few words, and then, as if the politeness of the Turkish gentleman had
caused them as much pleasure as surprise, they pocketed their stakes
and discontinued their game. With gracious and gallant air, and smiling
countenance, one hand upon the hip and the other armed with the goblet,
the four gentlemen approached the old Turk with a courteous mien,
intended to eclipse all the graces of the courtiers of Versailles. But
there was no need of a magnifying-glass to discern the true character
of the four companions; the adventurer was detectible at once in their
threadbare coats, their collars of false lace, and in the various
details of their dress, where dirt and frippery were ill concealed
by trick and tawdry. A moderately experienced eye would easily have
seen that it was vice which had fattened some of them, and made others
lean. The most portly of the four, approaching the Turkish gentleman,
thanked him in the name of his friends, and placed his empty glass upon
the table with so polite and kindly an air, that the Turk, touched by
his good grace, took the wine jug and refilled the four goblets to
the brim. Some compliments were exchanged, and all sorts of titles
used; so that by the time the jug was empty they had got to calling
each other Excellency. The barber, putting his mouth to the captain's
ear, with such intense gravity that one might have thought him angry,
assured him that these gentlemen were of the very first quality,
whereat the Turk testified his joy by placing his hand on his lips and
on his forehead. In proportion as mutual esteem and good understanding
augmented, the contents of the jug diminished. A second was called for;
it was speedily emptied in honour of the happy chance that had brought
the jovial company together. A third disappeared amidst promises of
frequent future meetings, and a fourth was drained amidst shaking of
hands, friendly embraces, and unlimited offers of service.
The barber, a man of taste, observed to his guests, that four jugs
amongst five persons made an uneven reckoning, which it would need the
mathematical powers of Barême duly to adjust. For symmetry's sake,
therefore, a fifth jug was brought, out of which the topers drank the
health of the king, of their Amphitryon, and of Barême, so appositely
quoted. The four seedy gentlemen greatly admired the intrepidity with
which the little old man tossed off his bumpers. Their project of
making the captain drunk was too transparent to escape any spectator
less innocent than the chorister; but in vain did they seek signs of
intoxication on the imperturbable countenance of the old Turk. In reply
to each toast and protestation of friendship, the captain emptied his
glass, and said:--
"Much obliged, gentlemen; _mi trop flatté_."
No sparkle of the eyes, no movement of the muscles, broke the monotony
of his faded visage. His parchment complexion preserved its yellow
tint. On the other hand, the cheeks of the four adventurers began to
flush purple; they unbuttoned their doublets, and used their hats as
fans. The signs of intoxication they watched for in their neighbour
were multiplied in their own persons. At last they got quite drunk. He
of the four whose head was the coolest proposed a game at cards.
"I plainly see," said the Turk, accepting, "that the _Signori n'esser
pas joueurs per habitude_."
"And how," exclaimed one of the adventurers, "did your excellency infer
from our physiognomy that incontestible truth?"
"_Perché_," replied the Turk, "on my arrival you broke off in the
middle of your game. A professed gambler never did such a thing."
They were in ecstasies at the noble foreigner's penetration, and they
called for the dice. When the captain drew forth his long purse,
stuffed with _génovèses_,[21] the four gentlemen experienced a sudden
shock, as if a thunderbolt had passed between them without touching
them, and this emotion half sobered them. The Turk placed one of the
large gold pieces upon the table, saying he would hold whatever stake
his good friends chose to venture. The others said that a _génovèse_
was a large sum, but that nothing in the world should make them flinch
from the honour of contending with so courteous an adversary. By
uniting their purses, they hoped to be able to hold the whole of his
stake. And accordingly, from the depths of their fobs, the gentlemen
produced so many six-livre and three-livre pieces, that they succeeded
in making up the thirty-two crowns, which were equivalent to the
_génovèse_. They played the sum in a rubber. The Turk won the first
game, then the second; and the four adventurers, on beholding him sweep
away their pile of coin, were suddenly and completely sobered. The
captain willingly agreed to give them their revenge. The difficulty
was to find the two-and-thirty crowns. By dint of rummaging their
pockets, the gentlemen exhibited four-and-twenty livres: but this was
only a quarter of the sum. The oldest of the adventurers then took the
buckle from his hat, and threw it on the table, swearing by the soul
of his uncle that the trinket was worth two hundred livres, although
even the simple chorister discerned the emeralds that adorned it to be
but bits of bottle-glass. Like a generous player, the old Turk made no
difficulties; he agreed that the buckle should stand for two hundred
livres, and it was staked to the extent of twenty-four crowns. This
time the dice was so favourable to the captain, that the game was not
even disputed. His adversaries were astounded: they twisted their
mustaches till they nearly pulled them up by the roots; they rubbed
their eyes, and cursed the good wine of Rhone. In the third game, the
glass jewel, already pledged for twenty-four crowns, passed entire
into the possession of the Turk. Then the excited gamblers threw upon
the table their rings, their sword-knots, and the swords themselves,
assigning to all these things imaginary value, which the Turk feigned
to accept as genuine. Not a single game did they win. The captain took
a string, and proceeded to tie together the tinsel and old iron he had
won, when he felt a hand insinuate itself into the pocket of his ample
hose. He seized this hand, and holding it up in the air--
"_Messirs_," he said, "_vous esser des coquins. Mi saper que vous aver
triché._"
"_Triché!_" cried one of the sharpers. "He strips us to the very shirt,
and then accuses us of cheating! _Morbleu!_ Such insolence demands
punishment."
A volley of abuse and a storm of blows descended simultaneously upon
the little old man. The four adventurers, thinking to have an easy
bargain of so puny a personage, threw themselves upon him to search
his pockets; but in vain did they ransack every fold of his loose
garments. The purse of gold _génovèses_ was not to be found; and
unfortunately the old Turk, in his struggles, upset the tripod which
supported the copper caldron. A flood of hot water boiled about the
legs of the thieves, who uttered lamentable cries. But it was far
worse when they saw the overturned caldron continue to pour forth its
scalding stream as unceasingly as the allegoric urn of Scamander.
The four sharpers and the barber, perched upon stools, beheld, with
deadly terror, the boiling lake gradually rising around them. Their
situation resembled that in which Homer has placed the valiant and
light-footed Achilles; but as these rogues had not the intrepid soul of
the son of Peleus, they called piteously upon God and all the saints
of paradise; mingling, from the force of habit, not a few imprecations
with their prayers. The wizened carcase of the old Turk must have
been proof against fire and water, for he walked with the streaming
flood up to his knees. Lifting the chorister upon his shoulders, he
issued, dry-footed, from the barber's shop, like Moses from the bosom
of the Red Sea. The river of boiling water waited but his departure to
re-enter its bed. This prodigy suddenly took place, without any one
being able to tell how. The water subsided, and flowed away rapidly,
leaving the various objects in the shop uninjured, with the exception
of the legs of the four adventurers, which were somewhat deteriorated.
The servant, hurrying back at sound of the scuffle, raised the caldron,
and resumed the stirring of her dirty linen, unsuspicious of the
sorcery that had just been practised. The barber and the four sharpers
took counsel together, and deliberated amongst themselves whether it
was proper to denounce the waterproof and incombustible old gentleman
to the authorities. The quantity of hot water that had been spilled
being out of all proportion with the capacity of the kettle, it seemed
a case for hanging or burning alive the author of the infernal jest.
The barber, however, assured his customers that learned physicians
had recently made many marvellous discoveries, in which the old Turk
might possibly be versed. He also deemed it prudent not lightly to put
himself in communication with the authorities, lest they should seek
to inform themselves as to the manner in which the cards were shuffled
in his shop. It was his opinion that the offender should be generously
pardoned, unless, indeed, an opportunity occurred of knocking him on
the head in some dark corner. This opinion met with general approbation.
Whilst this council of war is held, Jean and the old Turk are in
confabulation, and a bargain is at last concluded, by which the
commander's soul is redeemed, and Jean is to have five years of
earthly prosperity, at the end of which time, if he has failed to find
a substitute, his spiritual part becomes the demon's property. Two
years later we find Jean upon the road to Montpellier, well mounted
and equipped, and his purse well lined. Although but in his eighteenth
year, he is already a gay gallant, with some knowledge of the world,
and eager for adventures. These he meets with in abundance. A mark,
imprinted upon his arm by his attendant demon, causes him to be
recognised as the son of the Chevalier de Cerdagne. Thus ennobled, he
feels that he may aspire to all things, and soon we find him pushing
his fortune in Italy, attached to the person of the French Marshal de
Marchin, discovering the Baron d'Isola's conspiracy against the life
of Philip V. of Spain, and gaining laurels in the campaigns of the
War of Succession. There is much variety and interest in some of his
adventures, and the supernatural agency is sufficiently lost sight
of not to be wearisome. Time glides away, and the fatal term of five
years is within a few days of its completion. But _Jean le Trouvé_, now
_le Trouveur_, is in no want of substitutes. Two volunteers present
themselves; one his supposed sister, Mademoiselle de Cerdagne, whom
he has warmly befriended in certain love difficulties; the other a
convent gardener, whom he has made his private secretary, and whose
name is Giulio Alberoni. The demon, who still affects the form of
an old Turkish sailor, receives Alberoni in lieu of Jean, to whom,
however,--foreseeing that the young man's good fortune may be the means
of bringing him many other victims--he offers a new contract on very
advantageous terms. But Jean de Cerdagne, who is now Spanish ambassador
at Venice, with the title of prince, and in the enjoyment of immense
wealth, refuses the offer, anxious to save his soul. He soon discovers
that his good fortune is at an end. The real son of the Chevalier de
Cerdagne turns up, Jean is disgraced, stripped of his honours and
dignities, and his vast property is confiscated by the Inquisition.
The ex-ambassador exchanges for a squalid disguise his rich costume of
satin and velvet, and we next find him a member of a secret society in
the thieves' quarter of Venice. The worshipful fraternity of Chiodo--so
called from their sign of recognition, which is a rusty nail--live by
the exercise of various small trades and occupations, which, although
not strictly beggary or theft, are but a degree removed from these
culpable resources. Jean, whose conscience has become squeamish, will
accept none but honest employment. But the malice of the demon pursues
him, and he succeeds in nothing. He stations himself at a ferry to
catch gondolas with a boat-hook, and bring them gently alongside the
quay; he stands at a bridge stairs, to afford support to passengers
over the stones, slippery with the slime of the lagoons; he takes post
in front of the Doge's palace, with a vessel of fresh water and a
well-polished goblet, to supply passers-by. Many accept his stout arm,
and drink his cool beverage, but none think of rewarding him. Not all
his efforts and attention are sufficient to coax a sou from the pockets
of his careless customers. At last, upon the third day, he receives a
piece of copper, and trusts that the charm is broken. The coin proves
a bad one. His seizure by the authorities, and transportation to Zara,
relieve him of care for his subsistence. At last, pushed by misery,
and in imminent danger of punishment for having struck a Venetian
officer, Jean succumbs to temptation, and renews his infernal compact.
A Venetian senator adopts him, and he discovers, but too late, that
had he delayed for a few minutes his recourse to diabolical aid, he
would have stood in no need of it. He proceeds to Spain, where he has
many adventures and quarrels with his former secretary, Alberoni, now
a powerful minister. His contract again at an end, he would gladly
abstain from renewing it, but is hunted by the Inquisition into the
arms of the fiend. After a lapse of years, he is again shown to us
in Paris, and, finally, in Brittany, where he meets his death, but,
at the eleventh hour, disappoints the expectant demon, (who in a
manner outwits himself,) and re-enters the bosom of the church, his
bad bargain being taken off his hands by an ambitious village priest.
The book, which has an agreeable vivacity, closes with an attempt to
explain a portion of its supernatural incidents by a reference to
popular tradition and peasant credulity. Near the ramparts of the
Breton town of Guérande, an antiquary shows M. de Musset a moss-grown
stone, with a Latin epitaph, which antiquary and novelist explain each
after his own fashion.
"Let us see if you understand that, _M. le Parisien_," said the
antiquary. "Up to the two last words we shall agree; but what think you
of the _Ars. Inf._?"
"It appears to me," I replied, "that the popular chronicle perfectly
explains the whole epitaph--_Ars. Inf._ means _ars inferna_; that is
to say,--'Here reposes Jean Capello, citizen of Venice, whose body was
sent to the grave, and his soul to heaven, by infernal artifices.'"
"A translation worthy of a romance writer," said the antiquary. "You
believe then in the devil, in compact with evil spirits, in absurd
legends invented by ignorance and superstition amidst the evening
gossip of our peasants? You believe that, in 1718, a parish priest of
Guérande flew away into the air, after having redeemed the soul of this
Jean Capello. You are very credulous, M. le Parisien. This Venetian,
who came here but to die, was simply poisoned by the priest, who took
to flight; the town doctor, having opened the body, found traces of
the poison. That is why they engraved upon the tomb these syllables:
_Ars. Inf._, which signify _arsenici infusio_, an infusion of arsenic.
I will offer you another interpretation--Jean Capello was perhaps a
salt-maker, killed by some accident in our salt-works, and as in 1718
labourers of that class were very miserable, they engraved upon this
stone, to express the humility of his station, _Ars. Inf._, that is to
say, inferior craft."
"Upon my word!" I exclaimed, "that explanation is perfectly absurd.
I keep to the popular version: Jean le Trouveur was sent to heaven
by the stratagems of the demon himself. Let sceptics laugh at my
superstition, I shall not quarrel with them for their incredulity."
We see little else worthy of extract or comment in the mass of books
before us. M. Méry, whose extraordinary notions of English men and
things we exhibited in a former article, has given forth a rhapsodical
history, entitled _Le Transporté_, beginning with the Infernal
Machine, and ending with Surcouf the Pirate, full of conspiracies,
dungeons, desperate sea-fights, and tropical scenery, where English
line-of-battle ships are braved by French corvettes, and where the
transitions are so numerous, and the variety so great, that we may
almost say everything is to be found in its pages, except probability.
Mr Dumas the younger, who follows at respectful distance in his
father's footsteps, and publishes a volume or two per month, has not
yet, so far as we have been able to discover, produced anything that
attains mediocrity. M. Sue has dished up, since last we have adverted
to him, two or three more capital sins, his illustrations of which
are chiefly remarkable for an appearance of great effort, suggestive
of the pitiable plight of an author who, having pledged himself to
public and publishers for the production of a series of novels on
given subjects, is compelled to work out his task, however unwilling
his mood. This is certainly the most fatal species of book-making--a
selling by the cubic foot of a man's soul and imagination. Evil as it
is, the system is largely acted upon in France at the present day. Home
politics having lost much of the absorbing interest they possessed
twelve months ago, the Paris newspapers are resorting to their old
stratagems to maintain and increase their circulation. Prominent
amongst these is the holding out of great attractions in the way of
literary feuilletons. Accordingly, they contract with popular writers
for a name and a date, which are forthwith printed in large capitals
at the head of their leading columns. Thus, one journal promises its
readers six volumes by M. Dumas, to be published in its feuilleton, to
commence on a day named, and to be entitled _Les Femmes_. The odds are
heavy, that Alexander himself has not the least idea what the said six
volumes are to be about; but he relies on his fertility, and then so
vague and comprehensive a title gives large latitude. Moreover, he has
time before him, although he has promised in the interval to supply
the same newspaper with a single volume, to be called _Un Homme Fort_,
and to conclude the long procession of _Fantômes_, a thousand and one
in number, which now for some time past has been gliding before the
astonished eyes of the readers of the _Constitutionnel_. Other journals
follow the same plan with other authors, and in France no writer now
thinks of publishing a work of fiction elsewhere than at the foot of
a newspaper. To this feuilleton system, pushed to an extreme, and
entailing the necessity of introducing into each day's fragment an
amount of incident mystery or pungent matter, sufficient to carry the
reader over twenty-four hours, and make him anxious for the morrow's
return, is chiefly to be attributed the very great change for the worse
that of late has been observable in the class of French literature at
present under consideration. Its actual condition is certainly anything
but vigorous and flourishing, and until a manifest improvement takes
place, we are hardly likely again to pass it in review.
FOOTNOTES:
[21] A large gold coin, then worth nearly a hundred French livres.
Dies Boreales.
No. V.
CHRISTOPHER UNDER CANVASS.
_Camp at Cladich._
SCENE--_The Pavilion._ TIME--_After breakfast._
NORTH--TALBOYS--SEWARD--BULLER.
NORTH.
I begin to be doubtful of this day. On your visits to us, Talboys, you
have been most unfortunate in weather. This is more like August than
June.
TALBOYS.
The very word, my dear sir. It is indeed most august weather.
NORTH.
Five weeks to-day since we pitched our Camp--and we have had the
Beautiful of the Year in all its varieties; but the spiteful Season
seems to owe you some old grudge, Talboys--and to make it a point still
to assail your arrival with "thunder, lightning, and with rain."
TALBOYS.
"I tax not you, ye Elements! with unkindness." I feel assured they mean
nothing personal to me--and though this sort of work may not be very
favourable to Angling, 'tis quite a day for tidying our Tackle--and
making up our Books. But don't you think, sir, that the Tent would look
nothing the worse with some artificial light in this obscuration of the
natural?
NORTH.
Put on the gas. Pretty invention, the Gutta Percha tube, isn't it? The
Electric Telegraph is nothing to it. Tent illuminated in a moment, at a
pig's whisper.
TALBOYS.
Were I to wish, sir, for anything to happen now to the weather at all,
it would be just ever so little toning down of that one constituent
of the orchestral harmony of the Storm which men call--howling.
The Thunder is perfect--but that one Wind Instrument is slightly
out of tune--he is most anxious to do his best--his motive is
unimpeachable; but he has no idea how much more impressive--how much
more popular--would be a somewhat subdued style. There again--that's
positive discord--does he mean to disconcert the Concert--or does he
forget that he is not a Solo?
BULLER.
That must be a deluge of--hail.
TALBOYS.
So much the better. Hitherto we have had but rain. "Mysterious horrors!
HAIL!"
"'Twas a rough night.
My young remembrance cannot parallel
A fellow to it."
NORTH.
Suppose we resume yesterday's conversation?
TALBOYS.
By all manner of means. Let's sit close--and speak loud--else all will
be dumb show. The whole world's one waterfall.
NORTH.
Take up Knight on Taste. Look at the dog-ear.
TALBOYS.
"The most perfect instance of this kind is the Tragedy of Macbeth,
in which the character of an ungrateful traitor, murderer, usurper,
and tyrant, is made in the highest degree interesting by the sublime
flashes of generosity, magnanimity, courage, and tenderness, which
continually burst forth in the manly but ineffective struggle of every
exalted quality that can dignify and adorn the human mind, first
against the allurements of ambition, and afterwards against the pangs
of remorse and horrors of despair. Though his wife has been the cause
of all his crimes and sufferings, neither the agony of his distress,
nor the fury of his rage, ever draw from him an angry word, or
upbraiding expression towards her; but even when, at her instigation,
he is about to add the murder of his friend and late colleague to that
of his sovereign, kinsman, and benefactor, he is chiefly anxious that
she should not share the guilt of his blood:--'Be innocent of the
knowledge, dearest chuck! till thou applaud the deed.' How much more
real grandeur and exaltation of character is displayed in one such
simple expression from the heart, than in all the laboured pomp of
rhetorical amplification."
NORTH.
What think you of that, Talboys?
TALBOYS.
Why, like much of the cant of criticism, it sounds at once queer and
commonplace. I seem to have heard it before many thousand times, and
yet never to have heard it at all till this moment.
NORTH.
Seward?
SEWARD.
Full of audacious assertions, that can be forgiven but in the belief
that Payne Knight had never read the tragedy, even with the most
ordinary attention.
NORTH.
Buller?
BULLER.
Cursed nonsense. Beg pardon, sir--sink cursed--mere nonsense--out and
out nonsense--nonsense by itself nonsense.
NORTH.
How so?
BULLER.
A foolish libel on Shakspeare. Was he the man to make the character of
an ungrateful traitor, murderer, usurper, and tyrant, interesting by
sublime flashes of generosity, magnanimity, courage, and tenderness,
and--do I repeat the words correctly?--of every exalted quality that
can dignify and adorn the human mind.
NORTH.
Buller--keep up that face--you are positively beautiful--
BULLER.
No quizzing--I am ugly--but I have a good figure--look at that leg, sir!
NORTH.
I prefer the other.
TALBOYS.
There have been Poets among us who fain would--if they could--have
so violated nature; but their fabrications have been felt to be
falsehoods--and no quackery may resuscitate drowned lies.
NORTH.
Shakspeare nowhere insists on the virtues of Macbeth--he leaves their
measure indeterminate. That the villain may have had some good points
we are all willing to believe--few people are without them;--nor have
I any quarrel with those who believe he had high qualities, and is
corrupted by ambition. But what high qualities had he shown before
Shakspeare sets him personally before us to judge for ourselves?
Valour--courage--intrepidity--call it what you will--Martial Virtue--
"For brave Macbeth, (well he deserves that name,)
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 unseam'd him from the nave to the chaps,
And fixed his head upon our battlements."
The "bleeding Serjeant" pursues his panegyric till he grows faint--and
is led off speechless; others take it up--and we are thus--and in other
ways--prepared to look on Macbeth as a paragon of bravery, loyalty, and
patriotism.
TALBOYS.
So had seemed Cawdor.
NORTH.
Good. Shakspeare sets Macbeth before us under the most imposing
circumstances of a warlike age; but of his inner character as yet he
has told us nothing--we are to find that out for ourselves during
the Drama. If there be sublime flashes of generosity, magnanimity,
and every exalted virtue, we have eyes to see, unless indeed blinded
by the lightning--and if the sublime flashes be frequent, and the
struggle of every exalted quality that can adorn the human mind, though
ineffectual, yet strong--why, then, we must not only pity and forgive,
but admire and love the "traitor, murderer, usurper, and tyrant," with
all the poetical and philosophical fervour of that amiable enthusiast,
Mr Payne Knight.
BULLER.
Somehow or other I cannot help having an affection for Macbeth.
NORTH.
You had better leave the Tent, sir.
BULLER.
No. I won't.
NORTH
Give us then, my dear Buller, your Theory of the Thane's character.
BULLER.
"Theory, God bless you, I have none to give, sir." Warlike valour, as
you said, is marked first and last--at the opening, and at the end.
Surely a good and great quality, at least for poetical purposes. High
general reputation won and held. The opinion of the wounded soldier was
that of the whole army; and when he himself says, "I have bought golden
opinions from all sorts of people, which would be worn now in their
newest gloss, not thrown aside so soon," I accept that he then truly
describes his position in men's minds.
NORTH.
All true. But we soon gain, too, this insight into his constitution,
that the pillar upon which he has built up life is Reputation, and
not Respect of Law--not Self-Respect; that the point which Shakspeare
above all others intends in him, is that his is a spirit not
self-stayed--leaning upon outward stays--and therefore--
BULLER.
Liable to all--
NORTH.
Don't take the words out of my mouth, sir; or rather, don't put them
into my mouth, sir.
BULLER.
Touchy to-day.
NORTH.
The strongest expression of this character is his throwing himself upon
the illicit divinings of futurity, upon counsellors known for infernal;
and you see what subjugating sway the Three Spirits take at once over
him. On the contrary, the Thaness is self-stayed; and this difference
grounds the poetical opposition of the two personages. In Macbeth,
I suppose a certain splendour of character--magnificence of action
high--a certain impure generosity--mixed up of some kindliness and
sympathy, and of the pleasure from self-elation and self-expansion in a
victorious career, and of that ambition which feeds on public esteem.
BULLER.
Ay--just so, sir.
NORTH.
Now mark, Buller--this is a character which, if the path of duty and
the path of personal ambition were laid out by the Sisters to be one
and the same path, might walk through life in sunlight and honour, and
invest the tomb with proud and revered trophies. To show such a spirit
wrecked and hurled into infamy--the ill-woven sails rent into shreds
by the whirlwind--is a lesson worthy the Play and the Poet--and such
a lesson as I think Shakspeare likely to have designed--or, without
preaching about lessons, such an ethical revelation as I think likely
to have caught hold upon Shakspeare's intelligence. It would seem to me
a dramatically-poetical subject. The mightiest of temptations occurs
to a mind, full of powers, endowed with available moral elements, but
without set virtue--without principles--"and down goes all before
it." If the essential delineation of Macbeth be this conflict of
Moral elements--of good and evil--of light and darkness--I see a very
poetical conception; if merely a hardened and bloody hypocrite from
the beginning, I see none. But I need not say to you, gentlemen, that
all this is as far as may be from the exaggerated panegyric on his
character by Payne Knight.
TALBOYS.
Macbeth is a brave man--so is Banquo--so are we Four, brave men--they
in their way and day--we in ours--they as Celts and Soldiers--we as
Saxons and Civilians--and we had all need to be so--for hark! in the
midst of ours, "Thunder and Lightning, and enter Three Witches."
BULLER.
I cannot say that I understand distinctly their first Confabulation.
NORTH.
That's a pity. A sensible man like you should understand everything.
But what if Shakspeare himself did not distinctly understand it?
There may have been original errata in the report, as extended by
himself from notes taken in short-hand on the spot--light bad--noise
worse--voices of Weird Sisters worst--matter obscure--manner
uncouth--why really, Buller, all things considered, Shakspeare has
shown himself a very pretty Penny-a-liner.
BULLER.
I cry you mercy, sir.
SEWARD.
_Where_ are the Witches on their first appearance, at the very opening
of the wonderful Tragedy?
NORTH.
An open Place, with thunder and lightning.
SEWARD.
I know that--the words are written down.
NORTH.
Somewhere or other--anywhere--nowhere.
BULLER.
In Fife or Forfar? Or some one or other of your outlandish, or
inlandish, Lowland or Highland Counties?
NORTH.
Not knowing, can't say. Probably.
SEWARD
"When the Hurly Burly's done,
When the Battle's lost and won."
What Hurly Burly? What Battle? That in which Macbeth is then engaged?
And which is to be brought to issue ere "set of sun" of the day on
which "enter Three Witches?"
NORTH.
Let it be so.
SEWARD.
"Upon the heath,
There to meet with Macbeth."
The Witches, then, are to meet with Macbeth on the heath on the Evening
of the Battle?
NORTH.
It would seem so.
SEWARD.
They are "posters over sea and land"--and, like whiffs of lightning,
can outsail and outride the sound of thunder. But Macbeth and Banquo
must have had on their seven-league boots.
NORTH.
They must.
SEWARD.
"A drum, a drum!
Macbeth doth come."
Was he with the advanced guard of the Army?
NORTH.
Not unlikely--attended by his Staff. Generals, on such occasions,
usually ride--but perhaps Macbeth and Banquo, being in kilts, preferred
walking in their seven-league boots. Thomas Campbell has said, "When
the drum of the Scottish Army is heard on the wild heath, and when I
fancy it advancing with its bowmen in front, and its spears and banners
in the distance, I am always disappointed with Macbeth's entrance at
the head of a few kilted actors." The army may have been there--but
they did not see the Weirds--nor, I believe, did the Weirds see them.
With Macbeth and Banquo alone had they to do: we see no Army at that
hour--we hear no drums--we are deaf even to the Great Highland Bagpipe,
though He, you may be sure, was not dumb--all "plaided and plumed in
their tartan array" the Highland Host ceased to be--like vanished
shadows--at the first apparition of "those so withered and so wild in
their attire"--not of the earth though on it, and alive somewhere till
this day--while generations after generations of mere Fighting Men have
been disbanded by dusty Death.
SEWARD.
I wish to know _where_ and _when_ had been the Fighting? The
Norwegian--one Sweno, had come down very handsomely at Inchcolm with
ten thousand dollars--a sum in those days equal to a million of money
in Scotland----
NORTH.
Seward, speak on subjects you understand. What do you know, sir, of the
value of money _in_ those days in Scotland?
SEWARD.
But _where_ had been all the Fighting? There would seem to have been
two hurley-burleys.
NORTH.
I see your drift, Seward. _Time and Place_, through the First Scene of
the First Act, are past finding out. It has been asked--Was Shakspeare
ever in Scotland? Never. There is not one word in this Tragedy leading
a Scotsman to think so--many showing he never had that happiness. Let
him deal with our localities according to his own sovereign will and
pleasure, as a prevailing Poet. But let no man point out his dealings
with our localities as proofs of his having such knowledge of them as
implies personal acquaintance with them gained by a longer or shorter
visit in Scotland. The Fights at the beginning seem to be in Fife. The
Soldier, there wounded, delivers his relation at the King's Camp before
Forres. He has crawled, in half-an-hour, or an hour--or two hours--say
seventy, eighty, or a hundred miles, or more--crossing the ridge of the
Grampians. Rather smart. I do not know what you think here of Time; but
I think that Space is here pretty well done for. The TIME of the Action
of Shakspeare's Plays has never yet, so far as I know, been, in any
one Play, carefully investigated--never investigated at all; and I now
announce to you Three--don't mention it--that I have made discoveries
here that will astound the whole world, and demand a New Criticism of
the entire Shakspearean Drama.
BULLER.
Let us have one now, I beseech you, sir.
NORTH.
Not now.
BULLER.
No sleep in the Tent till we have it, sir. I do dearly love astounding
discoveries--and at this time of day, in astounding discovery in
Shakspeare! May it not prove a Mare's Nest!
NORTH.
The Tragedy of Macbeth is a _prodigious_ Tragedy, because in it the
Chariot of Nemesis _visibly_ rides in the lurid thunder-sky. Because
in it the ill motions of a human soul, which Theologians account for
by referring them all to suggestions of Beelzebub, are expounded in
visible, mysterious, tangible, terrible shape and symbolisation by
the Witches. It is great by the character and person, workings and
sufferings, of Lady Macbeth--by the immense poetical power in doing
the Witches--mingling for once in the world the Homely-Grotesque and
the Sublime--extinguishing the Vulgar in the Sublime--by the bond,
whatsoever it be, between Macbeth and his wife--by making us tolerate
her and him----
BULLER.
Didn't I say that in my own way, sir? And didn't you reprove me for
saying it, and order me out of the Tent?
NORTH.
And what of the Witches?
BULLER.
Had you not stopt me. I say now, sir, that nobody understands
Shakspeare's HECATE. Who is SHE? Each of the Three Weirds is = one
Witch + one of the Three Fates--therefore the union of two incompatible
natures--more than in a Centaur. Oh! Sir! what a hand that was which
bound the two into one--inseverably! There they are for ever as the
Centaurs _are_. But the gross Witch prevails; which Shakspeare needed
for securing belief, and he has it, full. Hecate, sir, comes in to
balance the disproportion--she lifts into Mythology--and strengthens
the mythological tincture. So does the "Pit of Acheron." That is
classical. To the best of my remembrance, no mention of any such Pit in
the Old or New Statistical Account of Scotland.
NORTH.
And, in the Incantation Scene, those Apparitions! Mysterious, ominous,
picturesque--and self-willed. They are commanded by the Witches, but
under a limitation. Their oracular power is their own. They are of
unknown orders--as if for the occasion created in Hell.
North.
Talboys, are you asleep--or are you at Chess with your eyes shut?
TALBOYS.
At Chess with my eyes shut. I shall send off my move to my friend
Stirling by first post. But my ears were open--and I ask--when did
Macbeth first design the murder of Duncan? Does not everybody think--in
the moment _after_ the Witches have first accosted and left him? Does
not--it may be asked--the whole moral significancy of the Witches
disappear, unless the invasion of hell into Macbeth's bosom is first
made by their presence and voices?
NORTH.
No. The whole moral significancy of the Witches only then appears, when
we are assured that they address themselves only to those who already
have been tampering with their conscience. "Good sir! why do you start,
and seem to fear things that do sound so fair?" That question put to
Macbeth by Banquo turns our eyes to his face--and we see Guilt. There
was no start at "Hail to thee, Thane of Cawdor,"--but at the word
"King" well might he start; for ---- eh?
TALBOYS.
We must look up the Scene.
NORTH.
No need for that. You have it by heart--recite it.
TALBOYS.
"_Macbeth._ So foul and fair a day I have not seen.
_Banquo._ How far is't call'd to Forres?--What are these,
So wither'd, and so wild in their attire;
That look not like the inhabitants of the earth,
And yet are on't? Live you? or are you aught
That man may question? You seem to understand me,
By each at once her choppy finger laying
Upon her skinny lips:--You should be women,
And yet your beards forbid me to interpret
That you are so.
_Macbeth._ Speak, if you can;--What are you?
_1st Witch._ All hail, Macbeth! hail to thee, thane of Glamis!
_2d Witch._ All hail, Macbeth! hail to thee, thane of Cawdor!
_3d Witch._ All hail, Macbeth! that shalt be king hereafter.
_Banquo._ Good sir, why do you start; and seem to fear
Things that do sound so fair?--I' the name of truth,
Are ye fantastical, or that indeed
Which outwardly ye show? My noble partner
You greet with present grace, and great prediction
Of noble having, and of royal hope,
That he seems rapt withal; to me you speak not:
If you can look into the seeds of time,
And say which grain will grow, and which will not;
Speak then to me, who neither beg, nor fear
Your favours nor your hate.
_1st Witch._ Hail!
_2d Witch._ Hail!
_3d Witch._ Hail!
_1st Witch._ Lesser than Macbeth, and greater.
_2d Witch._ Not so happy, yet much happier.
_3d Witch._ Thou shalt get kings, though thou be none:
So, all hail, Macbeth and Banquo!
_1st Witch._ Banquo and Macbeth, all hail!
_Macbeth._ Stay, you imperfect speakers, tell me more:
By Sinel's death, I know, I am thane of Glamis;
But how of Cawdor? the thane of Cawdor lives,
A prosperous gentleman; and to be king,
Stands not within the prospect of belief,
No more than to be Cawdor. Say, from whence
You owe this strange intelligence? or why
Upon this blasted heath you stop our way
With such prophetic greeting?--Speak, I charge you.
[_Witches vanish._
_Banquo._ The earth hath bubbles, as the water has,
And these are of them:--Whither are they vanish'd?
_Macbeth._ Into the air, and what seem'd corporal, melted
As breath into the wind. 'Would they had staid!
_Banquo._ Were such things here, as we do speak about?
Or have we eaten of the insane root,
That takes the reason prisoner.
_Macbeth._ Your children shall be kings.
_Banquo._ You shall be king.
_Macbeth._ And thane of Cawdor too; went it not so?
_Banquo._ To the self-same tune, and words."
NORTH.
Charles Kemble himself could not have given it more impressively.
BULLER.
You make him blush, sir.
NORTH.
Attend to that "start" of Macbeth, Talboys.
TALBOYS.
He might well start on being told of a sudden, by such seers, that he
was hereafter to be King of Scotland.
NORTH.
There was more in the start than that, my lad, else Shakspeare would
not have so directed our eyes to it. I say again--it was the start--of
a murderer.
TALBOYS.
And what if I say it was not? But I have the candour to confess, that
I am not familiar with the starts of murderers--so may possibly be
mistaken.
NORTH.
Omit what intervenes--and give us the Soliloquy, Talboys. But before
you do so, let me merely remind you that Macbeth's mind, from the
little he says in the interim, is manifestly ruminating on something
bad, ere he breaks out into Soliloquy.
TALBOYS.
"Two truths are told,
As happy prologues to the swelling act
Of the imperial theme--I thank you, gentlemen.--
This supernatural soliciting
Cannot be ill--cannot be good:--If ill,
Why hath it given me earnest of success,
Commencing in a truth? I am 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 is yet but fantastical
Shakes so my single state of man, that function
Is smothered in surmise; and nothing is,
But what is not."
NORTH.
Now, my dear Talboys, you will agree with me in thinking that this
first great and pregnant, although brief soliloquy, stands for germ,
type, and law of the whole Play, and of its criticism--and for clue
to the labyrinth of the Thane's character. "Out of this wood do not
desire to go." Out of it I do not expect soon to go. I regard William
as a fair Poet and a reasonable Philosopher; but as a supereminent
Play-wright. The First Soliloquy _must_ speak the nature of Macbeth,
else the Craftsman has no skill in his trade. A Soliloquy _reveals_.
That is its function. Therein is the soul heard and seen discoursing
with itself--within itself; and if you carry your eye through--up to
the First Appearance of Lady Macbeth--this Soliloquy is distinctly
the highest point of the Tragedy--the tragic acme--or dome--or
pinnacle--therefore of power indefinite, infinite. On this rock I
stand, a Colossus ready to be thrown down by--an Earthquake.
BULLER.
Pushed off by--a shove.
NORTH.
Not by a thousand Buller-power. Can you believe, Buller, that the word
of the Third Witch, "that shalt be KING Hereafter," _sows_ the murder
in Macbeth's heart, and that it springs up, flowers, and fruits with
such fearful rapidity.
BULLER.
Why--Yes and No.
NORTH.
Attend, Talboys, to the words "supernatural soliciting." What
"supernatural soliciting" to evil is there here? Not a syllable
had the Weird Sisters breathed about Murder. But now there is much
soliloquising--and Cawdor contemplates himself _objectively_--seen
busy upon an elderly gentleman called Duncan--after a fashion that so
frightens him _subjectively_--that Banquo cannot help whispering to
Rosse and Angus--
"See how our partner's rapt!"
TALBOYS.
"My thought whose murder's yet fantastical." I agree with you, sir, in
suspecting he must have thought of the murder.
NORTH.
It is from no leaning towards the Weird Sisters--whom I never set eyes
on but once, and then without interchanging a word, leapt momentarily
out of this world into that pitch-pot of a pond in Glenco--it is, I
say, from no leaning towards the Weird Sisters that I take this view of
Macbeth's character. No "sublime flashes of generosity, magnanimity,
tenderness, and every exalted quality that can dignify and adorn the
human mind," do I ever suffer to pass by without approbation, when
coruscating from the character of any well-disposed man, real or
imaginary, however unaccountable at other times his conduct may appear
to be; but Shakspeare, who knew Macbeth better than any of us, has here
assured us that he was in heart a murderer--for how long he does not
specify--before he had ever seen a birse on any of the Weird Sisters'
beards. But let's be canny. Talboys--pray, what is the meaning of the
word "soliciting," "preternatural soliciting," in this Soliloquy?
TALBOYS.
Soliciting, sir, is, in my interpreting, "an appealing, intimate
visitation."
NORTH.
Right. The appeal is general--as that _challenge_ of a trumpet--_Fairy
Queen_, book III., canto xii., stanza 1--
"Signe of nigh battail or got victorye"--
which, all indeterminate, is notwithstanding _a challenge_--operates,
and is felt as such.
TALBOYS.
So a thundering knock at your door--which may be a friend or an
enemy. It comes as a summoning. It is more than internal urging and
inciting of me by my own thoughts--for mark, sir, the rigour of the
word "supernatural," which throws the soliciting off his own soul upon
the Weirds. The word is really undetermined to pleasure or pain--the
essential thought being that there is a searching or penetrating
provocative--a stirring up of that which lay dead and still. Next is
the debate whether this intrusive, and pungent, and stimulant assault
of a presence and an oracle be good or ill?
NORTH.
Does the hope live in him for a moment that this home-visiting is not
ill--that the Spirits are not ill? They have spoken truth so far--ergo,
the Third "All hail!" shall be true, too. But more than that--they have
spoken _truth_. Ergo, they are not spirits of Evil. That hope dies
in the same instant, submerged in the stormy waves which the blast
from hell arouses. The infernal revelation glares clear before him--a
Crown held out by the hand of Murder. One or two struggles occur. Then
the truth stands before him fixed and immutable--"Evil, be thou my
good." He is dedicated: and passive to fate. I cannot comprehend this
so feeble debate in the mind of a good man--I cannot comprehend any
such debate at all in the mind of a previously settled and determined
murderer; but I can comprehend and feel its awful significancy in the
mind of a man already in a most perilous moral condition.
SEWARD.
The "start" shows that the spark has caught--it has fallen into a tun
of gunpowder.
TALBOYS.
The touch of Ithuriel's spear.
NORTH.
May we not say, then, that perhaps the Witches have shown no more than
this--the Fascination of Contact between Passion and Opportunity?
SEWARD.
To Philosophy reading the hieroglyphic; but to the People what? To
them they are a reality. They seize the imagination with all power.
They come like "blasts from hell"--like spirits of Plague, whose
breath--whose very sight kills.
"Within them Hell
They bring, and round about them; nor from Hell
One step, no more than from themselves, can fly."
The contagion of their presence, in spite of what we have been saying,
almost reconciles my understanding to what it would otherwise revolt
from, the _suddenness_ with which the penetration of Macbeth into
futurity lays fast hold upon Murder.
BULLER.
Pretty fast--though it gives a twist or two in his handling.
SEWARD.
Lady Macbeth herself corroborates your judgment and Shakspeare's on her
husband's character.
TALBOYS.
Does she?
SEWARD.
She does. In that dreadful parley between them on the night of the
Murder--she reminds him of a time when
"_Nor time nor place
Did then adhere, and yet you would make both_;
They have made themselves, and that their fitness now
Does unmake you."
This--mark you, sir--must have been before the Play began!
NORTH.
I have often thought of the words--and Shakspeare himself has so
adjusted the action of the Play as that, _since the encounter with the
Weirds_, no opportunity had occurred to Macbeth for the "making of
time and place." Therefore it must, as you say, have been _before it_.
Buller, what say you now?
BULLER.
Gagged.
NORTH.
True, she speaks of his being "full of the milk of human kindness."
The words have become favourites with us, who are an affectionate and
domestic people--and are lovingly applied to the loving; but Lady
Macbeth attached no such profound sense to them as we do; and meant
merely that she thought her husband would, after all, much prefer
greatness unbought by blood; and, at the time she referred to, it is
probable he would; but that she meant no more than that, is plain from
the continuation of her praise, in which her ideas get not a little
confused; and her words, interpret them as you will, leave nothing
"milky" in Macbeth at all. Milk of human kindness, indeed!
TALBOYS.
"What thou would'st highly,
That would'st thou holily; would'st not play false,
And yet would'st wrongly win: thou'dst have great Glamis,
That which cries, 'Thus thou must do, if thou have it;
And that which rather thou dost fear to do
Than wishest should be undone.'"
_That_ is her Ladyship's notion of the "milk of human kindness"! "I
wish somebody would murder Duncan--as for murdering him myself, I am
much too tender-hearted and humane for perpetrating such cruelty with
my own hand!"
BULLER.
Won't you believe a Wife to be a good judge of her Husband's
disposition?
NORTH.
Not Lady Macbeth. For does not she herself tell us, at the same time,
that he had formerly schemed how to commit Murder?
BULLER.
Gagged again.
NORTH.
I see no reason for doubting that she was attached to her husband; and
Shakspeare loved to put into the lips of women beautiful expressions of
love--but he did not intend that we should be deceived thereby in our
moral judgements.
SEWARD.
Did this ever occur to you, sir? Macbeth, when hiring the murderers who
are to look after Banquo and Fleance, cites a conversation in which
he had demonstrated to them that the oppression under which they had
long suffered, and which they had supposed to proceed from Macbeth,
proceeded really from Banquo? My firm belief is that it proceeded from
Macbeth--that their suspicion was right--that Macbeth is misleading
them--and that Shakspeare means you to apprehend this. But why should
Macbeth have oppressed his inferiors, unless he had been--long
since--of a tyrannical nature? He oppresses his inferiors--they are
sickened and angered with the world--by his oppression--he tells them
'twas not he but another who had oppressed them--and that other--at his
instigation--they willingly murder. An ugly affair altogether.
NORTH.
Very. But let us keep to the First Act--and see what a hypocrite
Macbeth has so very soon become--what a savage assassin! He has just
followed up his Soliloquy with these significant lines--
"Come what come may,
_Time and the hour run through the roughest day_;"
when he recollects that Banquo, Rosse, and Angus are standing near.
Richard himself is not more wily--guily--smily--and oily; to the Lords
his condescension is already quite kingly--
"Kind gentlemen, your pains
Are registered where every day I turn
The leaf to read them"--
TALBOYS.
And soon after, to the King how obsequious!
"The service and the loyalty I owe,
In doing it, pays itself. Your Highness' part
Is to receive our duties; and our duties
Are to your throne and state, children, and servants;
Which do but what they should by doing everything
Safe toward you love and honour."
What would Payne Knight have said to all that? This to his King, whom
he has resolved, first good opportunity, to murder!
NORTH.
Duncan is now too happy for this wicked world.
"My plenteous joys,
Wanton in fulness, seek to hide themselves
In drops of sorrow."
Invaders--traitors--now there are none. Peace is restored to the
Land--the Throne rock-fast--the line secure--
"We will establish our estate upon
Our eldest, Malcolm; whom we name hereafter,
The Prince of Cumberland: which honour must
Not, unaccompanied, invest him only,
But signs of nobleness, like stars, shall shine
On all deservers."
Now was the time for "the manly but ineffectual struggle of every
exalted quality that can dignify and exalt the human mind"--for a few
sublime flashes at least of generosity and tenderness, et cetera--now
when the Gracious Duncan is loading him with honours, and, better than
all honours, lavishing on him the boundless effusions of a grateful
and royal heart. The Prince of Cumberland! Ha, ha!
"The Prince of Cumberland!--That is a step
On which I must fall down, or else o'erleap,
For in my way it lies."
But the remorseless miscreant becomes poetical--
"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!"
The milk of human kindness has coagulated into the curd of inhuman
ferocity--and all this--slanderers say--is the sole work of the Weird
Sisters! No. His wicked heart--because it is wicked--believes in
their Prophecy--the end is assured to him--and the means are at once
suggested to his own slaughterous nature. No supernatural soliciting
here, which a better man would not successfully have resisted. I
again repudiate--should it be preferred against me--the charge of a
_tendresse_ towards the Bearded Beauties of the Blasted Heath; but
rather would I marry them all Three--one after the other--nay all three
at once, and as many more as there may be in our Celtic Mythology--than
see your Sophia, Seward, or, Buller, your--
BULLER.
We have but Marmy.
NORTH.
Wedded to a Macbeth.
SEWARD.
We know your affection, my dear sir, for your goddaughter. She is
insured.
NORTH.
Well, this Milk of Human Kindness is off at a hand-gallop to Inverness.
The King has announced a Royal Visit to Macbeth's own Castle. But
Cawdor had before this despatched a letter to his lady, from which
Shakspeare has given us an extract. And then, as I understand it, a
special messenger besides, to say "the King comes here to-night."
Which of the two is the more impatient to be at work 'tis hard to say;
but the idea of the murder originated with the male Prisoner. We have
his wife's word for it--she told him so to his face--and he did not
deny it. We have his own word for it--he told himself so to his own
face--and he never denies it at any time during the play.
TALBOYS.
You said, a little while ago, sir, that you believed Macbeth and his
wife were a happy couple.
NORTH.
Not I. I said she was attached to him--and I say now that the wise
men are not of the Seven, who point to her reception of her husband,
on his arrival at _home_, as a proof of her want of affection. They
seem to think she ought to have rushed into his arms--slobbered upon
his shoulder--and so forth. For had he not been at the Wars? Pshaw!
The most tender-hearted Thanesses of those days--even those that
kept albums--would have been ashamed of weeping on sending their
Thanes off to battle--much more on receiving them back in a sound
skin--with new honours nodding on their plumes. Lady Macbeth was not
one of the turtle-doves--fit mate she for the King of the Vultures.
I am too good an ornithologist to call them Eagles. She received her
mate fittingly--with murder in her soul; but more cruel--more selfish
than he, she could not be--nor, perhaps, was she less; but she was
more resolute--and resolution even in evil--in such circumstances as
hers--seems to argue a superior nature to his, who, while he keeps
vacillating, as if it were between good and evil, betrays all the time
the bias that is surely inclining him to evil, into which he makes a
sudden and sure wheel at last.
BULLER.
The Weirds--the Weirds!--the Weirds have done it all!
NORTH.
Macbeth--Macbeth!--Macbeth has done it all!
BULLER.
Furies and Fates!
NORTH.
Who make the wicked their victims!
SEWARD.
Is she sublime in her wickedness?
NORTH.
It would, I fear, be wrong to say so. But I was speaking of Macbeth's
character--not of hers--and, in comparison with him, she may seem a
great creature. They are now utterly alone--and of the two he has been
the more familiar with murder. Between them, Duncan already is a dead
man. But how pitiful--at such a time and at such a greeting--Macbeth's
cautions--
"My dearest Love,
Duncan comes here to-night!
_Lady._--And when goes hence?
_Macbeth._--To-morrow, as he purposes.
_Lady._--Oh, never
Shall sun that morrow see!"
Why, Talboys, does not the poor devil--
TALBOYS.
Poor devil! Macbeth a poor devil?
NORTH.
Why, Buller, does not the poor devil?
BULLER.
Poor devil! Macbeth a poor devil?
NORTH.
Why, Seward, does not the poor devil--
SEWARD.
Speak up--speak out? Is he afraid of the spiders? You know him,
sir--you see through him.
NORTH.
Ay, Seward--reserved and close as he is--he wants nerve--_pluck_--he is
close upon the coward--and that would be well, were there the slightest
tendency towards change of purpose in the Pale Face; but there is
none--he is as cruel as ever--the more close the more cruel--the more
irresolute the more murderous--for to murder he is sure to come.
Seward, you said well--why does not the poor devil speak up--speak out?
Is he afraid of the spiders?
TALBOYS.
Murderous-looking villain--no need of words.
NORTH.
I did not say, sir, there was any need of words. Why, will you always
be contradicting one?
TALBOYS.
Me? I? I hope I shall never live to see the day on which I contradict
Christopher North in his own Tent. At least--rudely.
NORTH.
Do it rudely--not as you did now--and often do--as if you were agreeing
with me--but you are incurable. I say, my dear Talboys, that Macbeth
so bold in a "twa-haun'd crack" with himself in a Soliloquy--so
figurative--and so fond of swearing by the Stars and old Mother
Night, who were not aware of his existence--should not have been thus
tongue-tied to his own wife in their own secretest chamber--should have
unlocked and flung open the door of his heart to her--like a Man. I
blush for him--I do. So did his wife.
BULLER.
I don't find that in the record.
NORTH.
Don't you? "Your face, my Thane, is as a book where men may read
strange matters." She sees in his face self-alarm at his own
murderous intentions. And so she counsels him about his face--like a
self-collected, trustworthy woman. "To beguile the time, look like the
time;" with further good stern advice. But--"We shall speak farther,"
is all she can get from him in answer to conjugal assurances that
should have given him a palpitation at the heart, and set his eyes on
fire--
"He that's coming
Must be provided for; and you shall put
This night's great business into my despatch;
Which shall, to all our nights and days to come,
Give solely sovereign sway and Masterdom."
There spoke one worthy to be a Queen!
SEWARD.
Worthy!
NORTH.
Ay--in that age--in that country. 'Twas not then the custom "to speak
daggers but use none." Did Shakspeare mean to dignify, to magnify
Macbeth by such demeanour? No--to degrade and minimise the murderer.
TALBOYS.
My dear sir, I cordially agree with every word you utter. Go on--my
dear sir--to instruct--to illumine--
SEWARD.
To bring out "sublime flashes of magnanimity, courage, tenderness," in
Macbeth--
BULLER.
"Of every exalted quality that can dignify and adorn the human
mind"--the mind of Macbeth in his struggle with the allurements of
ambition!
NORTH.
Observe, how this reticence--on the part of Macbeth--contrasted with
his wife's eagerness and exultation, makes her, for the moment, seem
the wickeder of the two--the fiercer and the more cruel. For the moment
only; for we soon ask ourselves what means this un-husbandly reserve
in him who had sent her _that letter_--and then a messenger to tell
her the king was coming--and who had sworn to himself as savagely as
she now does, not to let slip this opportunity of cutting his king's
throat. He is well-pleased to see that his wife is as bloody-minded as
himself--that she will not only give all necessary assistance--as an
associate--but concert the when, and the where, and the how--and if
need be, with her own hand deal the blow.
SEWARD.
She did not then know that Macbeth had made up his mind to murder
Duncan that very night. _But we know it._ She has instantly made up
hers--we know how; but being as yet unassured of her husband, she
welcomes him home with a Declaration that must have more than answered
his fondest hopes; and, therefore, he is almost mute--the few words he
does utter seem to indicate no settled purpose--Duncan may fulfil his
intention of going in the morning, or he may not; but we know that the
silence of the murderer now is because the murderess is manifestly all
he could wish--and that, had she shown any reluctance, he would have
resumed his eloquence, and, to convert her to his way of thinking,
argued as powerfully as he did when converting himself.
BULLER.
You carry on at such a pace, sir, there's no keeping up with you.
Pull up, that I may ask you a very simple question. On his arrival at
his castle, Macbeth finds his wife reading a letter from her amiable
spouse, about the Weird Sisters. Pray, when was that letter written?
NORTH.
At what hour precisely? That I can't say. It must, however, have been
written before Macbeth had been presented to the King--for there is no
allusion in it to the King's intention to visit their Castle. I believe
it to have been written about an hour or so after the prophecy of the
Weirds--either in some place of refreshment by the roadside--or in
such a Tent as this--kept ready for the General in the King's Camp at
Forres. He despatched it by a Gilly--a fast one like your Cornwall
Clipper--and then tumbled in.
BULLER.
When did she receive it?
NORTH.
Early next morning.
BULLER.
How could that be, since she is reading it, as her husband steps in,
well on, as I take it, in the afternoon?
NORTH.
Buller, you are a blockhead. There had she, for many hours, been
sitting, and walking _about_ with it, now rumpled up in her fist--now
crunkled up between her breasts--now locked up in a safe--now spread
out like a sampler on that tasty little oak table--and sometimes
she might have been heard by the servants--had they had the unusual
curiosity to listen at the door--murmuring like a stock-dove--anon
hooting like an owl--by-and-by barking like an eagle--then bellowing
liker a hart than a hind--almost howling like a wolf--and why not?--now
singing a snatch of an old Gaelic air, with a clear, wild, sweet voice,
like that of "a human!"
"Glamis thou art, and Cawdor; and shalt be
What thou art promised."
"Hie thee hither,
That I may pour my spirits in thine ear,
And chastise with the valour of my tongue,
All that impedes thee from the golden round,
Which Fate and metaphysical aid doth seem
To have thee crown'd withal."
BULLER.
Grand indeed.
NORTH.
It _is_ grand indeed. But, my dear Buller, was that all she had said
to herself, think you? No--no--no. But it was all Shakspeare had time
for on the Stage. Oh, sirs! The Time of the Stage is but a simulacrum
of true Time. That must be done at one stroke, on the Stage, which
in a Life takes ten. The Stage persuades _that_ in one conversation,
or soliloquy, which Life may do in twenty--you have not leisure or
good-will for the ambages and iterations of the Real.
SEWARD.
See an artist with a pen in his hand, challenged; and with a few lines
he will exhibit a pathetic story. From how many millions has he given
you--One? The units which he abstracts, represent sufficiently and
satisfactorily the millions of lines and surfaces which he neglects.
NORTH.
So in Poetry. You take little for much. You need not wonder, then, that
on an attendant entering and saying, "The King comes here to-night,"
she cries, "Thou'rt mad to say it!" Had you happened to tell her so
half-an-hour ago, who knows but that she might have received it with a
stately smile, that hardly moved a muscle on her high-featured front,
and gave a merciful look to her green eyes even when she was communing
with Murder!
NORTH.
What hurry and haste had been on all sides to get into the House of
Murder!
"Where's the Thane of Cawdor?
We coursed him, at the heels, and had a purpose
To be his purveyor: but he rides well:
And his great love, sharp as his spur, hath holp him
To his home before us--Fair and noble Hostess,
We are your guest to-night."
Ay, where is the Thane of Cawdor? I, for one, not knowing, can't say.
The gracious Duncan desires much to see him as well as his gracious
Hostess.
"Give me your hand:
Conduct me to mine host: we love him highly,
And shall continue our graces towards him.
By your leave, Hostess."
Ay--where's the Thane of Cawdor? Why did not Shakspeare show him to us,
sitting at supper with the King?
TALBOYS.
Did he sup with the King?
BULLER.
I believe he sat down--but got up again--and left the Chamber.
TALBOYS.
His wife seeks him out. "He has almost supped. Why have you left the
Chamber?" "Has he asked for me?" "Know ye not he has?"
NORTH.
On Macbeth's Soliloquy, which his wife's entrance here interrupts,
how much inconsiderate comment have not moralists made! Here--they
have said--is the struggle of a good man with temptation. Hearken,
say they--to the voice of Conscience! What does the good man, in this
hour of trial, say to himself? He says to himself--"I have made up my
mind to assassinate my benefactor in my own house--the only doubt I
have, is about the consequences to myself in the world to come." Well,
then--"We'd jump the world to come. But if I murder him--may not others
murder me? Retribution even in this world." Call you that the voice of
Conscience?
SEWARD.
Hardly.
NORTH.
He then goes on to descant to himself about the relation in which he
stands to Duncan, and apparently discovers for the first time, that
"he's here in double trust;" and that as his host, his kinsman, and his
subject, he should "against his murderer shut the door, not bear the
knife myself."
SEWARD.
A man of genius.
NORTH.
Besides, Duncan is not only a King, but a good King--
"So clear in his great office, that his virtues
Will plead like angels, trumpet-tongued, against
The deep damnation of his taking-off."
That is much better morality--keep there, Macbeth--or thereabouts--and
Duncan's life is tolerably safe--at least for one night. But Shakspeare
knew his man--and what manner of man he is we hear in the unbearable
context, that never yet has been quoted by any one who had ears to
distinguish between the true and the false.
"And pity, like a naked new-born babe,
Striding the blast, or heaven's cherubim, hors'd
Upon the sightless couriers of the air,
Shall blow the horrid deed in every eye,
That tears shall drown the wind."
Cant and fustian. Shakspeare knew that cant and fustian would come
at that moment from the mouth of Macbeth. Accordingly, he offers but
a poor resistance to the rhetoric that comes rushing from his wife's
heart--even that sentiment which is thought so fine--and 'tis well
enough in its way--
"I dare do all that may become a man;
Who dares do more is none"--
is set aside at once by--
"What beast was it, then,
That made you break this enterprise to me?"
We hear no more of "Pity like a naked new-born babe"--but at her horrid
scheme of the murder--
"Bring forth men-children only!
For thy undaunted mettle should compose
Nothing but males!"
Shakspeare does not paint here a grand and desperate struggle between
good and evil thoughts in Macbeth's mind--but a mock fight; had there
been any deep sincerity in the feeling expressed in the bombast--had
there been any true feeling at all--it would have revived and
deepened--not faded and died almost--at the picture drawn by Lady
Macbeth of their victim--
"When Duncan is asleep,
Whereto the rather shall his day's hard journey
Soundly invite him,"
the words that had just left his own lips--
"His virtues
Will plead like angels, trumpet-tongued, against
The deep damnation of his taking-off,"
would have re-rung in his ears; and a strange medley--words and
music--would they have made--with his wife's
"When in swinish sleep
Their drenched natures lie, as in a death,
What cannot you and I perform upon
The unguarded Duncan?"
That is my idea of the Soliloquy. Think on it.
TALBOYS.
The best critics tell us that Shakspeare's Lady Macbeth has a
commanding Intellect. Certes she has a commanding Will. I do not see
what a commanding Intellect has to do in a Tragedy of this kind--or
what opportunity she has of showing it. Do you, sir?
NORTH.
I do not.
TALBOYS.
Her Intellect seems pretty much on a par with Macbeth's in the planning
of the murder.
NORTH.
I defy any human Intellect to devise well an atrocious Murder. Pray,
how would you have murdered Duncan?
TALBOYS.
Ask me rather how I would--this night--murder Christopher North.
NORTH.
No more of that--no dallying in that direction. You make me shudder.
Shakspeare knew that a circumspect murder is an impossibility--that
a murder of a King in the murderer's own house, with expectation
of non-discovery, is the irrationality of infatuation. The poor
Idiot chuckles at the poor Fury's device as at once original and
plausible--and, next hour, what single soul in the Castle does not know
who did the deed?
SEWARD.
High Intellect indeed!
TALBOYS.
The original murder is bad to the uttermost. I mean badly contrived.
What colour was there in colouring the two Grooms? No two men kill
their master, and then go to bed again in his room with bloody faces
and poignards.
BULLER.
If this was really a very bad plot altogether, it is her Ladyship's as
much--far more than his Lordship's. Against whom, then, do we conclude?
Her? I think not--but the Poet. _He_ is the badly-contriving assassin.
He does not intend lowering your esteem for her Ladyship's talents.
Am I, sir, to think that William himself, after the same game, would
have hunted no better? I believe he would; but he thinks that this will
carry the Plot through for the Stage well enough. The House, seeing and
hearing, will not stay to criticise. The Horror persuades Belief. He
knew the whole mystery of murder.
NORTH.
My dear Buller, wheel nearer me. I would not lose a word you say.
BULLER.
Did Macbeth commit an error in killing the two Grooms? And does his
Lady think so?
TALBOYS.
A gross error, and his Lady thinks so.
BULLER.
Why was it a gross error--and why did his lady think so?
TALBOYS.
Because--why--I really can't tell.
BULLER.
Nor I. The question leads to formidable difficulties--either way. But
answer me this. Is her swooning at the close of her husband's most
graphic picture of the position of the corpses--real or pretended?
SEWARD.
Real.
TALBOYS.
Pretended.
BULLER.
Sir?
NORTH.
I reserve my opinion.
TALBOYS.
Not a faint--but a _feint_. She cannot undo that which is done; nor
hinder that which he will do next. She must mind her own business.
Now distinctly her own business is--to faint. A high-bred, sensitive,
innocent Lady, startled from her sleep to find her guest and King
murdered, and the room full of aghast nobles, cannot possibly do
anything else but faint. Lady Macbeth, who "all particulars of duty
knows," faints accordingly.
NORTH.
Seward, we are ready to hear you.
SEWARD.
She has been about a business that must have somewhat shook her
nerves--granting them to be of iron. She would herself have murdered
Duncan had he not resembled her Father as he slept; and on sudden
discernment of that dreadful resemblance, her soul must have shuddered,
if her body served her to stagger away from parricide. On the deed
being done, she is terrified after a different manner from the doer of
the deed; but her terror is as great; and though she says--
"The sleeping and the dead
Are but as pictures--'tis the eye of childhood
That fears a painted Devil--"
believe me that her face was like ashes, as she returned to the
chamber to gild the faces of the grooms with the dead man's blood.
That knocking, too, alarmed the Lady--believe me--as much as her
husband; and to keep cool and collected before him, so as to be able
to support him at that moment with her advice, must have tried the
utmost strength of her nature. Call her Fiend--she was Woman. Down
stairs she comes--and stands among them all, at first like one alarmed
only--astounded by what she hears--and striving to simulate the
ignorance of the innocent--"What, in our house?" "Too cruel anywhere!"
What she must have suffered then, Shakspeare lets us conceive for
ourselves; and what on her husband's elaborate description of his
inconsiderate additional murders. "The whole is too much for her"--she
"is perplexed in the extreme"--and the sinner swoons.
NORTH.
Seward suggests a bold, strong, deep, tragical turn of the scene--that
she faints actually. Well--so be it. I shall say, first, that I think
it a weakness in my favourite; but I will go so far as to add that I
can let it pass for a not unpardonable weakness--the occasion given.
But I must deal otherwise with her biographer. Him I shall hold to
a strict rendering of account. I will know of him what he is about,
and what she is about. If she faints really, and against her will,
having forcible reasons for holding her will clear, she must be shown
fighting to the last effort of will, against the assault of womanly
nature, and drop, vanquished, as one dead, without a sound. But the
Thaness calls out lustily--she remembers, "as we shall make our griefs
and clamours roar upon his death." She makes noise enough--takes
good care to attract everybody's attention to her performance--for
which I commend her. Calculate as nicely as you will--she distracts
or diverts speculation, and makes an interesting and agreeable break
in the conversation.--I think that the obvious meaning is the right
meaning--and _that she faints on purpose_.
NORTH.
Decided in favour of Feint.
BULLER.
You might have had the good manners to ask for _my_ opinion.
NORTH.
I beg a thousand pardons, Buller.
BULLER.
A hundred will do, North. In Davies' _Anecdotes of the Stage_, I
remember reading that Garrick would not trust Mrs Pritchard with the
Swoon--and that Macklin thought Mrs Porter alone could have been
endured by the audience. Therefore, by the Great Manager, Lady Macbeth
was not allowed in the Scene to appear at all. His belief was, that
with her Ladyship it was a feint--and that the Gods, aware of that,
unless restrained by profound respect for the actress, would have
_laughed_--as at something rather comic. If the Gods, in Shakspeare's
days, were as the Gods in Garrick's, William, methinks, would not, on
any account, have exposed the Lady to derision at such a time. But I
suspect the Gods of the Globe would not have laughed, whatever they
might have thought of her sincerity, and that she did appear before
them in a Scene from which nothing could account for her absence. She
was not, I verily believe, given to fainting--perhaps this was the
first time she had ever fainted since she was a girl. _Now_ I believe
she did. She would have stood by her husband at all hazards, had she
been able, both on his account and her own; she would not have so
deserted him at such a critical juncture; her character was of boldness
rather than duplicity; her business now--her duty--was to brazen it
out; but she grew sick--qualms of conscience, however terrible, can
be borne by sinners standing upright at the mouth of hell--but the
flesh of man is weak, in its utmost strength, when moulded to woman's
form--other qualms assail suddenly the earthly tenement--the breath is
choked--the "distracted globe" grows dizzy--they that look out of the
windows know not what they see--the body reels, lapses, sinks, and at
full length smites the floor.
SEWARD.
Well said--Chairman of the Quarter-sessions.
BULLER.
Nor, with all submission, my dear Sir, can I think you treat your
favourite murderess, on this trying occasion, with your usual fairness
and candour. All she says, is, "Help me hence, ho!" Macduff says, "Look
to the Lady"--and Banquo says, "Look to the Lady"--and she is "carried
off." Some critic or other--I think Malone--says that Macbeth shows
he knows "'tis a feint" by not going to her assistance. Perhaps he
was mistaken--know it he could not. And nothing more likely to make a
woman faint than that revelling and wallowing of his in that bloody
description.
NORTH.
By the Casting Vote of the President--_Feint_.
TALBOYS.
Let's to Lunch.
NORTH.
Go. You will find me sitting here when you come back.