seeming at least, their positions are reversed, though when we look
beneath the surface there is an inexorable consistency in the conduct
of both. He, whose imagination had foreseen all the consequences of
this initial step in crime, braces himself without hesitation to the
completion of his fatal task; she, who had foreseen nothing, is thrown
back upon the past, her dormant imagination now terribly alert, and
picturing to her broken spirit all the horrors she had previously
ignored. As the penalty of his crime is unresting action, her heavier
doom is isolated despair; and it is significant to observe that it
is she who suffers most acutely all the moral torments he had only
anticipated for himself. Macbeth indeed had “murdered sleep,” but it
was her sleep he had murdered as well as his own; and the blood that,
he feared, not “all great Neptune’s ocean” would wash away, counts
for little with one who afterwards plunged breast-high into the full
tide of blood, but remains with her a haunting memory to the end. This
change is already well marked in the scene immediately following the
murder, when he suddenly wrests the conduct of affairs from her hands,
and she sinks appalled at the dark vista of unending crime which his
readiness in resource now first opens to her view. He who before had
stood with trembling feet upon the brink of the stream now rushes
headlong into the flood; to complete the chain of suspicion, he murders
the two grooms without an instant’s hesitation; and before the next Act
opens he has already planned the death of Banquo and his son.
But from this point he proceeds alone. Her help is no longer needed,
and even if it were not so, she has none now to give. “Naught’s had,
all’s spent.” Her dream is shattered; the vision of glory is fled away
into the night, and she who had felt “the future in the instant” can
only brood over the wreck of the past. The crown for which she had
struggled presses like molten lead into her brain; the lamp which has
lighted her so far only flings its rays backward on the blood-stained
pathway she has trodden; and, bitterest of all to her woman’s soul, the
evil she had wrought for his sake now breaks their lives asunder and
parts them for ever. For his spirit has no access to the anguish of
remorse that is fast hurrying her to the tomb, and she on her side can
take no part in those darker projects with which he seeks to buttress
the tottering fabric of his ambition. In all tragedy there is nothing
so pitiful in its pathos as the passage in which she strives to grant
to her husband the support of which she herself stands so sorely in
need. She feels instinctively that he shuns her company, and surmises
that he too is suffering the lonely pangs of remorse, little guessing
that he comes to her fresh from a new scheme of murder:
How now, my lord? why do you keep alone,
Of sorriest fancies your companions making?
Using those thoughts which should indeed have died
With them they think on? Things without all remedy,
Should be without regard: what’s done, is done.
With what a jarring note comes his answer:
We have scotched the snake, not killed it.
And yet, despite this answer, with its clear indication of the true
drift of his thoughts, she still fails to realise the gulf that divides
them. All through the banquet scene she cannot rid herself of the
belief that he is haunted, as she is haunted, by the vision of the
murdered king, and even when he strips off the mask and bares the inner
workings of his breast--
For mine own good,
All causes shall give way; I am in blood
Stepp’d in so far, that, should I wade no more,
Returning were as tedious as go o’er,
she listens without understanding, and still interpreting his
sufferings by her own, answers him from the sleepless anguish of her
own soul:
You lack the season of all natures, sleep.
In the interval, before we meet Lady Macbeth again, and for the
last time, she has learnt all; and beneath the weight of her guilty
knowledge her shattered nerves have snapped and broken. Throughout the
wandering utterances of her dying hours her imagination is unalterably
fixed upon the scene and circumstances of Duncan’s death, but across
this unchanging background flit other spectres besides that of the
murdered king. Banquo is there, and Macduff’s unhappy wife: she is
spared no item in the dreary catalogue of her husband’s crimes;
and yet, always overpowering these more recent memories, come the
thick-crowding thoughts of that one fatal hour, when her spirit shot
like a flame across the sky, and then fell headlong down the dark abyss
of night.
The character of Macbeth standing in vivid contrast to that of his
wife, has been subject to an equal amount of misconception, though
of a different sort. He is commonly represented as being pursued by
the constant warnings of conscience, which are only silenced by the
evil ascendancy of the commanding figure at his elbow. But this is
to antedate the action of the drama, and to mistake the real basis
of his nature. If the voice of conscience ever gained a hearing, it
was in some earlier hour, not pictured by Shakespeare, before this
settled scheme of murder had taken firm possession of his soul. The
opening chorus of the witches, no less than the bearing of the man
himself, warn us that he has long ceased to wrestle with the messengers
of Heaven, and that he is now under the dominion of influences that
have a different origin. The forces that sway Macbeth as we know him
are intellectual rather than moral, and in order to exhibit more
effectively that tendency to deliberation which is characteristic of
his sex, Shakespeare has endowed him with the most potent imagination,
which presents the consequences of conduct as clearly as though the
secrets of the future were mirrored in a glass. It is not conscience,
the whispered echo of eternal law, which causes him to falter on the
verge of action: it is the instinct of security, which, as Hecate sings:
Is mortal’s chiefest enemy.
And so indeed it proved; for the initial step in crime once past, the
very forces that had been strongest in restraint now carry him with
unhalting speed through crime after crime, until his headlong course
is stayed by the hand of Macduff. And seeing that Macbeth’s keen
vision had pictured what was in store for him, it is no wonder that
he trembles with irresolute purpose while his wife’s blind impulse
moves with unbroken strength. In his case it is neither conscience nor
cowardice that cries halt, but an imagination morbidly vivid and alert,
which sees the oak in the acorn, and converts the trickling spring into
the full tide of the river that rushes to the sea. All this is plainly
imaged for us in the soliloquy that follows his first interview with
his wife:
If it were done, when ’tis done, then ’twere well
It were done quickly: 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. But, in these cases,
We still have judgment here; that we but teach
Bloody instructions, which, being taught, return
To plague the inventor: this even-handed justice
Commends the ingredients of our poisoned chalice
To our own lips.
Then in the passage that follows he realises in more particular detail
the horror and execration which such a deed will awaken. Duncan’s
virtues, he sees,
Will plead like angels, trumpet-tongued, against
The deep damnation of his taking-off:
And pity, like a naked new-born babe,
Striding the blast, or heaven’s cherubin, hors’d
Upon the sightless couriers of the air,
Shall blow the horrid deed in every eye,
That tears shall drown the wind.
Here we see set forth in clearest language both the scope and the limit
of Macbeth’s moral vision; and as we note his growing irresolution, it
is impossible not to be reminded of another of Shakespeare’s characters
in whom the imaginative temperament worked with equal potency. Macbeth
and Hamlet are in some points strangely allied, but when they are
placed side by side the elements of antagonism quickly overpower the
outward appearance of similarity. Both were men in whom the supremacy
of the imagination induced paralysis of action, but in the one case
its exercise is bounded by the limits of our present world, and in the
other it starts from the confines of mortal life and seeks to pierce
the veil of eternity. Macbeth takes no heed of what may lurk in those
dark recesses beyond the grave; if he can only be assured of safety
here he is ready to “jump the life to come.” To Hamlet, on the other
hand, the fortune of this world, and even death itself, are but as
shadows, for his imagination is haunted by the mysteries of that unseen
realm of which death is but the portal--
The undiscovered country, from whose bourne
No traveller returns.
It is this which “puzzles the will” and arrests the uplifted arm, and
though the voice that urges him to action comes to him from the grave,
the very fact that the command is borne by a supernatural messenger
suffices to ensure its neglect, and sends the imagination once more
adrift upon the limitless ocean of eternity. Macbeth too trafficks
in the supernatural, but with what different purpose and result! He
holds converse with the weird sisters only that Fate may echo the
dark project he fears to utter; and when he consults these “black and
midnight hags” again, it is to wring from their lips the knowledge
that may guide him still further in his settled career of crime. And
they answer him according to his will. He is already far advanced in
blood, but they beckon him still onward, and, speaking with the double
tongue of hope and fear, bid him beware, and yet be bold, leading him
by such sure steps to his doom that the struggle at last becomes almost
sublime, and Fate, which he had rashly challenged, enters the lists
against him.
When we have once grasped the motive-power of Macbeth’s character, it
is not difficult to reconcile the apparent inconsistency in his conduct
before and after the murder of Duncan. By this one act his trembling
hesitation is suddenly converted into an iron consistency of purpose.
The view of consequence that had held him for a while irresolute on the
threshold of crime now becomes the strongest incentive to whatever
may be needed to make his position secure. His imagination is thus
both the source of inaction and the spur that urges him to morbid
activity: it is at once the friend of conscience and its bitterest
foe: at one moment the lamp that reveals to him his hideous design and
all its attendant train of evil, in the next a lurid flame that lights
up a thousand avenues of danger, only to be guarded by the exercise
of a relentless cruelty and an unflinching courage. In nearly every
utterance of Macbeth after the murder we are allowed to see how clearly
he himself apprehends the danger of his position, and the sinister
policy which it demands. “Things bad begun make strong themselves by
ill”; and accordingly, with no more compunction than an executioner
might feel, he proceeds in the course of action which he had foreseen
from the first to be inevitable. Even his superstitious fears do not
shake him in his resolve, and he has no sooner recovered from the
vision of Banquo’s ghost than he determines to visit again the weird
sisters, that he may know “by the worst means the worst.”
Strange things I have in head, that will to hand,
Which must be acted ere they may be scanned.
This is the first intimation that we have of any menace to the safety
of Macduff, and when, in a following scene, Macbeth hears of his flight
to England, he is full of self-reproaches for his procrastination in
crime:
The flighty purpose never is o’ertook
Unless the deed go with it: from this moment,
The very firstlings of my heart shall be
The firstlings of my hand.
And then, baulked in his guilty designs upon the husband, he
straightway resolves to wreak his vengeance upon his family:
The castle of Macduff I will surprise;
Seize upon Fife; and give to the edge o’ the sword
His wife, his babes, and all unfortunate souls
That trace him in his line.
Truly indeed and with prophetic vision had he said to his wife that he
was “but young in deed,” and that his terror at Banquo’s ghost was only
“the initiate fear that wants hard use.”
And yet, despite this full revelation of the man’s nature, who can fail
to be moved by the splendid despair of his closing hours, when, with
all the forces of heaven and earth arrayed against him, he struggles
with dauntless courage to the end? His imagination, still informing his
shattered spirit, lights up the ruin of his life, and presents to his
wearied gaze the hated object that he has become in the sight of all
men:
My way of life
Is fallen into the sear, the yellow leaf:
And that which should accompany old age,
As honour, love, obedience, troops of friends,
I must not look to have; but, in their stead,
Curses not loud, but deep, mouth-honour, breath,
Which the poor heart would fain deny, and dare not.
There is no refuge of madness for him. He has seen the end from the
beginning, and even when the end has come it has no terror which he had
not known long ago. This only is added to his earlier knowledge, though
the truth, alas! comes too late, that this present life, which he had
held so dear, and for which he had sacrificed all, this life, which had
been the tomb of his virtue, and of his honour, is
... but a walking shadow; a poor player,
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage,
And then is heard no more: it is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.
And so, with the “sound and fury” of this present world still ringing
in his ears, he passes out into that “life to come” of which he had
never dreamed at all.
HENRY IRVING
The value of personality on the stage has rarely been exhibited with
greater force than in the case of Sir Henry Irving. Nature had not
specially equipped him for his calling; in several respects, indeed,
she had weighted him with disabilities which were destined to prove a
serious hindrance in the progress of his career. But she had dowered
him, as if by way of compensation, with a force and persistence of
character that finally shaped for themselves a mode of expression which
satisfied the demands of his ambition. And this sense of resident power
was mirrored in the man himself, even in the earlier days when those
physical peculiarities, which he never wholly lost, were, for the time,
gravely imperilling his success upon the stage.
I met him first at the Old Albion Tavern in Drury Lane--a favourite
haunt of actors that has long passed away--and I remember then
that the man himself impressed me more deeply than any of the few
impersonations in which I had seen him. Already in his face and in his
bearing he contrived to convey a curious sense of power and authority
that he had not yet found the means to incorporate completely in his
work upon the stage. I found myself vaguely wondering why he should
have chosen the actor’s calling as a means of impressing himself upon
his generation, and yet at the time I felt a full assurance that in
that or in some other walk of life he was bound to leave a mark upon
his time. Johnson once said of Burke that if a stranger should take
shelter beside him from the rain, he would part from him with the
feeling that chance had brought him in contact with a remarkable man.
Something of that same feeling was left in me as the impression drawn
from my first meeting with Irving; and it is perhaps characteristic
of that unnameable kind of force his personality suggested, that even
at the zenith of his career, when he had won complete authority over
a public that at first only reluctantly rallied to his banner, there
was still room left for a measure of doubt as to whether his powers
might not have found a fuller exercise in a different realm. It is, I
think, however, an attribute of all the very highest achievement in
any art that its authors, even when their special aptitude for the
chosen medium of expression is full and complete, possess, by right
of their genius, something more and something different in kind from
that particular endowment which the art they have adopted calls into
exercise. In Irving’s case, this thought marked itself more deeply,
because, as I have already hinted, his command of the special resources
of his art was by no means complete, and his whole career may be said
to have been a struggle, fiercer and more obstinate than most men
have to wage, to secure, through the medium of the theatre, a full
recognition of the latent forces he undoubtedly possessed.
He was conscious of that himself, and would often openly avow it; very
conscious, I mean, that, in a calling in which there is no escape from
the physical presence of the artist, he had much to contend with.
It made him quickly appreciative of the kind of perfection achieved
by others in whom the motive and the means of expression were more
finely attuned; and he never wearied in later days of appraising this
quality in the acting of Ellen Terry, whose varied gifts in the moment
of perfection were combined in a fashion so easy and so absolute as
sometimes almost to rob her of the praise due to conscious art.
Such appreciation would sometimes, though not so often, be extended to
the comrades of his own sex; and I recollect, during the time when
William Terriss was a member of his company, he would comment, with a
sense of half-humorous envy, upon the ease and grace with which the
younger actor could at once establish himself in the favour of his
audience. But this recognition of the qualities he knew himself not to
possess never, I think, for a moment shook his deeper conviction that,
when he could subdue to the service of his art the more refractory
elements of his own physical personality, he had a message to convey
which would carry a deeper and more lasting impression.
And he proved by his career that he had a true title to that
conviction. Force was always there, force that showed itself almost
to the point of terror in his early impersonation of “The Bells.” But
sweetness and grace came not till later, and was only won as the reward
of patient and unceasing effort: it was the case of the honeycomb
bedded in the carcase of the lion, and it took all a lion’s strength to
reveal it to the world. In the man himself, however, as distinguished
from his art, it was present from the first; and I recall, in those
earlier days of our friendship, that a certain grave courtliness of
bearing was among the first things that struck me. A certain sense
of loneliness and isolation always belonged to him--the index, as it
seemed to me, of a mind that was conscious that in his case the road
towards fame must be trodden alone; that such perfection as he could
ultimately achieve could borrow little from example, but must be due to
his own unaided subjugation of whatever in his individuality impeded
his progress.
But this suggestion was never so far obtruded as to burden the freedom
of personal intercourse, and my long association with him, in work or
at play, is rich in the remembrance of many varied moods of a sweet and
affectionate character. In common with all men who remain permanently
attractive in companionship, he had a quick and delicate sense of
humour, sometimes half-mischievous in its exercise, and touched now and
then with a slightly saturnine quality, but always ready at call--even
in his most serious moods.
One evening during a brief holiday with him in Paris it was somewhat
roughly put to the test. We stood in a group of spectators watching
the agile performances of some dancers who were exhibiting the wayward
figures of the Can-Can, when one of the more adventurous of the troupe,
greatly daring, suddenly lifted her foot and neatly removed the hat
that Irving was wearing. The other spectators, some of whom, I think,
had recognised the actor, and all of whom, as I had remarked, were
attracted by his personality, stood in momentary wonder as to how this
audacious act of familiarity might be received, and I thought that
I myself detected in Irving’s face a momentary struggle between the
dignity that was natural to him and the genial acceptance of the spirit
of the place in which we found ourselves. But it was only momentary,
and when he acknowledged with hearty laughter the adroitness of the
performer, the Parisians around us found themselves free to indulge in
the merriment which the look upon his grave, pale face had for the time
held in check.
Upon such lighter phases of the life of the French capital Irving
looked with a half-sinister tolerance.
That aspect of the character of the French people made no sympathetic
appeal to him, but he watched their antics with unceasing interest
rather as he might have watched the uncouth gambols of animals in a
menagerie. But there was one of the shows of Paris which positively
fascinated him, and that was the Morgue. Irving’s mind was always
attracted to the study of crime; he loved to trace its motives, to
examine and to probe the various modes of the criminal character; and
so it happened that, on one pretext or another, our morning wanderings
nearly always led us back to this gruesome exhibition. One day the
fancy seized him that a man who passed before one of the corpses and
then returned to gaze upon it again was possibly the murderer himself;
and afterwards, while we were breakfasting at Bignons, he occupied
himself with a sense of keen enjoyment in tracing in imagination the
motive of the crime and the means by which it had been carried out.
At that time his thoughts were greatly occupied with the proposed
revival of _Macbeth_, and on several evenings at the Hotel Bristol we
sat long into the night discussing every phase of that greatest of all
poetic tragedies. I think Irving felt--partly, perhaps, as the result
of our many discussions--that in his earlier presentation of the play
he had dwelt too insistently upon the purely criminal side of Macbeth’s
character to the neglect of its larger and more imaginative issues. I
know, at any rate, that he was so far impressed with my view of the
play, that he asked me to write an essay upon the subject which was
to appear simultaneously with the revival; and he did this in part,
I believe, because the view I entertained of the interplay of motive
between Macbeth and his guilty partner went far to supplant that
masculine conception of Lady Macbeth’s character which had hitherto
been imposed upon the world mainly through the genius of Mrs. Siddons.
The essay, no less than the performance, proved, as we had expected,
the mark for much hostile criticism; but the revival--interesting
to me in many respects--illustrated with surprising force the
extraordinary advance in his art which had been made by Irving since
the earlier production of the play--an advance not merely of technical
resource, but even more as showing the larger and profounder spirit in
which he could now approach the poetic drama.
Nearly all our excursions abroad were in some way associated with
work projected or already in hand, and it was while he was preparing
Mr. W. G. Wills’s version of _Faust_ that we made together a long
and delightful excursion to Nuremberg. Irving was very anxious to
find something that was both quaint and characteristic for the scene
of Margaret’s Garden, and although he was not very fond of physical
exercise, he never wearied of our constant tramps among the narrower
streets of the old German city in inquisitive search for something
that should fit with the ideal that he had in his mind. We trespassed
freely wherever we found an open gateway; and at last, having failed to
discover what was exactly suited to the purpose, we set out one day for
Rothenburg on the Tauber--one of the most perfect and complete examples
of a mediaeval city, and where, as we were assured, we should find
richer material than was provided in Nuremberg itself.
At that time the journey between Nuremberg and Rothenburg had to be
made mainly by road; the railway carried us only half-way, and then we
had a drive of several hours before reaching our destination. I think
it was this that mainly attracted Irving in undertaking the excursion.
All through his life he clearly loved the pleasure of a drive; and
during a week I spent with him at Lucerne, our every day, for six or
seven hours at a stretch, was employed in exploring the shores of the
lake. Rothenburg, as it chanced, furnished us with little new material
towards the object of which we were in quest, and on our return to
Albert Durer’s city, feeling that he had exhausted all the available
means of inquiry, he at once, with characteristic promptitude, summoned
the scenic artist, Mr. Hawes Craven, from London in order that he might
make notes on the spot of the several scenes of the drama.