“_Len._ ’Tis two or three, my lord, that bring you word
Macduff is fled to England.
_Macb._ Fled to England!”
The acme of the avenging conscience.
_Ib._ sc. 2. This scene, dreadful as it is, is still a relief, because a
variety, because domestic, and therefore soothing, as associated with the
only real pleasures of life. The conversation between Lady Macduff and her
child heightens the pathos, and is preparatory for the deep tragedy of
their assassination. Shakespeare’s fondness for children is everywhere
shown;—in Prince Arthur, in _King John_; in the sweet scene in the
_Winter’s Tale_ between Hermione and her son; nay, even in honest Evans’s
examination of Mrs. Page’s schoolboy. To the objection that Shakespeare
wounds the moral sense by the unsubdued, undisguised description of the
most hateful atrocity—that he tears the feelings without mercy, and even
outrages the eye itself with scenes of insupportable horror—I, omitting
_Titus Andronicus_, as not genuine, and excepting the scene of Gloster’s
blinding in _Lear_, answer boldly in the name of Shakespeare, not guilty.
_Ib._ sc. 3. Malcolm’s speech:—
... “Better Macbeth,
Than such an one to reign.”
The moral is—the dreadful effects even on the best minds of the
soul-sickening sense of insecurity.
_Ib._ How admirably Macduff’s grief is in harmony with the whole play! It
rends, not dissolves, the heart. “The tune of it goes manly.” Thus is
Shakespeare always master of himself and of his subject,—a genuine
Proteus:—we see all things in him, as images in a calm lake, most
distinct, most accurate,—only more splendid, more glorified. This is
correctness in the only philosophical sense. But he requires your sympathy
and your submission; you must have that recipiency of moral impression
without which the purposes and ends of the drama would be frustrated, and
the absence of which demonstrates an utter want of all imagination, a
deadness to that necessary pleasure of being innocently—shall I say,
deluded?—or rather, drawn away from ourselves to the music of noblest
thought in harmonious sounds. Happy he, who not only in the public
theatre, but in the labours of a profession, and round the light of his
own hearth, still carries a heart so pleasure-fraught!
Alas for Macbeth! now all is inward with him; he has no more prudential
prospective reasonings. His wife, the only being who could have had any
seat in his affections, dies; he puts on despondency, the final
heart-armour of the wretched, and would fain think every thing shadowy and
unsubstantial, as indeed all things are to those who cannot regard them as
symbols of goodness:—
“Out, out, brief candle!
Life’s but a walking shadow; a poor player,
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage,
And then is heard no more; it is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.”
“Winter’s Tale.”
Although, on the whole, this play is exquisitely respondent to its title,
and even in the fault I am about to mention, still a winter’s tale; yet it
seems a mere indolence of the great bard not to have provided in the
oracular response (Act ii. sc. 2.) some ground for Hermione’s seeming
death and fifteen years’ voluntary concealment. This might have been
easily effected by some obscure sentence of the oracle, as for example:—
“ ‘Nor shall he ever recover an heir, if he have a wife before
that recovery.’ ”
The idea of this delightful drama is a genuine jealousy of disposition,
and it should be immediately followed by the perusal of _Othello_, which
is the direct contrast of it in every particular. For jealousy is a vice
of the mind, a culpable tendency of the temper, having certain well-known
and well-defined effects and concomitants, all of which are visible in
Leontes, and, I boldly say, not one of which marks its presence in
Othello;—such as, first, an excitability by the most inadequate causes,
and an eagerness to snatch at proofs; secondly, a grossness of conception,
and a disposition to degrade the object of the passion by sensual fancies
and images; thirdly, a sense of shame of his own feelings exhibited in a
solitary moodiness of humour, and yet from the violence of the passion
forced to utter itself, and therefore catching occasions to ease the mind
by ambiguities, equivoques, by talking to those who cannot, and who are
known not to be able to, understand what is said to them,—in short, by
soliloquy in the form of dialogue, and hence a confused, broken, and
fragmentary, manner; fourthly, a dread of vulgar ridicule, as distinct
from a high sense of honour, or a mistaken sense of duty; and lastly, and
immediately, consequent on this, a spirit of selfish vindictiveness.