"That fell arrest,
Without all bail,"—
became England's last resource against this dangerous, lovable, bewildering, fateful woman. Her bronze effigy in St. Mary's Church at Warwick lifts features whose clearly cut delicacy implies her resolution, and the magnetic power of all her loves and plots.
Her attachments were sometimes inspired by politics, sometimes by sentiment. All her mental and emotional ability was pledged to honor drafts which came in the interest of the Pope, of France, of hatred of Protestantism, of desire to govern England. She was in a frame of constant pique at the influence and reputation of Elizabeth. The Scottish reformers kept her skirmishing talent well employed. Defending her amusements or her mass against John Knox, she braved him till his bitter speech gathered into brine in her eyes. But, as it flowed, the lines of resolution upon her face were etched more clearly. She could lend her person to Bothwell with the hope of consolidating a party. With power and beauty at command, she lavished every wile to control the transitional epoch into which she was born. Her life was a series of shifts and dramatic surprises. But no dark recollections ever disturbed her sleep; nor did she carry a candle through the midnight of a shattered mind, to throw light upon suspected murders.
In love she was less constant than Macbeth's wife, who felt but one great passion, and had no art nor culture to lavish in retaining its object. She might have said,—
"I am as true as truth's simplicity,
And simpler than the infancy of truth."
We shall find this sun-lighted heart less capable of endurance than the other blondes of history.
LADY MACBETH.
To make and share a husband's fortune was her only motive, and the only driving-power she could supply to that was love: her character was most inartificially contrived out of one or two broad elements of womankind; a Semele to invite the solar ray that consumed her. To be a woman was her sole resource.
Let us notice, therefore, how prompt was her first inspiration, and how quickly it recoiled exhausted from its terrible victory.
A full-blooded virago who has murder in her heart, but supposes that any chance to commit it is a long way off, would not betray emotion if Fate suddenly tossed a chance into her lap. Lady Macbeth's nerves are not well padded against such a shock. The husband's letter astonishes and exalts her soul; but the old desires, never before so animated, seem fruitless as ever, since neither time nor place concur. In the height of this turmoil, an attendant enters to say, "The King comes here to-night." The tidings appal her: has Providence gone mad, to trust Duncan with her in this temper? The man is mad to say it. Coming! To-night! "And when goes hence?" Her looks and speech recoil from the coincidence. Then she breaks into that soliloquy which is not the ranting of a mannish murderess who is in a frenzy to get at her victim. The lines quiver with the excitement of a delicate nature that is overstrained and dreads to fail. Vexed and chagrined at womanly proclivities which will be apt to follow their bent against her purpose, she invokes spirits to unsex her, to make thick the blood that runs too limpidly and warm, and clot "the access and passage to remorse." It fills us with dismay to see how far a susceptible womanhood can be transported by a vehement passion; as when, toward nightfall, the dweller upon a soft inland stream sees the freshet's discolored water come down, thick with the fruits of gentle husbandry and the quenched hearths of homesteads, with piteous wrecks of innocence clinging round them.