THE GLAMOUR OF MACBETH
What a delightful thing it is to be first enthralled with a drama,
romance, or poem, and then to enjoy a topographical appendix, in the
form of a ramble over the ground--where it never happened!
In Scotland there was once a Macbeth MacFinleigh, King of Scotland for
seventeen years, stout fighter, patron of the Culdees, and pilgrim to
Rome. He appears to have had all the accomplishments of royalty, piety,
belligerency, and whatever seemed necessary for an eleventh-century man
in power. In a word, he was in harmony with his age and environment and
did what was expected of him.
Not much is known of this Macbeth, but details of reality are never
necessary to literary immortality. Did not our own Irving, out of three
lines and a half of record, which concerned only one passing incident,
construct the colossal figure of Anthony van Corlear, the trumpeter?
And are not Anthony’s Nose, and Spuyten Duyvil, on the Hudson,
monumental evidences, in rock and water, of the personality of the
handsome fellow who broke the hearts of both Dutch and Yankee maidens?
Our old Dundee friend, Hector Boece (1465–1536), of King’s College,
Aberdeen, who wrote that lovely work of fiction, entitled the “History
of Scotland,” incorporated in his twelfth book what the old chronicler,
John of Fordun, of the century before, had written; but with liberal
decorations and embroideries. Boece, in turn, was utilized by that
charming rambler through the past, Raphael Holinshed, whose illustrated
volumes, as they fell from the press, were devoured by Shakespeare.
Boece’s twelfth book, rich in fables, inventions, and delightfully
baseless anecdotes, contains the very much expanded story of Macbeth.
Except the murder of Duncan and the probable character of Lady Macbeth,
Shakespeare’s drama scarcely touches history at more than two or three
points. Yet all that a genius, like the bard of Avon, needs, is a small
base-line of fact, whence to describe meridians of the immensities and
infinities from airy nothings. There are realities of truth independent
of place or time, and this Shakespeare knew.
Yet as, a half-century before the battle of Gettysburg, a visiting
British officer saw the possibilities of the site, and exclaimed, “What
a place for a battlefield,” so, fifty years or more before Shakespeare
put “Macbeth” upon the boards, Buchanan had already pointed out the
fitness of the legend for the stage.
After studying, lecturing upon, seeing “Macbeth” played by great
actors, and meeting all sorts of cranks who theorized upon it, it
was delightful, with some lively young folks, to visit Glamis, only
a few miles from Dundee and now one of the finest baronial castles
in Scotland. Such an imposing mass of towers, turrets, domes, and
battlements! Glamis of old was a thanedom and a thane was an hereditary
tenant of the king; that is, a feudal ruler. Macbeth, the thane of
Glamis, held rank as earl. Not satisfied with even so high an honor,
this vassal, Macbeth, murdered King Duncan and usurped his throne.
Why? Well, the chronicler says, “but specialie his wife lay sore upon
him to attempt the thing as she that was verie ambitious, burning in an
unquenchable desire to beare the name of a queen.” Unwilling to trust
to the strength of the feudal stronghold of Glamis, this picturesque
murderer of kings and of sleep, after the ruin wrought, went westward
and built a fortress at Dunsinane Hill. He knew that his enemies, old
and new, would soon rise up against him.
These were the days when most of the early “kings” of Scotland met with
violent deaths. Near the village is a cairn of stones, surrounding
a boulder, which is called “Malcolm’s gravestone,” and is supposed
to mark the place where the King Malcolm II, after being slain by
assassins, was buried. His father, Malcolm I, who reigned from 943 to
954, had been killed at Stonehaven. Malcolm II, his son, held the
sceptre from 1005 to 1034.
It is well to stop awhile at Glamis Castle, not that it was the scene
of the murder of Duncan, but it has plenty of fascinating lore of its
own, besides having Macbeth as a tenant.
It was at Glamis Castle, in 1745, that Bonnie Prince Charlie slept on
one night, to be succeeded on the next by the Duke of Cumberland, who
occupied the very same room. The housekeeper conducts the visitor over
the historic and antique portion of the castle, and the place is well
worth seeing, for it makes the past seem very real. Moreover, though
such sight-seeing does not supply facts, in place of Shakespeare’s
creation, it helps to the enjoyment of the truth personified. We may
delight in facts, for they are necessary; but truth is more. Whatever
the facts concerning the historical Macbeth, they were long ago
“stranded on the shore of the oblivious years.” They were, but the
truth was, and is, and is to come. Human nature is the one thing that
changes not, and that eternal element Shakespeare pictured.
We were visiting Dunkeld, in company with a party of pretty maidens and
rosy-cheeked Scottish youth from Dundee, seeing its cathedral, ruins,
waterfalls, and modern products, when we first realized that we were
in the land of Macbeth. Immediately, all the useful and statistical
data, gathered up on that August day, and even the fact that Dunkeld,
now having fewer than a thousand people, was once a bishopric, seemed
to fade into insignificance compared with the value and importance of
the imaginary--the world outside of history and of science. We looked
southward to see Birnam wood, whose trees and branches were to move to
Dunsinane in the Scotland hills and fulfil the sinister prophecy of the
witches.
Later on, we found comrades for a walk to Dunsinane Hill, which is
only twelve miles northwest of Dundee. All who have read Shakespeare
know that this was the scene of the closing tragedy in the play of
“Macbeth.” We pass red-roofed cottages, and the ruins of an old feudal
stronghold. It is a square tower, having walls of immense thickness,
with the deep, well-like dungeon, cut into the rock, down which the
keeper lowers for you a lighted candle. In place of the old arched
floors, which added strength and solidity to the tower walls, there
are platforms reached by stairways. Ascending to the top of the tower
and emerging by a doorway to the bartizan on the outside, we have a
most magnificent view of the wide-spreading valley of the Tay, with its
manifold tokens of a rich civilization, lying like a panorama at our
feet. One of these is Kinaird Castle, which belonged to a family which,
having taken the wrong side in the uprising of 1715, had their lands
forfeited.
Leaving this mass of stone behind us, we pass on to the upland moors,
and after three or four miles see the two bold hills, the King’s Seat
and Dunsinane. As we proceed, we find several old stones which, not
being rolling, have gathered on their faces a rich crop of the moss of
legend. The southern face of Dunsinane Hill is sheer and steep, but
the view from the top is magnificent. Here on the summit we can barely
trace the foundations of the second castle of Macbeth, which he built
after leaving Glamis and to which he retired. Here he lived in the hope
of finding security, the witches having predicted that he would never
be conquered until “Birnam wood came to Dunsinane.” Thinking to make
assurance doubly sure, he compelled the nobles and their retainers
to build new fortifications for him. Men and oxen were so roughly
impressed in the work that he made enemies of old friends and rupture
soon occurred between him and Macduff.
After his father’s murder, Malcolm fled to England, whence a powerful
army was sent to invade Scotland. The Scots joined the standard of the
young prince and the army marched northward unopposed and encamped
twelve miles away, at Birnam, under the shelter of a forest, which then
covered the hill, but is now no more. The soldiers, each one having
cut down a branch of a tree,--probably not with any knowledge of the
witch’s prophecy, but to conceal their numbers,--made a moving mass
of green. Macbeth, looking out from the battlements of his castle,
beheld what seemed to him a vast forest in motion across the plain to
overwhelm him with destruction.
Whatever was really true in the matter, tradition has adopted the
element of poetical justice so often illustrated by the great
Shakespeare, though some reports are that Macbeth escaped from two
battles with his life and kept up a guerilla warfare in the north,
until killed in a conflict in Aberdeenshire. In another Scottish town,
we were shown a school which stands on the site of the old castle of
the Macduffs, the Thanes or Earls of Fife.
[Illustration: A TYPICAL SCOTTISH STREET: HIGH STREET, DUMFRIES]
The touch of genius has made the name of Macbeth immortal. He is
known wherever the English language is read or spoken. How different
is the fate of those humbler folk, who lie in the ooze of the past,
unrecalled by poet or dramatist! In not a few places in Scotland, one
meets the pathetic sight of old tombs and graveyards that are, in some
instances, hardly visible for the greenery that covers them. Here “the
rude forefathers of the hamlet sleep,” but even the hamlet is gone,
the church is in ruins, and the descendants of those who once lived
and loved and died are now on various continents. They have found
other homes, and most of them, children of the new lands, only vaguely
remember, or most probably are ignorant of, the place in which their
forefathers dwelt and whence their parents or grandparents came.
Occasionally one meets an old man or woman in the great cities, like
Glasgow or Dundee, who will tell of the joys remembered or glories
passed away, naming the village, perhaps in the glens or on the carses,
which one cannot find on the map, or may discover only by consulting
some old gazetteer in the libraries.
To me, an American, these white-haired old folks I saluted on the moors
and in the glens, recalled the words of our own Holmes, and especially
that stanza which President Lincoln thought the most pathetic in the
English language:--
“The mossy marbles rest
On the lips that he has prest
In their bloom;
And the names he loved to hear
Have been carved for many a year
On the tomb.”
Yet who--unless a Mark Twain, who could drop a tear over Father Adam’s
grave--will weep over the long departed Picts? More often, while
reading the books, rather than when rambling among the country folk in
Scotland, do we hear of these shadowy figures, who live in ethnology
rather than in local tradition.
For example, what became of the “Picts,” who figure so largely in
ancient writings, before Pictland became Scotland? Old legends
represent King Kenneth II, who died in 995, as having “exterminated”
the Picts, who had slain his father. Thus these aborigines sank, in
popular tradition, to mere mythology. A Pict now seems but as a nixie,
a brownie, or some sort of mythical, even fairy folk, hardly human, to
whom great feats, including even the building of Glasgow Cathedral,
are attributed. In 1814, Sir Walter Scott met a dwarfish traveller in
the Orkneys, whom the natives regarded as a “Pecht” or Pict. So says
Andrew Lang. The Picts have been so swallowed up in oblivion that they
are like “the ten lost tribes of Israel”--who never were “lost” in any
sense but that of absence of records, and from a genealogical point of
view. I have met intelligent persons who thought “the dead cities of
the Zuyder Zee”--so denominated by Henri Havard--were as Pompeii and
only waiting to be excavated and come to resurrection in museums!
The Picts of Scotland are exactly where the ancient Ebisu or Ainu of
Japan are--in the veins of the people now called the Japanese. The
descendants of the Picts to-day talk Scotch, or English, either of the
American or British variety. It is no more fashionable in Scotland to
trace one’s lineage to Pictish forebears, than in Japan to the Ainu or
Ebisu, from whom millions of Japanese are descended. Who wants to be
descended from common savages, when gods, kings, nobles, and chiefs are
as plentiful as herring or blackberries?