"If it would but apprehend some joy,
It comprehends some bringer of that joy;"
and though he has become one of those madmen who
"Have such seething brains,
Such shaping fantasies, that apprehend
More than cool reason ever comprehends,"
he is still capable of reverting to this cool reason, at least so far
as to appreciate that his desperate dreams are the poetry of desperate
consequences which will tax all his waking powers. When the apparitions
vanish, in Act iv. 1, one of the witches gives a voice to Macbeth's
perturbation; but why
"Stands Macbeth thus amazedly?"
It was but the voice of revulsion from amazement, to "cheer up his
sprites" and summon resolution.
When Macbeth originates any thing out of himself, that Self is not
daunted, for it is too deeply compromised in fact and fancy. But when
some phenomenon threatens him from a quarter that is outside the limit
of his own creative power, as when Birnam Wood is descried coming
toward Dunsinane, he is puzzled, and says:--
"I pull in resolution; and begin
To doubt th' equivocation of the fiend,
That lies like truth.
I 'gin to be a-weary of the sun."
Nothing has disturbed him till he appreciates that some agency which
he does not control can transplant a forest at his castle gate. The
apparition of the witches scarcely lifts his eyebrows. "Speak, if you
can," is the calm greeting. When he starts, and seems to fear "things
that do sound so fair," it is because the shapes he conjures become
suddenly endowed with tongues, and he hears his own ambition syllabled.
For a man is not proof against shrinking at the first moment that lends
to the "airy nothing" of his desire a distinct name and purpose. He is
astonished at the audacious phrasing of his hopes, and he resents at
first what seems definite enough to be an impeachment from something
not himself; yet not until that moment was it really his Self. What
phantoms have thus leaped out of vacuity into the midnight chambers of
desire! What voices have drawn the startled answers of a crime that did
not suspect this overlooking! But when the man's Self has undergone
this real birth, and the secret parturition becomes a breathing child
of consciousness, he soon accepts his own new self, and forgets that
it was irritated into a cry by the first salutes of the atmosphere.
Casting away all repugnance, Macbeth exclaims to his wicked wishes,
before they have a chance to vanish,--
"Stay, you imperfect speakers, tell me more!
... Speak, I charge you!"
So the dagger that wavers in the heated air of his soul does not
surprise him,--"Come, let me clutch thee!" Really, he expected to grasp
it; for it was precisely the kind of instrument he thought of using,
the very shape and workmanship thereof. There's nothing to perturb
until he draws from his belt its counterpart, yet sees the other still
solid in the air. That sets him to pondering: his
"Eyes are made the fools o' the other senses,
Or else worth all the rest."
But, in spite of that, the murder in his brain reddens, sprinkles the
blade and dudgeon with drops of blood, "which was not so before." Now
when the illusion becomes the most intense, it is dispersed, as if the
brain's own climax swelled to breaking. The collapse reminds him that
the deed still waits to be accomplished: his dagger is yet clean. But
its form is the bloody business which he has on hand to get through
with before sweet morning. It seemed so clearly cut in his mind, and
stayed so long before he could turn it out, that he thought it worth
describing to his wife, as she indicates to us when at the banquet she
calls his vision of Banquo
"Proper stuff!
This is the very painting of your fear;
This is the air-drawn dagger which, you said,
Led you to Duncan."
Now when the ghost of Banquo enters to occupy Macbeth's chair, the
actor of the king's part need not strain himself to put on the highest
degree of an appalled feeling. "Are you a man?" whispers his wife; and
Macbeth gives the true tone to his share of the scene when he answers,--
"Ay, and a bold one, that dare look on that
Which might appal the devil."
He starts, to be sure; but he simply remarks, "The table's full." "Here
is a place reserved, sir." "Where?" he exclaims, so little annihilated
by the painting of his own consciousness. It has dazed him, as when
a mirror shifts distant sunlight full into the eyes: they blink, and
judgment cannot readjust the sight. So he dimly asks, "Which of you
have done this?" He is not "distilled to jelly with the act of fear,"
but simply amazed at this reproduction, so quick and palpable, of the
deed just described to him by the hired murderer who, by doing that,
put those "twenty trenched gashes" into his mind, whence they dripped
over the chair of state. His talent for this spectral extemporizing has
been indulged too often to overtake him with a special wonder. This
unexpected Banquo may be dared, and even threatened:--
"Thou canst not say I did it: never shake
Thy gory locks at me."
His wife blames his "flaws and starts" at such a moment of festivity
when ceremony ought to be the sauce to meat; but they are not the
ague-fits of a man who is dropping to pieces at a dreadful sight. The
image of his guilt absorbs and diverts his behavior from the guests in
a way that suggests to them a sudden flightiness:--
"Prythee, see there! behold! look! lo! how say you?
Why, what care I? If thou canst nod, speak too."
This is not bravado trying to steady itself in a breeze of horror.
In order to break Macbeth down, and fully identify him with the deed
of which Banquo was the horrible shadow, his temperament required
that the ghost should vanish and reappear at the moment when he
recovers composure. Shakspeare has marked, by Macbeth's sudden change
of demeanor, that he was usually familiar with these coinages of his
brain. To whatever ecstasy his feeling rose, with or without his wife's
complicity, Shakspeare would have us understand that Macbeth was
so fluent with these bodiless creations that he had naturalized the
night-side of his mind. Therefore, Banquo must re-enter precisely when
Macbeth drinks to the general joy, and to the dead man in particular.
Shakspeare knew the moment when to spill Macbeth's wine and all his
hardihood by putting out a disembodied hand to strike the goblet from
his grasp. It was the very nick of time, but it was in the man's own
temper.
Let us see how it was. The alteration of demeanor from astonishment to
the abjectness of a guilty terror slips out of Macbeth's conviviality
into the company, as he calls for wine and drinks "love and health
to all." At the rim of his goblet he can even banter with his
consciousness of murder: he is in a frame to enjoy proposing the health
of
"Our dear friend, Banquo, whom we miss;
Would he were here!"
Now this pretence of desiring Banquo's presence uses up what resistance
Macbeth has to spare. No sooner are the words out of his mouth than
he imagines how they might be answered: the imagining it is the vivid
answer. When you try jauntily to job off suspicion before other
persons, the cheek grows pale with dread of being contradicted. A
door is thrown ajar by this wind of pretending that nothing has been
committed. Come on, there! the villain cries. Has any thing happened?
Is anybody outside? Let him enter and take a look around! Sure enough,
'tis there: his mind's eye sees it enter. Even when the small faults
of social life are denied or disclaimed by us, a ghost is raised upon
the face, a dubious semblance of your guilt in the evasive eye, or just
a flicker in the corner of the mouth. Most people overestimate their
strength to make a flat denial of misdeeds when their soul is reflected
in the polished mirrors of watchful eyes. There is a non-committal look
which collars a man, puts him in the dock, and sends him to jail before
he knows that he has been apprehended.
Prosaic men with no imagination to defy can preserve a smug complacency
after the commission of a crime, because they cannot vibrate to it.
Give a stroke to their thick temper, and it only answers with a thud.
Their face is an emotionless Sahara, over which no showery gusts
or smiles of April linger. But Macbeth was delicately strung: the
slightest stir of the invisible air was registered by a vibration. When
the ghost slips out of his own phrase, 'twas too pat,--this coming at
the toast, "to the general joy of the whole table," at this pretence
of thirst to drink a dead man's welfare; too nicely timed for flesh
and blood to bear; too suggestive of continual liability to see the
eyes glaring across the brim of any moment. Observing how easily the
awful figure can thicken out of invisibility, he cries, "Take any shape
but that!" And his mind is desperate to exorcise it into an "unreal
mockery," and vainly struggles with his own personifying power.
"It will have blood; they say, blood will have blood."
It is a cold, calculating vengeance, marrowless, bloodless, but alert
in a shape against which Macbeth's nerves at any time may stumble, on
the midnight staircase, in the gallery's pale shimmer, in sleep between
his wife and his embrace, and always at his own suggestion of a phrase,
a dream. His fancy never yet inflicted such a frightful recoil of an
offended Heaven. It comes at his own invitation; for he had said in the
forenoon of that day,--
"To-night we hold a solemn supper, sir,
And I'll request your presence;"
to which Banquo acquiesced,--
"Lay your highness'
Command upon me."
"Fail not our feast."
"My lord, I will not."
On the way to it he was a little delayed by being murdered; but, though
late, he does not fail.
This tragedy was slowly conceived during the married life of Macbeth
and his Lady. Their ambitious desires spent years in collusion before
an heir of opportunity was born to them. The rapid and breathless
action of the earlier scenes makes clear to us that it does not flow
from any sudden resolution. The past years topple in the wave that
combs to break into this sweeping surge. The movement of the play
is unnatural, unless we admit that the married couple have grown
familiar with many projects, all of which make them languish for
occasion. Macbeth has revelled in the idea that if the chance offered
he possesses every other quality to supplant Duncan,--ambition,
audacity, swiftness, all good fortune, except a turn of circumstance.
He discovers at the juncture that his wife is the only aptitude he can
contribute to it. She remembers his profuse suggestions with a touch of
scorn. Is he a man?
"What beast was it, then,
That made you break this enterprise to me?
When you durst do it, then you were a man;
... 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."
Strenuous in fantasy, "infirm of purpose." The sudden crisis betrays
the secret pinings of past years for such an hour. The whispered
conferences swell into a din: it shouts to tell us how their pillows
touched, when darkness brooded in vain upon eyelids that were set wide
open with a stare at a gleam of greatness far outside their chamber.
We overhear, without ever having played eavesdropper, the anxious
interchange of feeling beneath the garden aspens, which might catch
their tremor from these two beings who passed hankering to and fro;
he encouraging a reverie, she trying to chastise it into action with
the valor of her tongue. Thus the years passed, while he alternated
between the grand loyalty of many a fight and the treachery which grew
warm upon the bosom of his wife. Much given to pondering and pleased
with vivid day-dreams, he sought no way to realize them. Well as she
knew this musing vein of his, and much as it displeased her spirit of
action, she will have to be re-enforced by opportunity. Then the deed,
now rusting in its sheath of speculation, may possibly leap forth. His
mind did not have the coupling which makes up wishing and doing into
one train; so the doing stands some distance off idle on the track.
The track which emerged from Hamlet's resolution met so many diverging
lines at the controlling switch that he was in doubt upon which to run:
at length, impatient chance unlocked the switch, and set the rail for
a disaster. When Macbeth's wishing became linked to acting, he was not
over-nice about his route. The subtle Hamlet considered till he could
not start. The inconsiderate Macbeth, when he ceased to vapor and began
to move, blundered with a full head of fantasy into ruin.
When a man's brain is well charged with blood, his powers are unified;
but Macbeth's current was addicted to the lobes of figment to some
defrauding of the rest. His wife's brain blushed all at once, and
expanded to give the measure of her structure; so that her hope,
implicating the whole of her, had all the substantiality of a deed. She
was already the deed from which Macbeth's ambition swerved. He spawned
spectres: she gave birth to men-children only. A woman inspired through
and through with love for him, discontented with the slowness of his
fortune, longing to touch the top and finish of her own; a helpmeet,
whose unextinguished bridal ardor kept burning up all scruples as fast
as her lover could rake them together. He, the still perfect object of
her pride and passion, must become great: he must be lifted to a place
whence all his qualities shall shine beyond cramped horizons with their
petty crowds. She would kiss him into the compass of a throne, if
lips could waft her soldier so far. Her whole soul, imagining him in
statelier guises, grows so impatient to speak out its action, that love
itself becomes for a moment inarticulate, though it is all the time the
life-blood of her hope; as when he returns to her after the perils of
the campaign which overthrew rebellion, her embrace is grave, as if her
arms enclosed the coming state: they do not radiate the touch of love.
He is not her darling husband, but
"Great Glamis! worthy Cawdor!
Greater than both by the all-hail hereafter!"
His letters transported her not only beyond the "ignorant present,"
but beyond him, away beyond the familiar circle of his arms, to which
she had so often committed soul and body,--away so far that she does
not feel him. "The future in the instant" is embracing her; and it is
against that splendor that her heart-beats break.
The first exclamation which follows the reading of his letter betrays
this passionate attachment: "_and shalt be_ what thou art promis'd."
There runs through the tone a vibration from her own desire, no doubt;
but it is dominated by exulting love, and bursts into a chord. The time
has come: he shall, he must be, what he has always longed to be. The
weird sisters are in luck when they promised so fairly to a man who is
so profoundly loved. 'Tis the good will of Nature that I love him.
Yet she knows him thoroughly. So close is her appraisement of him that
she instinctively postpones love to the immediate exigency,--that
is, to pour her spirits in his ear, to beat down every thing that
might intercept him when putting forth that one decisive hand-grasp
toward the crown. She fears his nature, because scruples hamper
his unscrupulous ambition. They are not entirely, as she conceives
them, the results of inborn mildness. He has a politic disposition
which grows all the more considerate as he sees the widening of his
popularity. He will proceed no farther against Duncan, because
"He hath honored me of late; and I have bought
Golden opinions from all sorts of people,
Which would be worn now in their newest gloss,
Not cast aside so soon."