Excursions in Art and Letters

by William Wetmore Story

“If the assassination
Could trammel up the consequence, and catch,
With his surcease, success; that but this blow
Might be the be-all and the end-all here,
But here, upon this bank and shoal of time,—
We’d jump the life to come.”

The idea of being restrained from committing this murder by any religious or moral scruples is very far from his thought. Right or wrong, good or bad, have nothing to do with the question; and as for the “life to come,” that is mere folly.

But while his moral sense is dead, his imagination is nervously alive. It engenders visions that terrify him: after the murder is done, he thinks he hears phantom-voices crying, “Sleep no more! Glamis hath murdered sleep; and therefore Cawdor shall sleep no more, Macbeth shall sleep no more;” and these voices so work upon his superstitious fears, that he is afraid for the moment to return to the chamber, and carry the daggers back and smear the grooms with blood. He is, as Lady Macbeth says, “brainsickly,” and “fears a painted devil.” This is superstition, not remorse—a momentary imaginative fear, not a permanent feeling. In a few minutes he has changed his dress, and calmly makes speeches as if nothing had occurred,—nay, this cold-blooded hypocrite is ready within the hour to commit two new and wanton murders on the chamberlains, and boastfully to refer them to his loyal spirit and loving heart, inflamed by horror at the hideous murder of the king, which he has himself committed.

The same superstitious fear attacks him when he hears that Birnam Wood is moving to Dunsinane Hill; but it does not prevent this creature, so “full of the milk of human kindness,” from striking the messenger, calling him “liar and slave,” and threatening,—

“If thou speak’st false,
Upon the next tree shalt thou hang alive
Till famine cling thee.”

So, too, when Macduff tells him that he was “not of woman born,” awed for a moment by his superstitious fears, he cries,—

“Accursed be that tongue that tells me so,
For it hath cow’d my better part of man!
... I’ll not fight with thee.”

At times, under the influence of an over-excitable imagination acting upon a nature thoroughly superstitious, his intellect wavers, and he is subject to sudden aberrations of mind resembling insanity. They are, however, evanescent, and in a moment he recovers his poise, descending through a poetical phase into his real and settled character of cruelty and wickedness. In the dagger-scene, where he is alone, these three phases are perfectly marked. The visionary dagger “proceeding from the heat-oppressed brain” soon vanishes, then follows the poetic mania, and then the stern resolution of murder. In the banquet-scene, when the ghost of Banquo rises, the poetic interval is less marked, for Macbeth is under the restraint of the company and under the influence of his wife; but scarce has the company gone when his real character returns. He is again forming new resolutions of blood. His mind reverts to Macduff, whose life he threatens. He is bent “to know, by the worst means, the worst;” “strange things I have in head, that will to hand.”

This aberration of mind Macbeth has in common with Lear, Hamlet, and Othello. But in Macbeth alone does it take a superstitious shape. The trance of Othello is but a momentary condition, in which his goaded imagination, acting upon an irritated sense of honor, love, and jealousy, obliterates for an instant the real world. Hamlet’s aberration, when it is not feigned, as for the most part it is, is but the “sore distraction” of a mind upon which the burden of a great action is fixed, which he is bound either to accept or to reject, but in regard to which he hesitates, not because he lacks decision of character, but solely because he cannot satisfy himself that he has sure grounds for action, and that he is not deceived as to the facts which are the motive of his action; once satisfied as to the grounds for action, he is decisive and prompt, as is clearly shown in the manner in which he disposes of Guildenstern and Rosencrantz on board the vessel, and in the instant slaying of the king himself, when the evidence of his infamy is clear. But while he is yet undecided and struggling with himself to solve this sad problem of the king’s guilt, he rejects all ideas of love as futile and impertinent, and, more than that, doubts whether Ophelia herself is not, unconsciously to herself, made a tool of by the king and queen. Lear, again, is “heart-struck.” His madness comes from wounded pride and affection. The ingratitude and cruelty of his daughters shake his mind, and to his excited spirit the very elements become his “pernicious daughters:” “I never gave you kingdoms, called you children.” In all except Macbeth, the nature thus driven to madness is noble in itself, moral in its character, and warm in its affections. The aberrations of Macbeth are superstitious, and have nothing to do with the morals or the affections.

Macbeth’s imagination is, however, a ruling characteristic of his nature. His brain is always active; and when it does not evoke phantoms, it indulges in fanciful and poetic images. He is a poet, and turns everything into poetry. His utterance is generally excited and high-flown, rarely simple and real, and almost never expresses his true feelings and thoughts. His heart remains cold while his head is on fire. On all occasions his first impulse is to poetize a little; and having done this, he goes about his work without regard to what he has said. His sayings are one thing; his doings are quite another. Shakespeare makes him rant intentionally, as if to show that in such a character the imagination can and does work entirely independently of real feelings and passions. There is no serious character in all Shakespeare’s plays who constantly rants and swells in his speech like Macbeth; and this is plainly to show the complete unreality of all his imaginative bursts. In this he differs from every other person in this play. Yet when he is really in earnest, and has some plain business in hand, he can be direct enough in his speech, as throughout the second interview with the weird sisters, and in the scene with the two murderers whom he sends to kill Banquo and Fleance; or when, enraged at the escape of Fleance, he forgets to be a hypocrite, and his real nature clearly expresses itself in direct words, full of savage resolve. But on all other occasions, when he is not in earnest and intends to deceive, or when his brain is excited, he indulges in sentimental speeches, violent figures of speech, extravagant personifications, and artificial tropes and conceits. Even in the phantom-voices he imagines crying to him over Duncan’s body, he cannot help this peculiarity. He curiously hunts out conceits to express sleep. He “murders sleep, the innocent sleep; sleep, that knits up the ravell’d sleeve of care, the death of each day’s life, sore labor’s bath, balm of hurt minds, great nature’s second course, chief nourisher in life’s feast.” No wonder that Lady Macbeth, amazed, cries out, “What do you mean?” But he cannot help going on like a mad poet. His language is full of alliteration, fanciful juxtaposition of words, assonance, and jingle. At times, so strong is this habit, he makes poems to himself, and for the moment half believes in them. Only compare, in this connection, the natural, simple pathos of the scene where Macduff hears of the barbarous murder of his wife and children, with the language of Macbeth, when the death of Lady Macbeth is announced to him. Macduff “pulls his hat upon his brows,” and gives vent to his agony in the simplest and most direct words. Here the feeling is deep and sincere:—