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.