"Lay your highness'
Command upon me."
"Fail not our feast."
"My lord, I will not."
On the way to it he was a little delayed by being murdered; but, though late, he does not fail.
This tragedy was slowly conceived during the married life of Macbeth and his Lady. Their ambitious desires spent years in collusion before an heir of opportunity was born to them. The rapid and breathless action of the earlier scenes makes clear to us that it does not flow from any sudden resolution. The past years topple in the wave that combs to break into this sweeping surge. The movement of the play is unnatural, unless we admit that the married couple have grown familiar with many projects, all of which make them languish for occasion. Macbeth has revelled in the idea that if the chance offered he possesses every other quality to supplant Duncan,—ambition, audacity, swiftness, all good fortune, except a turn of circumstance. He discovers at the juncture that his wife is the only aptitude he can contribute to it. She remembers his profuse suggestions with a touch of scorn. Is he a man?
"What beast was it, then,
That made you break this enterprise to me?
When you durst do it, then you were a man;
... Nor time, nor place,
Did then adhere, and yet you would make both;
They have made themselves, and that their fitness now
Does unmake you."
Strenuous in fantasy, "infirm of purpose." The sudden crisis betrays the secret pinings of past years for such an hour. The whispered conferences swell into a din: it shouts to tell us how their pillows touched, when darkness brooded in vain upon eyelids that were set wide open with a stare at a gleam of greatness far outside their chamber. We overhear, without ever having played eavesdropper, the anxious interchange of feeling beneath the garden aspens, which might catch their tremor from these two beings who passed hankering to and fro; he encouraging a reverie, she trying to chastise it into action with the valor of her tongue. Thus the years passed, while he alternated between the grand loyalty of many a fight and the treachery which grew warm upon the bosom of his wife. Much given to pondering and pleased with vivid day-dreams, he sought no way to realize them. Well as she knew this musing vein of his, and much as it displeased her spirit of action, she will have to be re-enforced by opportunity. Then the deed, now rusting in its sheath of speculation, may possibly leap forth. His mind did not have the coupling which makes up wishing and doing into one train; so the doing stands some distance off idle on the track. The track which emerged from Hamlet's resolution met so many diverging lines at the controlling switch that he was in doubt upon which to run: at length, impatient chance unlocked the switch, and set the rail for a disaster. When Macbeth's wishing became linked to acting, he was not over-nice about his route. The subtle Hamlet considered till he could not start. The inconsiderate Macbeth, when he ceased to vapor and began to move, blundered with a full head of fantasy into ruin.
When a man's brain is well charged with blood, his powers are unified; but Macbeth's current was addicted to the lobes of figment to some defrauding of the rest. His wife's brain blushed all at once, and expanded to give the measure of her structure; so that her hope, implicating the whole of her, had all the substantiality of a deed. She was already the deed from which Macbeth's ambition swerved. He spawned spectres: she gave birth to men-children only. A woman inspired through and through with love for him, discontented with the slowness of his fortune, longing to touch the top and finish of her own; a helpmeet, whose unextinguished bridal ardor kept burning up all scruples as fast as her lover could rake them together. He, the still perfect object of her pride and passion, must become great: he must be lifted to a place whence all his qualities shall shine beyond cramped horizons with their petty crowds. She would kiss him into the compass of a throne, if lips could waft her soldier so far. Her whole soul, imagining him in statelier guises, grows so impatient to speak out its action, that love itself becomes for a moment inarticulate, though it is all the time the life-blood of her hope; as when he returns to her after the perils of the campaign which overthrew rebellion, her embrace is grave, as if her arms enclosed the coming state: they do not radiate the touch of love. He is not her darling husband, but
"Great Glamis! worthy Cawdor!
Greater than both by the all-hail hereafter!"
His letters transported her not only beyond the "ignorant present," but beyond him, away beyond the familiar circle of his arms, to which she had so often committed soul and body,—away so far that she does not feel him. "The future in the instant" is embracing her; and it is against that splendor that her heart-beats break.
The first exclamation which follows the reading of his letter betrays this passionate attachment: "and shalt be what thou art promis'd." There runs through the tone a vibration from her own desire, no doubt; but it is dominated by exulting love, and bursts into a chord. The time has come: he shall, he must be, what he has always longed to be. The weird sisters are in luck when they promised so fairly to a man who is so profoundly loved. 'Tis the good will of Nature that I love him.
Yet she knows him thoroughly. So close is her appraisement of him that she instinctively postpones love to the immediate exigency,—that is, to pour her spirits in his ear, to beat down every thing that might intercept him when putting forth that one decisive hand-grasp toward the crown. She fears his nature, because scruples hamper his unscrupulous ambition. They are not entirely, as she conceives them, the results of inborn mildness. He has a politic disposition which grows all the more considerate as he sees the widening of his popularity. He will proceed no farther against Duncan, because