Yes, already he dreams of murder. He sees not his way clear; he will trust to chance; but he dreams of murder. And full of these thoughts, he rushes to his wife to fill her mind with his project, to consult her as to how it can be carried into execution; for he cannot plan in detail; and though the thought crosses him, that
“If chance will have me king, why, chance may crown me,
Without my stir,”
yet this is but a hope; for in the next scene he has determined to take the matter into his own hands and trust nothing to chance. As soon as he hears that Malcolm is made Prince of Cumberland and heir to the throne, he determines absolutely to kill the king:—
“The Prince of Cumberland!—That is a step
On which I must fall down, or else o’erleap,
For in my way it lies. Stars, hide your fires;
Let not light see my black and deep desires;
The eye wink at the hand; yet let that be,
Which the eye fears, when it is done, to see.”
He has already written to Lady Macbeth; and his letter has but one thought and one theme,—the promise that he shall be king. Much as she fears his nature, she knows thoroughly his desires, and has faint glimpses of his real character; she knows that he means to be king, and sees that he would “wrongly win;” that his ambition is great, and that his mind is filled solely with one idea. But she fears that he is “too full of the milk of human kindness to catch the nearest way;” and when she hears that Duncan is coming to the castle, and that Macbeth is hurrying to see her before the king’s arrival, she doubts his plan no longer. For a moment she is aghast. “Thou’rt mad to say it,” she says to the messenger who announces the king’s approach; for she sees that he comes to his death:—
“The raven himself is hoarse
That croaks the fatal entrance of Duncan
Under my battlements.”
He has been lured here by Macbeth to compass his destruction; and in a moment Macbeth will be with her. Then, summoning up all her courage at once, she resolves to aid him in his ambitious and murderous design. She calls upon the “spirits that tend on mortal thoughts” to unsex her, to alter her nature, to make her cruel and remorseless, to let nothing intervene to shake her purpose; for she is not quite sure of herself. She knows what “compunctious visitings of nature” are, and she strengthens herself against them. She is not naturally cruel; and she cries out to the spirits to “stop up the access and passage to remorse” now open in her nature, to change her “milk for gall,” and to cover her with “the dunnest smoke of hell,” so that her
“keen knife see not the wound it makes,
Nor heaven peep through the blanket of the dark,
To cry, Hold, hold.”
In this tremendous apostrophe, in which she goads herself on to crime, the woman’s nature is plainly seen. Macbeth never prays to have his nature altered, to have any passages to remorse closed up; never fears “compunctious visitings of nature,” nor desires darkness to hide his knife, so that he may not see the wound he makes. But she knows she is a woman, and that she needs to be unsexed, and feels that she is doing violence to her own nature; still her will is strong, and she cries down her misgivings, and resolves to aid Macbeth in his design.
Macbeth meets her in this mood. There is no salutation or greeting on his part; he has but one idea,—Duncan is coming, and is to be murdered. His first words are,—