and their prophecies, if they are to be rationalised or taken
symbolically, must represent not only the evil slumbering in the hero's
soul, but all those obscurer influences of the evil around him in the
world which aid his own ambition and the incitements of his wife. Such
influences, even if we put aside all belief in evil 'spirits,' are as
certain, momentous, and terrifying facts as the presence of inchoate
evil in the soul itself; and if we exclude all reference to these facts
from our idea of the Witches, it will be greatly impoverished and will
certainly fail to correspond with the imaginative effect. The union of
the outward and inward here may be compared with something of the same
kind in Greek poetry.[210] In the first Book of the _Iliad_ we are told
that, when Agamemnon threatened to take Briseis from Achilles, 'grief
came upon Peleus' son, and his heart within his shaggy breast was
divided in counsel, whether to draw his keen blade from his thigh and
set the company aside and so slay Atreides, or to assuage his anger and
curb his soul. While yet he doubted thereof in heart and soul, and was
drawing his great sword from his sheath, Athene came to him from heaven,
sent forth of the white-armed goddess Hera, whose heart loved both alike
and had care for them. She stood behind Peleus' son and caught him by
his golden hair, to him only visible, and of the rest no man beheld
her.' And at her bidding he mastered his wrath, 'and stayed his heavy
hand on the silver hilt, and thrust the great sword back into the
sheath, and was not disobedient to the saying of Athene.'[211] The
succour of the goddess here only strengthens an inward movement in the
mind of Achilles, but we should lose something besides a poetic effect
if for that reason we struck her out of the account. We should lose the
idea that the inward powers of the soul answer in their essence to
vaster powers without, which support them and assure the effect of their
exertion. So it is in _Macbeth_.[212] The words of the Witches are fatal
to the hero only because there is in him something which leaps into
light at the sound of them; but they are at the same time the witness of
forces which never cease to work in the world around him, and, on the
instant of his surrender to them, entangle him inextricably in the web
of Fate. If the inward connection is once realised (and Shakespeare has
left us no excuse for missing it), we need not fear, and indeed shall
scarcely be able, to exaggerate the effect of the Witch-scenes in
heightening and deepening the sense of fear, horror, and mystery which
pervades the atmosphere of the tragedy.
3
From this murky background stand out the two great terrible figures, who
dwarf all the remaining characters of the drama. Both are sublime, and
both inspire, far more than the other tragic heroes, the feeling of awe.
They are never detached in imagination from the atmosphere which
surrounds them and adds to their grandeur and terror. It is, as it were,
continued into their souls. For within them is all that we felt
without--the darkness of night, lit with the flame of tempest and the
hues of blood, and haunted by wild and direful shapes, 'murdering
ministers,' spirits of remorse, and maddening visions of peace lost and
judgment to come. The way to be untrue to Shakespeare here, as always,
is to relax the tension of imagination, to conventionalise, to conceive
Macbeth, for example, as a half-hearted cowardly criminal, and Lady
Macbeth as a whole-hearted fiend.
These two characters are fired by one and the same passion of ambition;
and to a considerable extent they are alike. The disposition of each is
high, proud, and commanding. They are born to rule, if not to reign.
They are peremptory or contemptuous to their inferiors. They are not
children of light, like Brutus and Hamlet; they are of the world. We
observe in them no love of country, and no interest in the welfare of
anyone outside their family. Their habitual thoughts and aims are, and,
we imagine, long have been, all of station and power. And though in both
there is something, and in one much, of what is higher--honour,
conscience, humanity--they do not live consciously in the light of these
things or speak their language. Not that they are egoists, like Iago;
or, if they are egoists, theirs is an _egoïsme à deux_. They have no
separate ambitions.[213] They support and love one another. They suffer
together. And if, as time goes on, they drift a little apart, they are
not vulgar souls, to be alienated and recriminate when they experience
the fruitlessness of their ambition. They remain to the end tragic, even
grand.
So far there is much likeness between them. Otherwise they are
contrasted, and the action is built upon this contrast. Their attitudes
towards the projected murder of Duncan are quite different; and it
produces in them equally different effects. In consequence, they appear
in the earlier part of the play as of equal importance, if indeed Lady
Macbeth does not overshadow her husband; but afterwards she retires more
and more into the background, and he becomes unmistakably the leading
figure. His is indeed far the more complex character: and I will speak
of it first.
Macbeth, the cousin of a King mild, just, and beloved, but now too old
to lead his army, is introduced to us as a general of extraordinary
prowess, who has covered himself with glory in putting down a rebellion
and repelling the invasion of a foreign army. In these conflicts he
showed great personal courage, a quality which he continues to display
throughout the drama in regard to all plain dangers. It is difficult to
be sure of his customary demeanour, for in the play we see him either in
what appears to be an exceptional relation to his wife, or else in the
throes of remorse and desperation; but from his behaviour during his
journey home after the war, from his _later_ conversations with Lady
Macbeth, and from his language to the murderers of Banquo and to others,
we imagine him as a great warrior, somewhat masterful, rough, and
abrupt, a man to inspire some fear and much admiration. He was thought
'honest,' or honourable; he was trusted, apparently, by everyone;
Macduff, a man of the highest integrity, 'loved him well.' And there
was, in fact, much good in him. We have no warrant, I think, for
describing him, with many writers, as of a 'noble' nature, like Hamlet
or Othello;[214] but he had a keen sense both of honour and of the worth
of a good name. The phrase, again, 'too much of the milk of human
kindness,' is applied to him in impatience by his wife, who did not
fully understand him; but certainly he was far from devoid of humanity
and pity.
At the same time he was exceedingly ambitious. He must have been so by
temper. The tendency must have been greatly strengthened by his
marriage. When we see him, it has been further stimulated by his
remarkable success and by the consciousness of exceptional powers and
merit. It becomes a passion. The course of action suggested by it is
extremely perilous: it sets his good name, his position, and even his
life on the hazard. It is also abhorrent to his better feelings. Their
defeat in the struggle with ambition leaves him utterly wretched, and
would have kept him so, however complete had been his outward success
and security. On the other hand, his passion for power and his instinct
of self-assertion are so vehement that no inward misery could persuade
him to relinquish the fruits of crime, or to advance from remorse to
repentance.
In the character as so far sketched there is nothing very peculiar,
though the strength of the forces contending in it is unusual. But there
is in Macbeth one marked peculiarity, the true apprehension of which is
the key to Shakespeare's conception.[215] This bold ambitious man of
action has, within certain limits, the imagination of a poet,--an
imagination on the one hand extremely sensitive to impressions of a
certain kind, and, on the other, productive of violent disturbance both
of mind and body. Through it he is kept in contact with supernatural
impressions and is liable to supernatural fears. And through it,
especially, come to him the intimations of conscience and honour.
Macbeth's better nature--to put the matter for clearness' sake too
broadly--instead of speaking to him in the overt language of moral
ideas, commands, and prohibitions, incorporates itself in images which
alarm and horrify. His imagination is thus the best of him, something
usually deeper and higher than his conscious thoughts; and if he had
obeyed it he would have been safe. But his wife quite misunderstands it,
and he himself understands it only in part. The terrifying images which
deter him from crime and follow its commission, and which are really the
protest of his deepest self, seem to his wife the creations of mere
nervous fear, and are sometimes referred by himself to the dread of
vengeance or the restlessness of insecurity.[216] His conscious or
reflective mind, that is, moves chiefly among considerations of outward
success and failure, while his inner being is convulsed by conscience.
And his inability to understand himself is repeated and exaggerated in
the interpretations of actors and critics, who represent him as a
coward, cold-blooded, calculating, and pitiless, who shrinks from crime
simply because it is dangerous, and suffers afterwards simply because he
is not safe. In reality his courage is frightful. He strides from crime
to crime, though his soul never ceases to bar his advance with shapes of
terror, or to clamour in his ears that he is murdering his peace and
casting away his 'eternal jewel.'
It is of the first importance to realise the strength, and also (what
has not been so clearly recognised) the limits, of Macbeth's
imagination. It is not the universal meditative imagination of Hamlet.
He came to see in man, as Hamlet sometimes did, the 'quintessence of
dust'; but he must always have been incapable of Hamlet's reflections on
man's noble reason and infinite faculty, or of seeing with Hamlet's eyes
'this brave o'erhanging firmament, this majestical roof fretted with
golden fire.' Nor could he feel, like Othello, the romance of war or the
infinity of love. He shows no sign of any unusual sensitiveness to the
glory or beauty in the world or the soul; and it is partly for this
reason that we have no inclination to love him, and that we regard him
with more of awe than of pity. His imagination is excitable and intense,
but narrow. That which stimulates it is, almost solely, that which
thrills with sudden, startling, and often supernatural fear.[217] There
is a famous passage late in the play (V. v. 10) which is here very
significant, because it refers to a time before his conscience was
burdened, and so shows his native disposition:
The time has been, my senses would have cool'd
To hear a night-shriek; and my fell of hair
Would at a dismal treatise rise and stir
As life were in't.
This 'time' must have been in his youth, or at least before we see him.
And, in the drama, everything which terrifies him is of this character,
only it has now a deeper and a moral significance. Palpable dangers
leave him unmoved or fill him with fire. He does himself mere justice
when he asserts he 'dare do all that may become a man,' or when he
exclaims to Banquo's ghost,
What man dare, I dare:
Approach thou like the rugged Russian bear,
The arm'd rhinoceros, or the Hyrcan tiger;
Take any shape but that, and my firm nerves
Shall never tremble.
What appals him is always the image of his own guilty heart or bloody
deed, or some image which derives from them its terror or gloom. These,
when they arise, hold him spell-bound and possess him wholly, like a
hypnotic trance which is at the same time the ecstasy of a poet. As the
first 'horrid image' of Duncan's murder--of himself murdering
Duncan--rises from unconsciousness and confronts him, his hair stands on
end and the outward scene vanishes from his eyes. Why? For fear of
'consequences'? The idea is ridiculous. Or because the deed is bloody?
The man who with his 'smoking' steel 'carved out his passage' to the
rebel leader, and 'unseam'd him from the nave to the chaps,' would
hardly be frightened by blood. How could fear of consequences make the
dagger he is to use hang suddenly glittering before him in the air, and
then as suddenly dash it with gouts of blood? Even when he _talks_ of
consequences, and declares that if he were safe against them he would
'jump the life to come,' his imagination bears witness against him, and
shows us that what really holds him back is the hideous vileness of the
deed:
He's here in double trust;
First, as I am his kinsman and his subject,
Strong both against the deed; then, as his host,
Who should against his murderer shut the door,
Not bear the knife myself. Besides, this Duncan
Hath borne his faculties so meek, hath been
So clear in his great office, that his virtues
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 cherubim, horsed
Upon the sightless couriers of the air,
Shall blow the horrid deed in every eye,
That tears shall drown the wind.
It may be said that he is here thinking of the horror that others will
feel at the deed--thinking therefore of consequences. Yes, but could he
realise thus how horrible the deed would look to others if it were not
equally horrible to himself?
It is the same when the murder is done. He is well-nigh mad with horror,
but it is not the horror of detection. It is not he who thinks of
washing his hands or getting his nightgown on. He has brought away the
daggers he should have left on the pillows of the grooms, but what does
he care for that? What _he_ thinks of is that, when he heard one of the
men awaked from sleep say 'God bless us,' he could not say 'Amen'; for
his imagination presents to him the parching of his throat as an
immediate judgment from heaven. His wife heard the owl scream and the
crickets cry; but what _he_ heard was the voice that first cried
'Macbeth doth murder sleep,' and then, a minute later, with a change of
tense, denounced on him, as if his three names gave him three
personalities to suffer in, the doom of sleeplessness:
Glamis hath murdered sleep, and therefore Cawdor
Shall sleep no more, Macbeth shall sleep no more.
There comes a sound of knocking. It should be perfectly familiar to him;
but he knows not whence, or from what world, it comes. He looks down at
his hands, and starts violently: 'What hands are here?' For they seem
alive, they move, they mean to pluck out his eyes. He looks at one of
them again; it does not move; but the blood upon it is enough to dye the
whole ocean red. What has all this to do with fear of 'consequences'? It
is his soul speaking in the only shape in which it can speak freely,
that of imagination.
So long as Macbeth's imagination is active, we watch him fascinated; we
feel suspense, horror, awe; in which are latent, also, admiration and
sympathy. But so soon as it is quiescent these feelings vanish. He is no
longer 'infirm of purpose': he becomes domineering, even brutal, or he
becomes a cool pitiless hypocrite. He is generally said to be a very bad
actor, but this is not wholly true. Whenever his imagination stirs, he
acts badly. It so possesses him, and is so much stronger than his
reason, that his face betrays him, and his voice utters the most
improbable untruths[218] or the most artificial rhetoric[219] But when
it is asleep he is firm, self-controlled and practical, as in the
conversation where he skilfully elicits from Banquo that information
about his movements which is required for the successful arrangement of
his murder.[220] Here he is hateful; and so he is in the conversation
with the murderers, who are not professional cut-throats but old
soldiers, and whom, without a vestige of remorse, he beguiles with
calumnies against Banquo and with such appeals as his wife had used to
him.[221] On the other hand, we feel much pity as well as anxiety in the
scene (I. vii.) where she overcomes his opposition to the murder; and we
feel it (though his imagination is not specially active) because this
scene shows us how little he understands himself. This is his great
misfortune here. Not that he fails to realise in reflection the baseness
of the deed (the soliloquy with which the scene opens shows that he does
not). But he has never, to put it pedantically, accepted as the
principle of his conduct the morality which takes shape in his
imaginative fears. Had he done so, and said plainly to his wife, 'The
thing is vile, and, however much I have sworn to do it, I will not,' she
would have been helpless; for all her arguments proceed on the
assumption that there is for them no such point of view. Macbeth does
approach this position once, when, resenting the accusation of
cowardice, he answers,
I dare do all that may become a man;
Who dares do more is none.
She feels in an instant that everything is at stake, and, ignoring the
point, overwhelms him with indignant and contemptuous personal reproach.
But he yields to it because he is himself half-ashamed of that answer of
his, and because, for want of habit, the simple idea which it expresses
has no hold on him comparable to the force it acquires when it becomes
incarnate in visionary fears and warnings.
Yet these were so insistent, and they offered to his ambition a
resistance so strong, that it is impossible to regard him as falling
through the blindness or delusion of passion. On the contrary, he
himself feels with such intensity the enormity of his purpose that, it
seems clear, neither his ambition nor yet the prophecy of the Witches
would ever without the aid of Lady Macbeth have overcome this feeling.
As it is, the deed is done in horror and without the faintest desire or
sense of glory,--done, one may almost say, as if it were an appalling
duty; and, the instant it is finished, its futility is revealed to
Macbeth as clearly as its vileness had been revealed beforehand. As he
staggers from the scene he mutters in despair,
Wake Duncan with thy knocking! I would thou could'st.
When, half an hour later, he returns with Lennox from the room of the
murder, he breaks out:
Had I but died an hour before this chance,
I had lived a blessed time; for from this instant
There's nothing serious in mortality:
All is but toys: renown and grace is dead;
The wine of life is drawn, and the mere lees
Is left this vault to brag of.
This is no mere acting. The language here has none of the false
rhetoric of his merely hypocritical speeches. It is meant to deceive,
but it utters at the same time his profoundest feeling. And this he can
henceforth never hide from himself for long. However he may try to drown
it in further enormities, he hears it murmuring,
Duncan is in his grave:
After life's fitful fever he sleeps well:
or,
better be with the dead:
or,
I have lived long enough:
and it speaks its last words on the last day of his life:
Out, out, brief candle!
Life's 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.
How strange that this judgment on life, the despair of a man who had
knowingly made mortal war on his own soul, should be frequently quoted
as Shakespeare's own judgment, and should even be adduced, in serious
criticism, as a proof of his pessimism!
It remains to look a little more fully at the history of Macbeth after
the murder of Duncan. Unlike his first struggle this history excites
little suspense or anxiety on his account: we have now no hope for him.
But it is an engrossing spectacle, and psychologically it is perhaps the
most remarkable exhibition of the _development_ of a character to be
found in Shakespeare's tragedies.
That heart-sickness which comes from Macbeth's perception of the
futility of his crime, and which never leaves him for long, is not,
however, his habitual state. It could not be so, for two reasons. In the
first place the consciousness of guilt is stronger in him than the
consciousness of failure; and it keeps him in a perpetual agony of
restlessness, and forbids him simply to droop and pine. His mind is
'full of scorpions.' He cannot sleep. He 'keeps alone,' moody and
savage. 'All that is within him does condemn itself for being there.'
There is a fever in his blood which urges him to ceaseless action in the
search for oblivion. And, in the second place, ambition, the love of
power, the instinct of self-assertion, are much too potent in Macbeth to
permit him to resign, even in spirit, the prize for which he has put
rancours in the vessel of his peace. The 'will to live' is mighty in
him. The forces which impelled him to aim at the crown re-assert
themselves. He faces the world, and his own conscience, desperate, but
never dreaming of acknowledging defeat. He will see 'the frame of things
disjoint' first. He challenges fate into the lists.
The result is frightful. He speaks no more, as before Duncan's murder,
of honour or pity. That sleepless torture, he tells himself, is nothing
but the sense of insecurity and the fear of retaliation. If only he were
safe, it would vanish. And he looks about for the cause of his fear; and
his eye falls on Banquo. Banquo, who cannot fail to suspect him, has not
fled or turned against him: Banquo has become his chief counsellor. Why?
Because, he answers, the kingdom was promised to Banquo's children.
Banquo, then, is waiting to attack him, to make a way for them. The
'bloody instructions' he himself taught when he murdered Duncan, are
about to return, as he said they would, to plague the inventor. _This_
then, he tells himself, is the fear that will not let him sleep; and it
will die with Banquo. There is no hesitation now, and no remorse: he has
nearly learned his lesson. He hastens feverishly, not to murder Banquo,
but to procure his murder: some strange idea is in his mind that the
thought of the dead man will not haunt him, like the memory of Duncan,
if the deed is done by other hands.[222] The deed is done: but, instead
of peace descending on him, from the depths of his nature his
half-murdered conscience rises; his deed confronts him in the apparition
of Banquo's Ghost, and the horror of the night of his first murder
returns. But, alas, _it_ has less power, and _he_ has more will.
Agonised and trembling, he still faces this rebel image, and it yields:
Why, so: being gone,
I am a man again.
Yes, but his secret is in the hands of the assembled lords. And, worse,
this deed is as futile as the first. For, though Banquo is dead and even
his Ghost is conquered, that inner torture is unassuaged. But he will
not bear it. His guests have hardly left him when he turns roughly to
his wife:
How say'st thou, that Macduff denies his person
At our great bidding?
Macduff it is that spoils his sleep. He shall perish,--he and aught else
that bars the road to peace.
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:
Strange things I have in head that will to hand,
Which must be acted ere they may be scann'd.
She answers, sick at heart,
You lack the season of all natures, sleep.
No doubt: but he has found the way to it now:
Come, we'll to sleep. My strange and self abuse
Is the initiate fear that wants hard use;
We are yet but young in deed.
What a change from the man who thought of Duncan's virtues, and of pity
like a naked new-born babe! What a frightful clearness of
self-consciousness in this descent to hell, and yet what a furious force
in the instinct of life and self-assertion that drives him on!
He goes to seek the Witches. He will know, by the worst means, the
worst. He has no longer any awe of them.
How now, you secret, black and midnight hags!
--so he greets them, and at once he demands and threatens. They tell him
he is right to fear Macduff. They tell him to fear nothing, for none of
woman born can harm him. He feels that the two statements are at
variance; infatuated, suspects no double meaning; but, that he may
'sleep in spite of thunder,' determines not to spare Macduff. But his
heart throbs to know one thing, and he forces from the Witches the
vision of Banquo's children crowned. The old intolerable thought
returns, 'for Banquo's issue have I filed my mind'; and with it, for all
the absolute security apparently promised him, there returns that inward
fever. Will nothing quiet it? Nothing but destruction. Macduff, one
comes to tell him, has escaped him; but that does not matter: he can
still destroy:[223]
And even now,
To crown my thoughts with acts, be it thought and done:
The castle of Macduff I will surprise;
Seize upon Fife; give to the edge o' the sword
His wife, his babes, and all unfortunate souls
That trace him in's line. No boasting like a fool;
This deed I'll do before this purpose cool.
But no more sights!
No, he need fear no more 'sights.' The Witches have done their work,
and after this purposeless butchery his own imagination will trouble him
no more.[224] He has dealt his last blow at the conscience and pity
which spoke through it.
The whole flood of evil in his nature is now let loose. He becomes an
open tyrant, dreaded by everyone about him, and a terror to his country.
She 'sinks beneath the yoke.'
Each new morn
New widows howl, new orphans cry, new sorrows
Strike heaven on the face.
She weeps, she bleeds, 'and each new day a gash is added to her wounds.'
She is not the mother of her children, but their grave;
where nothing,
But who knows nothing, is once seen to smile:
Where sighs and groans and shrieks that rend the air
Are made, not mark'd.
For this wild rage and furious cruelty we are prepared; but vices of
another kind start up as he plunges on his downward way.
I grant him bloody,
Luxurious, avaricious, false, deceitful,
Sudden, malicious,
says Malcolm; and two of these epithets surprise us. Who would have
expected avarice or lechery[225] in Macbeth? His ruin seems complete.