Coasting Bohemia

by J. Comyns Carr

SEX IN TRAGEDY

In the popular view of the play of Macbeth the relation of the two principal characters may be said to lie beyond the region of doubt or discussion. According to the tradition of the stage, supported in this instance by a respectable array of critical authority, the motive-power of the drama is not supplied by the “vaulting ambition” of Macbeth himself, but is to be sought rather in the sinister strength and inhuman cruelty of his guilty partner. In virtue of her unshaken resolution and her superior resource, Lady Macbeth is regarded as the dominating influence in this awful record of crime, and it may indeed be doubted whether any part of equal length—for, counted by actual lines, it is one of the shortest in all tragic drama—has ever left so strong a stamp on the popular imagination. Nor is the prevalent conception of Lady Macbeth’s character lacking at all in distinctness of definition. The outlines of the portrait are sharply and deeply impressed: and as she is commonly represented to us, it takes the form of a sexless creature endowed with the temper of a man and the heart of a fiend. The embodiment of all those fiercer passions that are deemed to be most repugnant to the ideal of womanhood, and moved by a will that is deaf to the pleadings of humanity and inaccessible to the voice of eternal law, she is regarded as the evil genius of her husband, crushing by the weight of her stronger individuality the constant promptings of his better nature, and sweeping him with irresistible force into a bottomless abyss of crime.

To this popular view of the character Mrs. Kemble, in her notes on Shakespeare, gives vivacious expression. Here we are told that Lady Macbeth was not only devoid of “all the peculiar sensibilities of her sex,” but that she was actually incapable of the feelings of remorse. The sleepless madness of her closing hours was not, so we are assured, the result of conscious guilt, for that was foreign to her nature: it resembled rather the nightmare of a butcher who is haunted by the blood in which his hands are imbrued. And as to her death, it was due in no degree to the anguish of a stricken soul, but was in some occult way directly traceable to the unconquerable wickedness of her heart.

“I think,” writes Mrs. Kemble, with the eager interest of a scientific inquirer on the track of a new poison, “her life was destroyed by sin as by a disease of which she was unconscious, and that she died of a broken heart, while the impenetrable resolution of her will remained unbowed. The spirit was willing, but the flesh was weak; the body can sin but so much and survive; and other deadly passions besides those of violence and sensuality can wear away its fine tissues and undermine its wonderful fabric. The woman’s mortal frame succumbed to the tremendous weight of sin and suffering which her immortal soul had power to sustain; and having destroyed its temporal house of earthly sojourn, that soul, unexhausted by its wickedness, went forth into its new abode of eternity.”

Allowing for a certain feminine vehemence in the wording of the indictment, this view of Lady Macbeth can scarcely be said to exaggerate the current conception of her character. That it represents a somewhat grotesque caricature of Shakespeare’s marvellous creation, will plainly appear from even the most cursory examination of the text, and has, indeed, already been pointed out on more than one occasion. In 1867 Mr. P. W. Clayden, in the Fortnightly Review, made a praiseworthy attempt to revive the finer outlines of Shakespeare’s portrait, an attempt in which he had already been forestalled by Mr. Fletcher in the Westminster Review for 1844, and by a writer in the National Review for 1863.

The only reproach that can fairly be brought against the last-named article, which for the rest deserves to rank as a careful and searching piece of criticism, is that it has too much the tone of being delivered as a brief in the lady’s favour. The advocacy of her cause, and the consequent denunciation of the character of her husband, are both in a style that seems rather to blur the imaginative beauty of the picture as a whole. We are made to feel that we are sitting in a court of law rather than at a poet’s feet, and we are sharply reminded of the somewhat inappropriate arena into which the discussion has drifted by the writer’s concluding assertion, that Macbeth was “one of the worst villains” ever drawn by Shakespeare. Charges of this sort smack too strongly of the forensic method, and have but little significance when applied to the central figure of a great tragedy. If Macbeth stood at the bar of the Old Bailey he would undoubtedly be convicted of murder, and so, for that matter, would his wife; but it is the poet’s privilege to lift the record of crime into an ideal atmosphere; and when, at the magic bidding of genius, the closest secrets of the human heart have been unlocked, and its inner workings laid bare, such epithets as may be used to dismiss the record of a police case cease to be instructive, and are scarcely even relevant to the wider issue that has been raised. The character of Iago, with whom Macbeth is compared, stands on different ground. It was there no part of Shakespeare’s task to lift the impenetrable mask of malice which serves as the instrument of Othello’s destruction. Iago is known to us only by his pitiless delight in human torture, and by the sinister cruelty of which he stands accused and convicted; while in the case of Macbeth, despite his heavier record of actual crime, the evil that he wrought serves only as the stepping-stone by which we are allowed to enter into the deeper recesses of his soul.

But there is one point in the article to which we have referred that has a profound interest for the student of the drama. It is the writer’s main contention that the source of the error he seeks to correct is to be traced to what he terms a distortion of the stage. The figure of Lady Macbeth as now popularly accepted is represented as the lineal descendant of the genius of Mrs. Siddons. It was her incomparable art which first gave to the character the particular stamp it now bears, and chased from the popular imagination the more delicate creation of the poet’s brain. This charge carries with it, of course, a splendid tribute to the artist’s powers, and the experience of our own time proves that it may not be altogether unfounded. It is not so long ago since the glamour of Salvini’s genius, with its superb gifts of voice and bearing and its incomparable technical resource, succeeded in effacing the Othello of Shakespeare, leaving us in its stead a figure admirably effective for the purposes of the stage, but sadly lacking in the higher and finer elements with which the character had been endowed by the author. And it may be added that the witness of contemporaries goes far to support this particular view of Mrs. Siddons’ performance of the part. The poet Campbell testifies to the extraordinary impression she created when he writes that “the moment she seized the part she identified her image with it in the minds of the living generation.” Boaden, her earlier biographer, speaking of her first entrance on the scene, says, “The distinction of sex was only external; ‘her spirits’ informed their tenement with the apathy of a demon”; and evidence to the same effect is supplied by the interesting notes of Professor Bell, first published some few years ago by Professor Fleeming Jenkin.

“Of Lady Macbeth,” he writes, “there is not much in the play, but the wonderful genius of Mrs. Siddons makes it the whole. She makes it tell the whole story of the ambitious project, the disappointment, the remorse, the sickness and despair of guilty ambition, the attainment of whose object is no cure for the wounds of the spirit. Macbeth in Kemble’s hand is only a co-operating part. I can conceive Garrick to have sunk Lady Macbeth as much as Mrs. Siddons does Macbeth, yet when you see Mrs. Siddons play the part you scarcely can believe that any acting could make her part subordinate. Her turbulent and inhuman strength of spirit does all. She turns Macbeth to her purpose, makes him her mere instrument, guides, directs, and inspires the whole plot. Like Macbeth’s evil genius, she hurries him on in the mad career of ambition and cruelty from which his nature would have shrunk.”

If this was really the impression produced by Mrs. Siddons—and the Professor’s notes are in close accord with Boaden’s description of her as “an exulting savage”—it only proves how potent a factor in the art of the stage is the unconscious and inevitable intrusion of the actor’s personality. For this creature of “turbulent and inhuman strength of spirit” was not at all what Mrs. Siddons in her critical moments conceived Lady Macbeth to be. Her recorded memoranda exhibit a widely different interpretation, and contain, indeed, much penetrating criticism on the general scope and purpose of the play. Even the physical image of Lady Macbeth, as it presented itself to her imagination, was strangely unlike the threatening and commanding figure which she actually presented on the stage. She thought of her as embodying a type of beauty “generally allowed to be most captivating to the other sex, fair, feminine, nay, perhaps even fragile”—a description which calls from her biographer the almost indignant protest that “the public would ill have exchanged such a representation for the dark locks and eagle eyes of Mrs. Siddons.” But the most remarkable feature of her criticism lies in its constant insistence upon the essentially feminine nature of Lady Macbeth. Speaking of her entrance in the Third Act, she pictures in a few eloquent words the sudden change which the haunting memory of crime has already wrought in her character. “The golden round of royalty now crowns her brow and royal robes enfold her form, but the peace which passeth all understanding is lost to her for ever, and the worm that never dies already gnaws her heart.” And, again, still treating of this same scene, the most deplorably pathetic in all tragedy, “she exhibits for the first time striking indications of sensibility, nay, tenderness and sympathy; and I think this conduct is nobly followed up by her during the whole of their subsequent eventful intercourse.” Not less striking is the keen perception which these notes exhibit of the terrible anguish of the woman herself: “Her feminine nature, her delicate structure, it is too evident, are soon overwhelmed by the enormous pressure of her crimes.... She knows by her own woeful experience the torments he undergoes, and endeavours to alleviate his sufferings.”

But there is one sentence in these notes more pregnant with meaning than all the rest. “The different physical powers of the two sexes,” she writes, “are finely delineated in the different effects which their mutual crimes produce.” Here in a few words is to be found the key that will unlock the heart of the tragedy. Not merely the different physical powers, but also, and with even a deeper truth, the different mental and moral characteristics of the two sexes in the presence of crime, are here illustrated by Shakespeare with unsurpassable force and delicacy. This is the imaginative theme which his transcendent genius has fastened upon the legend of Macbeth, and there is scarcely a line of the play which can be rightly understood until we realise that the two central figures are, and are deliberately intended to be, the embodiment and expression of the contrasted characteristics of sex. To argue that Lady Macbeth is not truly and typically a woman, is to destroy at one blow the delicate fabric which the poet has been at such pains to construct: to strive to vindicate the character of her husband at her expense, is but a vain endeavour to break through the empire of crime which sways and dominates the lives of both. There is here, indeed, no question of moral rescue for either; and it were idle to debate what he or she might have been under different conditions. For, as Shakespeare has conceived the action of the story, the shadow of guilt hangs from the first like a murky cloud in the sky, and the invisible hands of fate have drawn the net of evil closely around them long ere they appear upon the scene. But, accepting these conditions, with the transformation of individual character which they imply, Macbeth stands out among the works of Shakespeare as a sublime study of sexual contrast, a superb embodiment of the force and the weakness of the conjugal relation.

Coleridge has aptly observed that the dominant note of the tragedy is struck in its opening lines. The appearance of the supernatural agents of evil serves to set the framework of the picture: their choppy fingers have already drawn the magic circle of malignant fate around the caged souls of Macbeth and his partner, who are henceforth to be prisoners in a world where “fog and filthy air” exclude the purer light of heaven, a world in which the moral order of the universe is upturned, and where “fair is foul and foul is fair.” The whole after-action of the story passes in this darkened and shadowed light: the forms of the principal characters starting out from a background of crime, illumined as by the lurid gleam of a stormy sunset whose clouds drip blood. And as the play advances the scene seems gradually shifted into some unknown latitude of eternal night, where the voices of nature are made to chorus the direful music of the witches’ incantation. Throughout the drama this dominant note of evil is kept constantly vibrating. Even for those whose hearts are free the poisoned air seems to carry some taint of infection, and the imagination shudders at the uneasy forebodings that haunt the soul of Banquo, who fears to trust his assured integrity to the attacks of the secret agents of the dark.

Hold, take my sword.—There’s husbandry in heaven,

Their candles are all out.—Take thee that too.

A heavy summons lies like lead upon me,

And yet I would not sleep. Merciful powers!

Restrain in me the cursèd thoughts that nature

Gives way to in repose!

Macbeth, indeed, in its imaginative setting is a play of the night; and with unwearied imagery Shakespeare again and again appeals to the forces of darkness as so many symbols of the black pall of crime that weighs upon the souls of Macbeth and his wife. Nearly every page of the drama yields some striking picture fit to conjure up such fears as Banquo feels. Thus Macbeth himself on his way to the king’s chamber:

Nature seems dead, and wicked dreams abuse

The curtained sleep.

And, again, Lady Macbeth in the same scene:

It was the owl that shrieked, the fatal bellman

Which gives the stern’st good-night.

And when the murder has been committed, Nature, through the lips of Lenox, makes her own contribution to the picture:

The night has been unruly: where we lay,

Our chimneys were blown down; and, as they say,

Lamentings heard i’ the air: strange screams of death

And, prophesying with accents terrible

Of dire combustion and confused events,

New hatched to the woful time, the obscure bird

Clamour’d the live-long night: some say the earth

Was feverous and did shake.

How superbly is the effect of this description and its symbolic significance again enforced by the words of Rosse in a subsequent scene:

By the clock ’tis day

And yet dark night strangles the travelling lamp:

Is’t night’s predominance, or the day’s shame,

That darkness does the face of earth entomb,

When living light should kiss it?

The “night’s predominance” fit emblem of the deeds of this “woful time” prevails to the end: and as Macbeth advances in his terrible crusade his soul becomes attuned to its surroundings, and on the eve of Banquo’s murder he calls darkness to his aid. “The west yet glimmers with some streaks of day” when he utters that terrible invocation:

Come, seeling night,

Scarf up the tender eye of pitiful day;

And, with thy bloody and invisible hand,

Cancel, and tear to pieces, that great bond

Which keeps me pale! Light thickens; and the crow

Makes wing to the rooky wood;

Good things of day begin to droop and drowse;

While night’s black agents to their prey do rouse.

Lady Macbeth had already anticipated the spirit of this dread summons when, on the eve of Duncan’s coming to her castle, she cries out in the impatience of her passionate impulse:

Come, thick night,

And pall thee in the dunnest smoke of hell!

That my keen knife see not the wound it makes;

Nor heaven peep through the blanket of the dark,

To cry “Hold, Hold!”

Through this realm of darkness, that knows no dawn till that last hour when by the hand of Macduff “the time is free,” Shakespeare conducts his characters with no uncertain step. Lit as by the light of the under-world, the fell purpose of the guilty pair stands plainly revealed to us on the very threshold of the drama: the seeds of murder had been sown long ere the weird sisters have shrieked their fatal preface to the action; and before we meet with either Macbeth or his wife, the souls of both are already deeply dyed in blood. Nothing, indeed, could be more absurd than to suggest that the murder of Duncan is the fruit of sudden impulse on his part or hers; nor could anything be more destructive of the whole scheme of the poet’s work than the assumption that Macbeth’s enfeebled virtue was overborne by the satanic strength of her will. We cannot too often remind ourselves that there is no question of virtue here: it could not live in the air they had learned to breathe: it has passed beyond the ken of minds that have long brooded over crime. And it may be pointed out that Shakespeare himself has been at particular pains to make this clear to us; for he doubtless felt, and felt rightly, that unless the starting-point were clearly kept in view, the subsequent development of the action, with the contrast of character it is designed to illustrate, would lose all significance. Therefore at the first entrance of Macbeth, when the eulogy of others has but just pictured him to us as a soldier of dauntless courage fighting loyally for his sovereign, we are allowed to see that the thought of Duncan’s death has already found a lodging in his heart. As the weird sisters lift the veil of the future and point the dark way to the throne, the vision that presents itself to his eyes is but the mirrored image of the bloody picture seated in his own brain; and in foretelling the end, they wring from his lips a confession of the means which he has already devised for its fulfilment:

Why do I yield to that suggestion

Whose horrid image doth unfix my hair,

And make my seated heart knock at my ribs,

Against the use of nature? Present fears

Are less than horrible imaginings:

My thought, whose murder yet is but fantastical,

Shakes so my single state of man, that function

Is smothered in surmise; and nothing is

But what is not.

Then, like one affrighted by the echo of his own voice, he stands for a moment appalled at the concrete shape into which these withered hags have thrown his own phantasy, and, seeking to ignore, what he knows but too well, that in this dread business fate and he are one, tries to cheat his senses with the soothing anodyne that he may yet escape the responsibilities of action:

If chance will have me king, why, chance may crown me,

Without my stir.

But this mood lasts only a little while, for in the next scene, even while his grateful sovereign is loading him with honours, his dark purpose is seen to have taken still more defined shape:

Stars, hide your fires!

Let not light see my black and deep desires:

The eye wink at the hand! yet let that be,

Which the eye fears, when it is done, to see.

All this, be it observed, takes place before the meeting between himself and his wife. But it needed not his coming to enable her to divine his thoughts or to force her to confess her own. His written message to her contains no hint of murder, and yet the words she utters, as she holds his letter in her hands, have no meaning unless we suppose that the violent death of Duncan had long been the subject of conjugal debate. She has watched the working of the poison in his breast, and has already anticipated the hesitation which he afterwards displays. How far her generous interpretation of his halting action accords with the real character of the man we shall presently see for ourselves: but for the moment her speech suffices to afford the clearest evidence that he had already imparted to her his guilty purpose:

Yet do I fear thy nature;

It is too full o’ the milk of human kindness,

To catch the nearest way. Thou would’st be great;

Art not without ambition; but without

The illness should attend it. What thou would’st highly,

That thou would’st holily; would’st not play false,

And yet would’st wrongly win.

And that we may be in no doubt as to the original source from which this diabolical plot proceeded, Shakespeare makes the truth doubly plain to us in a subsequent passage. When the hesitation, which she had feared, threatens to wreck their cherished scheme of crime, she reminds him that in its inception the idea was his, not hers:

What beast was’t, then,

That made you break this enterprise to me?

---

Nor time, nor place,

Did then adhere, and yet you would make both:

They have made themselves, and that their fitness now

Does unmake you.

Nor, indeed, would the conduct of either be humanly explicable unless we clearly grasp the situation as it is here plainly stated by Shakespeare. Her superlative strength in executive resource is only consistent with the assumption that she has accepted without questioning a policy that was none of her own devising: his apparent weakness, on the other hand, is the inevitable attitude of an imaginative temperament which feels all the responsibilities and forecasts the consequences of the crime it has conceived.

And this brings us to a consideration of the particular types of character which have been chosen by Shakespeare for the two principal figures of his tragedy. I have suggested that the ideal motive of the drama lies in its contrast of the distinctive qualities of sex as these are developed under the pressure of a combined purpose and a common experience: and it will be found, at any rate, that the special individuality which the author has assigned to Macbeth not less than to his wife aptly serves the end I have supposed he had in view. Dr. Johnson has said of the play, that “it has no nice discriminations of character; the events are too great to admit the influence of particular dispositions, and the course of the action necessarily determines the conduct of the agents.” This, of course, is putting the matter too crudely. Shakespeare was not wont to deal in abstractions, though by the force of his imagination he could so inform his work as to raise the exhibition of individual nature into an image of our common humanity. Still less can he be accused of inventing mere puppets with no other function than to carry the chosen legend to its close. His characters always outlive the particular circumstances in which they are employed: they are enriched by a thousand touches of reality not absolutely needed for the requirements of the scene, which allow us to pursue them in imagination beyond the margin of the printed page. But there is at least this truth underlying Johnson’s criticism, that, accepting the malign influences under which their natures are exhibited, there is nothing abnormal in the character of either; and that what is particularly distinctive about them has been added with the view of giving ideal emphasis to tendencies that are common to us all.

We shall realise this the better as we come to examine more nearly their conduct and bearing towards the one terrible circumstance that dominates the lives of both. For it must never be forgotten that in the play of Macbeth the murder of Duncan means all. It is the touchstone by which temperament and disposition are tried and developed; the instrument of evolution which the poet has found ready to his hand, and which he has wielded with all the extraordinary force of his genius. The first of a long list of horrors committed by Macbeth, it nevertheless in essence contains them all; and though it hurries his unfortunate partner by a more terrible passage to a swifter doom, it illumines as by lightning-flashes every phase of the woman’s nature, from the first passionate impulse of evil to the remorse that cannot find refuge even in madness, and is only silenced by death.

On the threshold of this terrible adventure in what mood do we find them? The project, as we have seen, is no stranger to the breast of either, and yet with what strangely different effect has the poison worked its spell! They have been apart, and the soul of each has been thrown back upon itself. In the thick of action, “disdaining fortune with his brandished steel,” Macbeth has become infirm of purpose: alone in her castle at Inverness, Lady Macbeth has brooded over the crime until it has completely possessed her. With the concentration of a woman’s nature, she has driven from her brain all other thoughts save this: and she waits now with impatient expectancy for the hour that shall put her courage to the proof. Here, as we see, the divergence of sex has already asserted itself, working such a transformation that when they meet they scarcely recognise one another. The sudden coming of the occasion so long plotted and desired by both has hastened the development of individual character. He finds in the “dearest partner” of his greatness a being so formidable that he regards her for the moment with feelings of mingled admiration and dismay:

Bring forth men-children only;

For thy undaunted metal should compose

Nothing but males.

And though, with the woman’s finer instinct, she has partly divined and anticipated his mood, she is appalled at the extent of the change it has wrought in him. Beneath the armour of the valiant soldier she finds, as she thinks, the trembling heart of a coward, and struck with sudden terror at his failing purpose, she tries to recall him to his former self:

When you durst do it, then you were a man;

And, to be more than what you were, you would

Be so much more the man.

From this moment they are strangers in spirit, though the old bond still holds them together. And yet to us, who view the whole picture with the poet’s larger vision, the process of development moves in obedience to inevitable law. For at such a crisis it is natural in a man to anticipate: in a woman to remember; on the eve of action he looks forward with apprehension: on the morrow she looks back with regret; and while his nature is stronger in restraint, hers, on the contrary, surrenders itself more completely to the passion of remorse. The finer moral feelings of a woman are retrospective, for her imagination feeds and broods upon the past. She is often more intrepid in action because the intensity of her purpose bars the view of consequence; and whether the enterprise be heroic or malign, her indifference to danger, which then far surpasses the courage of man, is never so superbly illustrated as when she labours in his service, and not for any ends of her own. And so it happens that where she only follows she sometimes seems to lead, and the man, who has devised the policy which her readier resource only avails to carry into execution, appears in the guise of the reluctant victim of her stronger purpose and more undaunted will.

In order the better to exhibit these tendencies of her sex, Shakespeare has pictured for us in Lady Macbeth a woman of the highest nervous organisation, whose deep devotion gives to her character a passionate intensity of purpose that seems at times to be more than human. While the troubled surface of Macbeth’s mind sends back but a blurred image of the dark secret that it hides, in her transparent nature the guilty project of his ambition is clearly and sharply mirrored. Before the murder of Duncan she can see nothing but the crime and its reward, that crime—

Which shall to all our nights and days to come

Give solely sovereign sway and masterdom.

Macbeth’s message has reminded her that the time is drawing near, and she resolves to chase from his brain—

All that impedes thee from the golden round,

which the witches have placed upon his brow. In the next moment she hears of the king’s expected arrival, and then she knows that the hour so long awaited has come at last, and she nerves herself for the one supreme effort of her life:

The raven himself is hoarse

That croaks the fatal entrance of Duncan

Under my battlements. Come, you spirits

That tend on mortal thoughts, unsex me here;

And fill me, from the crown to the toe, top-full

Of direst cruelty!

But it is a vain cry; for throughout the terrible experiences of the next few hours the feminine nature is ever dominant. If there are no women save those who deal in gentle deeds, then Jael did not drive the nail into the forehead of Sisera, and it was not Judith’s hand that compassed the death of Holofernes. And yet, if such as they were truly of the sex which claims them, by a still firmer title may we say of Lady Macbeth that she is every inch a woman. It is the woman who in this same scene greets her husband on his return:

Great Glamis! worthy Cawdor!

Greater than both, by the all-hail hereafter!

Thy letters have transported me beyond

This ignorant present, and I feel now

The future in the instant.

And in “the instant” she now lives, looking neither before nor after; for the future that she sees stretches no further than the dreaded deed which is to bring fulfilment of all their cherished hopes. As she has shut out the past, with whatever compassionate scruples it might recall, so in like manner her fixed concentration on the business in hand excludes all vision of the time to come. If she had been endowed with Macbeth’s imagination, which could ride so swiftly on the track of consequence, Duncan would indeed have gone forth on the morrow as he purposed. It needed this fatal combination to effect what neither would have accomplished alone—the man’s guilty conception poisoning and possessing the woman’s soul, the woman’s surrender to his will so complete and passionate that when he falters she stands before him as the glittering image of his former self, a superb creation of his own brain, endowed with all, and more than all, the courage he had lost. This is Lady Macbeth on the eve of Duncan’s murder. From the moment that she perceives his wavering resolution she takes the yoke of action on to her own shoulders. She contrives and schemes every detail of the crime, and with ever-increasing impetuosity urges his failing footsteps towards the goal he now fears to reach. But the precious moments are speeding onward, and her passionate arguments seem powerless to lift his sickened spirit; till at the last, with all the rhetoric of despair, she presents to his affrighted gaze a blackened image of herself, thinking, as well she may, that such a vision will prove more potent than curses to fan into flame the dying embers of his resolve:

I have given suck, and know

How tender ’tis to love the babe that milks me;

I would, while it was smiling in my face,

Have pluck’d my nipple from his boneless gums,

And dash’d the brains out, had I so sworn as you

Have done to this.

It seems almost incredible, but it is nevertheless true, that this frenzied appeal has over and again been accepted as Lady Macbeth’s judicial report upon her own character. A speech which is conceived in the most daring spirit of dramatic fitness, and which bears in every word the stamp of the special purpose for which it is uttered, is transformed into a prosaic statement of fact; and we can only wonder we are not also invited to believe that this somewhat rigorous treatment of the young accounts for the fact that the play contains no mention of the lady’s surviving offspring.

When the scene in which the awful passage occurs has drawn to its close, Lady Macbeth’s task is already more than half accomplished. Her fiery eloquence has roused him from his stupor, and, inspired by the dauntless spirit which he had himself inspired, he bends up “each corporal agent to this terrible feat.” But she does not rest until all is finished; she never falters till the goal is passed. The woman’s quivering nerves, more potent than the iron sinews of a giant, bear her up safely to the end; and then, with a woman’s weakness, they break, not beneath the weight they bear, but beneath the weight they have borne. So long as the need of action endures she remains unflinching and undismayed. It is she who drugs the grooms in preparation for the murder: it is she who at the supreme moment, when he can do no more, revisits the chamber of death to complete what he has left undone:

Infirm of purpose!

Give me the daggers: the sleeping and the dead

Are but as pictures: ’tis the eye of childhood

That fears a painted devil.

A speech which shows how little she knew herself; for throughout all her brief after-life this picture of “the sleeping and the dead” is set in flames before her haunted vision and burnt with fire into the depths of her soul.

From this time forward Macbeth and his wife change places. In outward seeming at least, their positions are reversed, though when we look beneath the surface there is an inexorable consistency in the conduct of both. He, whose imagination had foreseen all the consequences of this initial step in crime, braces himself without hesitation to the completion of his fatal task; she, who had foreseen nothing, is thrown back upon the past, her dormant imagination now terribly alert, and picturing to her broken spirit all the horrors she had previously ignored. As the penalty of his crime is unresting action, her heavier doom is isolated despair; and it is significant to observe that it is she who suffers most acutely all the moral torments he had only anticipated for himself. Macbeth indeed had “murdered sleep,” but it was her sleep he had murdered as well as his own; and the blood that, he feared, not “all great Neptune’s ocean” would wash away, counts for little with one who afterwards plunged breast-high into the full tide of blood, but remains with her a haunting memory to the end. This change is already well marked in the scene immediately following the murder, when he suddenly wrests the conduct of affairs from her hands, and she sinks appalled at the dark vista of unending crime which his readiness in resource now first opens to her view. He who before had stood with trembling feet upon the brink of the stream now rushes headlong into the flood; to complete the chain of suspicion, he murders the two grooms without an instant’s hesitation; and before the next Act opens he has already planned the death of Banquo and his son.

But from this point he proceeds alone. Her help is no longer needed, and even if it were not so, she has none now to give. “Naught’s had, all’s spent.” Her dream is shattered; the vision of glory is fled away into the night, and she who had felt “the future in the instant” can only brood over the wreck of the past. The crown for which she had struggled presses like molten lead into her brain; the lamp which has lighted her so far only flings its rays backward on the blood-stained pathway she has trodden; and, bitterest of all to her woman’s soul, the evil she had wrought for his sake now breaks their lives asunder and parts them for ever. For his spirit has no access to the anguish of remorse that is fast hurrying her to the tomb, and she on her side can take no part in those darker projects with which he seeks to buttress the tottering fabric of his ambition. In all tragedy there is nothing so pitiful in its pathos as the passage in which she strives to grant to her husband the support of which she herself stands so sorely in need. She feels instinctively that he shuns her company, and surmises that he too is suffering the lonely pangs of remorse, little guessing that he comes to her fresh from a new scheme of murder:

How now, my lord? why do you keep alone,

Of sorriest fancies your companions making?

Using those thoughts which should indeed have died

With them they think on? Things without all remedy,

Should be without regard: what’s done, is done.

With what a jarring note comes his answer:

We have scotched the snake, not killed it.

And yet, despite this answer, with its clear indication of the true drift of his thoughts, she still fails to realise the gulf that divides them. All through the banquet scene she cannot rid herself of the belief that he is haunted, as she is haunted, by the vision of the murdered king, and even when he strips off the mask and bares the inner workings of his breast—

For mine own good,

All causes shall give way; I am in blood

Stepp’d in so far, that, should I wade no more,

Returning were as tedious as go o’er,

she listens without understanding, and still interpreting his sufferings by her own, answers him from the sleepless anguish of her own soul:

You lack the season of all natures, sleep.

In the interval, before we meet Lady Macbeth again, and for the last time, she has learnt all; and beneath the weight of her guilty knowledge her shattered nerves have snapped and broken. Throughout the wandering utterances of her dying hours her imagination is unalterably fixed upon the scene and circumstances of Duncan’s death, but across this unchanging background flit other spectres besides that of the murdered king. Banquo is there, and Macduff’s unhappy wife: she is spared no item in the dreary catalogue of her husband’s crimes; and yet, always overpowering these more recent memories, come the thick-crowding thoughts of that one fatal hour, when her spirit shot like a flame across the sky, and then fell headlong down the dark abyss of night.

The character of Macbeth standing in vivid contrast to that of his wife, has been subject to an equal amount of misconception, though of a different sort. He is commonly represented as being pursued by the constant warnings of conscience, which are only silenced by the evil ascendancy of the commanding figure at his elbow. But this is to antedate the action of the drama, and to mistake the real basis of his nature. If the voice of conscience ever gained a hearing, it was in some earlier hour, not pictured by Shakespeare, before this settled scheme of murder had taken firm possession of his soul. The opening chorus of the witches, no less than the bearing of the man himself, warn us that he has long ceased to wrestle with the messengers of Heaven, and that he is now under the dominion of influences that have a different origin. The forces that sway Macbeth as we know him are intellectual rather than moral, and in order to exhibit more effectively that tendency to deliberation which is characteristic of his sex, Shakespeare has endowed him with the most potent imagination, which presents the consequences of conduct as clearly as though the secrets of the future were mirrored in a glass. It is not conscience, the whispered echo of eternal law, which causes him to falter on the verge of action: it is the instinct of security, which, as Hecate sings:

Is mortal’s chiefest enemy.

And so indeed it proved; for the initial step in crime once past, the very forces that had been strongest in restraint now carry him with unhalting speed through crime after crime, until his headlong course is stayed by the hand of Macduff. And seeing that Macbeth’s keen vision had pictured what was in store for him, it is no wonder that he trembles with irresolute purpose while his wife’s blind impulse moves with unbroken strength. In his case it is neither conscience nor cowardice that cries halt, but an imagination morbidly vivid and alert, which sees the oak in the acorn, and converts the trickling spring into the full tide of the river that rushes to the sea. All this is plainly imaged for us in the soliloquy that follows his first interview with his wife:

If it were done, when ’tis done, then ’twere well

It were done quickly: if the assassination

Could trammel up the consequence, and catch,

With his surcease, success; that but this blow

Might be the be-all and the end-all here,

But here, upon this bank and shoal of time,

We’d jump the life to come. But, in these cases,

We still have judgment here; that we but teach

Bloody instructions, which, being taught, return

To plague the inventor: this even-handed justice

Commends the ingredients of our poisoned chalice

To our own lips.

Then in the passage that follows he realises in more particular detail the horror and execration which such a deed will awaken. Duncan’s virtues, he sees,

Will plead like angels, trumpet-tongued, against

The deep damnation of his taking-off:

And pity, like a naked new-born babe,

Striding the blast, or heaven’s cherubin, hors’d

Upon the sightless couriers of the air,

Shall blow the horrid deed in every eye,

That tears shall drown the wind.

Here we see set forth in clearest language both the scope and the limit of Macbeth’s moral vision; and as we note his growing irresolution, it is impossible not to be reminded of another of Shakespeare’s characters in whom the imaginative temperament worked with equal potency. Macbeth and Hamlet are in some points strangely allied, but when they are placed side by side the elements of antagonism quickly overpower the outward appearance of similarity. Both were men in whom the supremacy of the imagination induced paralysis of action, but in the one case its exercise is bounded by the limits of our present world, and in the other it starts from the confines of mortal life and seeks to pierce the veil of eternity. Macbeth takes no heed of what may lurk in those dark recesses beyond the grave; if he can only be assured of safety here he is ready to “jump the life to come.” To Hamlet, on the other hand, the fortune of this world, and even death itself, are but as shadows, for his imagination is haunted by the mysteries of that unseen realm of which death is but the portal—

The undiscovered country, from whose bourne

No traveller returns.

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.”

Strange things I have in head, that will to hand,

Which must be acted ere they may be scanned.

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:

The flighty purpose never is o’ertook

Unless the deed go with it: from this moment,

The very firstlings of my heart shall be

The firstlings of my hand.

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

The castle of Macduff I will surprise;

Seize upon Fife; and give to the edge o’ the sword

His wife, his babes, and all unfortunate souls

That trace him in his line.

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:

My way of life

Is fallen into the sear, the yellow leaf:

And that which should accompany old age,

As honour, love, obedience, troops of friends,

I must not look to have; but, in their stead,

Curses not loud, but deep, mouth-honour, breath,

Which the poor heart would fain deny, and dare not.

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

... but a walking shadow; a poor player,

That struts and frets his hour upon the stage,

And then is heard no more: it is a tale

Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,

Signifying nothing.

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.