It will be on the same day, then, to intercept Macbeth as homeward his ambitious mood hurries. The battle, which the rebels against Duncan's rule have just lost, Macbeth has won. What else has he won? His thoughts, out-travelling his body's utmost speed, will change into witches by the way and inform him. Hitherto his fateful Self has remained vague and disembodied. Now it will meet itself, and hear it utter a threefold "Hail!"
For thus I conceive that when Macbeth's crime had fully infected Shakspeare's imagination, and was urging it into the appalling swiftness of the first scenes of this tragedy, he endowed Macbeth with its own shaping quality. The witches were not decoys of another world to lure him into acquaintanceship with crime. They were his own intention grown to be so ravenous that it framed a prelude to his deed, as the condition of starving sets aphantom banquet before a person's eyes. Shakspeare had no need of them to start the business of his play or to keep alive his plot. Macbeth and his wife did their own tempting so thoroughly that spirits might applaud and refrain from interfering. But these witches were characters of the second-sight which Shakspeare imputed to Macbeth, a distinguishing trait born into Macbeth's mind from the conception of this tragedy. The prosaic supernature of the old chronicle, on which the play is based, is transformed into a psychological peculiarity.
So we observe that these weird sisters were no posters of vulgar ill, horsed on nursery broomsticks, to deliver murrain in the fold and rheumatism at the hearth, in gratification of a vicious whim. But they became vulgarized into this whenever Macbeth was absent from the scene. Then they shrank from Fates to hags, such as Banquo's undistempered eyes saw them, withered, hairy-faced, laying chappy fingers upon skinny lips,—old women dreaded by the common people for reputed powers of bewitching. All such Celtic superstitions breed nobly in Macbeth's fancy: he knows all about the village gossip. The eldritch women are the nearest hint of supernature which he had; but his kingly anticipations tolerate no common pranks from them. When Macbeth is absent, Shakspeare shows what stale witcheries they traffic in. The critics blame the incongruity, or attribute it to some interpolating pen. But Shakspeare rightly intended to place in contrast with Macbeth's fantasy the popular material of hisage in which it worked. So we hear the witches relating their trumpery exploits. This one has been killing poor people's swine. Another threatens to water-log a shipmaster because his wife refused to give her chestnuts. They put their spiteful heads together, and gloat over a drowned pilot's thumb. When Macbeth enters, this ghastly twaddle is hushed by a domineering thought which meets in these crones his "all-hail hereafter."
In the scene which follows the banquet, Shakspeare brings the witches and their mistress Hecate together. The stage direction, "Enter Hecate to the other three witches," simply includes her as one witch more. She has a Greek name that was representative of the Moon in her baleful and haunting phase. But on this Northern heath she displays a genuine Celtic temper, and scolds the witches for having unbidden dealings with Macbeth; while she, "the close contriver of all harms," was never called to bear her part. Of course not, as Macbeth's imagination had no personalrapportwith her; and all that Shakspeare wants of her is to keep the popular witch-element upon the stage, and set it to creating "artificial sprites" in collusion with the greater incantation in Macbeth's heart. The witches provide him nothing but the cave and the cauldron. The scene never rises into dignity until he arrives. Three old women, hovering around a kettle, throw in a number of nauseous curiosities which they have got by foraging in disreputable quarters: they stir the slab gruel to verses which are as realistic as a wooden spoon; yet neither Middleton nor any other of Shakspeare's contemporaries, save Marlowe perhaps, could have written them. But mark how the tone alters when Macbeth comes to conjure with them. What is it they do? "A deed without a name." Then there is only one more culinary interruption; but we shudder and cannot sneer, for it uses an ingredient furnished by a man who has committed crimes against nature: the spell catches the drippings of a murderer's gibbet. Macbeth's secret divinings of the future fill the scene: the visions incorporate his own anxiety. Out of his perturbed soul rise the armed head, the bloody child. He reassures himself with the phantom of a child crowned, with a tree in his hand, and misinterprets it into a "sweet bodement" of safety, so long as trees do not take to travelling. But the recollection of Banquo is the great disturber: that spirit sits at every feast of solace which the King partakes. His heart "throbs to know one thing:" Will Banquo's issue ever reign? The King's flaming soul throws shadows on the screen of his dread,—a show of kings, Banquo first and last, eight of them between Banquo blood-bolter'd and Banquo crowned. But the Banquo that smiles is bathed in blood. Blood let it be, then.
"From this moment,The very firstlings of my heart shall beThe firstlings of my hand."
But no critical theory can hold a work of imagination to a strict account. You may clap John Locke into the witness-box and riddle him with cross-questions: the same court has no authority to put a poet on oath to justify himself in every line; he is satisfied to let thedrift of his thought be traced through the material in which he works. Quartz that is found in certain localities is as good as gold, and rewards us for suspecting it. We need not strain Shakspeare's page into too minute an adaptation to our views in order to avoid rejecting it. If he convinces us that Macbeth and his wife have composed the tragedy before his pen touches the paper, the witches may appear just what we and Macbeth choose to have them,—at one moment concocters of country spells to give him a drench of murder, at another moment concocted themselves by a spell which his soul has brewed.
This spiritual gift is the main cause of all his practical hesitations. His strongest passion discharges and exhausts itself in a pulse of fantasy; as the electric fish lies awhile torpid after the transmission of a shock. In his case, there is imperfect connection of the motor nerves that run between imagining and doing; so that his milk of human kindness has time to mingle with his mood. When his wife has grown sick and incompetent to stimulate, dire necessity alone can do it for him; as we see after he has had the vision of Banquo's line of kings, when somebody informs him that Macduff, his most formidable enemy, has fled. This is his self-chiding:—
"Time, thou anticipat'st my dread exploits:The flighty purpose never is o'ertook,Unless the deed go with it.But no more sights."
Macduff's "wife, children, servants, all that could be found," are slaughtered by him. It is a deed that, making his fortunes more impaired than ever, betrays to us how feverish and impolitic his course becomes. Far better for him if he had not let the desperate crisis of his fate drive him out of the land of dreams. Shakspeare lets us hear Macbeth chiding the brag of his imagination when he says, "But no more sights." He has had enough of them,—too much time wasted in those presentiments which never have the element of prevention. On the contrary, it is a common experience that something is so sure to happen that it can impart to us a fruitless forefeeling of itself, as Henry IV. felt the blade of Ravaillac in his side a week before it struck him. Macbeth will humor no more sights. That is the key to Shakspeare's conception of the character. We are to understand that henceforth Macbeth is cured of his hallucinations.
Now let us return to the first scene provided with this pass-key. It unlocks that and all the subsequent supernature which had a relish for his society. We feel that the witches express the moral condition of Macbeth's mind, its tumultuous hesitation that is on the point of settling into the definiteness of crime,—"Fair is foul, and foul is fair." All moral discriminations are huddled together and dislocated by the upheaval of his subterranean motive.
He really sends these witches forth to a blasted heath, the avant-couriers of his own visit thither, and of a longing that gains substance and direction the more he entertains it. It is strong enough to be an object behind his retina; and it throws out shapes to limn themselves upon the air into which they make themselves and vanish. And they can appear only at that period of his evil brooding when it gathers and swells, too big for his brain, bursting its barriers to become external. After the actual murder of Duncan has occurred, the brain of Macbeth is depleted for a while: the ominous forms wait till Banquo's ghost can recruit them.
Macbeth has an imagination so keen and unbridled that it outruns the limits of thinking, to become projected outside of his bodily eye in shapes and objects that occupy the focus of his criminal intent. His crimes become ocular deceptions, because they are so palpably real to his mental vision, sharpened as it is by the ambitious sympathy of a wife whose temperament outraces action. Murder is Macbeth's owner before he is conscious that he has made himself the chattel of his wife's suggestions. That same creative fancy built forth into the air the handle of the instrument which he has fated himself to use: he marshalled it the way that he intended to go. No supernatural smith has forged the fatal weapon: it is tempered in the current of his own plastic mind.
But although Macbeth has this mobile imagination, like that which
"If it would but apprehend some joy,It comprehends some bringer of that joy;"
and though he has become one of those madmen who
"Have such seething brains,Such shaping fantasies, that apprehendMore than cool reason ever comprehends,"
he is still capable of reverting to this cool reason, at least so far as to appreciate that his desperate dreams are the poetry of desperate consequences which will tax all his waking powers. When the apparitions vanish, in Act iv. 1, one of the witches gives a voice to Macbeth's perturbation; but why
"Stands Macbeth thus amazedly?"
It was but the voice of revulsion from amazement, to "cheer up his sprites" and summon resolution.
When Macbeth originates any thing out of himself, that Self is not daunted, for it is too deeply compromised in fact and fancy. But when some phenomenon threatens him from a quarter that is outside the limit of his own creative power, as when Birnam Wood is descried coming toward Dunsinane, he is puzzled, and says:—
"I pull in resolution; and beginTo doubt th' equivocation of the fiend,That lies like truth.I 'gin to be a-weary of the sun."
Nothing has disturbed him till he appreciates that some agency which he does not control can transplant a forest at his castle gate. The apparition of the witches scarcely lifts his eyebrows. "Speak, if you can," is the calm greeting. When he starts, and seems to fear "things that do sound so fair," it is because the shapes he conjures become suddenly endowed with tongues, and he hears his own ambition syllabled. For a man is not proof against shrinking at the first moment that lends to the "airy nothing" of his desire a distinct name and purpose.He is astonished at the audacious phrasing of his hopes, and he resents at first what seems definite enough to be an impeachment from something not himself; yet not until that moment was it really his Self. What phantoms have thus leaped out of vacuity into the midnight chambers of desire! What voices have drawn the startled answers of a crime that did not suspect this overlooking! But when the man's Self has undergone this real birth, and the secret parturition becomes a breathing child of consciousness, he soon accepts his own new self, and forgets that it was irritated into a cry by the first salutes of the atmosphere. Casting away all repugnance, Macbeth exclaims to his wicked wishes, before they have a chance to vanish,—
"Stay, you imperfect speakers, tell me more!... Speak, I charge you!"
So the dagger that wavers in the heated air of his soul does not surprise him,—"Come, let me clutch thee!" Really, he expected to grasp it; for it was precisely the kind of instrument he thought of using, the very shape and workmanship thereof. There's nothing to perturb until he draws from his belt its counterpart, yet sees the other still solid in the air. That sets him to pondering: his
"Eyes are made the fools o' the other senses,Or else worth all the rest."
But, in spite of that, the murder in his brain reddens, sprinkles the blade and dudgeon with drops of blood, "which was not so before." Now when the illusionbecomes the most intense, it is dispersed, as if the brain's own climax swelled to breaking. The collapse reminds him that the deed still waits to be accomplished: his dagger is yet clean. But its form is the bloody business which he has on hand to get through with before sweet morning. It seemed so clearly cut in his mind, and stayed so long before he could turn it out, that he thought it worth describing to his wife, as she indicates to us when at the banquet she calls his vision of Banquo
"Proper stuff!This is the very painting of your fear;This is the air-drawn dagger which, you said,Led you to Duncan."
Now when the ghost of Banquo enters to occupy Macbeth's chair, the actor of the king's part need not strain himself to put on the highest degree of an appalled feeling. "Are you a man?" whispers his wife; and Macbeth gives the true tone to his share of the scene when he answers,—
"Ay, and a bold one, that dare look on thatWhich might appal the devil."
He starts, to be sure; but he simply remarks, "The table's full." "Here is a place reserved, sir." "Where?" he exclaims, so little annihilated by the painting of his own consciousness. It has dazed him, as when a mirror shifts distant sunlight full into the eyes: they blink, and judgment cannot readjust the sight. So he dimly asks, "Which of you have done this?" He is not "distilled to jelly with the act of fear," but simply amazed at thisreproduction, so quick and palpable, of the deed just described to him by the hired murderer who, by doing that, put those "twenty trenched gashes" into his mind, whence they dripped over the chair of state. His talent for this spectral extemporizing has been indulged too often to overtake him with a special wonder. This unexpected Banquo may be dared, and even threatened:—
"Thou canst not say I did it: never shakeThy gory locks at me."
His wife blames his "flaws and starts" at such a moment of festivity when ceremony ought to be the sauce to meat; but they are not the ague-fits of a man who is dropping to pieces at a dreadful sight. The image of his guilt absorbs and diverts his behavior from the guests in a way that suggests to them a sudden flightiness:—
"Prythee, see there! behold! look! lo! how say you?Why, what care I? If thou canst nod, speak too."
This is not bravado trying to steady itself in a breeze of horror.
In order to break Macbeth down, and fully identify him with the deed of which Banquo was the horrible shadow, his temperament required that the ghost should vanish and reappear at the moment when he recovers composure. Shakspeare has marked, by Macbeth's sudden change of demeanor, that he was usually familiar with these coinages of his brain. To whatever ecstasy his feeling rose, with or without his wife's complicity, Shakspeare would have us understand that Macbeth wasso fluent with these bodiless creations that he had naturalized the night-side of his mind. Therefore, Banquo must re-enter precisely when Macbeth drinks to the general joy, and to the dead man in particular. Shakspeare knew the moment when to spill Macbeth's wine and all his hardihood by putting out a disembodied hand to strike the goblet from his grasp. It was the very nick of time, but it was in the man's own temper.
Let us see how it was. The alteration of demeanor from astonishment to the abjectness of a guilty terror slips out of Macbeth's conviviality into the company, as he calls for wine and drinks "love and health to all." At the rim of his goblet he can even banter with his consciousness of murder: he is in a frame to enjoy proposing the health of
"Our dear friend, Banquo, whom we miss;Would he were here!"
Now this pretence of desiring Banquo's presence uses up what resistance Macbeth has to spare. No sooner are the words out of his mouth than he imagines how they might be answered: the imagining it is the vivid answer. When you try jauntily to job off suspicion before other persons, the cheek grows pale with dread of being contradicted. A door is thrown ajar by this wind of pretending that nothing has been committed. Come on, there! the villain cries. Has any thing happened? Is anybody outside? Let him enter and take a look around! Sure enough, 'tis there: his mind's eye sees it enter. Even when the small faults of social life are denied or disclaimed by us, a ghost is raised uponthe face, a dubious semblance of your guilt in the evasive eye, or just a flicker in the corner of the mouth. Most people overestimate their strength to make a flat denial of misdeeds when their soul is reflected in the polished mirrors of watchful eyes. There is a non-committal look which collars a man, puts him in the dock, and sends him to jail before he knows that he has been apprehended.
Prosaic men with no imagination to defy can preserve a smug complacency after the commission of a crime, because they cannot vibrate to it. Give a stroke to their thick temper, and it only answers with a thud. Their face is an emotionless Sahara, over which no showery gusts or smiles of April linger. But Macbeth was delicately strung: the slightest stir of the invisible air was registered by a vibration. When the ghost slips out of his own phrase, 'twas too pat,—this coming at the toast, "to the general joy of the whole table," at this pretence of thirst to drink a dead man's welfare; too nicely timed for flesh and blood to bear; too suggestive of continual liability to see the eyes glaring across the brim of any moment. Observing how easily the awful figure can thicken out of invisibility, he cries, "Take any shape but that!" And his mind is desperate to exorcise it into an "unreal mockery," and vainly struggles with his own personifying power.
"It will have blood; they say, blood will have blood."
It is a cold, calculating vengeance, marrowless, bloodless, but alert in a shape against which Macbeth's nervesat any time may stumble, on the midnight staircase, in the gallery's pale shimmer, in sleep between his wife and his embrace, and always at his own suggestion of a phrase, a dream. His fancy never yet inflicted such a frightful recoil of an offended Heaven. It comes at his own invitation; for he had said in the forenoon of that day,—
"To-night we hold a solemn supper, sir,And I'll request your presence;"
to which Banquo acquiesced,—
"Lay your highness'Command upon me.""Fail not our feast.""My lord, I will not."
On the way to it he was a little delayed by being murdered; but, though late, he does not fail.
This tragedy was slowly conceived during the married life of Macbeth and his Lady. Their ambitious desires spent years in collusion before an heir of opportunity was born to them. The rapid and breathless action of the earlier scenes makes clear to us that it does not flow from any sudden resolution. The past years topple in the wave that combs to break into this sweeping surge. The movement of the play is unnatural, unless we admit that the married couple have grown familiar with many projects, all of which make them languish for occasion. Macbeth has revelled in the idea that if the chance offered he possesses every other quality to supplant Duncan,—ambition, audacity, swiftness, all good fortune, except a turn of circumstance. He discovers atthe juncture that his wife is the only aptitude he can contribute to it. She remembers his profuse suggestions with a touch of scorn. Is he a man?
"What beast was it, then,That made you break this enterprise to me?When you durst do it, then you were a man;... Nor time, nor place,Did then adhere, and yet you would make both;They have made themselves, and that their fitness nowDoes unmake you."
Strenuous in fantasy, "infirm of purpose." The sudden crisis betrays the secret pinings of past years for such an hour. The whispered conferences swell into a din: it shouts to tell us how their pillows touched, when darkness brooded in vain upon eyelids that were set wide open with a stare at a gleam of greatness far outside their chamber. We overhear, without ever having played eavesdropper, the anxious interchange of feeling beneath the garden aspens, which might catch their tremor from these two beings who passed hankering to and fro; he encouraging a reverie, she trying to chastise it into action with the valor of her tongue. Thus the years passed, while he alternated between the grand loyalty of many a fight and the treachery which grew warm upon the bosom of his wife. Much given to pondering and pleased with vivid day-dreams, he sought no way to realize them. Well as she knew this musing vein of his, and much as it displeased her spirit of action, she will have to be re-enforced by opportunity. Then the deed, now rusting in its sheath of speculation, may possibly leap forth. His mind did not have thecoupling which makes up wishing and doing into one train; so the doing stands some distance off idle on the track. The track which emerged from Hamlet's resolution met so many diverging lines at the controlling switch that he was in doubt upon which to run: at length, impatient chance unlocked the switch, and set the rail for a disaster. When Macbeth's wishing became linked to acting, he was not over-nice about his route. The subtle Hamlet considered till he could not start. The inconsiderate Macbeth, when he ceased to vapor and began to move, blundered with a full head of fantasy into ruin.
When a man's brain is well charged with blood, his powers are unified; but Macbeth's current was addicted to the lobes of figment to some defrauding of the rest. His wife's brain blushed all at once, and expanded to give the measure of her structure; so that her hope, implicating the whole of her, had all the substantiality of a deed. She was already the deed from which Macbeth's ambition swerved. He spawned spectres: she gave birth to men-children only. A woman inspired through and through with love for him, discontented with the slowness of his fortune, longing to touch the top and finish of her own; a helpmeet, whose unextinguished bridal ardor kept burning up all scruples as fast as her lover could rake them together. He, the still perfect object of her pride and passion, must become great: he must be lifted to a place whence all his qualities shall shine beyond cramped horizons with their petty crowds. She would kiss him into the compass of athrone, if lips could waft her soldier so far. Her whole soul, imagining him in statelier guises, grows so impatient to speak out its action, that love itself becomes for a moment inarticulate, though it is all the time the life-blood of her hope; as when he returns to her after the perils of the campaign which overthrew rebellion, her embrace is grave, as if her arms enclosed the coming state: they do not radiate the touch of love. He is not her darling husband, but
"Great Glamis! worthy Cawdor!Greater than both by the all-hail hereafter!"
His letters transported her not only beyond the "ignorant present," but beyond him, away beyond the familiar circle of his arms, to which she had so often committed soul and body,—away so far that she does not feel him. "The future in the instant" is embracing her; and it is against that splendor that her heart-beats break.
The first exclamation which follows the reading of his letter betrays this passionate attachment: "and shalt bewhat thou art promis'd." There runs through the tone a vibration from her own desire, no doubt; but it is dominated by exulting love, and bursts into a chord. The time has come: he shall, he must be, what he has always longed to be. The weird sisters are in luck when they promised so fairly to a man who is so profoundly loved. 'Tis the good will of Nature that I love him.
Yet she knows him thoroughly. So close is her appraisement of him that she instinctively postpones love to the immediate exigency,—that is, to pour her spirits in his ear, to beat down every thing that might intercept him when putting forth that one decisive hand-grasp toward the crown. She fears his nature, because scruples hamper his unscrupulous ambition. They are not entirely, as she conceives them, the results of inborn mildness. He has a politic disposition which grows all the more considerate as he sees the widening of his popularity. He will proceed no farther against Duncan, because
"He hath honored me of late; and I have boughtGolden opinions from all sorts of people,Which would be worn now in their newest gloss,Not cast aside so soon."
He discusses the project of murdering Banquo in the same way:—
"Though I couldWith 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 miragequenches 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 breastsAnd take my milk for gall, you murd'ring ministers,Wherever in your sightless substancesYou 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 bepopular: 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 spuriousvalues 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 lifedidcommit 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, andmywomen 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 sacrificecoulda 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 alonepreservesthe 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 dearestlove," 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,—"Wefail!" 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 screwyourcourage to the point, andwe, 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 haveloved 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 lifeIs 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 nomore," 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 antidoteCleanse 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 ofthe 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.