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