As Thomas De Quincey states at the beginning of the essay, he was intrigued by a peculiar feeling of admiration/ sympathy for the murderer (the regicide) in his boyhood when he read Shakespeare’s Macbeth. Contrary to the usual expectation that he hate and despise Macbeth for his heinous act of killing the pious and innocent Duncan, his relative and king, De Quincey, to his shock and shame, found himself filled with fascination for the murderer. This feeling is evidently immoral and undesirable in a person by any moral standard of our life. His usual reaction should have been one of hatred and rejection of Macbeth for this same reason. He felt an opposition between his understanding (rational reaction) and feeling (emotional reaction). He says, too, that knocking at the gate in Macbeth should not have impressed him at all; but he “felt that it did.” He had since been trying to explain this strange feeling in him. He “waited and clung to the problem until further knowledge” provided him with a satisfactory solution.
The case of Mr. Williams the serial killer opened his eyes and provided him with an invaluable insight into his peculiar feeling towards Macbeth : Mr. Williams, a sailor, threw London into panic by killing the two families, the Marrs and the Williamsons, in a breathtaking space of twelve days in 1811. As usual, at first he was widely condemned for this despicable immoral act. But when this wind of moral and legal condemnation and criticism settled down after a few days, he began to be lionized and hailed as a peerless artist of perfect killing by connoisseurs of homicide. For them Mr. Williams had set the standard of how finely the killer should kill. Thus, he came to be apotheosized as an artist and ceased to be condemned as a killer by the connoisseurs of murder. They would find any other homicide badly suffer by comparison with Mr. Williams’ faultless example on the ground of perfect execution of the art of killing.
In two other essays On Murder Considered as One of the Fine Arts, De Quincey argues that , once a murderer has been condemned and the demands of morality satisfied, the conoisseur of homicide will naturally be drawn to compare the narratives of the different cases, the degrees of finesse or brutality involved and then to pass an aesthetic judgement. De Quincey is here playing upon the divide between "beautiful" as an aesthetic as opposed to moral epithet. Presumably a "beautiful" murder signifies an act that was effective within the scope of its intentions rather than an alluring spectacle. A murder can be made into a “beautiful” artistic creation free from moral feelings when it is taken beyond the limits of what is acceptable in life. Shakespeare’s art takes Macbeth’s immoral and sinful act beyond these limits and elicit admiration from the audience for the murderer.
Now this insight helps him explain his boyhood admiration for the regicide in Macbeth. By any judgement in life Macbeth is condemnable and reproachable for killing Duncan. Shakespeare prefers Macbeth to Duncan not from any moral point of view. He chooses the former because, through the theatrical variedness of his emotion such as jealousy, ambition, vengeance, hatred and so on and so forth, he can bring out the best of Shakespeare’s dramatic genius. De Quincey implies that Shakespeare’s immediate concerns in the play are not moral. He is mainly interested in those characters and actions that would be to the best advantage to his art. Therefore, the murder of King Duncan in Macbeth belongs to the realm of fine art beyond the pale.
Thomas De Quincey warns the reader against judgment based on understanding and advises that he form his opinion on the basis of feeling. This is a Romantic principle of evaluation in art. Understanding is supported by reason but falls short when it comes to explaining feelings such De Quincey’s about Macbeth. Such feelings can only be aesthetically supported beyond the limits of morality set by black-and-white logic and crude arguments.
