On books and arts

by Sir Frederick Wedmore

I do to spite the world’:

the other, less revengeful, yet more weary,

‘So weary with disasters, tugg’d with fortune,

That I would set my life on any chance,

To mend it or be rid on ’t.’

Of course no commonly intelligent actor could fail to indicate—for the play itself indicates it a hundred times—how much Macbeth is separated from these, originally; but it does need some such a deep understanding of the character as seems to be Irving’s, to indicate, as time goes on, the gradual sinking to that level of theirs—the fact that the distance that divided the one from the others at the time that the one would ponder regretfully that he ‘could not say “Amen”’ when the grooms ‘said “God bless us,”’ had shrunk to well-nigh nothing by the time when Macbeth’s first greeting to an arriving messenger must needs, in his desperation, be no milder than—

‘The devil damn thee black, thou cream-faced loon’—

words which recall the purposeless and exaggerated angers of impending frenzy—and when his final and bloody resolution—

‘Yet I will try the last,’

is spoken to his foe with a savage hopelessness akin to the murderers’ own. And it is at least a suggestive and worthy, if not at every point a complete; stage performance that can display the half-repenting pathos of the first, and the savagery of the last, and the passages from crime to crime by which the transition is accomplished.