocles has represented suicide as a deliberate act, what impresses us throughout is the utter demoralization of the victim… . Labouring at first in a turbid storm of frenzy, he regains self-mastery only to reduce to the dominion of a perverted will an anarchy of conflicting emotions—rage, shame, remorse, pity, grief—perishing desperately, a laughing stock to his foes, a source of sorrow and reproach to his friends. So perish Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet, Brutus, Cassius, Titinius, Cleopatra, Antony, Enobarbus, Goneril, Othello, and, it would seem, Lady Macbeth. In none of these cases is self-destruction associated with anything but intemperance or retribution. ' The foul'st best fits my latter part of life,' exclaims Enobarbus; and it is remarkable that the poet should have put into the mouth of Brutus, the noblest of those who fall by their own hands in the tragedies, not merely a condemnation of the act generally, but a condemnation of the one suicide which tradition has universally glorified, and which even Bante appears to have excepted from the catalogue of crimes:I did blame Cato for the deathWhich he did give himself; I know not how,But I do find it cowardly and vile,For fear of what might fall, so to preventThe time of life: arming myself with patienceTo stay the providence of some high powersThat govern us below.Hamlet's remark in his famous soliloquy will occur to every one, but still more striking are the words in which Gloucester expresses his thankfulness that he has been saved from such a crime:You ever-gentle gods, take my breath from me;Let not my worser spirit tempt me againTo die before you please.
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