Art is art because it is not nature, is the motto of the Idealisti; Art is but the imitation of nature, say the Naturalisti. The truth lies between the two. Art is neither nature alone, nor can it do without nature. No imitation, however accurate, for imitation’s sake makes a good work of art in any other than a mechanical sense. And every work of art in which the objects represented are inaccurately or imperfectly imitated is in so far deficient. But art works by suggestion as well as by imitation. Whatever is untrue to the imagination fails to produce its proper effect, however true it be to the fact. The most absolute realism will not answer the higher demand of the imagination for ideal truth. Art is not simply the reproduction of nature, but nature as modified and colored by the spirit of the artist. It is a crystallization out of nature of all elements and facts related by affinity to the idea intended to be embodied. These solely it should eliminate and draw to itself, leaving the rest as unessential. A literal adherence to all the accidents of nature is not only not necessary in art, but may even be fatal. The enumeration of all the leaves in a tree does not reproduce a tree to the imagination, while a whole landscape may be compressed into a single verse.
Between the ideal and the natural school there is a perpetual struggle. Under the purely ideal treatment art becomes vague and insipid; under the purely natural treatment it becomes literal and prosaic. The Pre-Raphaelites, in protesting against weak sentimentalism and vague generalization, and demanding an honest study of nature, have fallen into the error of exaggerating the importance of minute detail, and, by insisting too strongly on literal truth, have sometimes lost sight of that ideal truth which is of higher worth. But their work was needed, and it has been bravely done. They have roused the age out of that dull conventionalism in which it had fallen asleep. They have stimulated thought, revivified sentiment, and reasserted with word and deed the necessity of nature as a true basis of art.
As in the arts of painting and sculpture, so in the drama and on the stage a strong reaction is taking place against the stilted conventionalism and elaborate artifice of the last generation. Such plays as the “Nina Sforza” of Mr. Troughton, the “Legend of Florence” of Mr. Leigh Hunt, and the “Blot in the ‘Scutcheon” and “Colombe’s Birthday” of Mr. Browning, are vigorous protests against the feeble pretensions and artificial tragedies of the previous century. The poems and plays of Mr. Browning breathe a new life; and if as yet they have only found “fit audience though few,” they are stimulating the best thought of this age, and slowly infusing a new life and spirit into it.
But the traditions of the stage are very strong in England, and are not easily to be rooted out. The English public has become accustomed to certain traditional and conventional modes of acting, which interfere with the freedom of the actor, and cramp his genius within artificial forms. There is almost no attempt on the English stage to represent life as it really is. Tradition and convention stand in the stead of nature. From the moment an actor puts his foot on the stage he is taught to mouth and declaim. He studies rather to make telling points than to give a consistent whole to the character he represents. His utterance and action are false and “stagey.” In quiet scenes he is pompous and stilted; in tragic scenes, ranting and violent. He never forgets his audience, but, standing before the footlights, constantly addresses himself to them as if they were personages in the play. Habit at last becomes a second nature; his taste becomes corrupted, and he ceases to strive to be simple and natural. There is, in a word, no defect against which Hamlet warns the actor which is not a characteristic feature of English acting. It never “holds the mirror up to nature,” but is always “overdone,” without “temperance,” full of mouthing, strutting, bellowing, and noise. It “tears a passion to tatters, to very rags, to split the ears of the groundlings.” And “there be players that I have seen play, and heard others praise, and that highly, not to speak it profanely, that, having neither the accent of Christians nor the gait of Christian, pagan, nor Turk, have so strutted and bellowed, that I have thought some of Nature’s journeymen had made men, and not made them well, they imitated humanity so abominably;” and this needs to be reformed altogether.
These words of Shakespeare show that even in his time the inflated, pompous, and artificial style still in vogue on the English stage was a national characteristic. We have scarcely improved, since old traditions cling and hold the stage in mortmain. Reform moves slowly everywhere in England; but the two institutions which oppose to it the most obstinate resistance are the church and the theatre. In both of these tradition stands for nearly as much as revelation. Each adheres to its old forms, as if they contained its true essence; each believes that those forms once broken, the whole spirit would be lost; just as if they were phials which contained a precious liquid, and must be therefore preserved at all costs. The idea that the liquid can be quite as well, and perhaps better, kept in different phials has never occurred to them. They will die for the phial.
Still it is plain that a strong reaction against this bigoted admiration of traditional and conventional forms is now perceptible. The facilities of travel and intercourse with other nations have engendered new notions and modified old ones. It is impossible to compare the French and Italian stage with the English, and not perceive the vast inferiority of the latter. In the one we see nature, simplicity, and life; in the other, the galvanism of artificial convention. It cannot be denied that the recent acting of Hamlet by Fechter was to the English mind a daring and doubtful innovation. It was something so utterly different in spirit and style from that to which we have been accustomed that it created a sensation; and while it found many ardent admirers, it found quite as many vehement opposers. The public ranged themselves in two parties; the one insisting that the traditional and artificial school, as represented by Garrick, the elder Kean, and Cooke, was the only safe guide for the tragic actor; and the other arguing that as the true function of the stage was to hold up the mirror to nature, acting should be as much like life and as little like acting as possible. The former, at the head of which were the friends of Mr. Charles Kean, made a public demonstration in his behalf, and scouted these newfangled French notions of acting. Was it to be supposed that any school of acting could be superior to that created and established in England by the genius of such actors as Garrick, the elder Kean, and Cooke? Should foreigners presume to teach us how to interpret and represent plays which had been the study of the English people for centuries? To this it was opposed that, however mortifying to us, it was a fact that the Germans had led the way to a profounder and more metaphysical study of Shakespeare, and had taught us in many ways how to understand his plays, and that therefore there was no reason why foreigners might not teach us how to act them. The very fact that their eyes were not blinded, nor their tongues tied by traditional conventions, enabled them to study Shakespeare with more freedom and directness. There was no deep rut of ancient usage out of which they were forced to wrench themselves. And, besides, it was affirmed, and with truth, that the English stage is the jeer of the world, and needs thorough reform.
We have indeed made little progress in reforming the stage. Mr. Charles Kean has devoted his talents to improving the wardrobe and scenery, and has so far done good service; but in the essential matter of acting we are nearly where we were in the past century. While the background and dresses are reformed, and the bag-wig in which Garrick played Hamlet is thrown aside, we have carefully preserved all the old points, all the stage-tricks, and all the stilted intonations of the artificial school; and the consequence is, that the sole reality is in that which is the least essential. The attention is thus withdrawn from the actor to the scenery, and we have a spectacle instead of a tragedy. The background is real, but the actor is conventional; the blanket has usurped the prominent place, and Shakespeare has retired behind it. The bursts of genius with which Garrick startled the house, and made the audience forget his bag-wig, are wanting, but all his tricks are preserved; the corpse is still there, but the spirit he put into it is gone.
In comedy there is as little resemblance to real life as in tragedy; humor and wit are travestied by buffoonery and grimace. Instead of pictures of life as it is, we have grotesque daubs and caricatures, so exaggerated and farcical in their character as to “make the judicious grieve.” The actor and the audience react upon each other. The audience are generally uneducated, and for the most part agree with Partridge in his comment on “Hamlet:” “Give me the king for my money,” says he. The actors must bow to this low taste,—
But tradition has worse sins to answer for. It has not only ruined our national acting, but in some cases has overshadowed the drama itself, and perverted the meaning of some of the greatest plays of Shakespeare. Hamlet is not Hamlet on the English stage; he is the tall, imposing figure of John Kemble; dark, melodramatic, and dressed in black velvet. Strive as we will, we cannot imagine him as the light-haired Dane, easy and dreamy of temperament, “fat and scant of breath,” essentially metaphysical, hating physical action, and wanting energy to put his thoughts into deeds. The whole spirit of the acted Hamlet is southern; that of the real Hamlet is purely northern. We have indeed broken through an old tradition, according to which, incredible as it may seem, Shylock used to be acted as a comic character, though we are still far from a real understanding of his character. But of all the plays of Shakespeare none is so grossly misunderstood as “Macbeth.” Nor is this misapprehension confined to the stage; it prevails even among those who have zealously studied and admired Shakespeare. As John Kemble stands for Hamlet in our imaginations, so does Mrs. Siddons for Lady Macbeth. She has completely transformed this wonderful creation of Shakespeare’s, distorted its true features, and so stamped upon it her own individuality, that when we think of one we have the figure of the other in our minds. The Lady Macbeth of Mrs. Siddons is the only Lady Macbeth we know and believe in. She is the imperious, wicked, cruel wife of Macbeth, urging on her weak and kindhearted husband to abominable crimes solely to gratify her own ambitious and evil nature. She is without heart, tenderness, or remorse. Devilish in character, violent in purpose, she is the soul of the whole play; the plotter and instigator of all its horrors; a fiend-like creature, who, having a complete mastery over Macbeth, works him to madness by her taunts, and relentlessly drives him on against his will to the commission of his terrible crimes. We hate her, as we pity Macbeth. He is weak of purpose, amiable of disposition, “full of the milk of human kindness,” an unwilling instrument of all her evil designs, who, wanting force of will and strength of character, yields reluctantly to her infernal temptations.
Nothing could more clearly prove the great genius of Mrs. Siddons, than that she has been able so to stamp upon the public mind this amazing misconception, that, despite all the careful study which of late years has been given to Shakespeare, this notion of the character of Lady Macbeth and Macbeth should still prevail. Yet so deeply is it rooted, and so universal, that whoever attempts to eradicate it will find his task most difficult. But, believing it to be an utter distortion of the characters as Shakespeare drew them, and so at variance with the interior thought, conduct, and development of the play as not only entirely to obscure its real meaning, but to obliterate all its finest and most delicate features, we venture to enter upon this difficult task.
Macbeth and his wife, so far from being the characters above described, are their direct opposites. He is the villain, who can never satiate himself with crimes. She, having committed one crime, dies of remorse. She is essentially a woman—acts suddenly and violently, and then breaks down, and wastes her life and thoughts in bitter repentance. He is, on the contrary, essentially a man—who resolves slowly and with calculation, but once determined and entered upon a course of action, obstinately pursues it to the end, haunted by no remorse for his crimes, and agitated by no regrets and doubts, so long as his wicked plans do not miscarry. The spring of his nature is ambition;28 and in working out his ends he is cruel, pitiless, and bloody. He is without a single good trait of character; and from the beginning to the end of the play, at every step, he develops deeper abysses of cruelty and inhumanity in his nature. When he is first presented to us, we, in common with Lady Macbeth, are completely unaware of his baseness. He is a thorough hypocrite, and deceives us, as he deceived her. We see that he has a grasping ambition, but we believe that he is amiable and weak of purpose, for so Lady Macbeth tells us; but as the play goes on, his character develops itself, and at last we find that he has neither heart nor tenderness for anybody or anything; that his will is unconquerable; that he is utterly without moral sense, is hopelessly selfish, and wickedly cruel. All he loves is power. His ambition is insatiable. It grows by what it feeds on. The more he has, the more he desires, and he is ready to commit every kind of horror for the sake of attaining his object. He is restrained by no scruples of honor, by no claims of friendship, by no sensitiveness of conscience. He murders his sovereign, from whom he has just received large gifts and honors in his own house; and then instantly compasses the death of his nearest friend and guest, Banquo. Not content with this, he then seeks the life of Macduff; and, enraged because he has fled, savagely and in cold blood puts the whole of his family to the sword. There is a steady growth of evil in his character from the beginning to the end, or rather a steady development of his evil nature.
Malcolm and Macduff, who at first were his friends and companions, afterwards, when they had learned to “know” him, call him “treacherous” and “devilish.” So far from agreeing in the character given of him by Lady Macbeth, they say,—
Yet even they admit that
As he had deceived the world, so he deceived his wife. His bloody and treacherous nature was at first as unknown to her as to his friends. As they thought him “honest,” she thought him amiable and infirm of purpose, greatly ambitious, and one who would “wrongly win,” but yet kindly of nature. Fiery temptations had not as yet brought out the secret writing of his character. It was with Macbeth as it was with Nero: their real natures did not exhibit themselves at first; but when once they began to develop, their growth was rapid and terrible. And in each of them there was a vein of madness. Essentially a hypocrite, and secretive by nature, Macbeth had passed for only a brave and stern soldier when he first makes his appearance. Yet even in his fierce Norwegian fight we see a violent and bloody spirit. In the very beginning of the play, one of his soldiers describes him, in his encounter with Macdonald, as one who,—
This is rather a grim picture, and scarcely corresponds to the character usually assigned to Macbeth. Here is not only no infirmity of purpose, but a stern, unwavering resolution, carving its way through all difficulties and against all opposition. Thus far, however, all his deeds had been loyal and for a lawful purpose. Still within his heart burnt, as he himself says, “black and deep desires,” and only circumstances and opportunities were needed to show that he could be as fierce and bloody in crime as he had shown himself in doing a soldier’s duty. They were already urging him in the very first scene; but, secretive of nature, he kept them out of sight.
Thus he cries to himself as he speeds to his wife. The “murder,” which was but an hour before “fantastical,” has now become a fixed resolve.
A nature like this, secretive, false, deceitful, and wicked, which had thus far satisfied itself in a legitimate way, and, having no temptation in his own house, had never shown its real shape there, would naturally not have been understood by his wife. Glimpses she might have of what he was, but not a thorough understanding of him. Blinded by her personal attachment to him, and herself essentially his opposite in character, as we shall see, she would naturally have misinterpreted him. The secretive nature is always a puzzle to the frank nature. Accustomed to go straight to her object, whether good or bad, she was completely deceived by his hypocritical and sentimental pretenses, and supposed his nature to be “full of the milk of human kindness.” But time also opened her eyes, though, perhaps, never, even to the last, did she fully comprehend him. “What thou wouldst highly, that wouldst thou holily,” she would never have said after the murder of the king. But however this may be, that her view of his character is false is proved by the whole play. When did he ever show an iota of kindness? What crime did his conscience or the desire to act “holily” ever prevent his committing? When did he ever exhibit any want of bloody determination? Infirm of purpose? He was like a tiger in his purposes and in his deeds. The murder of Duncan did not satisfy him. The next morning, he kills the two chamberlains, in cold blood, to gratify his wanton cruelty. It was impossible that they should testify against him—they had been drugged, and he could have had no fear of them. Then immediately he plots the murder of Banquo and Fleance, and all the while hypocritically conceals his foul purposes even from his wife; and because Macduff “failed his presence at the tyrant’s feast,” he determines also to murder him. Foiled of this, he then cruelly and hideously puts to the sword his wife and little children. In all these murders, after the king’s, Lady Macbeth not only takes no part, but she is even kept in ignorance of them. She drive him to the commission of his crimes? She does not know of them till they are done. They are plotted and determined upon in secret by Macbeth alone, and carried into execution with a bloody directness and suddenness. He is “bloody, false, deceitful, sudden,”—essentially a hypocrite, false in his pretenses, secret in his plotting, loud in his showy talk, but sudden and bloody in his crimes and in his malice.
Thus far, however, we have seen but one side of Macbeth. The other side was its opposite. Bold, ambitious, and treacherous, he was also equally imaginative and superstitious. In action he feared no man. Brave as he was cruel, and ready to meet anything in the flesh, he was equally visionary of head, a victim of superstitious fears, and a mere coward before the unreal fancies evoked by his imagination. He has the Scottish second-sight, and visions and phantoms shake his soul. Show him twenty armed men who seek his life, he encounters them with a fierce joy. Show him a white sheet on a pole, and tell him it is a ghost, and he trembles abjectly. He conjures up for himself phantoms that “unfix his hair and make his seated heart knock at his ribs;” he is distracted with “horrible imaginings.” His excited imagination always plays him false and fills him with momentary and superstitious fears; but these fears never ultimately control his action. They are fumes of the head, and being purely visionary, they are also temporary. They come in moments of excitement, obscure for a time his judgment, and influence his ideas; but having regard solely to things unreal, they vanish with the necessity of action.
These superstitious fears have nothing to do with conscience or morals. He has no morals; there is no indication of a moral sense in any single word of the whole play. The only passage which faintly indicates a sense of right and wrong is when he urges to himself, as reasons why he should not kill Duncan, not only that the king is his kinsman, his king, and his guest, but that he has borne his faculties so meekly, that his virtues would plead like angels trumpet-tongued against the deep damnation of his taking-off. This, however, is mere talk, and has reference only to the indignation which his murder will excite, not to any sorrow Macbeth has for the crime. His sole doubt is lest he may not succeed; for, as he says,—
The idea of being restrained from committing this murder by any religious or moral scruples is very far from his thought. Right or wrong, good or bad, have nothing to do with the question; and as for the “life to come,” that is mere folly.
But while his moral sense is dead, his imagination is nervously alive. It engenders visions that terrify him: after the murder is done, he thinks he hears phantom-voices crying, “Sleep no more! Glamis hath murdered sleep; and therefore Cawdor shall sleep no more, Macbeth shall sleep no more;” and these voices so work upon his superstitious fears, that he is afraid for the moment to return to the chamber, and carry the daggers back and smear the grooms with blood. He is, as Lady Macbeth says, “brainsickly,” and “fears a painted devil.” This is superstition, not remorse—a momentary imaginative fear, not a permanent feeling. In a few minutes he has changed his dress, and calmly makes speeches as if nothing had occurred,—nay, this cold-blooded hypocrite is ready within the hour to commit two new and wanton murders on the chamberlains, and boastfully to refer them to his loyal spirit and loving heart, inflamed by horror at the hideous murder of the king, which he has himself committed.
The same superstitious fear attacks him when he hears that Birnam Wood is moving to Dunsinane Hill; but it does not prevent this creature, so “full of the milk of human kindness,” from striking the messenger, calling him “liar and slave,” and threatening,—
So, too, when Macduff tells him that he was “not of woman born,” awed for a moment by his superstitious fears, he cries,—
At times, under the influence of an over-excitable imagination acting upon a nature thoroughly superstitious, his intellect wavers, and he is subject to sudden aberrations of mind resembling insanity. They are, however, evanescent, and in a moment he recovers his poise, descending through a poetical phase into his real and settled character of cruelty and wickedness. In the dagger-scene, where he is alone, these three phases are perfectly marked. The visionary dagger “proceeding from the heat-oppressed brain” soon vanishes, then follows the poetic mania, and then the stern resolution of murder. In the banquet-scene, when the ghost of Banquo rises, the poetic interval is less marked, for Macbeth is under the restraint of the company and under the influence of his wife; but scarce has the company gone when his real character returns. He is again forming new resolutions of blood. His mind reverts to Macduff, whose life he threatens. He is bent “to know, by the worst means, the worst;” “strange things I have in head, that will to hand.”
This aberration of mind Macbeth has in common with Lear, Hamlet, and Othello. But in Macbeth alone does it take a superstitious shape. The trance of Othello is but a momentary condition, in which his goaded imagination, acting upon an irritated sense of honor, love, and jealousy, obliterates for an instant the real world. Hamlet’s aberration, when it is not feigned, as for the most part it is, is but the “sore distraction” of a mind upon which the burden of a great action is fixed, which he is bound either to accept or to reject, but in regard to which he hesitates, not because he lacks decision of character, but solely because he cannot satisfy himself that he has sure grounds for action, and that he is not deceived as to the facts which are the motive of his action; once satisfied as to the grounds for action, he is decisive and prompt, as is clearly shown in the manner in which he disposes of Guildenstern and Rosencrantz on board the vessel, and in the instant slaying of the king himself, when the evidence of his infamy is clear. But while he is yet undecided and struggling with himself to solve this sad problem of the king’s guilt, he rejects all ideas of love as futile and impertinent, and, more than that, doubts whether Ophelia herself is not, unconsciously to herself, made a tool of by the king and queen. Lear, again, is “heart-struck.” His madness comes from wounded pride and affection. The ingratitude and cruelty of his daughters shake his mind, and to his excited spirit the very elements become his “pernicious daughters:” “I never gave you kingdoms, called you children.” In all except Macbeth, the nature thus driven to madness is noble in itself, moral in its character, and warm in its affections. The aberrations of Macbeth are superstitious, and have nothing to do with the morals or the affections.
Macbeth’s imagination is, however, a ruling characteristic of his nature. His brain is always active; and when it does not evoke phantoms, it indulges in fanciful and poetic images. He is a poet, and turns everything into poetry. His utterance is generally excited and high-flown, rarely simple and real, and almost never expresses his true feelings and thoughts. His heart remains cold while his head is on fire. On all occasions his first impulse is to poetize a little; and having done this, he goes about his work without regard to what he has said. His sayings are one thing; his doings are quite another. Shakespeare makes him rant intentionally, as if to show that in such a character the imagination can and does work entirely independently of real feelings and passions. There is no serious character in all Shakespeare’s plays who constantly rants and swells in his speech like Macbeth; and this is plainly to show the complete unreality of all his imaginative bursts. In this he differs from every other person in this play. Yet when he is really in earnest, and has some plain business in hand, he can be direct enough in his speech, as throughout the second interview with the weird sisters, and in the scene with the two murderers whom he sends to kill Banquo and Fleance; or when, enraged at the escape of Fleance, he forgets to be a hypocrite, and his real nature clearly expresses itself in direct words, full of savage resolve. But on all other occasions, when he is not in earnest and intends to deceive, or when his brain is excited, he indulges in sentimental speeches, violent figures of speech, extravagant personifications, and artificial tropes and conceits. Even in the phantom-voices he imagines crying to him over Duncan’s body, he cannot help this peculiarity. He curiously hunts out conceits to express sleep. He “murders sleep, the innocent sleep; sleep, that knits up the ravell’d sleeve of care, the death of each day’s life, sore labor’s bath, balm of hurt minds, great nature’s second course, chief nourisher in life’s feast.” No wonder that Lady Macbeth, amazed, cries out, “What do you mean?” But he cannot help going on like a mad poet. His language is full of alliteration, fanciful juxtaposition of words, assonance, and jingle. At times, so strong is this habit, he makes poems to himself, and for the moment half believes in them. Only compare, in this connection, the natural, simple pathos of the scene where Macduff hears of the barbarous murder of his wife and children, with the language of Macbeth, when the death of Lady Macbeth is announced to him. Macduff “pulls his hat upon his brows,” and gives vent to his agony in the simplest and most direct words. Here the feeling is deep and sincere:—
But when Macbeth is told of the death of his wife, he makes a little poem, full of alliterations and conceits. It is an answer to the question, What is life like? What can we say about it now?
Enter a Messenger.
Has this any relation to true feeling? Do men of any feeling, whose hearts are touched, fall to improvising poems like this, filled with fanciful images, when great sorrows come upon them? This speech is full of “sound and fury, signifying nothing.” There is no accent from the heart in it. It is elaborate, poetic, cold-blooded. “Life is a candle,” “a poor player,” “a walking shadow,” “a tale told by an idiot.” We have his customary alliterations: “petty pace,” “dusty death,” “day to day;” his love of repeating the same word, “to-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow,” just as we have “If it were done when ’tis done, then ’twere well it were done quickly;” and his “Sleep no more, Macbeth does murder sleep,—sleep, that knits up,” etc.; “Sleep no more! Glamis hath murdered sleep; and therefore Cawdor shall sleep no more, Macbeth shall sleep no more.” He cannot forget himself enough to cease to be ingenious in his phrases. As a poem this speech is striking; as an expression of feeling it is perfectly empty. At the end of it he has quite forgotten the death of his wife; he is only employed in piling up figure after figure to personify life. What renders the unreality of this still more striking is the sudden change which comes over him upon the entrance of the messenger. In an instant he stops short in his poem, and his tone becomes at once decided and harsh; his wife’s death has passed utterly out of his mind. When the messenger tells him that Birnam Wood is beginning to move, with a sudden burst of rage he turns upon him, calls him liar and slave, and threatens to hang him alive till famine cling him, if his report prove to be incorrect. This is the real Macbeth. From this time forward he never alludes to Lady Macbeth; but, in a strange condition of superstitious fear and soldierly courage, he calls his men to arms, and goes out crying,—
And this throughout is the character of Macbeth’s utterances. He is not like Tartuffe, a religious hypocrite; he is a poetical and sentimental hypocrite. His phrases and figures of speech have no root in his real life; they are only veneered upon them. “His words fly up, his thoughts remain below.” When he is poetical he is never in earnest. Sometimes his speeches are merely oratorical, and made from habit and for effect; sometimes they are hypocritical, and used to conceal his real intentions; and sometimes they are the expression of an inflamed and diseased imagination stimulated by superstition. But they are generally bombastic and swelling in tone, and are so intended to be. His habit of making speeches and inventing curious conceits is so strong, that he even “unpacks his heart with words” when alone, so as to leave himself free and direct to act. Thus, in one of his famous soliloquies, mark the unreal quality of all the pretended feeling, the mixture of immorality, bombast, and hypocrisy, the assonances and alliterations, the plays upon words, the extravagant figures, all showing the excitability of the brain and not of the heart:—
Then, after some questions about killing his guest, his kinsman, his king, which would seem honest, but for what comes after and for the utter reckless immorality which has gone before these words, his imagination excites itself, and runs into a wild and extravagant figure which means nothing. Duncan’s virtues, he says,—
No sooner does he begin to swell and alliterate again than he goes wild:—
This is pure rant, and intended to be so. It is the product of an unrestrained imagination which exhausts itself in the utterance. But it neither comes from the heart nor acts upon the heart.
Again, in the soliloquy of the air-drawn dagger, the superstitious, visionary Macbeth, who always projects his fancies into figures and phantoms, after addressing this
falls at once into poetic declamation about the night, and indulges himself in strange images and personifications. A man about to commit a murder who invents these conceits must be a poetical villain:—
Can anything be more extraordinary and elaborate than this pressing of one conceit upon another? Wither’d murder has a sentinel, the wolf, who howls his watch, and who with stealthy pace strides with Tarquin’s ravishing strides like a ghost! Shakespeare makes no other character systematically talk like this.
But the fumes of the brain pass, and leave the stern, determined man of action:—
We have no such rant as this in Lady Macbeth. In the scenes of the murder, she does not befool herself with visions and poetry. She is practical, and her attention is given solely to the real facts about her. Contrast the simple language in which she speaks, while waiting for Macbeth, with his previous rhodomontade. Agitated, in great emotion, listening for sounds, doubting whether some mischance may not have befallen to prevent the murder, she speaks in short, broken sentences; but she does not liken her husband to Tarquin, and say now is the time when “witchcraft celebrates pale Hecate’s offerings,” nor employ this interval in making a poem full of conceits.
Macbeth goes in to the king, and commits the murder; no scruples of any kind prevent him. But when that is secure, he has a superstitious fit, and imagines phantom-voices, that talk as no phantoms ever did before. Still he is a coward in the presence of phantoms, and will not go back. The deed has been done, and ghosts alarm him.
But, as has been before observed, all this raving as usual passes by at once. In a half-hour he is as cold and calm as ever. The phantom-voices did not reach his conscience, and awakened no remorse. They were the children of superstition and imagination, and they vanished with cockcrow and daylight, leaving no trace behind in his memory. They have not altered his mood nor his plans.
We now come to consider Lady Macbeth’s character. At all points she was her husband’s opposite, or rather his complement. Where he was strong, she was weak; where he was weak, she was strong. He was poetical and visionary of nature; she was plain and practical. He was indirect, false, secretive; she, on the contrary, was vehement and impulsive. Between what she willed and what she did was a straight line. She was troubled by none of his superstitious fears or visions. Her imagination was feeble and inactive, her character was energetic; she saw only the object immediately before her, and she went to it with rapidity and directness of purpose. She was skillful in management and ready in contrivance, as women are apt to be; while Macbeth was wanting in both these qualities, as men generally are. For herself she seems to have had no ambition, and not personally to have coveted the position of queen. Her ambition is but the reflection of Macbeth’s, and her great crime was wrought in furtherance of his suggestions and promptings. Mistaking entirely his character at first, proud of his success for his sake, and rightly reading him so far as to see that his ambition, which was insatiable, grasped at the throne, she lent herself to the murder of Duncan, in the belief that a throne once obtained, Macbeth’s ambition would be satisfied. Her moral sense was inactive, and not sufficient to lead her to oppose his project. It was not, as we shall see, utterly wanting in her, as in Macbeth. She seems to have been warmly attached to Macbeth, and always, after the murder is committed, she endeavors to soothe and tranquillize him with gentle and affectionate words. But she could not understand his superstitious hesitations when once resolved on action. His poetry and his imaginative flights, as well as his visions, were to her incomprehensible, and she made the natural mistake of supposing him to be infirm of purpose. Her mind was one of management and detail. The determination and suggestion of the murder are his; the management and detail of it are hers. This is a master-stroke of Shakespeare’s, by which he at once distinguishes the masculine from the feminine nature. Man is quick to propose and suggest a plan in its general scope; woman is always superior in adjusting the details by which it may be carried into execution. Lady Macbeth’s nature was not wicked in itself; it was susceptible of deep feeling and remorse. But her moral sense was sluggish, while her impulses were sudden and vehement; and as such women generally are, she was irritably impatient of the postponement of any project already decided upon. She had a strong will, and gave expression to it in an exaggerated way:—
This is but a vehement, passionate, and exaggerated way of saying that if she had sworn to herself to do anything, however shocking, as deliberately and determinedly as Macbeth had to commit this murder, she would do it in spite of consequences, and not like him be “afeard to be the same in thine own act and valor as thou art in desire.” She does not mean, nor did Shakespeare mean, that so hideous an act would be possible for her either to plan or to commit; but to prove her contempt of that condition of mind when “I dare not” waits upon “I would,” she seizes on the most horrible and repulsive act that she can imagine, and declares energetically that, shocking as that is, she would not hesitate to do even that, had she so sworn to do it as Macbeth had. Yet this wild and violent figure of speech is generally taken as the key of her whole character. It is nothing of the sort; for the very line preceding it proves that she had a tenderness of nature under all her energy, and a power of love as well as of will:—
Well, despite that tenderness and love, which you, Macbeth, know I have, I would have done what is so contrary to all my nature, had I so sworn as you. Throughout this scene her sole object is to urge upon Macbeth, as vehemently as she can, the folly of dallying and hesitating to carry out a project which he alone had conceived, suggested, and determined, merely for fear of consequences and lest it should do him injury in the eyes of the world. He never feels nor suggests any moral objection; he does not pretend to feel it. His sole fear is lest he may not succeed; he only doubts whether it would not be better to postpone the execution of his project until a more fitting time. His decisions are less rapid than hers. She must at once act on the first strength of her resolve. She is impetuous, and would spring upon her prey at once. He, knowing that his fell purpose will only strengthen with meditation, and doubting whether the time has come to secure his object, proposes to postpone its execution. But there is no time for this. There are but a few hours in which all must be accomplished, and he is not ready with the detail. But to this proposal of postponement she says “No.” She knows that he never will rest till it is accomplished. Neither time nor place adhered when you “broke this enterprise to me,” she says; and now, when both “have made themselves,” execute your design, and no longer let “I dare not wait upon I would.” To this he feebly opposes, “If we should fail,” failure being the only thing that troubles him. She then suggests the plan in detail by which the murder can be effected; and he cries out, in a burst of admiration and delight,—
Still, when the time approaches, Lady Macbeth needs all her courage, and she stimulates it with wine, lest it should break down:—
She preserves her courage, however, to the end, never loses her self-possession, and takes care that the plan is carried out fully in all its details. But that accomplished, she utterly breaks down. She has over-calculated her strength; she was not utterly wicked, and her remorses are terrible. From this time forward we have no such scenes between her and her husband; he performs all his other murders alone, without her connivance or knowledge.
And here the main feature of this play must be kept in mind. Lady Macbeth dies of remorse for this her crime; she cannot forget it; it haunts her in her sleep; the damned spot cannot be washed from her conscience or her hand. What a fearful cry of remorse and agony is that of hers in her dream!—
“Here’s the smell of the blood still: all the perfumes of Arabia will not sweeten this little hand! Oh! oh! oh!”
There is no poetizing here, no sentimental and figurative personifications; it is the cry of a wounded heart and conscience. It is written too in prose, not in verse. It is real, and not fantastic like the rant and poetry of Macbeth. That terrible night remains with her, and haunts her and tears her like a demon, and at last she dies of it.
How is it with Macbeth? Does the memory of that night torture him? Never for a moment. He plots new murders. He has tasted blood, and cannot live without it. On, on he goes, deeper and deeper into blood, till he is slain; and never, to the last, one cry of conscience.
Yet it is thought that Lady Macbeth urged on this amiable man, so infirm of purpose, so filled with the milk of human kindness, and was the mainspring of his crimes. Suffice it to say, in answer to this view, that after Duncan is killed he keeps her in complete ignorance of all he does, and his murders are thenceforward more terrible and pitiless, and with no faint shadow of excuse or apology. This cold-hearted villain stops at nothing; even her death does not awaken a throb in his heart. Is it not preposterous to suppose that the so-called fiend of the play, she who instigates and drives an unwilling victim to crime, should die of remorse for that crime; while the amiable accomplice, far from sharing any such feeling, only plunges deeper into crime when she does not instigate him, and develops at every step an increasing brutality and savageness of nature?
No; it is not the tall, dark, commanding, and imperious figure of Mrs. Siddons, with threatening brow and inflated nostrils, that represents Lady Macbeth; she is not at all of such character or features. She is of rather a delicate organization, of medium height, her hair inclining to red, her temperament nervous and sanguine, with a florid complexion and little hands. So was Lucrezia Borgia; and so was Lady Macbeth. She was personally fair and attractive. Can any one imagine Macbeth calling a dark, towering, imperious woman like Mrs. Siddons his “dearest love,” “dear wife,” or his “dearest chuck”?
But it is commonly thought that the murder of Duncan was suggested by Lady Macbeth, and that her husband was urged into it against his will and contrary to his nature. Such a view is utterly in contradiction of the play itself. The suggestion is entirely Macbeth’s, and he has resolved upon it before he sees her. The witches are a projection of his own desires and superstitions. They meet him at the commencement of the play, prophesying, in response to his own desires, that he is thane of Cawdor, and shall be king hereafter; but they respond also to his fears, by adding that Banquo’s children shall be kings. Those are the very points upon which all his thoughts hinge—his ambition to be king, his fears lest the throne shall pass from his family. Hence his hate of Banquo and Fleance. From this time forward he thinks of nothing else. As he rides across the heath, he is self-involved, abstracted, silent, sullen, revolving in his mind how to compass his designs, which are nothing less than the murder of the king. He does not dream that the prophecies of the weird women will accomplish themselves without his assistance, for they are projections of his own thoughts. He instantly receives news that he is made thane of Cawdor, and scarcely gives a thought to this honor, scarcely expresses his satisfaction; when the news is announced he says,—
And then immediately his mind reverts to the promise that Banquo’s children shall be kings:—
Then he falls again into gloomy silence, and talks to himself inwardly. What does he say and think? He resolves to murder the king:—
Yes, already he dreams of murder. He sees not his way clear; he will trust to chance; but he dreams of murder. And full of these thoughts, he rushes to his wife to fill her mind with his project, to consult her as to how it can be carried into execution; for he cannot plan in detail; and though the thought crosses him, that
yet this is but a hope; for in the next scene he has determined to take the matter into his own hands and trust nothing to chance. As soon as he hears that Malcolm is made Prince of Cumberland and heir to the throne, he determines absolutely to kill the king:—
He has already written to Lady Macbeth; and his letter has but one thought and one theme,—the promise that he shall be king. Much as she fears his nature, she knows thoroughly his desires, and has faint glimpses of his real character; she knows that he means to be king, and sees that he would “wrongly win;” that his ambition is great, and that his mind is filled solely with one idea. But she fears that he is “too full of the milk of human kindness to catch the nearest way;” and when she hears that Duncan is coming to the castle, and that Macbeth is hurrying to see her before the king’s arrival, she doubts his plan no longer. For a moment she is aghast. “Thou’rt mad to say it,” she says to the messenger who announces the king’s approach; for she sees that he comes to his death:—
He has been lured here by Macbeth to compass his destruction; and in a moment Macbeth will be with her. Then, summoning up all her courage at once, she resolves to aid him in his ambitious and murderous design. She calls upon the “spirits that tend on mortal thoughts” to unsex her, to alter her nature, to make her cruel and remorseless, to let nothing intervene to shake her purpose; for she is not quite sure of herself. She knows what “compunctious visitings of nature” are, and she strengthens herself against them. She is not naturally cruel; and she cries out to the spirits to “stop up the access and passage to remorse” now open in her nature, to change her “milk for gall,” and to cover her with “the dunnest smoke of hell,” so that her
In this tremendous apostrophe, in which she goads herself on to crime, the woman’s nature is plainly seen. Macbeth never prays to have his nature altered, to have any passages to remorse closed up; never fears “compunctious visitings of nature,” nor desires darkness to hide his knife, so that he may not see the wound he makes. But she knows she is a woman, and that she needs to be unsexed, and feels that she is doing violence to her own nature; still her will is strong, and she cries down her misgivings, and resolves to aid Macbeth in his design.
Macbeth meets her in this mood. There is no salutation or greeting on his part; he has but one idea,—Duncan is coming, and is to be murdered. His first words are,—
Whereupon she asks, “And when goes hence?” “To-morrow,” he answers, and pauses; and adds, “as he purposes.” But in the look and in the pause Lady Macbeth has read his whole sold and intent. There is murder in that look; and she cries:—
There is no explanation between them. He has conveyed all his intention by a look and a gesture, as she herself distinctly says. He has ridden headlong, as fast as horse could carry him, away from the king, full of this one idea; and the king has vainly “coursed him at the heels,” having the purpose, as he himself says, “to be his purveyor.” And his thoughts have spoken in his looks so unmistakably, that they are perfectly understood. If there be any doubt by whom the murder was suggested, it is made perfectly clear by what Lady Macbeth subsequently says to him in the next scene in which they are presented. When he begins to doubt whether the murder had not better be postponed, she says:—
It was not of my plotting, but of your own; “Nor time, nor place, did then adhere, and yet you would make both;” you desired it and still desire it, but are afraid of consequences. These words of hers would indeed seem to indicate that he had urged the crime upon her against her will at a previous interview not reported in the play, or perhaps by a letter; for she says distinctly, that when he broke the enterprise to her,—
It would plainly seem, therefore, that Macbeth had broken this enterprise to her, and urged it on her, even before the king had determined to come to his castle, and that he intended to make time and place. This would account completely for her opening speech, and for the fact that he does not make any explanation to her of his intentions other than by his look and intonation when they first meet; for certainly there is nothing in the play about the time and place of the murder except as herein indicated. It would also explain the surprise of Lady Macbeth when she hears that her husband is coming, and the king after him: “Thou’rt mad to say it,” she says; and “the raven himself is hoarse that croaks the fatal entrance of Duncan under my battlements.” The time and place had made themselves, then; and it is on hearing this that she suddenly changes from calm to vehement emotion, and makes that wonderful apostrophe to the spirits to unsex her. She sees that all has been resolved, and that she has need of her utmost resolution.
There is no warrant of any kind that, in the simple words, “And when goes hence,” she meant more than she said. It was the most natural question that she could possibly ask. Granting that she intended equally with him to commit the murder, what is more natural than that she should wish to know how long the king was to stay, so as to know how soon it was necessary to carry out the plan of murder, and what time there was in which to make all the arrangements? Not only Macbeth pauses after saying “To-morrow” (so, at least, is the punctuation in all editions), before adding “as he purposes,” but Lady Macbeth, in her answer, says that she sees in his face that he intends that “never shall sun that morrow see.” Yet, in the recitation of these parts on the stage, and as generally read, the meaning is given to Lady Macbeth’s simple words; and Macbeth is made perfectly innocently to answer without showing in his look any “strange matter.” But the king is coming close on his heels; there is no time to arrange details; and Macbeth goes away to receive him, saying, “We will speak further.”
The characters, as exhibited in the next scenes, have been already sufficiently discussed. He shows his superstitions, his visions, his poetry, and his hesitations; she, with the stern determination of a woman who has screwed her courage to the sticking-place, is agitated by no visions, but, feeling the necessity of immediate action, she occupies herself in the arrangements of details, and thus dulls her conscience.
After all the excitements which have agitated Macbeth—after his soliloquy, in which he says there is no spur to prick the sides of his intent, but only vaulting ambition; but if he were sure of success, he would jump the life to come—there comes a moment when he either has or pretends to have a hesitation about proceeding further in “this business.” He does not hesitate for conscience’ sake, but because, being ambitious, he now would like to wear the golden opinions he has won, “in their newest gloss,” and not cast them aside so soon, before he has had the satisfaction of being wondered at and admired a little longer. He had gained praise and high position, and his vanity was gratified. He naturally would pause before committing a hideous murder. But he never pretends that this feeling comes from any moral sense. His mind has been too long strained with one thought; and, as in all men of excitable brain, there comes a moment of reaction. He cannot see his way clear. He fears the effect of his crime. He does not see how it can be done so that he may avoid suspicion, and attain the object beyond the murder and for which he commits it, without running too great risks, and thus exposing himself to the vengeance of the king’s friends. He fears that his “bloody instructions” may “return to plague the inventor”—not hereafter, but “here.” But what most troubles him is, that he cannot see the practical way, cannot arrange the details so as to secure a chance of avoiding suspicion. Here his wife comes to his aid. She has thought out a plan and arranged the details. She sternly opposes his proposal to abandon his design, for she knows that his hesitation is only for a moment, and that nothing less than to be king can ever satisfy him. Better, then, do the deed at once. His only opposition after this is, “If we should fail?” But as soon as he sees the feasibility of her plan, all his scruples are gone; he is more than convinced, he is delighted, and enters upon it with a joy which he does not pretend to conceal.
During all these scenes, up to the murder of Duncan, Lady Macbeth is laboring under an excitement of mind which sustains her in carrying out the design of her husband. The time is purposely made very short—only a few hours between the arrival of Duncan and his death—so that she may not break down. All is hurry and movement, and arrangement of detail. There is no time for reaction. The very necessity for immediate action serves as an irritant to the nerves, and strains all her thoughts and feelings to an unnatural pitch. Still, when the murder is on the point of being done, she keeps up her courage by drink; for the strain is almost too great. In this excited state her inflamed will has got completely the command of her; and to have it all over, and not caring about the dreadful design longer, she says that had Duncan “not resembled my father as he slept, I had done it.” But though she can talk of dashing out the brains of her babe while it was smiling in her face, she was not, even in this excitement, able to strike Duncan, because she thought he looked like her father. Her woman’s hand would have failed her had she attempted it. But all her powers are bound up in this one design. She has come to a violent determination, and this she will carry out, come what may. She thrusts aside all compunction of conscience, and makes such a noise by action in her brain, that its still small voice cannot be heard.
Macbeth, on the contrary, is of a colder and more brutal nature. His determination is sullen, and it lies like an immovable rock on which the flames of his imagination burn like momentary fires of straw, and over which his superstitious visions pass like clouds or fogs, and then clear away, leaving the rock unchanged. Just before he commits the murder, Banquo comes in and tells him that the king
But this does not touch Macbeth, nor induce a moment’s hesitation. Banquo then speaks of the three weird sisters, and says, “To you they have show’d some truth;” and Macbeth answers falsely:—
Thus, cold and collected, he bids him “Good repose,” sends off the servant, and waits for the bell to ring, which is the sign that all is ready for him to murder Duncan. In this interval we have his three characteristic features brought out one after the other: the cloudy vision of the air-drawn dagger; then the straw-fire of his poetry about Hecate and withered murder’s sentinel, the wolf, and Tarquin’s ravishing strides; and, as these clear off, the stern, sullen resolution underneath—“Whiles I threat he lives;” “I go, and it is done.”
When the murder is done, the two are equally distinct in character,—she energetic and practical, he visionary and superstitious; and so they part.
Thus far, be it observed, Lady Macbeth has supposed her husband to be merely “infirm of purpose;” but the next scene is to open her eyes to a glimpse of his real character.
Macbeth has become perfectly calm and cold again in a few minutes, and makes his appearance immediately after the knocking. He is completely master of himself, offers to conduct Macduff to the king, and when Macduff says he knows it will be a “joyful trouble” to him, answers like a proverb, calmly, “The labor we delight in physics pain.” The king is then found dead, and the noise brings Lady Macbeth from her room. What a difference is now visible in the way in which she and he speak and act! When Macduff says, “Our royal master’s murdered!” she cries out, “Woe! alas! what, in our house?” and says not a word more. Macbeth, however, who is only afraid of shadows, but who, with the daylight, has no fear of looking at dead bodies, or adding one or two more with his sword, goes to the room of Duncan, and then reappears, without the faintest shadow of feeling, and makes a little hypocritical poem on the event:—
“What is amiss?” says Donalbain. And Macbeth cries, “You are, and do not know’t. The spring, the head, the fountain of your blood is stopp’d; the very source of it is stopp’d.”
This is Macbeth’s rant and fustian. He has no feeling, and, as usual, he makes the pretense of poetry serve him. The head, the spring, the fountain, the source is stopped, is stopped.
And this stuff he recites coolly, although he has but a moment before wantonly killed the two grooms; nay, he does not mention it until afterwards, on their being spoken of by Lenox, when this hypocritical villain cries:—
During this amazing speech, in which he poetizes so elaborately, and with such curious artifice coldly paints the picture of the man and friend he had just murdered, Lady Macbeth has been looking and listening in silence. Suddenly, for the first time, she sees what her husband really is; she sees that he has neither heart nor conscience; for no man possessing either could have acted or talked as he has since the murder of Duncan. So far from having any feeling of shame or remorse, he, without provocation, wantonly, and with no sufficient object, has added two other murders to it; and, with a cold-blooded artificial hypocrisy, he paints in his stilted way the scene of Duncan’s death, and has command enough of himself to seek out elaborate and high-flown phrases. But Lady Macbeth, whose courage, stimulated by excitement, has carried her through the murder, now suddenly breaks down. This new revelation of her husband’s character, and the ghastly picture which he summons up before her of the scene of the murder, are too much for her. She swoons, loses all consciousness, and is carried out. In her violent excitement, while there was something practical to busy her mind and her body with, she could carry back the daggers and smear the grooms with blood; but she could not bear the vivid remembrance of it when there was nothing to do, and when the excitement was over: as women will go through extreme dangers, stand at the surgeon’s table during terrible operations, be great and strong in a great crisis, and then suddenly faint and fall when the work is over, unable to bear the remembrance of what they have gone through.
This swooning of Lady Macbeth is the crisis of her nature. From this time forward she is no more what she has appeared; we hear no more urging of Macbeth to strengthen his throne by other crimes; no more taunts by her that he is infirm of purpose; no more allusions to his amiable weaknesses of character. She has begun to know him and to fear him. She only endeavors to tranquilize him and content him with what he has got. But still she does not know him; for his nature, before hidden, like secret writing, comes out little by little before the fire of his heated ambition and superstitious fears.
At this swooning-point the two characters of Lady Macbeth and her husband cross each other. She has thus far only made the running for Macbeth, and he now takes up the race and passes her; she not only does not follow, but withdraws. Henceforth he rushes to his goal alone; alone he arranges the death of Banquo and Fleance.
When next they meet she is no longer the same person we have known; she feels the gnawing tooth of remorse; she is calmed and cowed by what she has done:—
And as Macbeth enters she endeavors to tranquilize his mind. She has his confidence no longer; he avoids her, and keeps alone after the murder of the king. She, not yet aware of the abysses of his nature, and little imagining that he has been plotting the murder of Banquo, supposes that the secret of his perturbations, of the solitude he now seeks, and of his avoidance of her, is the remorse that he begins to feel, and says as he enters:—
His answer shows it is no remorse which is haunting him; his sorry fancies are new plots of murder:
and we are still “in danger of her former tooth.”
Here is one of those cases where he uses his poetry as a cloak to his real thoughts. Yet despite his hypocrisy, which takes in his wife, his real meaning is clear. He would rather die than to go on in this fear: rather be like Duncan, whom they have at all events “sent to peace,” and whom nothing can “touch further,” than on “the torture of the mind to lie in restless ecstasy.” What is this “fear”? what is this “torture of the mind”? Is it, as Lady Macbeth supposes, from remorse? Oh, no! he tells us himself what it is; it is solely because Banquo and Fleance are alive:—
This it is that tortures him, and this only.
says she; meaning, as she has throughout this scene, solely to console him and draw his thoughts away. They may die; a thousand accidents may happen to them; you may outlive them; don’t torture yourself with vain fears. “There’s comfort yet,” he cries, “they are assailable;” and now, after his old fashion, he breaks into poetry:
“What’s to be done?” she cries; for having completely misunderstood him through all the previous part of this interview, she completely fails to see what he now means. But he has no longer confidence in her; and so, with caressing words, and probably with some caressing act, he answers her:
How could she suspect his real meaning? This murdering hypocrite had just told her that Banquo was coming to the feast that night, and bade her be jovial, and said to her,—
And this he proposes to her after having just left the murderers whom he has hired to waylay and kill Banquo, and entertaining no real doubt in his mind that Banquo will never reach the supper—certainly never reach it unless his plot miscarries. Well might she “marvel at his words.” What follows is full of poetry and wickedness; but it is plain that he was a mystery to her now, a riddle which she could not read.
The banquet-scene now comes, and Macbeth, believing that he has secured the death of Banquo and Fleance, is happy, until the murderers come in and tell him that Fleance has escaped. This upsets him:—
So he poetizes his condition, for superstitious fears always inflame his imagination; but he cannot regain his composure; his “fit” is on him, as it “hath been from his youth.” He conjures up the phantom of Banquo to threaten him and his throne, and this ghost shakes him with superstitious terror. Lady Macbeth, to whom it is invisible, rouses herself at this; and not only not comprehending these starts and flaws of fear, but having a contempt for him, endeavors to recall him to himself by sharp words; but it is useless, his fit will not leave him, and the company is dismissed in confusion. When the guests have gone, Lady Macbeth’s spirit and courage, which were momentary, have fled. She does not taunt him, but soothes him. He, as soon as he recovers himself, begins with Macduff, whom he also means to murder:—
To this she only says, not imagining his meaning,
Henceforward Lady Macbeth disappears; we hear nothing of her save in the terrible sleep-walking scene; she is dying of remorse. But Macbeth goes to the weird sisters, to learn whether “Banquo’s issue shall ever reign in this kingdom.” They answer, “Seek to know no more:” and he cries out, “I will be satisfied; deny me this, and an eternal curse fall on you.” And when they show him the issue of Banquo, kings, he is enraged beyond control, and curses them. Henceforth for him no hesitations, no delays. He speaks directly enough now.
And no more sights he has; but he is still haunted by fears. And when “the English power is near, led on by Malcolm, his uncle Siward, and the good Macduff,” burning for revenge, Macbeth’s spirit falters. He rushes into violent rages and then subsides into vague fears, and then endeavors to strengthen his heart by recalling the mysterious promises of the weird sisters that he shall not fall by the hand of any man of woman born, or before Birnam wood come to Dunsinane; but, do all he can, “he cannot buckle his distempered cause within the belt of rule,” though he declares,—
Still he does fear; and in one of his dispirited moods, after blazing out at the messenger who tells him of the approach of Birnam wood,—
he says, finding that there are ten thousand men coming to attack him, and his followers are not stanch,—
But in a moment he is himself again, and cries:—
In this mood the illness and death of the queen is nothing to him; he fights bravely to the end; though, superstitious to the last, his “better part of man” is cowed by the knowledge that Macduff “was from his mother’s womb untimely ripped,” and so not of woman born.
And so, by the sword of Macduff, perishes the worst villain, save Iago, that Shakespeare ever drew.
We have called the witches the projections of Macbeth’s evil thoughts, and suggested that they were only objective representations of his inward being. To this it may be objected that they were seen also by Banquo. But this may well be; for Banquo also seems to have had evil intentions, which are vaguely hinted at in the play. He constantly harps on the idea that his children are to be kings. Approaching the castle of Inverness at night, before the murder of the king, he says,—
Meeting then Macbeth, he gives him the diamond sent by the king to Lady Macbeth; and after speaking of Duncan’s “measureless content,” he says,—
At which Macbeth proposes an interview, to
To which he readily consents.
The “cursed thoughts,” then, are connected with his dreams about the weird sisters.
At his next appearance the same thoughts agitate him in Macbeth’s palace at Fores. His first words are—in soliloquy—
When it is recollected that, after the scene on the heath with the soldiers, these are nearly all the words we have from Banquo, it seems to be pretty clearly indicated that his thoughts at least were not perfectly honest and what they should have been.
The weird sisters are but outward personifications of the evil thoughts conceived and fermenting in the brains of Banquo and Macbeth; both high in station, both generals in the king’s army, both friends, and both nourishing evil wishes. They are visible only to these two friends; and though they are represented as having an outer existence independent of them, they are, metaphysically speaking, but embodiments of the hidden thoughts and desires of Banquo and Macbeth; as such they are a new and terrible creation, differing from the vulgar flesh-and-blood witches of Middleton. They look not like the inhabitants of the earth; they vanish into thin air; wild, vague, mysterious, they come and go, like devilish thoughts that tempt us, and take shape before us, as if they had come from the other world. The devils that haunt us and tempt us come out of ourselves, like the weird sisters of Macbeth.