There are perhaps higher ideals of love. What dramatist or preacher has said anything finer than the words of the great cavalier lyrist:--
I could not love thee, dear, so much, Loved I not honour more.
One of the best known of the Tudor dramatists, Habington, says:--
He is but A coward lover, whom or death or hell Can fright from 's Mistress.
The enormity of Michael's sacrifice, the very unpardonableness of his offence, constitute the sweetest savour to him as to her. To her it brings an intoxicating, a delirious triumph, to him a sense how much he must hug to himself and cherish a possession secured at so fearful a price.
It is perhaps the distinguishing characteristic of Michael's madness that the sin once committed is not repented. Landor talks of
Modesty who when she flies Is fled for ever.
This is true of other things beside modesty. Not seldom it is true of virtue. Sin is our sad portion, let us make the best of it. If we may not have a "stately pleasure-house" of love, let us get what shelter we may and at least cling close together while the winds of censure rebuke and the rains of scandal chill. This is, of course, what Audrie would suggest. "My beloved is mine and I am his." What matter concerning other things, what other thing is there to matter? Not so Michael. Lead me back, he says, to the ways of peace and purity. Let us march hand in hand to the throne of forgiveness. There is no such throne, says the moralist and the priest within him. "Can one be pardoned and retain the offence?" he asks with Claudius, and the answer extracted from his conscience is a negative. After her death, a death for which he is, as he knows, mainly responsible, he abandons all struggle, resigns his volition and his being into the hands of a church that demands implicit obedience and pardons no questioning of its decisions and decrees, and taking upon himself monastic vows enters permanently a cloister.
If this is not according to the present reading of the word "tragedy," I know not where tragedy is to be sought. It may be that the subject is one that cannot with advantage be set before the public with the fierce and brilliant illumination of stage presentation. Compare however the method of treatment, earnest, severe, resolute, unfaltering, with that which was adopted by novelists dealing with clerical trials and offences of the sort from the time of Diderot to that of L'Abbé Michon, the reputed author of "La Réligieuse," "Le Maudit," and other works of the class.