But, "if we should fail," he suggests, revolving possibilities. What deliberate forethought of contempt her answer yields, if it be properly emphasized,—"We fail!" That is, I'll parrot your phrase, and say "we," but out of disdain. Of us two, the one who fails will not be myself. We, indeed! there's one too much of us for that. Only screw your courage to the point, and we, as you say, will not fail.
If this fortitude which pulls Macbeth through a murder leaves her in our imagination unsexed and brutalized, we deprive ourselves of reasons why he should have loved and married her; for the clouds of moral disaster which whirl around him cannot conceal from us a fine and noble disposition. It breaks through the gathering obscurity in the delicate considerations which urge him to be a loyal host to Duncan; in the imagination so sensitive to life's fitful fever, so shaken nightly by terrible dreams, as she was too; so quick to mark the objects of Nature, and clothe them in poetic feeling; so melted by tender recollections, and capable of noble regrets that call a pause to ruin just as it breaks, a lull that lasts long enough for us to see how much will be ruined:—
"My way of life
Is fall'n into the sear, the yellow leaf:
And that which should accompany old age,
As honor, love, obedience, troops of friends,
I must not look to have; but, in their stead,
Curses, not loud, but deep, mouth-honor, breath,
Which the poor heart would fain deny, and dare not."
What sort of a woman was she, in whose behalf tenderness struggled with despair at last, when he was remembering what a soul had gone delirious, who was too nice for her own fortitude, eminent to be shattered, worse than sick, "as she is troubled with thick-coming fancies"!
"Cure her of that," he replies to the Doctor, but in a tone that repels rather than invites his skill; for those "thick-coming fancies" started from Duncan's room, where he lay looking like her father. Fatal first moment, beyond the reach of medicine! The Doctor has dark misgivings as to the cause of her sleeplessness, though he never heard that midnight cry, "Sleep no more," which the parting soul of Duncan gave as it awoke and fled through the inhospitable palace. Macbeth murdered then the innocent sleep which might have been Nature's resource, but which no doctor can restore. Cure her of that? Cure me first of the infection that was caught at Duncan's bedside, and which spread to the partner of my night-horrors: we are both far gone beyond a doctor's art.
Still he pleads—"Canst thou not minister?"—in piteous forlornness against the better judgment which, when it recurs, prompts him to "throw physic to the dogs." It is a plea which seems to visit the chamber of the wife who ruined herself for love. It is the visit of a yearning that her heart might be cleansed in the oblivion of innocence.
"Canst thou not minister to a mind diseas'd,
Pluck from the memory a rooted sorrow,
Raze out the written troubles of the brain,
And with some sweet oblivious antidote
Cleanse the stuff'd bosom of that perilous stuff,
Which weighs upon the heart?"
If he had married a female butcher of the strongest-minded type, there would have been no fees to pay for doctor's attendance, and the bloom of regret would have been rubbed from Macbeth's language. Such a wife's muscle would have been perilous to any stuff that conscience might venture to suggest. A virago who could dash out the brains of her smiling babe as easily as nurse it,—more easily, forsooth, for how could Nature have endowed her person with the founts of maternity?—was not the kind of woman Shakspeare selected for the ruin of Macbeth.
If the poet had intended Lady Macbeth to be a fury, a person of abnormal wildness and cruelty, who had exhausted love and craved the fire-water of ambition, he would have prepared us to throw such a conception over her, by hinting some motive or circumstance for this divergence from the normal feminine nature. On the contrary, he purposely neglected the opportunity which the old story furnished toward the warping and poisoning of a woman's mind. The historical Lady Macbeth was the grand-daughter of Kenneth IV., who fell in the fight against Malcolm II., Duncan's father. Shakspeare has carefully suppressed any allusion which might recall the bitter family feud to unsex her and make revenge an element of her ambition.