“This tyrant, whose sole name blisters our tongues,
Was once thought honest.”
As he had deceived the world, so he deceived his wife. His bloody and
treacherous nature was at first as unknown to her as to his friends.
As they thought him “honest,” she thought him amiable and infirm of
purpose, greatly ambitious, and one who would “wrongly win,” but yet
kindly of nature. Fiery temptations had not as yet brought out the
secret writing of his character. It was with Macbeth as it was with
Nero: their real natures did not exhibit themselves at first; but when
once they began to develop, their growth was rapid and terrible. And
in each of them there was a vein of madness. Essentially a hypocrite,
and secretive by nature, Macbeth had passed for only a brave and
stern soldier when he first makes his appearance. Yet even in his
fierce Norwegian fight we see a violent and bloody spirit. In the
very beginning of the play, one of his soldiers describes him, in his
encounter with Macdonald, as one who,—
“Disdaining fortune, with his brandished steel,
Which smoked with bloody execution,
Like Valour’s minion,
Carved out his passage till he faced the slave;
And ne’er shook hands nor bade farewell to him
Till he unseamed him from the nape to the chaps,
And fixed his head upon our battlements.”
This is rather a grim picture, and scarcely corresponds to the
character usually assigned to Macbeth. Here is not only no infirmity of
purpose, but a stern, unwavering resolution, carving its way through
all difficulties and against all opposition. Thus far, however, all
his deeds had been loyal and for a lawful purpose. Still within his
heart burnt, as he himself says, “black and deep desires,” and only
circumstances and opportunities were needed to show that he could be as
fierce and bloody in crime as he had shown himself in doing a soldier’s
duty. They were already urging him in the very first scene; but,
secretive of nature, he kept them out of sight.
“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.”
Thus he cries to himself as he speeds to his wife. The “murder,” which
was but an hour before “fantastical,” has now become a fixed resolve.
A nature like this, secretive, false, deceitful, and wicked, which
had thus far satisfied itself in a legitimate way, and, having no
temptation in his own house, had never shown its real shape there,
would naturally not have been understood by his wife. Glimpses she
might have of what he was, but not a thorough understanding of him.
Blinded by her personal attachment to him, and herself essentially
his opposite in character, as we shall see, she would naturally have
misinterpreted him. The secretive nature is always a puzzle to the
frank nature. Accustomed to go straight to her object, whether good or
bad, she was completely deceived by his hypocritical and sentimental
pretenses, and supposed his nature to be “full of the milk of human
kindness.” But time also opened her eyes, though, perhaps, never, even
to the last, did she fully comprehend him. “What thou wouldst highly,
that wouldst thou holily,” she would never have said after the murder
of the king. But however this may be, that her view of his character
is false is proved by the whole play. When did he ever show an iota of
kindness? What crime did his conscience or the desire to act “holily”
ever prevent his committing? When did he ever exhibit any want of
bloody determination? Infirm of purpose? He was like a tiger in his
purposes and in his deeds. The murder of Duncan did not satisfy him.
The next morning, he kills the two chamberlains, in cold blood, to
gratify his wanton cruelty. It was impossible that they should testify
against him—they had been drugged, and he could have had no fear of
them. Then immediately he plots the murder of Banquo and Fleance, and
all the while hypocritically conceals his foul purposes even from his
wife; and because Macduff “failed his presence at the tyrant’s feast,”
he determines also to murder him. Foiled of this, he then cruelly and
hideously puts to the sword his wife and little children. In all these
murders, after the king’s, Lady Macbeth not only takes no part, but
she is even kept in ignorance of them. She drive him to the commission
of his crimes? She does not know of them till they are done. They are
plotted and determined upon in secret by Macbeth alone, and carried
into execution with a bloody directness and suddenness. He is “bloody,
false, deceitful, sudden,”—essentially a hypocrite, false in his
pretenses, secret in his plotting, loud in his showy talk, but sudden
and bloody in his crimes and in his malice.
Thus far, however, we have seen but one side of Macbeth. The other
side was its opposite. Bold, ambitious, and treacherous, he was also
equally imaginative and superstitious. In action he feared no man.
Brave as he was cruel, and ready to meet anything in the flesh, he was
equally visionary of head, a victim of superstitious fears, and a mere
coward before the unreal fancies evoked by his imagination. He has
the Scottish second-sight, and visions and phantoms shake his soul.
Show him twenty armed men who seek his life, he encounters them with
a fierce joy. Show him a white sheet on a pole, and tell him it is a
ghost, and he trembles abjectly. He conjures up for himself phantoms
that “unfix his hair and make his seated heart knock at his ribs;”
he is distracted with “horrible imaginings.” His excited imagination
always plays him false and fills him with momentary and superstitious
fears; but these fears never ultimately control his action. They are
fumes of the head, and being purely visionary, they are also temporary.
They come in moments of excitement, obscure for a time his judgment,
and influence his ideas; but having regard solely to things unreal,
they vanish with the necessity of action.
These superstitious fears have nothing to do with conscience or morals.
He has no morals; there is no indication of a moral sense in any single
word of the whole play. The only passage which faintly indicates a
sense of right and wrong is when he urges to himself, as reasons why
he should not kill Duncan, not only that the king is his kinsman, his
king, and his guest, but that he has borne his faculties so meekly,
that his virtues would plead like angels trumpet-tongued against the
deep damnation of his taking-off. This, however, is mere talk, and has
reference only to the indignation which his murder will excite, not to
any sorrow Macbeth has for the crime. His sole doubt is lest he may not
succeed; for, as he says,—
“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.”
The idea of being restrained from committing this murder by any
religious or moral scruples is very far from his thought. Right or
wrong, good or bad, have nothing to do with the question; and as for
the “life to come,” that is mere folly.
But while his moral sense is dead, his imagination is nervously alive.
It engenders visions that terrify him: after the murder is done, he
thinks he hears phantom-voices crying, “Sleep no more! Glamis hath
murdered sleep; and therefore Cawdor shall sleep no more, Macbeth
shall sleep no more;” and these voices so work upon his superstitious
fears, that he is afraid for the moment to return to the chamber, and
carry the daggers back and smear the grooms with blood. He is, as Lady
Macbeth says, “brainsickly,” and “fears a painted devil.” This is
superstition, not remorse—a momentary imaginative fear, not a permanent
feeling. In a few minutes he has changed his dress, and calmly makes
speeches as if nothing had occurred,—nay, this cold-blooded hypocrite
is ready within the hour to commit two new and wanton murders on the
chamberlains, and boastfully to refer them to his loyal spirit and
loving heart, inflamed by horror at the hideous murder of the king,
which he has himself committed.
The same superstitious fear attacks him when he hears that Birnam Wood
is moving to Dunsinane Hill; but it does not prevent this creature,
so “full of the milk of human kindness,” from striking the messenger,
calling him “liar and slave,” and threatening,—
“If thou speak’st false,
Upon the next tree shalt thou hang alive
Till famine cling thee.”
So, too, when Macduff tells him that he was “not of woman born,” awed
for a moment by his superstitious fears, he cries,—
“Accursed be that tongue that tells me so,
For it hath cow’d my better part of man!
... I’ll not fight with thee.”
At times, under the influence of an over-excitable imagination acting
upon a nature thoroughly superstitious, his intellect wavers, and he is
subject to sudden aberrations of mind resembling insanity. They are,
however, evanescent, and in a moment he recovers his poise, descending
through a poetical phase into his real and settled character of
cruelty and wickedness. In the dagger-scene, where he is alone, these
three phases are perfectly marked. The visionary dagger “proceeding
from the heat-oppressed brain” soon vanishes, then follows the poetic
mania, and then the stern resolution of murder. In the banquet-scene,
when the ghost of Banquo rises, the poetic interval is less marked, for
Macbeth is under the restraint of the company and under the influence
of his wife; but scarce has the company gone when his real character
returns. He is again forming new resolutions of blood. His mind reverts
to Macduff, whose life he threatens. He is bent “to know, by the worst
means, the worst;” “strange things I have in head, that will to hand.”
This aberration of mind Macbeth has in common with Lear, Hamlet, and
Othello. But in Macbeth alone does it take a superstitious shape.
The trance of Othello is but a momentary condition, in which his
goaded imagination, acting upon an irritated sense of honor, love,
and jealousy, obliterates for an instant the real world. Hamlet’s
aberration, when it is not feigned, as for the most part it is, is
but the “sore distraction” of a mind upon which the burden of a great
action is fixed, which he is bound either to accept or to reject, but
in regard to which he hesitates, not because he lacks decision of
character, but solely because he cannot satisfy himself that he has
sure grounds for action, and that he is not deceived as to the facts
which are the motive of his action; once satisfied as to the grounds
for action, he is decisive and prompt, as is clearly shown in the
manner in which he disposes of Guildenstern and Rosencrantz on board
the vessel, and in the instant slaying of the king himself, when the
evidence of his infamy is clear. But while he is yet undecided and
struggling with himself to solve this sad problem of the king’s guilt,
he rejects all ideas of love as futile and impertinent, and, more than
that, doubts whether Ophelia herself is not, unconsciously to herself,
made a tool of by the king and queen. Lear, again, is “heart-struck.”
His madness comes from wounded pride and affection. The ingratitude
and cruelty of his daughters shake his mind, and to his excited spirit
the very elements become his “pernicious daughters:” “I never gave you
kingdoms, called you children.” In all except Macbeth, the nature thus
driven to madness is noble in itself, moral in its character, and warm
in its affections. The aberrations of Macbeth are superstitious, and
have nothing to do with the morals or the affections.
Macbeth’s imagination is, however, a ruling characteristic of his
nature. His brain is always active; and when it does not evoke
phantoms, it indulges in fanciful and poetic images. He is a poet, and
turns everything into poetry. His utterance is generally excited and
high-flown, rarely simple and real, and almost never expresses his
true feelings and thoughts. His heart remains cold while his head is
on fire. On all occasions his first impulse is to poetize a little;
and having done this, he goes about his work without regard to what
he has said. His sayings are one thing; his doings are quite another.
Shakespeare makes him rant intentionally, as if to show that in such
a character the imagination can and does work entirely independently
of real feelings and passions. There is no serious character in all
Shakespeare’s plays who constantly rants and swells in his speech like
Macbeth; and this is plainly to show the complete unreality of all
his imaginative bursts. In this he differs from every other person
in this play. Yet when he is really in earnest, and has some plain
business in hand, he can be direct enough in his speech, as throughout
the second interview with the weird sisters, and in the scene with
the two murderers whom he sends to kill Banquo and Fleance; or when,
enraged at the escape of Fleance, he forgets to be a hypocrite, and
his real nature clearly expresses itself in direct words, full of
savage resolve. But on all other occasions, when he is not in earnest
and intends to deceive, or when his brain is excited, he indulges
in sentimental speeches, violent figures of speech, extravagant
personifications, and artificial tropes and conceits. Even in the
phantom-voices he imagines crying to him over Duncan’s body, he cannot
help this peculiarity. He curiously hunts out conceits to express
sleep. He “murders sleep, the innocent sleep; sleep, that knits up the
ravell’d sleeve of care, the death of each day’s life, sore labor’s
bath, balm of hurt minds, great nature’s second course, chief nourisher
in life’s feast.” No wonder that Lady Macbeth, amazed, cries out, “What
do you mean?” But he cannot help going on like a mad poet. His language
is full of alliteration, fanciful juxtaposition of words, assonance,
and jingle. At times, so strong is this habit, he makes poems to
himself, and for the moment half believes in them. Only compare, in
this connection, the natural, simple pathos of the scene where Macduff
hears of the barbarous murder of his wife and children, with the
language of Macbeth, when the death of Lady Macbeth is announced to
him. Macduff “pulls his hat upon his brows,” and gives vent to his
agony in the simplest and most direct words. Here the feeling is deep
and sincere:—
“All my pretty ones?
Did you say, all?—O hell-kite!—All?
What, all my pretty chickens, and their dam,
At one fell swoop?
_Mal._ Dispute it like a man.
_Macd._ I shall do so;
But I must also feel it like a man:
I cannot but remember such things were,
And were most precious to me.—Did heaven look on,
And would not take their part? Sinful Macduff,
They were all struck for thee! naught that I am,
Not for their own demerits, but for mine,
Fell slaughter on their souls. Heaven rest them now!
* * * * *
O, I could play the woman with my eyes.”
But when Macbeth is told of the death of his wife, he makes a little
poem, full of alliterations and conceits. It is an answer to the
question, What is life like? What can we say about it now?
“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. 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.
_Enter a Messenger._
Thou com’st to use thy tongue; thy story quickly.”
Has this any relation to true feeling? Do men of any feeling, whose
hearts are touched, fall to improvising poems like this, filled with
fanciful images, when great sorrows come upon them? This speech is full
of “sound and fury, signifying nothing.” There is no accent from the
heart in it. It is elaborate, poetic, cold-blooded. “Life is a candle,”
“a poor player,” “a walking shadow,” “a tale told by an idiot.” We
have his customary alliterations: “petty pace,” “dusty death,” “day to
day;” his love of repeating the same word, “to-morrow, and to-morrow,
and to-morrow,” just as we have “If it were done when ’tis done, then
’twere well it were done quickly;” and his “Sleep no more, Macbeth
does murder sleep,—sleep, that knits up,” etc.; “Sleep no more! Glamis
hath murdered sleep; and therefore Cawdor shall sleep no more, Macbeth
shall sleep no more.” He cannot forget himself enough to cease to be
ingenious in his phrases. As a poem this speech is striking; as an
expression of feeling it is perfectly empty. At the end of it he has
quite forgotten the death of his wife; he is only employed in piling
up figure after figure to personify life. What renders the unreality
of this still more striking is the sudden change which comes over him
upon the entrance of the messenger. In an instant he stops short in his
poem, and his tone becomes at once decided and harsh; his wife’s death
has passed utterly out of his mind. When the messenger tells him that
Birnam Wood is beginning to move, with a sudden burst of rage he turns
upon him, calls him liar and slave, and threatens to hang him alive
till famine cling him, if his report prove to be incorrect. This is the
real Macbeth. From this time forward he never alludes to Lady Macbeth;
but, in a strange condition of superstitious fear and soldierly
courage, he calls his men to arms, and goes out crying,—
“Blow, wind! come, wrack!
At least we’ll die with harness on our back.”
And this throughout is the character of Macbeth’s utterances. He is not
like Tartuffe, a religious hypocrite; he is a poetical and sentimental
hypocrite. His phrases and figures of speech have no root in his real
life; they are only veneered upon them. “His words fly up, his thoughts
remain below.” When he is poetical he is never in earnest. Sometimes
his speeches are merely oratorical, and made from habit and for
effect; sometimes they are hypocritical, and used to conceal his real
intentions; and sometimes they are the expression of an inflamed and
diseased imagination stimulated by superstition. But they are generally
bombastic and swelling in tone, and are so intended to be. His habit
of making speeches and inventing curious conceits is so strong, that
he even “unpacks his heart with words” when alone, so as to leave
himself free and direct to act. Thus, in one of his famous soliloquies,
mark the unreal quality of all the pretended feeling, the mixture of
immorality, bombast, and hypocrisy, the assonances and alliterations,
the plays upon words, the extravagant figures, all showing the
excitability of the brain and not of the heart:—
“If _it were done_ when ’tis _done_, then _’twere_ well
_It were done_ quickly. If th’ assassination
_C_ould trammel up the _c_onsequence, and _c_atch,
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.”
Then, after some questions about killing his guest, his kinsman, his
king, which would seem honest, but for what comes after and for the
utter reckless immorality which has gone before these words, his
imagination excites itself, and runs into a wild and extravagant figure
which means nothing. Duncan’s virtues, he says,—
“Will plead like angels _t_rumpet-_t_ongued against
The _d_eep _d_amnation of his _t_aking-off.”
No sooner does he begin to swell and alliterate again than he goes
wild:—
“And pity, like a _n_aked _n_ew-_b_orn _b_abe,
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_.”
This is pure rant, and intended to be so. It is the product of an
unrestrained imagination which exhausts itself in the utterance. But it
neither comes from the heart nor acts upon the heart.
Again, in the soliloquy of the air-drawn dagger, the superstitious,
visionary Macbeth, who always projects his fancies into figures and
phantoms, after addressing this
“false creation
Proceeding from the heat-oppressed brain,”
falls at once into poetic declamation about the night, and indulges
himself in strange images and personifications. A man about to commit a
murder who invents these conceits must be a poetical villain:—
“Now witchcraft celebrates
Pale Hecate’s offerings; and wither’d murder,
Alarum’d by his sentinel, the wolf,
Whose howl’s his watch, thus with his stealthy pace,
With Tarquin’s ravishing strides, towards his design
Moves like a ghost.”
Can anything be more extraordinary and elaborate than this pressing of
one conceit upon another? Wither’d murder has a sentinel, the wolf, who
howls his watch, and who with stealthy pace strides with Tarquin’s
ravishing strides like a ghost! Shakespeare makes no other character
systematically talk like this.
But the fumes of the brain pass, and leave the stern, determined man of
action:—
“Whiles I threat, he lives;
Words to the heat of deeds too cold breath gives.
I go, and it is done; the bell invites me.
Hear it not, Duncan; for it is a knell
That summons thee to heaven, or to hell.”
We have no such rant as this in Lady Macbeth. In the scenes of the
murder, she does not befool herself with visions and poetry. She is
practical, and her attention is given solely to the real facts about
her. Contrast the simple language in which she speaks, while waiting
for Macbeth, with his previous rhodomontade. Agitated, in great
emotion, listening for sounds, doubting whether some mischance may
not have befallen to prevent the murder, she speaks in short, broken
sentences; but she does not liken her husband to Tarquin, and say now
is the time when “witchcraft celebrates pale Hecate’s offerings,” nor
employ this interval in making a poem full of conceits.
Macbeth goes in to the king, and commits the murder; no scruples of any
kind prevent him. But when that is secure, he has a superstitious fit,
and imagines phantom-voices, that talk as no phantoms ever did before.
Still he is a coward in the presence of phantoms, and will not go back.
The deed has been done, and ghosts alarm him.
But, as has been before observed, all this raving as usual passes by at
once. In a half-hour he is as cold and calm as ever. The phantom-voices
did not reach his conscience, and awakened no remorse. They were the
children of superstition and imagination, and they vanished with
cockcrow and daylight, leaving no trace behind in his memory. They have
not altered his mood nor his plans.
We now come to consider Lady Macbeth’s character. At all points she
was her husband’s opposite, or rather his complement. Where he was
strong, she was weak; where he was weak, she was strong. He was
poetical and visionary of nature; she was plain and practical. He was
indirect, false, secretive; she, on the contrary, was vehement and
impulsive. Between what she willed and what she did was a straight
line. She was troubled by none of his superstitious fears or visions.
Her imagination was feeble and inactive, her character was energetic;
she saw only the object immediately before her, and she went to it with
rapidity and directness of purpose. She was skillful in management
and ready in contrivance, as women are apt to be; while Macbeth was
wanting in both these qualities, as men generally are. For herself she
seems to have had no ambition, and not personally to have coveted the
position of queen. Her ambition is but the reflection of Macbeth’s,
and her great crime was wrought in furtherance of his suggestions and
promptings. Mistaking entirely his character at first, proud of his
success for his sake, and rightly reading him so far as to see that
his ambition, which was insatiable, grasped at the throne, she lent
herself to the murder of Duncan, in the belief that a throne once
obtained, Macbeth’s ambition would be satisfied. Her moral sense was
inactive, and not sufficient to lead her to oppose his project. It
was not, as we shall see, utterly wanting in her, as in Macbeth. She
seems to have been warmly attached to Macbeth, and always, after the
murder is committed, she endeavors to soothe and tranquillize him
with gentle and affectionate words. But she could not understand his
superstitious hesitations when once resolved on action. His poetry
and his imaginative flights, as well as his visions, were to her
incomprehensible, and she made the natural mistake of supposing him to
be infirm of purpose. Her mind was one of management and detail. The
determination and suggestion of the murder are his; the management and
detail of it are hers. This is a master-stroke of Shakespeare’s, by
which he at once distinguishes the masculine from the feminine nature.
Man is quick to propose and suggest a plan in its general scope; woman
is always superior in adjusting the details by which it may be carried
into execution. Lady Macbeth’s nature was not wicked in itself; it
was susceptible of deep feeling and remorse. But her moral sense was
sluggish, while her impulses were sudden and vehement; and as such
women generally are, she was irritably impatient of the postponement
of any project already decided upon. She had a strong will, and gave
expression to it in an exaggerated way:—
“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.”
This is but a vehement, passionate, and exaggerated way of saying that
if she had sworn to herself to do _anything_, however shocking, as
deliberately and determinedly as Macbeth had to commit this murder, she
would do it in spite of consequences, and not like him be “afeard to be
the same in thine own act and valor as thou art in desire.” She does
not mean, nor did Shakespeare mean, that so hideous an act would be
possible for her either to plan or to commit; but to prove her contempt
of that condition of mind when “I dare not” waits upon “I would,” she
seizes on the most horrible and repulsive act that she can imagine,
and declares energetically that, shocking as that is, she would not
hesitate to do even that, had she so sworn to do it as Macbeth had. Yet
this wild and violent figure of speech is generally taken as the key
of her whole character. It is nothing of the sort; for the very line
preceding it proves that she had a tenderness of nature under all her
energy, and a power of love as well as of will:—
“I have given suck, and know
How tender ’tis to love the babe that milks me.”
Well, despite that tenderness and love, which you, Macbeth, know I
have, I would have done what is so contrary to all my nature, had I so
sworn as you. Throughout this scene her sole object is to urge upon
Macbeth, as vehemently as she can, the folly of dallying and hesitating
to carry out a project which he alone had conceived, suggested, and
determined, merely for fear of consequences and lest it should do him
injury in the eyes of the world. He never feels nor suggests any moral
objection; he does not pretend to feel it. His sole fear is lest he may
not succeed; he only doubts whether it would not be better to postpone
the execution of his project until a more fitting time. His decisions
are less rapid than hers. She must at once act on the first strength of
her resolve. She is impetuous, and would spring upon her prey at once.
He, knowing that his fell purpose will only strengthen with meditation,
and doubting whether the time has come to secure his object, proposes
to postpone its execution. But there is no time for this. There are
but a few hours in which all must be accomplished, and he is not ready
with the detail. But to this proposal of postponement she says “No.”
She knows that he never will rest till it is accomplished. Neither time
nor place adhered when you “broke this enterprise to me,” she says; and
now, when both “have made themselves,” execute your design, and no
longer let “I dare not wait upon I would.” To this he feebly opposes,
“If we should fail,” failure being the only thing that troubles him.
She then suggests the plan in detail by which the murder can be
effected; and he cries out, in a burst of admiration and delight,—
“Bring forth men-children only,
For thy undaunted mettle should compose
Nothing but males.”
Still, when the time approaches, Lady Macbeth needs all her courage,
and she stimulates it with wine, lest it should break down:—
“That which hath made them drunk hath made me bold.”
She preserves her courage, however, to the end, never loses her
self-possession, and takes care that the plan is carried out fully in
all its details. But that accomplished, she utterly breaks down. She
has over-calculated her strength; she was not utterly wicked, and her
remorses are terrible. From this time forward we have no such scenes
between her and her husband; he performs all his other murders alone,
without her connivance or knowledge.
And here the main feature of this play must be kept in mind. Lady
Macbeth dies of remorse for this her crime; she cannot forget it; it
haunts her in her sleep; the damned spot cannot be washed from her
conscience or her hand. What a fearful cry of remorse and agony is that
of hers in her dream!—
“Here’s the smell of the blood still: all the perfumes of Arabia
will not sweeten this _little_ hand! Oh! oh! oh!”
There is no poetizing here, no sentimental and figurative
personifications; it is the cry of a wounded heart and conscience. It
is written too in prose, not in verse. It is real, and not fantastic
like the rant and poetry of Macbeth. That terrible night remains with
her, and haunts her and tears her like a demon, and at last she dies of
it.
How is it with Macbeth? Does the memory of that night torture him?
Never for a moment. He plots new murders. He has tasted blood, and
cannot live without it. On, on he goes, deeper and deeper into blood,
till he is slain; and never, to the last, one cry of conscience.
Yet it is thought that Lady Macbeth urged on this amiable man, so
infirm of purpose, so filled with the milk of human kindness, and was
the mainspring of his crimes. Suffice it to say, in answer to this
view, that after Duncan is killed he keeps her in complete ignorance
of all he does, and his murders are thenceforward more terrible
and pitiless, and with no faint shadow of excuse or apology. This
cold-hearted villain stops at nothing; even her death does not awaken
a throb in his heart. Is it not preposterous to suppose that the
so-called fiend of the play, she who instigates and drives an unwilling
victim to crime, should die of remorse for that crime; while the
amiable accomplice, far from sharing any such feeling, only plunges
deeper into crime when she does not instigate him, and develops at
every step an increasing brutality and savageness of nature?
No; it is not the tall, dark, commanding, and imperious figure of Mrs.
Siddons, with threatening brow and inflated nostrils, that represents
Lady Macbeth; she is not at all of such character or features. She is
of rather a delicate organization, of medium height, her hair inclining
to red, her temperament nervous and sanguine, with a florid complexion
and little hands. So was Lucrezia Borgia; and so was Lady Macbeth. She
was personally fair and attractive. Can any one imagine Macbeth calling
a dark, towering, imperious woman like Mrs. Siddons his “dearest love,”
“dear wife,” or his “dearest chuck”?
But it is commonly thought that the murder of Duncan was suggested by
Lady Macbeth, and that her husband was urged into it against his will
and contrary to his nature. Such a view is utterly in contradiction
of the play itself. The suggestion is entirely Macbeth’s, and he has
resolved upon it before he sees her. The witches are a projection of
his own desires and superstitions. They meet him at the commencement of
the play, prophesying, in response to his own desires, that he is thane
of Cawdor, and shall be king hereafter; but they respond also to his
fears, by adding that Banquo’s children shall be kings. Those are the
very points upon which all his thoughts hinge—his ambition to be king,
his fears lest the throne shall pass from his family. Hence his hate of
Banquo and Fleance. From this time forward he thinks of nothing else.
As he rides across the heath, he is self-involved, abstracted, silent,
sullen, revolving in his mind how to compass his designs, which are
nothing less than the murder of the king. He does not dream that the
prophecies of the weird women will accomplish themselves without his
assistance, for they are projections of his own thoughts. He instantly
receives news that he is made thane of Cawdor, and scarcely gives a
thought to this honor, scarcely expresses his satisfaction; when the
news is announced he says,—
“Glamis, and thane of Cawdor:
_The greatest is behind._—Thanks for your pains.”
And then immediately his mind reverts to the promise that Banquo’s
children shall be kings:—
“Do you not hope your children shall be kings,
When those that gave the thane of Cawdor to me
Promis’d no less to them?”
Then he falls again into gloomy silence, and talks to himself inwardly.
What does he say and think? He resolves to murder the king:—
“This supernatural soliciting
Cannot be ill; cannot be good. If ill,
Why hath it given me earnest of success,
Commencing in a truth? I’m thane of Cawdor.
If good, why do I yield to that suggestion
Whose horrid image doth unfix my hair,
And make my seated heart knock at my ribs,
Against the use of nature? Present fears
Are less than horrible imaginings;
My thought, whose _murder_ yet is but fantastical,
Shakes so my single state of man, that function
Is smother’d in surmise; and nothing is
But what is not.”
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,—
“My dearest love,
Duncan comes here to-night.”
Whereupon she asks, “And when goes hence?” “To-morrow,” he answers, and
pauses; and adds, “as he purposes.” But in the look and in the pause
Lady Macbeth has read his whole sold and intent. There is murder in
that look; and she cries:—
“O, never
Shall sun that morrow see!
Your face, my thane, is as a book, where men
May read strange matters.”
There is no explanation between them. He has conveyed all his intention
by a look and a gesture, as she herself distinctly says. He has ridden
headlong, as fast as horse could carry him, away from the king, full
of this one idea; and the king has vainly “coursed him at the heels,”
having the purpose, as he himself says, “to be his purveyor.” And
his thoughts have spoken in his looks so unmistakably, that they are
perfectly understood. If there be any doubt by whom the murder was
suggested, it is made perfectly clear by what Lady Macbeth subsequently
says to him in the next scene in which they are presented. When he
begins to doubt whether the murder had not better be postponed, she
says:—
“What beast was’t, then,
That made you break this enterprise to me?”
It was not of my plotting, but of your own; “Nor time, nor place, did
then adhere, and yet you would make both;” you desired it and still
desire it, but are afraid of consequences. These words of hers would
indeed seem to indicate that he had urged the crime upon her against
her will at a previous interview not reported in the play, or perhaps
by a letter; for she says distinctly, that when he broke the enterprise
to her,—
“Nor _time_, nor _place_,
Did then adhere, and yet _you would make both_:
They have made themselves.”
It would plainly seem, therefore, that Macbeth had broken this
enterprise to her, and urged it on her, even before the king had
determined to come to his castle, and that he intended to make time
and place. This would account completely for her opening speech, and
for the fact that he does not make any explanation to her of his
intentions other than by his look and intonation when they first meet;
for certainly there is nothing in the play about the time and place
of the murder except as herein indicated. It would also explain the
surprise of Lady Macbeth when she hears that her husband is coming,
and the king after him: “Thou’rt mad to say it,” she says; and “the
raven himself is hoarse that croaks the fatal entrance of Duncan under
my battlements.” The time and place had made themselves, then; and it
is on hearing this that she suddenly changes from calm to vehement
emotion, and makes that wonderful apostrophe to the spirits to unsex
her. She sees that all has been resolved, and that she has need of her
utmost resolution.
There is no warrant of any kind that, in the simple words, “And when
goes hence,” she meant more than she said. It was the most natural
question that she could possibly ask. Granting that she intended
equally with him to commit the murder, what is more natural than that
she should wish to know how long the king was to stay, so as to know
how soon it was necessary to carry out the plan of murder, and what
time there was in which to make all the arrangements? Not only Macbeth
pauses after saying “To-morrow” (so, at least, is the punctuation in
all editions), before adding “as he purposes,” but Lady Macbeth, in
her answer, says that she sees in his face that he intends that “never
shall sun that morrow see.” Yet, in the recitation of these parts
on the stage, and as generally read, the meaning is given to Lady
Macbeth’s simple words; and Macbeth is made perfectly innocently to
answer without showing in his look any “strange matter.” But the king
is coming close on his heels; there is no time to arrange details; and
Macbeth goes away to receive him, saying, “We will speak further.”
The characters, as exhibited in the next scenes, have been already
sufficiently discussed. He shows his superstitions, his visions, his
poetry, and his hesitations; she, with the stern determination of a
woman who has screwed her courage to the sticking-place, is agitated
by no visions, but, feeling the necessity of immediate action, she
occupies herself in the arrangements of details, and thus dulls her
conscience.
After all the excitements which have agitated Macbeth—after his
soliloquy, in which he says there is no spur to prick the sides of his
intent, but only vaulting ambition; but if he were sure of success, he
would jump the life to come—there comes a moment when he either has
or pretends to have a hesitation about proceeding further in “this
business.” He does not hesitate for conscience’ sake, but because,
being ambitious, he now would like to wear the golden opinions he has
won, “in their newest gloss,” and not cast them aside so soon, before
he has had the satisfaction of being wondered at and admired a little
longer. He had gained praise and high position, and his vanity was
gratified. He naturally would pause before committing a hideous murder.
But he never pretends that this feeling comes from any moral sense. His
mind has been too long strained with one thought; and, as in all men
of excitable brain, there comes a moment of reaction. He cannot see
his way clear. He fears the effect of his crime. He does not see how
it can be done so that he may avoid suspicion, and attain the object
beyond the murder and for which he commits it, without running too
great risks, and thus exposing himself to the vengeance of the king’s
friends. He fears that his “bloody instructions” may “return to plague
the inventor”—not hereafter, but “_here_.” But what most troubles him
is, that he cannot see the practical way, cannot arrange the details
so as to secure a chance of avoiding suspicion. Here his wife comes
to his aid. She has thought out a plan and arranged the details. She
sternly opposes his proposal to abandon his design, for she knows that
his hesitation is only for a moment, and that nothing less than to be
king can ever satisfy him. Better, then, do the deed at once. His only
opposition after this is, “If we should fail?” But as soon as he sees
the feasibility of her plan, all his scruples are gone; he is more than
convinced, he is delighted, and enters upon it with a joy which he does
not pretend to conceal.
During all these scenes, up to the murder of Duncan, Lady Macbeth is
laboring under an excitement of mind which sustains her in carrying
out the design of her husband. The time is purposely made very
short—only a few hours between the arrival of Duncan and his death—so
that she may not break down. All is hurry and movement, and arrangement
of detail. There is no time for reaction. The very necessity for
immediate action serves as an irritant to the nerves, and strains all
her thoughts and feelings to an unnatural pitch. Still, when the murder
is on the point of being done, she keeps up her courage by drink; for
the strain is almost too great. In this excited state her inflamed will
has got completely the command of her; and to have it all over, and
not caring about the dreadful design longer, she says that had Duncan
“not resembled my father as he slept, I had done it.” But though she
can talk of dashing out the brains of her babe while it was smiling in
her face, she was not, even in this excitement, able to strike Duncan,
because she thought he looked like her father. Her woman’s hand would
have failed her had she attempted it. But all her powers are bound up
in this one design. She has come to a violent determination, and this
she will carry out, come what may. She thrusts aside all compunction
of conscience, and makes such a noise by action in her brain, that its
still small voice cannot be heard.
Macbeth, on the contrary, is of a colder and more brutal nature. His
determination is sullen, and it lies like an immovable rock on which
the flames of his imagination burn like momentary fires of straw, and
over which his superstitious visions pass like clouds or fogs, and then
clear away, leaving the rock unchanged. Just before he commits the
murder, Banquo comes in and tells him that the king
“hath been in unusual pleasure, and
Sent forth great largess to your offices.
This diamond he greets your wife withal,
By the name of most kind hostess; and shut up
In measureless content.”
But this does not touch Macbeth, nor induce a moment’s hesitation.
Banquo then speaks of the three weird sisters, and says, “To you they
have show’d some truth;” and Macbeth answers falsely:—
“I think not of them;
Yet, when we can entreat an hour to serve,
We’d spend it in some words upon that business,
If you would grant the time.”
Thus, cold and collected, he bids him “Good repose,” sends off the
servant, and waits for the bell to ring, which is the sign that all
is ready for him to murder Duncan. In this interval we have his
three characteristic features brought out one after the other: the
cloudy vision of the air-drawn dagger; then the straw-fire of his
poetry about Hecate and withered murder’s sentinel, the wolf, and
Tarquin’s ravishing strides; and, as these clear off, the stern, sullen
resolution underneath—“Whiles I threat he lives;” “I go, and it is
done.”
When the murder is done, the two are equally distinct in
character,—she energetic and practical, he visionary and superstitious;
and so they part.
Thus far, be it observed, Lady Macbeth has supposed her husband to be
merely “infirm of purpose;” but the next scene is to open her eyes to a
glimpse of his real character.
Macbeth has become perfectly calm and cold again in a few minutes, and
makes his appearance immediately after the knocking. He is completely
master of himself, offers to conduct Macduff to the king, and when
Macduff says he knows it will be a “joyful trouble” to him, answers
like a proverb, calmly, “The labor we delight in physics pain.” The
king is then found dead, and the noise brings Lady Macbeth from her
room. What a difference is now visible in the way in which she and he
speak and act! When Macduff says, “Our royal master’s murdered!” she
cries out, “Woe! alas! what, in our house?” and says not a word more.
Macbeth, however, who is only afraid of shadows, but who, with the
daylight, has no fear of looking at dead bodies, or adding one or two
more with his sword, goes to the room of Duncan, and then reappears,
without the faintest shadow of feeling, and makes a little hypocritical
poem on the event:—
“Had I but died an hour before this chance,
I had liv’d 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.”
“What is amiss?” says Donalbain. And Macbeth cries, “You are, and
do not know’t. The spring, the head, the fountain of your blood is
stopp’d; the very source of it is stopp’d.”
This is Macbeth’s rant and fustian. He has no feeling, and, as usual,
he makes the pretense of poetry serve him. The head, the spring, the
fountain, the source is stopped, is stopped.
And this stuff he recites coolly, although he has but a moment before
wantonly killed the two grooms; nay, he does not mention it until
afterwards, on their being spoken of by Lenox, when this hypocritical
villain cries:—
“O, yet I do repent me of my fury,
That I did kill them.
_Macd._ Wherefore did you so?
_Macb._ Who can be wise, amaz’d, temperate and furious,
Loyal and neutral, in a moment? No man:
The expedition of my violent love
Outrun the pauser, reason.—Here lay Duncan,
His _silver_ skin lac’d with his _golden_ blood;
And his gash’d stabs look’d like a breach in nature,
For ruin’s wasteful entrance: there, the murderers,
Steep’d in the colors of their trade, their daggers
Unmannerly breech’d with gore: who could refrain,
That had a heart to love, and in that heart
Courage to make’s love known?”
During this amazing speech, in which he poetizes so elaborately,
and with such curious artifice coldly paints the picture of the man
and friend he had just murdered, Lady Macbeth has been looking and
listening in silence. Suddenly, for the first time, she sees what her
husband really is; she sees that he has neither heart nor conscience;
for no man possessing either could have acted or talked as he has
since the murder of Duncan. So far from having any feeling of shame
or remorse, he, without provocation, wantonly, and with no sufficient
object, has added two other murders to it; and, with a cold-blooded
artificial hypocrisy, he paints in his stilted way the scene of
Duncan’s death, and has command enough of himself to seek out elaborate
and high-flown phrases. But Lady Macbeth, whose courage, stimulated by
excitement, has carried her through the murder, now suddenly breaks
down. This new revelation of her husband’s character, and the ghastly
picture which he summons up before her of the scene of the murder, are
too much for her. She swoons, loses all consciousness, and is carried
out. In her violent excitement, while there was something practical
to busy her mind and her body with, she could carry back the daggers
and smear the grooms with blood; but she could not bear the vivid
remembrance of it when there was nothing to do, and when the excitement
was over: as women will go through extreme dangers, stand at the
surgeon’s table during terrible operations, be great and strong in a
great crisis, and then suddenly faint and fall when the work is over,
unable to bear the remembrance of what they have gone through.
This swooning of Lady Macbeth is the crisis of her nature. From this
time forward she is no more what she has appeared; we hear no more
urging of Macbeth to strengthen his throne by other crimes; no more
taunts by her that he is infirm of purpose; no more allusions to his
amiable weaknesses of character. She has begun to know him and to fear
him. She only endeavors to tranquilize him and content him with what
he has got. But still she does not know him; for his nature, before
hidden, like secret writing, comes out little by little before the fire
of his heated ambition and superstitious fears.
At this swooning-point the two characters of Lady Macbeth and her
husband cross each other. She has thus far only made the running for
Macbeth, and he now takes up the race and passes her; she not only does
not follow, but withdraws. Henceforth he rushes to his goal alone;
alone he arranges the death of Banquo and Fleance.
When next they meet she is no longer the same person we have known; she
feels the gnawing tooth of remorse; she is calmed and cowed by what she
has done:—
“Nought’s had, all’s spent,
Where our desire is got without content:
’Tis safer to be that which we destroy,
Than, by destruction, dwell in doubtful joy.”
And as Macbeth enters she endeavors to tranquilize his mind. She has
his confidence no longer; he avoids her, and keeps alone after the
murder of the king. She, not yet aware of the abysses of his nature,
and little imagining that he has been plotting the murder of Banquo,
supposes that the secret of his perturbations, of the solitude he now
seeks, and of his avoidance of her, is the remorse that he begins to
feel, and says as he enters:—
“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.”
His answer shows it is no remorse which is haunting him; his sorry
fancies are new plots of murder:
“We have scotch’d the snake, not kill’d it;”
and we are still “in danger of her former tooth.”
“But let
The frame of things disjoint, both the worlds suffer,
Ere we will eat our meal in _fear_, and sleep
In the affliction of these terrible dreams
That shake us nightly: better be with the dead,
Whom we, to gain our place, have sent to peace,
Than on the torture of the mind to lie
In restless ecstasy. Duncan is in his grave;
After life’s fitful fever, he sleeps well;
Treason has done his worst: nor steel, nor poison,
Malice domestic, foreign levy, nothing,
Can touch him further!”
Here is one of those cases where he uses his poetry as a cloak to his
real thoughts. Yet despite his hypocrisy, which takes in his wife, his
real meaning is clear. He would rather die than to go on in this fear:
rather be like Duncan, whom they have at all events “sent to peace,”
and whom nothing can “touch further,” than on “the torture of the mind
to lie in restless ecstasy.” What is this “fear”? what is this “torture
of the mind”? Is it, as Lady Macbeth supposes, from remorse? Oh, no!
he tells us himself what it is; it is solely because Banquo and Fleance
are alive:—
“O, full of scorpions is my mind, dear wife!
Thou know’st that Banquo, and his Fleance, lives.”
This it is that tortures him, and this only.
“But in them nature’s copy’s not eterne,”
says she; meaning, as she has throughout this scene, solely to console
him and draw his thoughts away. They may die; a thousand accidents may
happen to them; you may outlive them; don’t torture yourself with vain
fears. “_There’s_ comfort yet,” he cries, “they are assailable;” and
now, after his old fashion, he breaks into poetry:
“Then be thou _jocund_: ere the bat hath flown
His cloister’d flight; ere, to black Hecate’s summons,
The shard-borne beetle, with his drowsy hums,
Hath rung night’s yawning peal, there shall be done
A deed of dreadful note.”
“What’s to be done?” she cries; for having completely misunderstood him
through all the previous part of this interview, she completely fails
to see what he now means. But he has no longer confidence in her; and
so, with caressing words, and probably with some caressing act, he
answers her:
“Be innocent of the knowledge, dearest chuck,
Till thou applaud the deed.”
How could she suspect his real meaning? This murdering hypocrite had
just told her that Banquo was coming to the feast that night, and bade
her be jovial, and said to her,—
“Let your remembrance apply to Banquo;
Present him eminence, both with eye and tongue.”
And this he proposes to her after having just left the murderers whom
he has hired to waylay and kill Banquo, and entertaining no real doubt
in his mind that Banquo will never reach the supper—certainly never
reach it unless his plot miscarries. Well might she “marvel at his
words.” What follows is full of poetry and wickedness; but it is plain
that he was a mystery to her now, a riddle which she could not read.
The banquet-scene now comes, and Macbeth, believing that he has secured
the death of Banquo and Fleance, is happy, until the murderers come in
and tell him that Fleance has escaped. This upsets him:—
“Then comes _my fit_ again: I had else been perfect,
Whole as the marble, founded as the rock,
As broad and general as the casing air:
Now I am cabin’d, cribb’d, confin’d, bound in
To saucy doubts and fears.”
So he poetizes his condition, for superstitious fears always inflame
his imagination; but he cannot regain his composure; his “fit” is on
him, as it “hath been from his youth.” He conjures up the phantom of
Banquo to threaten him and his throne, and this ghost shakes him with
superstitious terror. Lady Macbeth, to whom it is invisible, rouses
herself at this; and not only not comprehending these starts and flaws
of fear, but having a contempt for him, endeavors to recall him to
himself by sharp words; but it is useless, his fit will not leave him,
and the company is dismissed in confusion. When the guests have gone,
Lady Macbeth’s spirit and courage, which were momentary, have fled.
She does not taunt him, but soothes him. He, as soon as he recovers
himself, begins with Macduff, whom he also means to murder:—
“Strange things I have in head, that will to hand,
Which must be acted, ere they may be scann’d.”
To this she only says, not imagining his meaning,
“You lack the season of all natures, sleep.”
Henceforward Lady Macbeth disappears; we hear nothing of her save in
the terrible sleep-walking scene; she is dying of remorse. But Macbeth
goes to the weird sisters, to learn whether “Banquo’s issue shall ever
reign in this kingdom.” They answer, “Seek to know no more:” and he
cries out, “I _will_ be satisfied; deny me this, and an eternal curse
fall on you.” And when they show him the issue of Banquo, kings, he
is enraged beyond control, and curses them. Henceforth for him no
hesitations, no delays. He speaks directly enough now.
“From this moment
The firstlings of my heart shall be
The firstlings of my hand. 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’ th’ sword
His wife, his babes, and all unfortunate souls
That trace him in his line. No boasting like a fool;
This deed I’ll do before this purpose cool:
But no more _sights_!”
And no more _sights_ he has; but he is still haunted by fears. And when
“the English power is near, led on by Malcolm, his uncle Siward, and
the good Macduff,” burning for revenge, Macbeth’s spirit falters. He
rushes into violent rages and then subsides into vague fears, and then
endeavors to strengthen his heart by recalling the mysterious promises
of the weird sisters that he shall not fall by the hand of any man of
woman born, or before Birnam wood come to Dunsinane; but, do all he
can, “he cannot buckle his distempered cause within the belt of rule,”
though he declares,—
“The mind I sway by and the heart I bear
Shall never sag with doubt, nor shake with fear.”
Still he does fear; and in one of his dispirited moods, after blazing
out at the messenger who tells him of the approach of Birnam wood,—
“The devil damn thee black, thou cream-fac’d loon!
Where got’st thou that goose look?”
he says, finding that there are ten thousand men coming to attack him,
and his followers are not stanch,—
“This push
Will chair me ever, or disseat me now.
I have liv’d long enough: my way of life
Is fall’n into the sear, the yellow leaf:
And that which should accompany old age,
As honor, love, obedience, troops of friends,
I must not look to have; but, in their stead,
Curses, not loud, but deep, mouth-honor, breath,
Which the poor heart would fain deny.”