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,