Don't take the words out of my mouth, sir; or rather, don't put them into my mouth, sir.
BULLER.
Touchy to-day.
NORTH.
The strongest expression of this character is his throwing himself upon the illicit divinings of futurity, upon counsellors known for infernal; and you see what subjugating sway the Three Spirits take at once over him. On the contrary, the Thaness is self-stayed; and this difference grounds the poetical opposition of the two personages. In Macbeth, I suppose a certain splendour of character—magnificence of action high—a certain impure generosity—mixed up of some kindliness and sympathy, and of the pleasure from self-elation and self-expansion in a victorious career, and of that ambition which feeds on public esteem.
BULLER.
Ay—just so, sir.
NORTH.
Now mark, Buller—this is a character which, if the path of duty and the path of personal ambition were laid out by the Sisters to be one and the same path, might walk through life in sunlight and honour, and invest the tomb with proud and revered trophies. To show such a spirit wrecked and hurled into infamy—the ill-woven sails rent into shreds by the whirlwind—is a lesson worthy the Play and the Poet—and such a lesson as I think Shakspeare likely to have designed—or, without preaching about lessons, such an ethical revelation as I think likely to have caught hold upon Shakspeare's intelligence. It would seem to me a dramatically-poetical subject. The mightiest of temptations occurs to a mind, full of powers, endowed with available moral elements, but without set virtue—without principles—"and down goes all before it." If the essential delineation of Macbeth be this conflict of Moral elements—of good and evil—of light and darkness—I see a very poetical conception; if merely a hardened and bloody hypocrite from the beginning, I see none. But I need not say to you, gentlemen, that all this is as far as may be from the exaggerated panegyric on his character by Payne Knight.
TALBOYS.