To make and share a husband's fortune was her only motive, and the
only driving-power she could supply to that was love: her character
was most inartificially contrived out of one or two broad elements of
womankind; a Semele to invite the solar ray that consumed her. To be a
woman was her sole resource.
Let us notice, therefore, how prompt was her first inspiration, and how
quickly it recoiled exhausted from its terrible victory.
A full-blooded virago who has murder in her heart, but supposes that
any chance to commit it is a long way off, would not betray emotion if
Fate suddenly tossed a chance into her lap. Lady Macbeth's nerves are
not well padded against such a shock. The husband's letter astonishes
and exalts her soul; but the old desires, never before so animated,
seem fruitless as ever, since neither time nor place concur. In the
height of this turmoil, an attendant enters to say, "The King comes
here to-night." The tidings appal her: has Providence gone mad, to
trust Duncan with her in this temper? The man is mad to say it.
Coming! To-night! "And when goes hence?" Her looks and speech recoil
from the coincidence. Then she breaks into that soliloquy which is
not the ranting of a mannish murderess who is in a frenzy to get at
her victim. The lines quiver with the excitement of a delicate nature
that is overstrained and dreads to fail. Vexed and chagrined at
womanly proclivities which will be apt to follow their bent against
her purpose, she invokes spirits to unsex her, to make thick the blood
that runs too limpidly and warm, and clot "the access and passage
to remorse." It fills us with dismay to see how far a susceptible
womanhood can be transported by a vehement passion; as when, toward
nightfall, the dweller upon a soft inland stream sees the freshet's
discolored water come down, thick with the fruits of gentle husbandry
and the quenched hearths of homesteads, with piteous wrecks of
innocence clinging round them.
Soon after those shrill cries, as of a string too tightly drawn,
have escaped from her, the King arrives at the castle. Contrast the
dry color of her language when, as hostess, she welcomes him: we are
surprised at its constrained and measured politeness. Her soul seems to
have collapsed into the dullest prose:--
"Your servants ever
Have theirs, themselves, and what is theirs, in compt,
To make their audit at your highness' pleasure,
Still to return your own."
It is the talk of a book-keeper to his employer. Has something bereft
the fine woman of her tact? No, the fineness of the woman fell
instinctively into a protective tone. Her consciousness has been so
acutely set to the key of crime that she knows the least touch will
sound it. The secret is torture to the mind, but must be borne; as a
guilty man, who overhears the pursuit drawing close to his cramped and
insupportable place of concealment, turns rigid with stifled groans.
So, when Duncan says,--
"See, see! our honor'd hostess!
The love that follows us sometime is our trouble,
Which still we thank as love."
"Fair and noble hostess,
We are your guest to-night,"--
the courtesy, so mild and royal, is a threat that comes too near the
pent-up feeling: she grows preternaturally still and cold.
The Amazonian female would have failed in tact through absence of
anxiety, as her language effervesced with the congenial occasion. Such
a largess of blank verse would be scattered as certainly to raise
suspicion in the observant Banquo, who has heard the witches' promise.
The awkward parsimony of Lady Macbeth's words might be credited to the
suddenness of the visit, to a stately dread of seeming over-pleased at
the "late dignities" and over-covetous of more, or to the constraint of
feeling unprepared to entertain so many people.
But the other style of woman, as the victim approached, would cram
him with fulsomeness to make him fat for slaying, somewhat in this
fashion:--
Most gracious highness! the poor wife am I
Of thy good soldier, now the Thane of Cawdor,
But ever less the more thou raisest him.
He should be here: he'd say the castle's thine,
And wring its service to some decent welcome.
Alas, I can but kneel, and droop my lips,
And let them flutter ere they light upon
My perch, thy hand; this violence to plot,
Scarce this, against thy person venturing here;
But see, my knees invoke great Heaven's rest
Upon thy stay and slumber; all good angels
Hie hither to encamp around his bed.
Enter, my lord; treason has bled to death,
And roofs are sacreder than oaths.
The impetuous language and action which hurry along the following
scenes, and sweep reflection from every holding-ground, are not the
result of an excision of psychological leading-matter by Middleton, or
any one else who worked for the theatre and reduced the length of the
play to bring it into acting limits. A miner strikes his pick through
a thin partition behind which subterranean waters have been slowly
gathering: they deluge his tunnel and sweep him away. In Shakspeare's
mind the hidden precedent of the tragedy's action accumulated. The
first scratch of his pen let it loose to flood the scenes. There was
no preliminary warning. The psychological filtration through his brain
from the sources of his plot bursted in like a freshet that explains
itself without recalling separate rills.
Nor was the swift and unheralded action inspired solely by Lady
Macbeth's impatience to be the wife of a king. All women run after
their thoughts more eagerly than do the men. They are Atalantas without
a weakness for the golden apples which are sent across the path to
break up their desire for winning. But, if Atalanta secretly prefers
a suitor, she will chase his golden apple. For whenever personal
preferences divert a woman from her course, it is because they, too,
grow in the Hesperides of her imagination. Men deliberate, study the
ground, observe the obstacles, cluster round preponderating judgment
and wait for its direction. Women are not heedless: they also can
deliberate until the heart has become too deeply involved; but, when
the heart is set upon something, they are the swift-footed couriers
of the Ideal, and their only turnpike is as the bird flies. If there
be any virtuous advantage to be gained, any scheme to carry out, any
enthusiasm that beautifies the distance, they go across-lots for
it, not minding that they may stumble upon brooks unprovided with a
stepping-stone or fallen tree. They fret at obstacles, and instigate
the neighborhood against them. They advocate with ardor, consult no
selfishness, want to override every thing with the moral feeling that
what is worth doing at all ought to be done quickly. Macbeth seizes
this trait by his reflection that it would be all very fine if it were
done when 'tis done: her quickness would then justify itself to his
consideration. For good or evil all women who can be inspired with
purposes speak in her ideal tone:--
"Art thou afeard
To be the same in thine own act and valor
As thou art in desire? Would'st thou have that
Which thou esteem'st the ornament of life,
And live a coward in thine own esteem;
Letting 'I dare not' wait upon 'I would,'
Like the poor cat i' the adage?"
Women can shame a partner into valor by venturing the worst affront
when they cry,--
"From this time,
Such I account thy love;"
that is, I account it like thy drunken hope which wakes up penitent and
pale. When a husband hears himself scorned in this style, he does not
believe his own ears, but instinctively translates the phrases to mean,
"From this time, count upon my love." For the ideal, in the moment of
its greatest rage and dread, betrays the immortal attachment which is a
man's breath, his superiority, his sole success.
She does not give Macbeth time to observe that to murder Duncan will
exact of him the murder of Malcolm also, who is designated by the King
to succeed him. She is in no temper to reflect that the taking-off
of Duncan will plunge the husband into ever-renewing complications:
her transport carries him away to fruitless crime. But the first blow
spends her terrible ardor and disenchants her of murder. She can force
it upon her husband, but is not endowed with the complexly woven tissue
of talents and motives that can sustain reaction. His muscle drags him
through successive scenes of feigning, inures him to the contemplation
of fresh murders, and keeps his foot well planted to thrust and
parry the foes of his own making. She is all made for love, and for
the uttermost that love can suggest: there is no masculine fibre in
her heart; it is packed with the invisible, fine-strung nerves of a
feminine disposition. And they have been stretched to such a tension
that, since no solider flesh sheathes and protects them as they relax,
we see them ravelled: they no longer sustain the firm heart-beat and
regulate the blood. There are symptoms, even before the murder is
committed, that her strength threatens to be inadequate. She must have
recourse to wine, to borrow courage from it that may last till morning;
and her mood is so intense that the light body can absorb large
draughts of it:--
"That which hath made them drunk hath made me bold."
It does not, however, cancel a susceptibility, which was unusual with
her, to the weird influences of night and loneliness. It was unusual;
for I think it to be no fancy, but a well-attested experience, that
the blonde women are the least affected by the physical influences of
darkness: they have a certain clarity to repel this infection that
penetrates so many darker-looking people,--a certain nonchalance that
is manifested even in girlhood's nursery, and prevents spooks from
being rocked in the same cradle. Being free from the frailness which
is latent in a tendency to project startled feelings into ghostly
phenomena, they do, as a general rule, find it easy to translate the
queer noises and conspiracies of the darkness into their plain prose.
They keep the obscurest entry free from the litter which gathers from
tales of superstition: from garret to cellar there's not a nook where
creepiness can make a goblin-nest. Up and down lonesome staircases they
can go without a light, prowl unperturbed into the uncanniest corners,
hurry to investigate the cause of a low moan with a warm heart for a
candle, enter the room of the dead without laying a reluctant hand upon
the lock or pausing to summon fortitude.
One of these women was Lady Macbeth, who never before experienced, what
her husband always had in liability, those paintings of his fear, those
flaws and starts, that objectivity of over-wrought imagination. But now
this scene, which treads upon the threshold of the murder, shudders
with the proximity of something bodiless on the corridors and stairs a
spectral gleam is congealing into shapes not known to this world; the
wild weather of the "sore night" has hunted the moon and stars out of
the heaven; the rain rushes at the panes to get vindictive entrance;
the wind utters personal threats at these violators of "the Lord's
anointed temple;"--
"The obscure bird
Clamor'd the livelong night."
How finely seated in its place is that word "obscure"! Substitute
for it the various reading, "obscene," and you destroy the sense
which Shakspeare would convey of a creature heard but seldom seen at
any time, sitting so moveless in the dark: not a leaf prates of its
whereabout; the mysterious hooting seems to be one of the unexplained
things of Nature.
Lady Macbeth's breath itself is intent to listen,--"Hark!" Then, as her
novel tremor passes off, she interprets it:--
"It was the owl that shriek'd, the fatal bellman,
Which gives the stern'st good-night."
Far away, through innocent hamlets, human watchmen go their rounds,
and let their "All's well!" mix with the dreams of inviolate chambers.
Here is a different bellman to invite an eternal hour to murder sleep.
She listens again, and her nerves are tightened by the hand of silence.
"He is about it." How awfully does Macbeth's voice come struggling back
into this stillness, where the wife begins to feel something personal
in the air! So does he. "Who's there? What, ho!" And she expects to see
something that was not invited:--
"Alack! I am afraid they have awak'd,
And 'tis not done: the attempt, and not the deed,
Confounds us."
Shakspeare makes us aware that Macbeth, after killing Duncan, must pass
along a passage and descend some stairs to the next story. What a walk
of a few moments, protracted into endless awe, with Duncan disembodied
close at his heels! The brave soldier's feet weaken at the distance
which his own soul creates. Will he ever annihilate a space that is
made by a crime and reach his wife again?
"I have done the deed! Did'st thou not hear a noise?"