sympathy; we never feel towards him as we do to those who appear the
born children of darkness. There remains something sublime in the
defiance with which, even when cheated of his last hope, he faces earth
and hell and heaven. Nor would any soul to whom evil was congenial be
capable of that heart-sickness which overcomes him when he thinks of the
'honour, love, obedience, troops of friends' which 'he must not look to
have' (and which Iago would never have cared to have), and contrasts
with them
Curses, not loud but deep, mouth-honour, breath,
Which the poor heart would fain deny, and dare not,
(and which Iago would have accepted with indifference). Neither can I
agree with those who find in his reception of the news of his wife's
death proof of alienation or utter carelessness. There is no proof of
these in the words,
She should have died hereafter;
There would have been a time for such a word,
spoken as they are by a man already in some measure prepared for such
news, and now transported by the frenzy of his last fight for life. He
has no time now to feel.[226] Only, as he thinks of the morrow when time
to feel will come--if anything comes, the vanity of all hopes and
forward-lookings sinks deep into his soul with an infinite weariness,
and he murmurs,
To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow,
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day
To the last syllable of recorded time,
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
The way to dusty death.
In the very depths a gleam of his native love of goodness, and with it a
touch of tragic grandeur, rests upon him. The evil he has desperately
embraced continues to madden or to wither his inmost heart. No
experience in the world could bring him to glory in it or make his peace
with it, or to forget what he once was and Iago and Goneril never were.
FOOTNOTES:
[Footnote 194: See note BB.]
[Footnote 195: 'Hell is murky' (V. i. 35). This, surely, is not meant
for a scornful repetition of something said long ago by Macbeth. He
would hardly in those days have used an argument or expressed a fear
that could provoke nothing but contempt.]
[Footnote 196: Whether Banquo's ghost is a mere illusion, like the
dagger, is discussed in Note FF.]
[Footnote 197: In parts of this paragraph I am indebted to Hunter's
_Illustrations of Shakespeare_.]
[Footnote 198: The line is a foot short.]
[Footnote 199: It should be observed that in some cases the irony would
escape an audience ignorant of the story and watching the play for the
first time,--another indication that Shakespeare did not write solely
for immediate stage purposes.]
[Footnote 200: Their influence on spectators is, I believe, very
inferior. These scenes, like the Storm-scenes in _King Lear_, belong
properly to the world of imagination.]
[Footnote 201: 'By yea and no, I think the 'oman is a witch indeed: I
like not when a 'oman has a great peard' (_Merry Wives_, IV. ii. 202).]
[Footnote 202: Even the metaphor in the lines (II. iii. 127),
What should be spoken here, where our fate,
Hid in an auger-hole, may rush and seize us?
was probably suggested by the words in Scot's first chapter, 'They can
go in and out at awger-holes.']
[Footnote 203: Once, 'weird women.' Whether Shakespeare knew that
'weird' signified 'fate' we cannot tell, but it is probable that he did.
The word occurs six times in _Macbeth_ (it does not occur elsewhere in
Shakespeare). The first three times it is spelt in the Folio _weyward_,
the last three _weyard_. This may suggest a miswriting or misprinting of
_wayward_; but, as that word is always spelt in the Folio either rightly
or _waiward_, it is more likely that the _weyward_ and _weyard_ of
_Macbeth_ are the copyist's or printer's misreading of Shakespeare's
_weird_ or _weyrd_.]
[Footnote 204: The doubt as to these passages (see Note Z) does not
arise from the mere appearance of this figure. The idea of Hecate's
connection with witches appears also at II. i. 52, and she is mentioned
again at III. ii. 41 (cf. _Mid. Night's Dream_, V. i. 391, for her
connection with fairies). It is part of the common traditional notion of
the heathen gods being now devils. Scot refers to it several times. See
the notes in the Clarendon Press edition on III. v. 1, or those in
Furness's Variorum.
Of course in the popular notion the witch's spirits are devils or
servants of Satan. If Shakespeare openly introduces this idea only in
such phrases as 'the instruments of darkness' and 'what! can the devil
speak true?' the reason is probably his unwillingness to give too much
prominence to distinctively religious ideas.]
[Footnote 205: If this paragraph is true, some of the statements even of
Lamb and of Coleridge about the Witches are, taken literally, incorrect.
What these critics, and notably the former, describe so well is the
poetic aspect abstracted from the remainder; and in describing this they
attribute to the Witches themselves what belongs really to the complex
of Witches, Spirits, and Hecate. For the purposes of imagination, no
doubt, this inaccuracy is of small consequence; and it is these purposes
that matter. [I have not attempted to fulfil them.]]
[Footnote 206: See Note CC.]
[Footnote 207: The proclamation of Malcolm as Duncan's successor (I.
iv.) changes the position, but the design of murder is prior to this.]
[Footnote 208: Schlegel's assertion that the first thought of the murder
comes from the Witches is thus in flat contradiction with the text. (The
sentence in which he asserts this is, I may observe, badly mistranslated
in the English version, which, wherever I have consulted the original,
shows itself untrustworthy. It ought to be revised, for Schlegel is well
worth reading.)]
[Footnote 209: It is noticeable that Dr. Forman, who saw the play in
1610 and wrote a sketch of it in his journal, says nothing about the
later prophecies. Perhaps he despised them as mere stuff for the
groundlings. The reader will find, I think, that the great poetic effect
of Act IV. Sc. i. depends much more on the 'charm' which precedes
Macbeth's entrance, and on Macbeth himself, than on the predictions.]
[Footnote 210: This comparison was suggested by a passage in Hegel's
_Aesthetik_, i. 291 ff.]
[Footnote 211: _Il._ i. 188 ff. (Leaf's translation).]
[Footnote 212: The supernaturalism of the modern poet, indeed, is more
'external' than that of the ancient. We have already had evidence of
this, and shall find more when we come to the character of Banquo.]
[Footnote 213: The assertion that Lady Macbeth sought a crown for
herself, or sought anything for herself, apart from her husband, is
absolutely unjustified by anything in the play. It is based on a
sentence of Holinshed's which Shakespeare did _not_ use.]
[Footnote 214: The word is used of him (I. ii. 67), but not in a way
that decides this question or even bears on it.]
[Footnote 215: This view, thus generally stated, is not original, but I
cannot say who first stated it.]
[Footnote 216: The latter, and more important, point was put quite
clearly by Coleridge.]
[Footnote 217: It is the consequent insistence on the idea of fear, and
the frequent repetition of the word, that have principally led to
misinterpretation.]
[Footnote 218: _E.g._ I. iii. 149, where he excuses his abstraction by
saying that his 'dull brain was wrought with things forgotten,' when
nothing could be more natural than that he should be thinking of his new
honour.]
[Footnote 219: _E.g._ in I. iv. This is so also in II. iii. 114 ff.,
though here there is some real imaginative excitement mingled with the
rhetorical antitheses and balanced clauses and forced bombast.]
[Footnote 220: III. i. Lady Macbeth herself could not more naturally
have introduced at intervals the questions 'Ride you this afternoon?'
(l. 19), 'Is't far you ride?' (l. 24), 'Goes Fleance with you?' (l.
36).]
[Footnote 221: We feel here, however, an underlying subdued frenzy which
awakes some sympathy. There is an almost unendurable impatience
expressed even in the rhythm of many of the lines; _e.g._:
Well then, now
Have you consider'd of my speeches? Know
That it was he in the times past which held you
So under fortune, which you thought had been
Our innocent self: this I made good to you
In our last conference, pass'd in probation with you,
How you were borne in hand, how cross'd, the instruments,
Who wrought with them, and all things else that might
To half a soul and to a notion crazed
Say, 'Thus did Banquo.'
This effect is heard to the end of the play in Macbeth's less poetic
speeches, and leaves the same impression of burning energy, though not
of imaginative exaltation, as his great speeches. In these we find
either violent, huge, sublime imagery, or a torrent of figurative
expressions (as in the famous lines about 'the innocent sleep'). Our
impressions as to the diction of the play are largely derived from these
speeches of the hero, but not wholly so. The writing almost throughout
leaves an impression of intense, almost feverish, activity.]
[Footnote 222: See his first words to the Ghost: 'Thou canst not say I
did it.']
[Footnote 223:
For only in destroying I find ease
To my relentless thoughts.--_Paradise Lost_, ix. 129.
Milton's portrait of Satan's misery here, and at the beginning of Book
IV., might well have been suggested by _Macbeth_. Coleridge, after
quoting Duncan's speech, I. iv. 35 ff., says: 'It is a fancy; but I can
never read this, and the following speeches of Macbeth, without
involuntarily thinking of the Miltonic Messiah and Satan.' I doubt if it
was a mere fancy. (It will be remembered that Milton thought at one time
of writing a tragedy on Macbeth.)]
[Footnote 224: The immediate reference in 'But no more sights' is
doubtless to the visions called up by the Witches; but one of these, the
'blood-bolter'd Banquo,' recalls to him the vision of the preceding
night, of which he had said,
You make me strange
Even to the disposition that I owe,
When now I think you can behold such _sights_,
And keep the natural ruby of your cheeks,
When mine is blanch'd with fear.]
[Footnote 225: 'Luxurious' and 'luxury' are used by Shakespeare only in
this older sense. It must be remembered that these lines are spoken by
Malcolm, but it seems likely that they are meant to be taken as true
throughout.]
[Footnote 226: I do not at all suggest that his love for his wife
remains what it was when he greeted her with the words 'My dearest love,
Duncan comes here to-night.' He has greatly changed; she has ceased to
help him, sunk in her own despair; and there is no intensity of anxiety
in the questions he puts to the doctor about her. But his love for her
was probably never unselfish, never the love of Brutus, who, in somewhat
similar circumstances, uses, on the death of Cassius, words which remind
us of Macbeth's:
I shall find time, Cassius, I shall find time.
For the opposite strain of feeling cf. Sonnet 90:
Then hate me if thou wilt; if ever, now,
Now while the world is bent my deeds to cross.]
LECTURE X
MACBETH
1
To regard _Macbeth_ as a play, like the love-tragedies _Romeo and
Juliet_ and _Antony and Cleopatra_, in which there are two central
characters of equal importance, is certainly a mistake. But Shakespeare
himself is in a measure responsible for it, because the first half of
_Macbeth_ is greater than the second, and in the first half Lady Macbeth
not only appears more than in the second but exerts the ultimate
deciding influence on the action. And, in the opening Act at least, Lady
Macbeth is the most commanding and perhaps the most awe-inspiring figure
that Shakespeare drew. Sharing, as we have seen, certain traits with her
husband, she is at once clearly distinguished from him by an
inflexibility of will, which appears to hold imagination, feeling, and
conscience completely in check. To her the prophecy of things that will
be becomes instantaneously the determination that they shall be:
Glamis thou art, and Cawdor, and shalt be
That thou art promised.
She knows her husband's weakness, how he scruples 'to catch the nearest
way' to the object he desires; and she sets herself without a trace of
doubt or conflict to counteract this weakness. To her there is no
separation between will and deed; and, as the deed falls in part to her,
she is sure it will be done:
The raven himself is hoarse
That croaks the fatal entrance of Duncan
Under my battlements.
On the moment of Macbeth's rejoining her, after braving infinite dangers
and winning infinite praise, without a syllable on these subjects or a
word of affection, she goes straight to her purpose and permits him to
speak of nothing else. She takes the superior position and assumes the
direction of affairs,--appears to assume it even more than she really
can, that she may spur him on. She animates him by picturing the deed as
heroic, 'this night's _great_ business,' or 'our _great_ quell,' while
she ignores its cruelty and faithlessness. She bears down his faint
resistance by presenting him with a prepared scheme which may remove
from him the terror and danger of deliberation. She rouses him with a
taunt no man can bear, and least of all a soldier,--the word 'coward.'
She appeals even to his love for her:
from this time
Such I account thy love;
--such, that is, as the protestations of a drunkard. Her reasonings are
mere sophisms; they could persuade no man. It is not by them, it is by
personal appeals, through the admiration she extorts from him, and
through sheer force of will, that she impels him to the deed. Her eyes
are fixed upon the crown and the means to it; she does not attend to the
consequences. Her plan of laying the guilt upon the chamberlains is
invented on the spur of the moment, and simply to satisfy her husband.
Her true mind is heard in the ringing cry with which she answers his
question, 'Will it not be received ... that they have done it?'
Who _dares_ receive it other?
And this is repeated in the sleep-walking scene: 'What need we fear who
knows it, when none can call our power to account?' Her passionate
courage sweeps him off his feet. His decision is taken in a moment of
enthusiasm:
Bring forth men-children only;
For thy undaunted mettle should compose
Nothing but males.
And even when passion has quite died away her will remains supreme. In
presence of overwhelming horror and danger, in the murder scene and the
banquet scene, her self-control is perfect. When the truth of what she
has done dawns on her, no word of complaint, scarcely a word of her own
suffering, not a single word of her own as apart from his, escapes her
when others are by. She helps him, but never asks his help. She leans on
nothing but herself. And from the beginning to the end--though she makes
once or twice a slip in acting her part--her will never fails her. Its
grasp upon her nature may destroy her, but it is never relaxed. We are
sure that she never betrayed her husband or herself by a word or even a
look, save in sleep. However appalling she may be, she is sublime.
In the earlier scenes of the play this aspect of Lady Macbeth's
character is far the most prominent. And if she seems invincible she
seems also inhuman. We find no trace of pity for the kind old king; no
consciousness of the treachery and baseness of the murder; no sense of
the value of the lives of the wretched men on whom the guilt is to be
laid; no shrinking even from the condemnation or hatred of the world.
Yet if the Lady Macbeth of these scenes were really utterly inhuman, or
a 'fiend-like queen,' as Malcolm calls her, the Lady Macbeth of the
sleep-walking scene would be an impossibility. The one woman could never
become the other. And in fact, if we look below the surface, there is
evidence enough in the earlier scenes of preparation for the later. I do
not mean that Lady Macbeth was naturally humane. There is nothing in the
play to show this, and several passages subsequent to the murder-scene
supply proof to the contrary. One is that where she exclaims, on being
informed of Duncan's murder,
Woe, alas!
What, in our house?
This mistake in acting shows that she does not even know what the
natural feeling in such circumstances would be; and Banquo's curt
answer, 'Too cruel anywhere,' is almost a reproof of her insensibility.
But, admitting this, we have in the first place to remember, in
imagining the opening scenes, that she is deliberately bent on
counteracting the 'human kindness' of her husband, and also that she is
evidently not merely inflexibly determined but in a condition of
abnormal excitability. That exaltation in the project which is so
entirely lacking in Macbeth is strongly marked in her. When she tries to
help him by representing their enterprise as heroic, she is deceiving
herself as much as him. Their attainment of the crown presents itself to
her, perhaps has long presented itself, as something so glorious, and
she has fixed her will upon it so completely, that for the time she sees
the enterprise in no other light than that of its greatness. When she
soliloquises,
Yet do I fear thy nature:
It is too full o' the milk of human kindness
To catch the nearest way: thou wouldst be great;
Art not without ambition, but without
The illness should attend it; what thou wouldst highly,
That wouldst thou holily,
one sees that 'ambition' and 'great' and 'highly' and even 'illness' are
to her simply terms of praise, and 'holily' and 'human kindness' simply
terms of blame. Moral distinctions do not in this exaltation exist for
her; or rather they are inverted: 'good' means to her the crown and
whatever is required to obtain it, 'evil' whatever stands in the way of
its attainment. This attitude of mind is evident even when she is alone,
though it becomes still more pronounced when she has to work upon her
husband. And it persists until her end is attained. But, without being
exactly forced, it betrays a strain which could not long endure.
Besides this, in these earlier scenes the traces of feminine weakness
and human feeling, which account for her later failure, are not absent.
Her will, it is clear, was exerted to overpower not only her husband's
resistance but some resistance in herself. Imagine Goneril uttering the
famous words,
Had he not resembled
My father as he slept, I had done 't.
They are spoken, I think, without any sentiment--impatiently, as though
she regretted her weakness: but it was there. And in reality, quite
apart from this recollection of her father, she could never have done
the murder if her husband had failed. She had to nerve herself with wine
to give her 'boldness' enough to go through her minor part. That
appalling invocation to the spirits of evil, to unsex her and fill her
from the crown to the toe topfull of direst cruelty, tells the same tale
of determination to crush the inward protest. Goneril had no need of
such a prayer. In the utterance of the frightful lines,
I have given suck, and know
How tender 'tis to love the babe that milks me:
I would, while it was smiling in my face,
Have pluck'd my nipple from his boneless gums,
And dash'd the brains out, had I so sworn as you
Have done to this,
her voice should doubtless rise until it reaches, in 'dash'd the brains
out,' an almost hysterical scream.[227] These lines show unmistakably
that strained exaltation which, as soon as the end is reached, vanishes,
never to return.
The greatness of Lady Macbeth lies almost wholly in courage and force of
will. It is an error to regard her as remarkable on the intellectual
side. In acting a part she shows immense self-control, but not much
skill. Whatever may be thought of the plan of attributing the murder of
Duncan to the chamberlains, to lay their bloody daggers on their
pillows, as if they were determined to advertise their guilt, was a
mistake which can be accounted for only by the excitement of the moment.
But the limitations of her mind appear most in the point where she is
most strongly contrasted with Macbeth,--in her comparative dulness of
imagination. I say 'comparative,' for she sometimes uses highly poetic
language, as indeed does everyone in Shakespeare who has any greatness
of soul. Nor is she perhaps less imaginative than the majority of his
heroines. But as compared with her husband she has little imagination.
It is not _simply_ that she suppresses what she has. To her, things
remain at the most terrible moment precisely what they were at the
calmest, plain facts which stand in a given relation to a certain deed,
not visions which tremble and flicker in the light of other worlds. The
probability that the old king will sleep soundly after his long journey
to Inverness is to her simply a fortunate circumstance; but one can
fancy the shoot of horror across Macbeth's face as she mentions it. She
uses familiar and prosaic illustrations, like
Letting 'I dare not' wait upon 'I would,'
Like the poor cat i' the adage,
(the cat who wanted fish but did not like to wet her feet); or,
We fail?
But screw your courage to the sticking-place,
And we'll not fail;[228]
or,
Was the hope drunk
Wherein you dress'd yourself? hath it slept since?
And wakes it now, to look so green and pale
At what it did so freely?
The Witches are practically nothing to her. She feels no sympathy in
Nature with her guilty purpose, and would never bid the earth not hear
her steps, which way they walk. The noises before the murder, and during
it, are heard by her as simple facts, and are referred to their true
sources. The knocking has no mystery for her: it comes from 'the south
entry.' She calculates on the drunkenness of the grooms, compares the
different effects of wine on herself and on them, and listens to their
snoring. To her the blood upon her husband's hands suggests only the
taunt,
My hands are of your colour, but I shame
To wear a heart so white;
and the blood to her is merely 'this filthy witness,'--words impossible
to her husband, to whom it suggested something quite other than sensuous
disgust or practical danger. The literalism of her mind appears fully in
two contemptuous speeches where she dismisses his imaginings; in the
murder scene:
Infirm of purpose!
Give me the daggers! The sleeping and the dead
Are but as pictures: 'tis the eye of childhood
That fears a painted devil;
and in the banquet scene:
O these flaws and starts,
Impostors to true fear, would well become
A woman's story at a winter's fire,
Authorised by her grandam. Shame itself!
Why do you make such faces? When all's done,
You look but on a stool.
Even in the awful scene where her imagination breaks loose in sleep she
uses no such images as Macbeth's. It is the direct appeal of the facts
to sense that has fastened on her memory. The ghastly realism of 'Yet
who would have thought the old man to have had so much blood in him?' or
'Here's the smell of the blood still,' is wholly unlike him. Her most
poetical words, 'All the perfumes of Arabia will not sweeten this little
hand,' are equally unlike his words about great Neptune's ocean. Hers,
like some of her other speeches, are the more moving, from their greater
simplicity and because they seem to tell of that self-restraint in
suffering which is so totally lacking in him; but there is in them
comparatively little of imagination. If we consider most of the passages
to which I have referred, we shall find that the quality which moves our
admiration is courage or force of will.
This want of imagination, though it helps to make Lady Macbeth strong
for immediate action, is fatal to her. If she does not feel beforehand
the cruelty of Duncan's murder, this is mainly because she hardly
imagines the act, or at most imagines its outward show, 'the motion of a
muscle this way or that.' Nor does she in the least foresee those inward
consequences which reveal themselves immediately in her husband, and
less quickly in herself. It is often said that she understands him well.
Had she done so, she never would have urged him on. She knows that he is
given to strange fancies; but, not realising what they spring from, she
has no idea either that they may gain such power as to ruin the scheme,
or that, while they mean present weakness, they mean also perception of
the future. At one point in the murder scene the force of his
imagination impresses her, and for a moment she is startled; a light
threatens to break on her: