Creation or Evolution? A Philosophical Inquiry

by George Ticknor Curtis

Here we may pause upon the first exhibition of the phenomenon called sleep-walking, which we get by description only, and analyze the nature of the action. It is perfectly apparent that what the poet accepted as true, is the power of the mind to move the body while the body is asleep, so as to make it perform many acts. Experience makes this assumption perfectly correct. I presume it will not be questioned that this phenomenon is described by Shakespeare with entire accuracy, and it is explicable only upon the hypothesis that the mind has some control over the body while the body is asleep. Actions as minute and as much premeditated as those performed by Lady Macbeth "in a most fast sleep," have been witnessed in persons who were undoubtedly asleep, and whose eyes were open for some purposes, but, as in her case, their sense was shut for other purposes.

We now pass to the more awful exhibition of a mind worked upon by a guilty conscience. Lady Macbeth comes out of her bedroom fast asleep, but with a light in her hand. The gentlewoman who interprets her state to the doctor informs him that she has a light by her bedside continuously; and we thus learn that her nights are so disturbed that she can not bear darkness. They notice that her eyes are open, but "their sense is shut." Then begin the terrific manifestations of the control of a guilty conscience over both mind and body, when the memory, alive to certain terrible facts, plays fantastic tricks with itself, and mingles delusions with realities. As she approaches, with the taper in her hand, she performs an action which the gentlewoman says she has repeatedly seen her go through, for a quarter of an hour at a time, endeavoring to rub a spot of blood off from one of her hands. Her hands have been clean, physically, since the time when she first washed them on the fatal night; but the delusion that is upon her is that there is blood on them still. She goes on rubbing them, and her first exclamation is, "Out, damned spot! out, I say!" Yet it will not out. That little hand wears what she imagines to be an indelible stain. After her first exclamation, the memory rushes back to the moment before the murder. She thinks she hears, perhaps does hear, the clock strike—"one, two"; and then, as if speaking to her husband, she says, "Why, then 'tis time to do't." Then there is a pause, and out comes the reflection, "Hell is murky!" This seems to indicate that darkness, in which she and her husband are whispering together just before the murder, is a hell, and so very fit for what is about to be done. Hell is murky, as this chamber is. Then she remembers her husband's reluctance, and fancying that she is still talking with him and bracing him up to the deed, she says: "Fye, my lord, fye! a soldier, and afeard? What need we fear who knows it, when none can call our power to account?" Presently she is looking back upon the deed, and exclaims, "Yet who would have thought the old man to have had so much blood in him!" Then she recurs to herself as if she were another: "The thane of Fife had a wife; where is she now?" Again she thinks of her stained hands: "What, will these hands ne'er be clean?" Are they to wear this horrible stain forever? Instantly she is again at the door of Duncan's chamber, speaking to her husband: "No more o' that, my lord, no more o' that: you mar all with this starting!" Then her hands again, her poor hands; they smell of the blood: "Here's the smell of the blood still: all the perfumes of Arabia will not sweeten this little hand! Oh, oh, oh!" Then, after another pause, she is speaking to her husband, when the deed has been done: "Wash your hands, put on your night-gown; look not so pale!" In another instant she is thinking of Banquo's murder, which occurred after Duncan's, and she says to her husband: "I tell you yet again, Banquo's buried; he can not come out of his grave!" Once more she is back at the door of Duncan's chamber, in the darkness, and the murder has been committed. Speaking to her husband, she says: "To bed, to bed; there's knocking at the gate. Come, come, come, come, give me your hand. What's done can not be undone. To bed, to bed, to bed!" Then she goes quickly toward her chamber and to bed, believing that Macbeth is with her and that she is holding his hand.

How mixed, how wild, how fantastic, how coherent and incoherent are these phantoms of the imagination! If she were awake, things would not thus present themselves to her. Every event in the dreadful story would stand in its true relations, and, however she might be suffering the pangs of a guilty conscience, she would not mix up the scenes through which she had passed, but every fact would stand in its due order. She would be conscious that there was no blood upon her hands, and that they did not need the perfumes of Arabia to sweeten them. She would know that Duncan had been murdered, and would not enact the murder over again. She would remember that Banquo's murder had not been distinctly made known to her, and that she had only surmised it, when at the banquet Macbeth fancied that the ghost of Banquo rose and sat at the table—an apparition which neither she nor any one else saw. But, in that strange scene, it flashed across her mind that Banquo was dead, and to herself she interpreted truly what was passing in her husband's mind, and instantly explained his conduct to the company as the recurrence of an old malady to which he was subject.

If we go back to what had actually happened before the banquet, and then go forward to the condition in which she is seen by the doctor and her attendant, we shall understand how her mind was working, not upon a fact that she knew, but upon a fact which she had truly surmised. In her somnambulistic state, she says to her husband: "I tell you yet again, Banquo's buried; he can not come out of his grave." Had she said this to him before? According to the course of the story, as the text of the play gives it to us, she had not. In the second scene of the third act, where, after Duncan had been murdered and Macbeth had become king, they are preparing for the banquet, to which Banquo was expected as one of the guests, Macbeth and his wife are talking together, and she is trying to get him out of the contemplative and conscience-stricken mood in which he looks back upon what they have done. He concludes one of his mixed and melancholy reflections with these words:

Duncan is in his grave;

After life's fitful fever he sleeps well;

Treason has done his worst: nor steel, nor poison,

Malice domestic, foreign levy, nothing

Can touch him further!

Then she says to him: