"Cor. How! traitor!
Men. Nay, temperately: your promise.
Cor. The fires i' the lowest hell fold-in the people!
Call me their traitor! Thou injurious tribune!
Within thine eyes sat twenty thousand deaths,
In thy hands clutch'd as many millions, in
Thy lying tongue both numbers, I would say,
'Thou liest,' unto thee with a voice as free
As I do pray the gods."[692]
His friends surround him, entreat him: he will not listen; he foams at the mouth, he is like a wounded lion:
"Let them pronounce the steep Tarpeian death,
Vagabond exile, flaying, pent to linger
But with a grain a day, I would not buy
Their mercy at the price of one fair word."[693]
The people vote exile, supporting by their shouts the sentence of the tribune:
"Cor. You common cry of curs! whose breath I hate
As reek o' the rotten fens, whose love I prize
As the dead carcasses of unburied men
That do corrupt my air, I banish you.... Despising,
For you, the city, thus I turn my back:
There is a world elsewhere."[694]
Judge of his hatred by these raging words. It goes on increasing whilst waiting for vengeance. We find him next with the Volscian army before Rome. His friends kneel before him, he lets them kneel. Old Menenius, who had loved him as a son, only comes now to be driven away. "Wife, mother, child, I know not."[695] He knows not himself. For this strength of hating in a noble heart is the same as the force of loving. He has transports of tenderness as of rage, and can contain himself no more in joy than in grief. He runs, spite of his resolution, to his wife's arms; he bends his knee before his mother. He had summoned the Volscian chiefs to make them witnesses of his refusals; and before them, he grants all, and weeps. On his return to Corioli, an insulting word from Aufidius maddens him, and drives him upon the daggers of the Volscians. Vices and virtues, glory and misery, greatness and feebleness, the unbridled passion which composes his nature, endowed him with all.
If the life of Coriolanus is the history of a mood, that of Macbeth is the history of a monomania. The witches' prophecy has sunk into his mind at once, like a fixed idea. Gradually this idea corrupts the rest, and transforms the whole man. He is haunted by it; he forgets the thanes who surround him and "who stay upon his leisure"; he already sees in the future an indistinct chaos of images of blood:
"... Why do I yield to that suggestion
Whose horrid image doth unfix my hair
And make my seated heart knock at my ribs?...
My thought, whose murder yet is but fantastical,
Shakes so my single state of man that function
Is smother'd in surmise, and nothing is
But what is not."[696]
This is the language of hallucination. Macbeth's hallucination becomes complete when his wife has persuaded him to assassinate the king. He sees in the air a blood-stained dagger, "in form as palpable, as this which now I draw." His whole brain is filled with grand and terrible phantoms, which the mind of a common murderer could never have conceived: the poetry of which indicates a generous heart, enslaved to an idea of fate, and capable of remorse:
"... Now o'er the one half world
Nature seems dead, and wicked dreams abuse
The curtain'd sleep; witchcraft celebrates
Pale Hecate's offerings, and wither'd murder,
Alarum'd by his sentinel, the wolf,
Whose howl's his watch, thus with his stealthy pace,
With Tarquin's ravishing strides, towards his design
Moves like a ghost.... (A bell rings.)
I go, and it is done; the bell invites me.
Hear it not, Duncan; for it is a knell
That summons thee to heaven or to hell."[697]