“Thou sure and firm-set earth,
Hear not my steps, which way they walk, for fear
Thy very stones prate of my whereabout,
And take the present horror from the time
Which now suits with it.”
What is meant by the last two lines? It seems to us to be just another
form of the words, “For there is nothing covered, that shall not be
revealed; neither hid, that shall not be known. Therefore whatsoever ye
have spoken in darkness shall be heard in the light; and that which ye
have spoken in the ear in closets shall be proclaimed upon the
house-tops.” Of course we do not mean that Macbeth is represented as
having this passage in his mind, but that Shakspere had the feeling of
it when he wrote thus. What Macbeth means is, “Earth, do not hear me in
the dark, which is suitable to the present horror, lest the very stones
prate about it in the daylight, which is not suitable to such things;
thus taking ‘the present horror _from_ the time which now suits with
it.’”
Again, in the only piece of humour in the play--if that should be called
humour which, taken in its relation to the consciousness of the
principal characters, is as terrible as anything in the piece--the
porter ends off his fantastic soliloquy, in which he personates the
porter of hell-gate, with the words, “But this place is too cold for
hell: I’ll devil-porter it no further. I had thought to have let in some
of all professions, that go the primrose way to the everlasting
bonfire.” Now what else had the writer in his mind but the verse from
the Sermon on the Mount, “For wide is the gate, and broad is the way,
that leadeth to destruction, and many there be which go in thereat”?
It may be objected that such passages as these, being of the most
commonly quoted, imply no profound acquaintance with Scripture, such as
we have said Shakspere possessed. But no amount of knowledge of the
_words_ of the Bible would be sufficient to justify the use of the word
_profound_. What is remarkable in the employment of these passages, is
not merely that they are so present to his mind that they come up for
use in the most exciting moments of composition, but that he embodies
the spirit of them in such a new form as reveals to minds saturated and
deadened with the _sound_ of the words, the very visual image and
spiritual meaning involved in them. “_The primrose way!_” And to what?