Hear not my steps, which way they walk, for fear
The very stones prate of my whereabout,
And take the present horror from the time,
Which now suits with it.
The man who had an hour or two before been driven from the table of his guests by the mere thought of a crime moves to the deed itself with the exalted language of a Hebrew prophet. On the other hand, in his spiritual struggles there is a simpleness that sometimes suggests childishness. ii. ii. 31. His trouble is that he could not say 'Amen' when the sleepers cried 'God bless us'; his conscience seems a voice outside him; ii. ii. 35-46.finally, the hardened warrior dare not return to the darkness and face the victim he had so exultingly done to death.
Macbeth, then, is the embodiment of one side of the antithesis with which we started; his is pre-eminently the practical nature, moulded in a world of action, but uninfluenced by the cultivation of the inner life. Yet he is not perfect as a man of action: for the practical cannot reach its perfection without the assistance of the inner life. Two flaws in Macbeth as an embodiment of the practical: his superstition;There are two flaws in Macbeth's completeness. For one, his lack of training in thought has left him without protection against the superstition of his age. He is a passive prey to supernatural imaginings. v. v. 10.He himself tells us he is a man whose senses would cool to hear a night-shriek, and his fell of hair rouse at a dismal treatise. And we see throughout the play how he never for an instant doubts the reality of the supernatural appearances: e.g. iii. iv. 60; i. iii. 107, 122. a feature the more striking from its contrast with the scepticism of Lady Macbeth, and the hesitating doubt of Banquo. and his helplessness under suspense. Again: no active career can be without its periods when action is impossible, iii. i. 6.and it is in such periods that the training given by the intellectual life makes itself felt, with its self-control and passive courage. All this Macbeth lacks: in suspense he has no power of self-restraint. compare i. iii. 137, and iii. ii. 16.When we come to trace him through the stages of the action we shall find that one of these two flaws springing out of Macbeth's lack of the inner life, his superstition and his helplessness in suspense, is at every turn the source of his betrayal.
In the case of Lady Macbeth, the old-fashioned view of her as a second Clytæmnestra has long been steadily giving way before a conception higher at least on the intellectual side. Lady Macbeth as an embodiment of the inner life.The exact key to her character is given by regarding her as the antithesis of her husband, and an embodiment of the inner life and its intellectual culture so markedly wanting in him. She has had the feminine lot of being shut out from active life, and her genius and energy have been turned inwards; v. i. 58.her soul—like her 'little hand'—is not hardened for the working-day world, but is quick, delicate, sensitive. She has the keenest insight into the characters of those around her. She is accustomed to moral loneliness and at home in mental struggles. She has even solved for herself some of their problems. In the very crisis of Duncan's murder she gives utterance to the sentiment:
ii. ii. 53.
the sleeping and the dead
Are but as pictures.