"Art thou afeard
To be the same in thine own act and valor
As thou art in desire? Would'st thou have that
Which thou esteem'st the ornament of life,
And live a coward in thine own esteem;
Letting 'I dare not' wait upon 'I would,'
Like the poor cat i' the adage?"
Women can shame a partner into valor by venturing the worst affront when they cry,—
"From this time,
Such I account thy love;"
that is, I account it like thy drunken hope which wakes up penitent and pale. When a husband hears himself scorned in this style, he does not believe his own ears, but instinctively translates the phrases to mean, "From this time, count upon my love." For the ideal, in the moment of its greatest rage and dread, betrays the immortal attachment which is a man's breath, his superiority, his sole success.
She does not give Macbeth time to observe that to murder Duncan will exact of him the murder of Malcolm also, who is designated by the King to succeed him. She is in no temper to reflect that the taking-off of Duncan will plunge the husband into ever-renewing complications: her transport carries him away to fruitless crime. But the first blow spends her terrible ardor and disenchants her of murder. She can force it upon her husband, but is not endowed with the complexly woven tissue of talents and motives that can sustain reaction. His muscle drags him through successive scenes of feigning, inures him to the contemplation of fresh murders, and keeps his foot well planted to thrust and parry the foes of his own making. She is all made for love, and for the uttermost that love can suggest: there is no masculine fibre in her heart; it is packed with the invisible, fine-strung nerves of a feminine disposition. And they have been stretched to such a tension that, since no solider flesh sheathes and protects them as they relax, we see them ravelled: they no longer sustain the firm heart-beat and regulate the blood. There are symptoms, even before the murder is committed, that her strength threatens to be inadequate. She must have recourse to wine, to borrow courage from it that may last till morning; and her mood is so intense that the light body can absorb large draughts of it:—
"That which hath made them drunk hath made me bold."
It does not, however, cancel a susceptibility, which was unusual with her, to the weird influences of night and loneliness. It was unusual; for I think it to be no fancy, but a well-attested experience, that the blonde women are the least affected by the physical influences of darkness: they have a certain clarity to repel this infection that penetrates so many darker-looking people,—a certain nonchalance that is manifested even in girlhood's nursery, and prevents spooks from being rocked in the same cradle. Being free from the frailness which is latent in a tendency to project startled feelings into ghostly phenomena, they do, as a general rule, find it easy to translate the queer noises and conspiracies of the darkness into their plain prose. They keep the obscurest entry free from the litter which gathers from tales of superstition: from garret to cellar there's not a nook where creepiness can make a goblin-nest. Up and down lonesome staircases they can go without a light, prowl unperturbed into the uncanniest corners, hurry to investigate the cause of a low moan with a warm heart for a candle, enter the room of the dead without laying a reluctant hand upon the lock or pausing to summon fortitude.
One of these women was Lady Macbeth, who never before experienced, what her husband always had in liability, those paintings of his fear, those flaws and starts, that objectivity of over-wrought imagination. But now this scene, which treads upon the threshold of the murder, shudders with the proximity of something bodiless on the corridors and stairs a spectral gleam is congealing into shapes not known to this world; the wild weather of the "sore night" has hunted the moon and stars out of the heaven; the rain rushes at the panes to get vindictive entrance; the wind utters personal threats at these violators of "the Lord's anointed temple;"—
"The obscure bird
Clamor'd the livelong night."