"Though I could
With bare-fac'd power sweep him from my sight,
And bid my will avouch it, yet I must not,
For certain friends that are both his and mine,
Whose loves I may not drop, but wail his fall,
Whom I myself struck down."
His wife must needs have sore dealings with such a non-committal
spirit:--
"Thou'd'st have, great Glamis,
That which cries, 'Thus thou must do, if thou have it;
And that which rather thou dost fear to do,
Thou wishest should be undone.'"
He wants to win a game to which his hand does not entitle him; and the
desire to win is as great as the dread of cheating.
This tainted mood of her beloved husband makes her almost frantic.
Dreams satisfy her thirst as the mirage quenches the craving of a
caravan. Here comes my Macbeth and--"thou'rt mad to say it"--Duncan
with him,--a lifetime's opportunity: 'twill never come again. Heaven
drives Duncan "under my battlements,"--yes, _mine_, for this night
only; Macbeth's at every other time, but mine this once, to hold out
with against my husband's mood. The raven himself is hoarse with
chiding his delay. What need the tone of my language be, when the
bird croaks Duncan's fatal entrance? Let it be unsexed. Here I tear
every rag of woman's garments from it, in this my frenzy of dread lest
Macbeth elude Fate's purpose:--
"Come to my woman's breasts
And take my milk for gall, you murd'ring ministers,
Wherever in your sightless substances
You wait on Nature's mischief."
For love's sake her tongue becomes unlovely; and the delicate woman,
with blue eyes sparkling like an electric firmament, and that little
hand, snatched out of its old dalliance and clenched as if to drive a
weapon, is transformed by the spirit of some ruthless Medea who has
lent herself to contrive and enjoy another murder.
It has been said that Lady Macbeth did not reflect upon consequences
as Macbeth did, because that is not the way of her sex. But the sex
varies in this respect. The average woman is less selfish than we
are, not from a feebler gift for calculation, but from a stronger
capacity of love; for sex was invented before arithmetic. Macbeth
reflected, not merely because he was male, but a selfish male, eager
to be great, yet admiring to be popular: he would drive the sharpest
bargain with Destiny. His wife's impetuous movement of love oversets
and spills out her calculation. Many a woman is capable of regarding
all the consequences of an act, but she must not love too deeply: if
she does, she will stick at nothing. If there be motive enough, she
can turn a lover into a criminal, and then, with perjury, deceit,
unblushing cheek, will screen him: they twain are one, for better,
for worse. They are too deeply compromised to haggle about salvation.
The very intercourse of sex devotes a woman: she has become flesh and
blood of another. This complicity of nature engages the most imperious
nerve-centres of her life. Were she aware of this beforehand, as she
is not, it would not be evaded nor entitled bondage. If her lover has
been always above her suspicion, the discovery on his part of some
ill-doing is seldom violent enough to tear this bond: her revulsion is
against a prying world that is no better than it should be; and she
will help to secrete what she is too proud to have attributed to him.
It is one article in the creed of a detective that a man's wife is more
baffling than circumstance, more loyal than conscience. She is chaste
clear through and single-hearted. Only when love itself is wounded
and disgraced will she resign the culprit lover to the scorn of men;
but not always even then, for it is her concern, and earth and heaven
may keep out of it. But let him forge, she will secrete him, smuggle
him out of the country, join him afterward to comfort him. Let him
counterfeit any thing but love, and she will help to put the spurious
values on the town. Let him come home with murder on his cheek and
blood upon his garments, she, fainting, will cleanse the stain that
falls athwart her vision like a lurid sunset of her peace. Selfishness
would turn informer, but perfect love casts out the fear of becoming
that! Do you say this, too, is criminal? I say nothing, because it
is my concern only to refer you to the facts. She is a partner, for
better, for worse,--married and interpenetrated by the husband's
fate. For love is charity: _it rejoiceth not in iniquity_, and yet it
"beareth all things, believeth all things, hopeth all things, endureth
all things."
Thackeray imagines the officers calling upon Mrs. Dodd, wife of that
clerical scoundrel of the reign of George II.: "is my wife, Mrs. Dodd,
to show them into the dining-room, and say, 'Pray step in, gentlemen!
My husband has just come home from church. That bill with my Lord
Chesterfield's acceptance, I am bound to own, was never written by his
lordship; and the signature is in the doctor's handwriting'? I say,
would any man of sense or honor or fine feeling praise his wife for
telling the truth under such circumstances? Suppose she made a fine
grimace and said, 'Most painful as my position is, most deeply as I
feel for my William, yet truth must prevail; and I deeply lament to
state that the beloved partner of my life _did_ commit the flagitious
act with which he is charged, and is at this present moment located in
the two-pair back, up the chimney, whither it is my duty to lead you.'
Why, even Dodd himself, who was one of the greatest humbugs who ever
lived, would not have had the face to say that he approved of his wife
telling the truth in such a case. If ever I steal a teapot, and _my_
women don't stand up for me, pass the article under their shawls, whisk
down the street with it, outbluster the policeman, and utter any amount
of fibs before Mr. Beak, those beings are not what I take them to be."
A bronze lioness was dedicated to Leæna, a girl of humble birth,
beloved by Aristogiton, who, with Harmodius, conspired to kill the
tyrant Hippias. She "was sentenced to the torture, and, that the
pain might not wring from her any confession of the secrets of the
conspiracy, she bit out her tongue." Some scoffer will say, What
greater sacrifice _could_ a woman make?
But she earned, and ought to have had, a verse in the poem of
Kallistratus,[20] to wreathe around her name the myrtle-bough of the
two patriots.
In "Far from the Madding Crowd," a novel written by Thomas Hardy,
Bathsheba has hotly denied being in love; but she resents being taken
in earnest by her confidant. "O God, what a lie it was! Heaven and
my love forgive me! And don't you know that a woman who loves at all
thinks nothing of perjury when it is balanced against her love?"
Lady Macbeth has the kind of wifehood which devotes itself. Hurried by
her husband's hopes, she throws herself without reserve into the abyss
they dig at her feet. All her character is lavished to consolidate his
state. She is not a vulgar murderess, because her soul is without a
flaw of egotism. She is not a perfect woman; but she is most perfectly
and irrevocably married. The imperfect wives are egotistical, from
various motives. They have some knack or talent which craves airing,
and earns the superficial admiration which is the discord of a
household. Harlots are not the only women who live upon the street.
Lady Macbeth's mind has no specialty, no gift that itches to be
noticed, no facility save that of aggrandizing at any expense the man
she loves and is absorbed in.
To be perfectly married, and perfectly bound up in a husband for weal
or woe, does not imply loss of personality. Lady Macbeth is still
immensely personal, even in the devotion of her love. For love alone
_preserves_ the person such as she intrinsically is. A feebler love, a
more imperfect attachment, may favor idiosyncrasy, and permit the woman
to assert some traits in isolation instead of letting them be merged in
the total influence of her attachment. Greater love hath no man--and no
woman--than this, that an individuality lays down its life to sustain a
personality.
So when Macbeth tells her that he cannot proceed any farther in the
business, for Duncan is in the castle, "in double trust," as king and
guest,--and, besides, he does not like to risk the golden opinions he
has lately won,--her language is an affront to the womanly sentiments
which always charmed Macbeth and drew from him such phrases of
fondness: all the horrors of this tragedy cannot frighten them from his
lips. She is "my dearest love," the "dear wife," and "dearest chuck."
After the murderer has told him that Banquo is slain, he falls into
musing which she strives to dispel: her words recall to him what a
"sweet remembrancer" she is.
Therefore she hammers stern sentences out of the "undaunted mettle" of
her love. They are iron levers to swing him out of the slough of his
moods: disdainful smitings on the lover's cheek, they are, to bring
them up to regal purple:--
"Shame itself!
Why do you make such faces?"
"Fie! for shame!"
She could never be capable of risking this style if she had not
been wont to soothe his ear with words selected by choice moments
of inclination. She would fain recur to them, but there must be a
coronation first. When the day comes, there will be bystanders and
observers, else she would bend over him with the old-time prattle and
remarry him as king.
But, "if we should fail," he suggests, revolving possibilities. What
deliberate forethought of contempt her answer yields, if it be properly
emphasized,--"_We_ fail!" That is, I'll parrot your phrase, and say
"_we_," but out of disdain. Of us two, the one who fails will not be
myself. _We_, indeed! there's one too much of us for that. Only screw
_your_ courage to the point, and _we_, as you say, will not fail.
If this fortitude which pulls Macbeth through a murder leaves her in
our imagination unsexed and brutalized, we deprive ourselves of reasons
why he should have loved and married her; for the clouds of moral
disaster which whirl around him cannot conceal from us a fine and noble
disposition. It breaks through the gathering obscurity in the delicate
considerations which urge him to be a loyal host to Duncan; in the
imagination so sensitive to life's fitful fever, so shaken nightly
by terrible dreams, as she was too; so quick to mark the objects
of Nature, and clothe them in poetic feeling; so melted by tender
recollections, and capable of noble regrets that call a pause to ruin
just as it breaks, a lull that lasts long enough for us to see how much
will be ruined:--
"My way of life
Is fall'n into the sear, the yellow leaf:
And that which should accompany old age,
As honor, love, obedience, troops of friends,
I must not look to have; but, in their stead,
Curses, not loud, but deep, mouth-honor, breath,
Which the poor heart would fain deny, and dare not."
What sort of a woman was she, in whose behalf tenderness struggled
with despair at last, when he was remembering what a soul had gone
delirious, who was too nice for her own fortitude, eminent to be
shattered, worse than sick, "as she is troubled with thick-coming
fancies"!
"Cure her of that," he replies to the Doctor, but in a tone that repels
rather than invites his skill; for those "thick-coming fancies" started
from Duncan's room, where he lay looking like her father. Fatal first
moment, beyond the reach of medicine! The Doctor has dark misgivings as
to the cause of her sleeplessness, though he never heard that midnight
cry, "Sleep no more," which the parting soul of Duncan gave as it
awoke and fled through the inhospitable palace. Macbeth murdered then
the innocent sleep which might have been Nature's resource, but which
no doctor can restore. Cure her of that? Cure me first of the infection
that was caught at Duncan's bedside, and which spread to the partner of
my night-horrors: we are both far gone beyond a doctor's art.
Still he pleads--"Canst thou not minister?"--in piteous forlornness
against the better judgment which, when it recurs, prompts him to
"throw physic to the dogs." It is a plea which seems to visit the
chamber of the wife who ruined herself for love. It is the visit of a
yearning that her heart might be cleansed in the oblivion of innocence.
"Canst thou not minister to a mind diseas'd,
Pluck from the memory a rooted sorrow,
Raze out the written troubles of the brain,
And with some sweet oblivious antidote
Cleanse the stuff'd bosom of that perilous stuff,
Which weighs upon the heart?"
If he had married a female butcher of the strongest-minded type, there
would have been no fees to pay for doctor's attendance, and the bloom
of regret would have been rubbed from Macbeth's language. Such a wife's
muscle would have been perilous to any stuff that conscience might
venture to suggest. A virago who could dash out the brains of her
smiling babe as easily as nurse it,--more easily, forsooth, for how
could Nature have endowed her person with the founts of maternity?--was
not the kind of woman Shakspeare selected for the ruin of Macbeth.
If the poet had intended Lady Macbeth to be a fury, a person of
abnormal wildness and cruelty, who had exhausted love and craved
the fire-water of ambition, he would have prepared us to throw such
a conception over her, by hinting some motive or circumstance for
this divergence from the normal feminine nature. On the contrary, he
purposely neglected the opportunity which the old story furnished
toward the warping and poisoning of a woman's mind. The historical
Lady Macbeth was the grand-daughter of Kenneth IV., who fell in the
fight against Malcolm II., Duncan's father. Shakspeare has carefully
suppressed any allusion which might recall the bitter family feud to
unsex her and make revenge an element of her ambition.
Her shape, complexion, tone of voice, and style of feeling cannot
be constructed for us out of the brawn of those lines which she
throws out from the shoulder to hit Macbeth's irresolution. They
do not provide us with the essence of her material. If we build a
woman out of that literal clay, she would be square-shouldered,
big-limbed, stout-bodied, sharp-boned, and pachydermatous, with a skin
of bronzed leather tightened over knobs of cheek-bones, hairs woven
in a wire-mill, and eyebrows like two heavy dashes from the circus
charcoal. Prometheus would connive with Billingsgate to o'er-inform
that clay. We confess that such a female lingers among the traditional
properties of theatres; but she is too shop-worn to dare again the
blaze of footlights. We would not so defame a Jason, and blast his
life by constructing the mother of his children out of the language
which the jealous, frenzied moment drove by heart-spasms from her lips.
Still less can we subject Macbeth to the matrimonial luck of such a
ferocious contrast. How truculently married would numerous husbands be
if their wives' temper corresponded to the abandoned use of language
which domestic virtue sometimes will employ, when every hair upon the
head, both native and naturalized, seems twisted into the coils of a
fell purpose to turn a thing of beauty into a fury for ever! The gust
passes, the familiar features of the landscape reappear, and the lips
transpire with mellower salutes; as when Lady Macbeth, who has been
regretting that her husband should stay so much apart, greets him with
the blandishing rhythm of those two lines:--
"How now, my lord? why do you keep alone,
Of sorriest fancies your companions making?"
There the old feeling strays out beyond the flaming swords which
forbid paradise to follow in the track of this tragedy. The mutual
crime closes a double gate, and posts inexorable sentinels against the
endearments of the past.