It is this which “puzzles the will” and arrests the uplifted arm, and though the voice that urges him to action comes to him from the grave, the very fact that the command is borne by a supernatural messenger suffices to ensure its neglect, and sends the imagination once more adrift upon the limitless ocean of eternity. Macbeth too trafficks in the supernatural, but with what different purpose and result! He holds converse with the weird sisters only that Fate may echo the dark project he fears to utter; and when he consults these “black and midnight hags” again, it is to wring from their lips the knowledge that may guide him still further in his settled career of crime. And they answer him according to his will. He is already far advanced in blood, but they beckon him still onward, and, speaking with the double tongue of hope and fear, bid him beware, and yet be bold, leading him by such sure steps to his doom that the struggle at last becomes almost sublime, and Fate, which he had rashly challenged, enters the lists against him.

When we have once grasped the motive-power of Macbeth’s character, it is not difficult to reconcile the apparent inconsistency in his conduct before and after the murder of Duncan. By this one act his trembling hesitation is suddenly converted into an iron consistency of purpose. The view of consequence that had held him for a while irresolute on the threshold of crime now becomes the strongest incentive to whatever may be needed to make his position secure. His imagination is thus both the source of inaction and the spur that urges him to morbid activity: it is at once the friend of conscience and its bitterest foe: at one moment the lamp that reveals to him his hideous design and all its attendant train of evil, in the next a lurid flame that lights up a thousand avenues of danger, only to be guarded by the exercise of a relentless cruelty and an unflinching courage. In nearly every utterance of Macbeth after the murder we are allowed to see how clearly he himself apprehends the danger of his position, and the sinister policy which it demands. “Things bad begun make strong themselves by ill”; and accordingly, with no more compunction than an executioner might feel, he proceeds in the course of action which he had foreseen from the first to be inevitable. Even his superstitious fears do not shake him in his resolve, and he has no sooner recovered from the vision of Banquo’s ghost than he determines to visit again the weird sisters, that he may know “by the worst means the worst.”

This is the first intimation that we have of any menace to the safety of Macduff, and when, in a following scene, Macbeth hears of his flight to England, he is full of self-reproaches for his procrastination in crime:

And then, baulked in his guilty designs upon the husband, he straightway resolves to wreak his vengeance upon his family:

Truly indeed and with prophetic vision had he said to his wife that he was “but young in deed,” and that his terror at Banquo’s ghost was only “the initiate fear that wants hard use.”

And yet, despite this full revelation of the man’s nature, who can fail to be moved by the splendid despair of his closing hours, when, with all the forces of heaven and earth arrayed against him, he struggles with dauntless courage to the end? His imagination, still informing his shattered spirit, lights up the ruin of his life, and presents to his wearied gaze the hated object that he has become in the sight of all men:

There is no refuge of madness for him. He has seen the end from the beginning, and even when the end has come it has no terror which he had not known long ago. This only is added to his earlier knowledge, though the truth, alas! comes too late, that this present life, which he had held so dear, and for which he had sacrificed all, this life, which had been the tomb of his virtue, and of his honour, is

And so, with the “sound and fury” of this present world still ringing in his ears, he passes out into that “life to come” of which he had never dreamed at all.