It will be on the same day, then, to intercept Macbeth as homeward
his ambitious mood hurries. The battle, which the rebels against
Duncan's rule have just lost, Macbeth has won. What else has he won?
His thoughts, out-travelling his body's utmost speed, will change
into witches by the way and inform him. Hitherto his fateful Self has
remained vague and disembodied. Now it will meet itself, and hear it
utter a threefold "Hail!"
For thus I conceive that when Macbeth's crime had fully infected
Shakspeare's imagination, and was urging it into the appalling
swiftness of the first scenes of this tragedy, he endowed Macbeth
with its own shaping quality. The witches were not decoys of another
world to lure him into acquaintanceship with crime. They were his own
intention grown to be so ravenous that it framed a prelude to his deed,
as the condition of starving sets a phantom banquet before a person's
eyes. Shakspeare had no need of them to start the business of his play
or to keep alive his plot. Macbeth and his wife did their own tempting
so thoroughly that spirits might applaud and refrain from interfering.
But these witches were characters of the second-sight which Shakspeare
imputed to Macbeth, a distinguishing trait born into Macbeth's mind
from the conception of this tragedy. The prosaic supernature of the
old chronicle, on which the play is based, is transformed into a
psychological peculiarity.
So we observe that these weird sisters were no posters of vulgar ill,
horsed on nursery broomsticks, to deliver murrain in the fold and
rheumatism at the hearth, in gratification of a vicious whim. But they
became vulgarized into this whenever Macbeth was absent from the scene.
Then they shrank from Fates to hags, such as Banquo's undistempered
eyes saw them, withered, hairy-faced, laying chappy fingers upon
skinny lips,--old women dreaded by the common people for reputed
powers of bewitching. All such Celtic superstitions breed nobly in
Macbeth's fancy: he knows all about the village gossip. The eldritch
women are the nearest hint of supernature which he had; but his kingly
anticipations tolerate no common pranks from them. When Macbeth is
absent, Shakspeare shows what stale witcheries they traffic in. The
critics blame the incongruity, or attribute it to some interpolating
pen. But Shakspeare rightly intended to place in contrast with
Macbeth's fantasy the popular material of his age in which it worked.
So we hear the witches relating their trumpery exploits. This one has
been killing poor people's swine. Another threatens to water-log a
shipmaster because his wife refused to give her chestnuts. They put
their spiteful heads together, and gloat over a drowned pilot's thumb.
When Macbeth enters, this ghastly twaddle is hushed by a domineering
thought which meets in these crones his "all-hail hereafter."
In the scene which follows the banquet, Shakspeare brings the witches
and their mistress Hecate together. The stage direction, "Enter Hecate
to the other three witches," simply includes her as one witch more. She
has a Greek name that was representative of the Moon in her baleful
and haunting phase. But on this Northern heath she displays a genuine
Celtic temper, and scolds the witches for having unbidden dealings
with Macbeth; while she, "the close contriver of all harms," was never
called to bear her part. Of course not, as Macbeth's imagination had
no personal _rapport_ with her; and all that Shakspeare wants of her
is to keep the popular witch-element upon the stage, and set it to
creating "artificial sprites" in collusion with the greater incantation
in Macbeth's heart. The witches provide him nothing but the cave and
the cauldron. The scene never rises into dignity until he arrives.
Three old women, hovering around a kettle, throw in a number of
nauseous curiosities which they have got by foraging in disreputable
quarters: they stir the slab gruel to verses which are as realistic as
a wooden spoon; yet neither Middleton nor any other of Shakspeare's
contemporaries, save Marlowe perhaps, could have written them. But
mark how the tone alters when Macbeth comes to conjure with them. What
is it they do? "A deed without a name." Then there is only one more
culinary interruption; but we shudder and cannot sneer, for it uses an
ingredient furnished by a man who has committed crimes against nature:
the spell catches the drippings of a murderer's gibbet. Macbeth's
secret divinings of the future fill the scene: the visions incorporate
his own anxiety. Out of his perturbed soul rise the armed head,
the bloody child. He reassures himself with the phantom of a child
crowned, with a tree in his hand, and misinterprets it into a "sweet
bodement" of safety, so long as trees do not take to travelling. But
the recollection of Banquo is the great disturber: that spirit sits at
every feast of solace which the King partakes. His heart "throbs to
know one thing:" Will Banquo's issue ever reign? The King's flaming
soul throws shadows on the screen of his dread,--a show of kings,
Banquo first and last, eight of them between Banquo blood-bolter'd and
Banquo crowned. But the Banquo that smiles is bathed in blood. Blood
let it be, then.
"From this moment,
The very firstlings of my heart shall be
The firstlings of my hand."
But no critical theory can hold a work of imagination to a strict
account. You may clap John Locke into the witness-box and riddle him
with cross-questions: the same court has no authority to put a poet
on oath to justify himself in every line; he is satisfied to let the
drift of his thought be traced through the material in which he works.
Quartz that is found in certain localities is as good as gold, and
rewards us for suspecting it. We need not strain Shakspeare's page into
too minute an adaptation to our views in order to avoid rejecting it.
If he convinces us that Macbeth and his wife have composed the tragedy
before his pen touches the paper, the witches may appear just what we
and Macbeth choose to have them,--at one moment concocters of country
spells to give him a drench of murder, at another moment concocted
themselves by a spell which his soul has brewed.
This spiritual gift is the main cause of all his practical hesitations.
His strongest passion discharges and exhausts itself in a pulse of
fantasy; as the electric fish lies awhile torpid after the transmission
of a shock. In his case, there is imperfect connection of the motor
nerves that run between imagining and doing; so that his milk of human
kindness has time to mingle with his mood. When his wife has grown sick
and incompetent to stimulate, dire necessity alone can do it for him;
as we see after he has had the vision of Banquo's line of kings, when
somebody informs him that Macduff, his most formidable enemy, has fled.
This is his self-chiding:--
"Time, thou anticipat'st my dread exploits:
The flighty purpose never is o'ertook,
Unless the deed go with it.
But no more sights."
Macduff's "wife, children, servants, all that could be found," are
slaughtered by him. It is a deed that, making his fortunes more
impaired than ever, betrays to us how feverish and impolitic his course
becomes. Far better for him if he had not let the desperate crisis
of his fate drive him out of the land of dreams. Shakspeare lets us
hear Macbeth chiding the brag of his imagination when he says, "But
no more sights." He has had enough of them,--too much time wasted in
those presentiments which never have the element of prevention. On the
contrary, it is a common experience that something is so sure to happen
that it can impart to us a fruitless forefeeling of itself, as Henry
IV. felt the blade of Ravaillac in his side a week before it struck
him. Macbeth will humor no more sights. That is the key to Shakspeare's
conception of the character. We are to understand that henceforth
Macbeth is cured of his hallucinations.
Now let us return to the first scene provided with this pass-key. It
unlocks that and all the subsequent supernature which had a relish
for his society. We feel that the witches express the moral condition
of Macbeth's mind, its tumultuous hesitation that is on the point of
settling into the definiteness of crime,--"Fair is foul, and foul is
fair." All moral discriminations are huddled together and dislocated by
the upheaval of his subterranean motive.
He really sends these witches forth to a blasted heath, the
avant-couriers of his own visit thither, and of a longing that gains
substance and direction the more he entertains it. It is strong enough
to be an object behind his retina; and it throws out shapes to limn
themselves upon the air into which they make themselves and vanish.
And they can appear only at that period of his evil brooding when it
gathers and swells, too big for his brain, bursting its barriers to
become external. After the actual murder of Duncan has occurred, the
brain of Macbeth is depleted for a while: the ominous forms wait till
Banquo's ghost can recruit them.
Macbeth has an imagination so keen and unbridled that it outruns the
limits of thinking, to become projected outside of his bodily eye in
shapes and objects that occupy the focus of his criminal intent. His
crimes become ocular deceptions, because they are so palpably real to
his mental vision, sharpened as it is by the ambitious sympathy of
a wife whose temperament outraces action. Murder is Macbeth's owner
before he is conscious that he has made himself the chattel of his
wife's suggestions. That same creative fancy built forth into the air
the handle of the instrument which he has fated himself to use: he
marshalled it the way that he intended to go. No supernatural smith
has forged the fatal weapon: it is tempered in the current of his own
plastic mind.