"From this moment,
The very firstlings of my heart shall be
The firstlings of my hand."
But no critical theory can hold a work of imagination to a strict account. You may clap John Locke into the witness-box and riddle him with cross-questions: the same court has no authority to put a poet on oath to justify himself in every line; he is satisfied to let the drift of his thought be traced through the material in which he works. Quartz that is found in certain localities is as good as gold, and rewards us for suspecting it. We need not strain Shakspeare's page into too minute an adaptation to our views in order to avoid rejecting it. If he convinces us that Macbeth and his wife have composed the tragedy before his pen touches the paper, the witches may appear just what we and Macbeth choose to have them,—at one moment concocters of country spells to give him a drench of murder, at another moment concocted themselves by a spell which his soul has brewed.
This spiritual gift is the main cause of all his practical hesitations. His strongest passion discharges and exhausts itself in a pulse of fantasy; as the electric fish lies awhile torpid after the transmission of a shock. In his case, there is imperfect connection of the motor nerves that run between imagining and doing; so that his milk of human kindness has time to mingle with his mood. When his wife has grown sick and incompetent to stimulate, dire necessity alone can do it for him; as we see after he has had the vision of Banquo's line of kings, when somebody informs him that Macduff, his most formidable enemy, has fled. This is his self-chiding:—
"Time, thou anticipat'st my dread exploits:
The flighty purpose never is o'ertook,
Unless the deed go with it.
But no more sights."
Macduff's "wife, children, servants, all that could be found," are slaughtered by him. It is a deed that, making his fortunes more impaired than ever, betrays to us how feverish and impolitic his course becomes. Far better for him if he had not let the desperate crisis of his fate drive him out of the land of dreams. Shakspeare lets us hear Macbeth chiding the brag of his imagination when he says, "But no more sights." He has had enough of them,—too much time wasted in those presentiments which never have the element of prevention. On the contrary, it is a common experience that something is so sure to happen that it can impart to us a fruitless forefeeling of itself, as Henry IV. felt the blade of Ravaillac in his side a week before it struck him. Macbeth will humor no more sights. That is the key to Shakspeare's conception of the character. We are to understand that henceforth Macbeth is cured of his hallucinations.
Now let us return to the first scene provided with this pass-key. It unlocks that and all the subsequent supernature which had a relish for his society. We feel that the witches express the moral condition of Macbeth's mind, its tumultuous hesitation that is on the point of settling into the definiteness of crime,—"Fair is foul, and foul is fair." All moral discriminations are huddled together and dislocated by the upheaval of his subterranean motive.
He really sends these witches forth to a blasted heath, the avant-couriers of his own visit thither, and of a longing that gains substance and direction the more he entertains it. It is strong enough to be an object behind his retina; and it throws out shapes to limn themselves upon the air into which they make themselves and vanish. And they can appear only at that period of his evil brooding when it gathers and swells, too big for his brain, bursting its barriers to become external. After the actual murder of Duncan has occurred, the brain of Macbeth is depleted for a while: the ominous forms wait till Banquo's ghost can recruit them.
Macbeth has an imagination so keen and unbridled that it outruns the limits of thinking, to become projected outside of his bodily eye in shapes and objects that occupy the focus of his criminal intent. His crimes become ocular deceptions, because they are so palpably real to his mental vision, sharpened as it is by the ambitious sympathy of a wife whose temperament outraces action. Murder is Macbeth's owner before he is conscious that he has made himself the chattel of his wife's suggestions. That same creative fancy built forth into the air the handle of the instrument which he has fated himself to use: he marshalled it the way that he intended to go. No supernatural smith has forged the fatal weapon: it is tempered in the current of his own plastic mind.
But although Macbeth has this mobile imagination, like that which
"If it would but apprehend some joy,
It comprehends some bringer of that joy;"