"I heard the owl scream, and the crickets cry.
Did not you speak?
When?
Now.
As I descended?
Ay.
Hark! Who lies i' the second chamber?"
The scene is full of pauses of startled listening: it waits with a
husband absent upstairs upon an errand, retreats with him through a
haunted corridor, thenceforth for ever haunted, and shudders in us as
midnight never shuddered before; and the crickets, those carollers of
a sacred hearth, cry, as blood drips through it and quenches their
content.
When Macbeth relates to her his sensations while he was upstairs, the
amen that stuck in his throat, the voice that threatened him with
nights devoid of sleep and that still cried, "Macbeth shall sleep no
more," Lady Macbeth, intuitively feeling that she could dare no more,
and could not risk another thought with her imagination, said,--
"These deeds must not be thought
After these ways: so, it will make us mad."
The deed is done, but to her surprise it will not do for her too
curiously to consider it. But no, the deed is not yet neatly finished.
Macbeth, in his hurry to elude the dead man, has brought the bloody
daggers with him. She must carry them back for him: not for his newly
bought kingdom would he return along that entry and through that
ghastly door. The exigency recalls the fair woman to her native temper.
To put the needed finish to her night's business, she resumes her
wonted contempt for darkness and the sight of the dead:--
"The sleeping and the dead
Are but as pictures."
While she is absent, there comes that knocking at the gate which appals
Macbeth; and we quake with him in that moment which lets into the
tragedy a human world again.
This world, unconscious of the hell which husband and wife have
inaugurated within the castle, has been travelling all night to reach
it. What morning redness salutes Lenox's and Macduff's eyes!
"Ring the alarum-bell!
Malcolm! awake!
Shake off this downy sleep, death's counterfeit,
And look on death itself! Up, up, and see
The great doom's image! Malcolm! Banquo!
As from your graves rise up, and walk like sprites,
To countenance this horror. Ring the bell!"
Thereupon Lady Macbeth enters: she has had time to see what color
Duncan's blood imparts to water, in the little act of washing the hands
which became memorable to her, and seared into the brain as if with
a brand heated in nether fires. No constraint of alarm caused her to
enter, but she is driven in by the terrible affinity of her feeling:
she belongs to the scene,--a part of it which cannot be left out. She
must hear what is said, observe what occurs, keep her appointment with
the death which she solicited. This fascination of spilt blood, this
woman's instinct to see her husband through the first surprise, this
dread of some defect in his behavior, this solicitude to repair it by
some spirit of her own, takes her into a scene which deals one stroke
too much upon her emotion. For the morn broke rapidly, as if to resent
the criminal advantage which the midnight took. She has had no chance
to calculate what effect this murder will have upon human sensibilities
when they are taken by it unawares. She sees the awfulness of it
suddenly reflected from the faces and gestures of Macduff, Banquo, and
the rest. It beats at the gate, across which she has braced a woman's
arm, and breaks it in; and a mob of reproaches rush over her. What
have those delicate hands been doing? What is this hideous issue of
her slender body, just born, stark naked, in the horror of these men?
Nature, in making her, was so little in the male mood, so intently
following the woman's model, that it left out the element which
carries Macbeth through this scene. To hear her husband describe his
simulated rage in butchering the grooms, and draw that painting of
Duncan in his blood,--
"And his gash'd stabs look'd like a breach in nature
For ruin's wasteful entrance,"--
it is too much, and 'tis plain she is not needed. "Help me hence,
ho!" her sex cries. It is the revulsion of nature in a feminine soul.
Love has exhaled all its hardihood into the deed which is just now
discovered. She, too, has only now really discovered it. The nerves
part at the overstrain of seeing what the deed is like, and drop her
helpless into a swoon.
She recovers, but her mind wakes to the necessity of playing a part, to
the harassing assumption of royal demeanor to hide a slavish dread, to
the cruel demands of courtesy, to the effort to sustain her husband's
state, to the counterfeit composure of the banquet:--
"Better be with the dead,
Whom we, to gain our place, have sent to peace,
Than on the torture of the mind to lie
In restless ecstasy."
She does not say this; but Macbeth avows it for her, since they are
partners
"In the affliction of these terrible dreams
That shake us nightly."
Banquo would have been safe enough from her; for the scheming love
has been too rudely handled. But he is not safe from Macbeth, who
does not reflect that, while Malcolm is out of his reach, 'tis a
superfluity of naughtiness to slay Banquo and Fleance. His wife might
have counselled better, but he did not dare to confide his temper of
murder to her. Henceforth, murder is become a necessary of their daily
life. But her feeling that nought is had and all is spent does not
involve a threat of Banquo's person. She broods in spiritless reaction,
and tells Macbeth that "what's done is done." He broods in dangerous
recklessness, feeling that it is not yet done:--
"Thou know'st that Banquo and his Fleance live."
She does not perceive what he is darkly hinting, and merely replies
that they cannot live for ever. He judges hastily that they must die at
once; and "there's comfort yet." But he does not venture to be explicit
with her, because, if she cannot detect the murder in his words,--
"There shall be done
A deed of dreadful note,"--
it is because there is murder no longer in her heart. He does not dare
to risk his resolutions openly with her returning womanhood. So, when
she unconsciously asks, "What's to be done?" he cannot muster courage
to expose his thought:--
"Be innocent of the knowledge, dearest chuck,
Till thou applaud the deed."
Then his imagination, excited by the dire policy which he premeditates,
shudders into language that recalls to us her own when she unsexed
herself to make a man of him: it is his turn to be demonized, and she
simply marvels at his words.
So she goes to the feast where Banquo is expected, without his ghost
in her heart: not a hint reaches her of what has happened. It is plain
that she misconstrues the distracted behavior of Macbeth; and when he
says, "If I stand here, I saw him," she could only suppose that it was
the ghost of Duncan which was the painting of his fear: so that she
bravely carries Macbeth through the brunt of the guests' wonder, and
passes to that night's tormented sleep without a fresh spectre in its
train. For Macbeth was either too dispirited or too considerate to tell
her; so he lets the news wait till another day divulges it.
When the guests have departed, Macbeth is still absorbed by the
terrifying possibilities of disclosure that were suggested by the
apparition. Banquo, who can so easily become visible, may hint the
manner of his death to somebody, to any thing, making the dumbest
object voluble with it,--may even make a stone move to hit the
murderer, or a tree's branch point speakingly to him, "the secretest
man of blood." But his wife says nothing either to refute the fear or
to make him ashamed of it. What palsy has been laid upon that ruffling
tongue? It is not silent, as some critics fancy, because her love
sets in to pity and to spare him; nor silent because the exigency has
passed away, nor because Middleton struck out some speech of hers,--but
silent simply from exhaustion. See, between the lines of Macbeth's
mood, how the overtaxed woman droops, utterly frayed away, although
the guests relieve her by departure. Exhaustion so preoccupies her that
love itself is too faint to pity or to cheer, and her only thought is
to get to bed. She has begun to feel the drift of a hopeless future,
against which she has no strength, by contending, to regain the old
mooring-ground where they cut loose and allowed an unseen current to
clutch the slim bark. Neither curiosity nor self-interest can rouse her
when Macbeth mentions that he has strange things in head which he means
to carry to performance.
"You lack the season of all natures, sleep,"
is all that her tired nature has left to say.
Her fortitude just eked her out to reach the gracious action that
dismissed the guests, as she wished "A kind good-night to all!" Yes,
good-night to all,--to us also. She gains the shelter of her chamber:
then she entirely disappears from the action of the tragedy, to sicken
in seclusion with the consciousness that her fatal love has purveyed
successive murders for her household. She can be of no further use to
Shakspeare now: such a terrible requisition of genius has exhausted
her; she is removed from our view and consigned to the offices
of women. For the courage that was screwed to the sticking-place
was screwed by love's wrest one turn too far. But another kind of
woman--massive, cruel, prompted by unmixed ambition, guided by
pure hatefulness--would have had no trouble in assuming the dogged
resolution with which Macbeth began henceforth to outface Fate. Not so
this soul, who has known "how tender 'tis to love the babe" that milks
her.
"The tackle of her heart is crack'd and burned;
And all the shrouds wherewith her life should sail
Are turned to one thread, one little hair."