From my boyish days I had always felt a great perplexity on one point
in Macbeth: it was this: the knocking at the gate, which succeeds to
the murder of Duncan, produced to my feelings an effect for which I
never could account: the effect was--that it reflected back upon the
murder a peculiar awfulness and a depth of solemnity: yet, however
obstinately I endeavoured with my understanding to comprehend this,
for many years I never could see _why_ it should produce such an
effect.----
Here I pause for one moment to exhort the reader never to pay any
attention to his understanding when it stands in opposition to any
other faculty of his mind. The mere understanding, however useful and
indispensable, is the meanest faculty in the human mind and the most
to be distrusted: and yet the great majority of people trust to
nothing else; which may do for ordinary life, but not for philosophic
purposes. Of this, out of ten thousand instances that I might produce,
I will cite one. Ask of any person whatsoever, who is not previously
prepared for the demand by a knowledge of perspective, to draw in the
rudest way the commonest appearance which depends upon the laws of
that science--as for instance, to represent the effect of two walls
standing at right angles to each other, or the appearance of the
houses on each side of a street, as seen by a person looking down the
street from one extremity. Now in all cases, unless the person has
happened to observe in pictures how it is that artists produce these
effects, he will be utterly unable to make the smallest approximation
to it. Yet why?--For he has actually seen the effect every day of his
life. The reason is--that he allows his understanding to overrule his
eyes. His understanding, which includes no intuitive knowledge of the
laws of vision, can furnish him with no reason why a line which is
known and can be proved to be a horizontal line, should not _appear_ a
horizontal line: a line, that made any angle with the perpendicular
less than a right angle, would seem to him to indicate that his houses
were all tumbling down together. Accordingly he makes the line of his
houses a horizontal line, and fails of course to produce the effect
demanded. Here then is one instance out of many, in which not only the
understanding is allowed to overrule the eyes, but where the
understanding is positively allowed to obliterate the eyes as it were:
for not only does the man believe the evidence of his understanding in
opposition to that of his eyes, but (which is monstrous!) the idiot is
not aware that his eyes ever gave such evidence. He does not know that
he has seen (and therefore _quoad_ his consciousness has _not_ seen)
that which he _has_ seen every day of his life. But to return from
this digression,--my understanding could furnish no reason why the
knocking at the gate in Macbeth should produce any effect direct or
reflected: in fact, my understanding said positively that it could
_not_ produce any effect. But I knew better: I felt that it did: and I
waited and clung to the problem until further knowledge should enable
me to solve it.--At length, in 1812, Mr. Williams made his _debut_ on
the stage of Ratcliffe Highway, and executed those unparalleled
murders which have procured for him such a brilliant and undying
reputation. On which murders, by the way, I must observe, that in one
respect they have had an ill effect, by making the connoisseur in
murder very fastidious in his taste, and dissatisfied with any thing
that has been since done in that line. All other murders look pale by
the deep crimson of his: and, as an amateur once said to me in a
querulous tone, "There has been absolutely nothing _doing_ since his
time, or nothing that's worth speaking of." But this is wrong: for it
is unreasonable to expect all men to be great artists, and born with
the genius of Mr. Williams.--Now it will be remembered that in the
first of these murders (that of the Marrs) the same incident (of a
knocking at the door soon after the work of extermination was
complete) did actually occur which the genius of Shakspeare had
invented: and all good judges and the most eminent dilettanti
acknowledged the felicity of Shakspeare's suggestion as soon as it was
actually realized. Here then was a fresh proof that I had been right
in relying on my own feeling in opposition to my understanding; and
again I set myself to study the problem: at length I solved it to my
own satisfaction; and my solution is this. Murder in ordinary cases,
where the sympathy is wholly directed to the case of the murdered
person, is an incident of coarse and vulgar horror; and for this
reason--that it flings the interest exclusively upon the natural but
ignoble instinct by which we cleave to life; an instinct which, as
being indispensable to the primal law of self-preservation, is the
same in kind (though different in degree) amongst all living
creatures; this instinct therefore, because it annihilates all
distinctions, and degrades the greatest of men to the level of "the
poor beetle that we tread on," exhibits human nature in its most
abject and humiliating attitude. Such an attitude would little suit
the purposes of the poet. What then must he do? He must throw the
interest on the murderer: our sympathy must be with _him_; (of course
I mean a sympathy of comprehension, a sympathy by which we enter into
his feelings, and are made to understand them,--not a sympathy[47] of
pity or approbation:) in the murdered person all strife of thought,
all flux and reflux of passion and of purpose, are crushed by one
overwhelming panic: the fear of instant death smites him "with its
petrific mace." [Footnote 47: It seems almost ludicrous to guard and
explain my use of a word in a situation where it should naturally
explain itself. But it has become necessary to do so, in consequence
of the unscholarlike use of the word sympathy, at present so general,
by which, instead of taking it in its proper use, as the act of
reproducing in our minds the feelings of another, whether for hatred,
indignation, love, pity, or approbation, it is made a mere synonyme of
the word _pity_; and hence, instead of saying, "sympathy _with_
another," many writers adopt the monstrous barbarism of "sympathy
_for_ another."] But in the murderer, such a murderer as a poet will
condescend to, there must be raging some great storm of
passion,--jealousy, ambition, vengeance, hatred,--which will create a
hell within him; and into this hell we are to look. In Macbeth, for
the sake of gratifying his own enormous and teeming faculty of
creation, Shakspeare has introduced two murderers: and, as usual in
his hands, they are remarkably discriminated: but though in Macbeth
the strife of mind is greater than in his wife, the tiger spirit not
so awake, and his feelings caught chiefly by contagion from her,--yet,
as both were finally involved in the guilt of murder, the murderous
mind of necessity is finally to be presumed in both. This was to be
expressed; and on its own account, as well as to make it a more
proportionable antagonist to the unoffending nature of their victim,
"the gracious Duncan," and adequately to expound "the deep damnation
of his taking off," this was to be expressed with peculiar energy. We
were to be made to feel that the human nature, _i.e._ the divine
nature of love and mercy, spread through the hearts of all creatures,
and seldom utterly withdrawn from man,--was gone, vanished, extinct;
and that the fiendish nature had taken its place. And, as this effect
is marvellously accomplished in the dialogues and soliloquies
themselves, so it is finally consummated by the expedient under
consideration; and it is to this that I now solicit the reader's
attention. If the reader has ever witnessed a wife, daughter, or
sister, in a fainting fit, he may chance to have observed that the
most affecting moment in such a spectacle, is _that_ in which a sigh
and a stirring announce the recommencement of suspended life. Or, if
the reader has ever been present in a vast metropolis on the day when
some great national idol was carried in funeral pomp to his grave, and
chancing to walk near to the course through which it passed, has felt
powerfully in the silence and desertion of the streets and in the
stagnation of ordinary business, the deep interest which at that
moment was possessing the heart of man,--if all at once he should hear
the death-like stillness broken up by the sound of wheels rattling
away from the scene, and making known that the transitory vision was
dissolved, he will be aware that at no moment was his sense of the
complete suspension and pause in ordinary human concerns so full and
affecting as at that moment when the suspension ceases, and the
goings-on of human life are suddenly resumed. All action in any
direction is best expounded, measured, and made apprehensible, by
reaction. Now apply this to the case in Macbeth. Here, as I have said,
the retiring of the human heart and the entrance of the fiendish heart
was to be expressed and made sensible. Another world has stepped in;
and the murderers are taken out of the region of human things, human
purposes, human desires. They are transfigured: Lady Macbeth is
"unsexed;" Macbeth has forgot that he was born of woman; both are
conformed to the image of devils; and the world of devils is suddenly
revealed. But how shall this be conveyed and made palpable? In order
that a new world may step in, this world must for a time disappear.
The murderers, and the murder, must be insulated--cut off by an
immeasurable gulph from the ordinary tide and succession of human
affairs--locked up and sequestered in some deep recess: we must be
made sensible that the world of ordinary life is suddenly
arrested--laid asleep--tranced--racked into a dread armistice: time
must be annihilated; relation to things without abolished; and all
must pass self-withdrawn into a deep syncope and suspension of earthly
passion. Hence it is that when the deed is done--when the work of
darkness is perfect, then the world of darkness passes away like a
pageantry in the clouds: the knocking at the gate is heard; and it
makes known audibly that the reaction has commenced: the human has
made its reflux upon the fiendish: the pulses of life are beginning to
beat again: and the re-establishment of the goings-on of the world in
which we live, first makes us profoundly sensible of the awful
parenthesis that had suspended them.
Oh! mighty poet!--Thy works are not as those of other men, simply and
merely great works of art; but are also like the phenomena of nature,
like the sun and the sea, the stars and the flowers,--like frost and
snow, rain and dew, hail-storm and thunder, which are to be studied
with entire submission of our own faculties, and in the perfect faith
that in them there can be no too much or too little, nothing useless
or inert--but that, the further we press in our discoveries, the more
we shall see proofs of design and self-supporting arrangement where
the careless eye had seen nothing but accident!
N.B. In the above specimen of psychological criticism, I have
purposely omitted to notice another use of the knocking at the gate,
viz. the opposition and contrast which it produces in the porter's
comments to the scenes immediately preceding; because this use is
tolerably obvious to all who are accustomed to reflect on what they
read.
_De Quincey._