FOOTNOTES:[19]Grau Mariechen: Malkin is endearing diminutive for Mary: the cat is Little Gray Mary.[20]Ἑν μὑοτου κλαδἱ τὁ ἑἱφος φορἡσω,—In myrtle will I wear my blade.
FOOTNOTES:
[19]Grau Mariechen: Malkin is endearing diminutive for Mary: the cat is Little Gray Mary.
[19]Grau Mariechen: Malkin is endearing diminutive for Mary: the cat is Little Gray Mary.
[20]Ἑν μὑοτου κλαδἱ τὁ ἑἱφος φορἡσω,—In myrtle will I wear my blade.
[20]Ἑν μὑοτου κλαδἱ τὁ ἑἱφος φορἡσω,—In myrtle will I wear my blade.
BLONDE WOMEN.LADY MACBETH.
BLONDE WOMEN.
Thosecolors of complexion and of hair which mark a feminine type that is distinct from the brunette announce also a different style of temper and action. Virtue and vice, in these two types of women, differ in quality and in mode of manifestation. If we construct too strict a theory upon this difference, it will savor of affectation: a great many exceptions might spring up to discredit it, and to threaten its advocate with being called fantastic. He would spend all his time in lame refutations, and lose the benefit of a moderate statement. We must be content to observe in general that there are distinctions of behavior between the blonde and the brunette, which are by no means cutaneous, but reside deep within the temperament. The superficial color and the physical structure announce what methods and gestures we may expect, but do not guarantee that our expectation shall be invariably fulfilled. Shares of goodness and of faultiness are impartially distributed to both kinds of women; but subtle differences of color and movement describe the transactions of their conscience and their passion.
The poets instinctively build fair-haired and fair-colored women around deeds which have the flavor of risk and daring; as Tennyson, who describes Godiva when she is disrobed to ride through Coventry that shemay strip a burdensome tax from her husband's subjects:—
"She shook her head,And showered the rippled ringlets to her knee;Unclad herself in haste; adown the stairStole on, and, like a creeping sunbeam, slidFrom pillar unto pillar."
So the brave and constant Imogen has eyes which are the "blue of heaven's own tinct;" and the flower that is like her face is the "pale primrose:" through her complexion the veins show like "the azur'd harebell."
Dante's forerunner, who is celebrated in Browning's "Sordello," is beloved by Palma, whose influence continually resists his poetic day-dreams. He, speculating too finely upon his relation to the politics of the epoch, and always wondering what way were best for him to take to benefit men,—through what party, Guelf or Ghibeline, he might approach his aspirations,—is obliged to turn for manhood and consistent purpose to Palma:—
"Conspicuous in his worldOf dreams sat Palma. How the tresses curledInto a sumptuous swell of gold, and woundAbout her like a glory! Even the groundWas bright as with spilt sunbeams."
Julia, in "Two Gentlemen of Verona," iv. 4, hangs jealously over the picture of Sylvia, her unconscious rival:—
"And yet the painter flatter'd her a little,Unless I flatter with myself too much.Her hair is auburn, mine is perfect yellow:If that be all the difference in his love,I'll get me such a color'd periwig.Her eyes are gray as glass; and so are mine:Ay, but her forehead's low, and mine's as high."
All the light-complexioned women may be classed as blondes, whether the pure red and white that strive for ascendency be pacified by golden hair, or whether a more even tint of the cheek find its correspondence in hair of chestnut hue. There are also women of high vitality, with gifts never too forthputting because blended into a harmonious disposition, who contribute still a fresh tone to this chromatic scale; for their heads wear the crisp aureole of another shade that seems to invite you, as William Blake, the painter, invited his city friend, to a "thatched roof of rusted gold." Beneath these roofs we can take shelter, fearing no catastrophe, unless the rich and winning manners bring one on. In Bellini's portrait of Cassandra Fedeli,[21]the famous improvisatrice, whom the Venetians crowned early in the sixteenth century, this gracious style of woman is preserved.
There is a kind of brunette whose eyes are black as the sloe-berry, with the pupil and the iris melted together: they are couched underneath sombre hedges of eyebrows, and silently keep a good look-out. "The Prince of Darkness is a gentleman:" so can the princesses of the same color be ladies, but their style may ambush wickedness enough to task the most adventurous resources of a criminal lawyer. You will notice, however, that their scheming minds are endowed with little sprightliness. Intrigue does not put forth a sparkling surface that is swept by the light thrills of variousmoods that blow: the social prattle lacks the tone of charming simplicity and ease. The face is subject to lowering weather when one of these women meditates a poisoning: there is one clinch of the teeth as the limbs collect to make a fatal spring, one glance askant at the person whom she is diplomatically entertaining with arrangements for his ruin. They cannot so readily nurse a fell purpose with a melting air of maternity which transpires in every line of the face and limbs, as the victim is held cosingly to the fatal breast. He is clutched a little too menacingly, and has time for a suspicion concerning the nutriment he is about to draw.
But when blonde women have a talent for mischief, they delicately distinguish themselves from the brunettes in the style of it. For downright, unadulterated mischief, let us be commended to the blonde women of the Indo-Germanic races. And frequently it is merely organic, with no more premeditation or sense of consciousness than a stinging-nettle has. They know how to be unaffectedly unscrupulous, as Miss Rosamond Vincy was in "Middlemarch," with a gay versatility that is rare in women of a differently-tempered color. Yourriantblonde can drop a bolt from a clear sky, and scatter your long-projected picnic with sudden misery. As you look up, it is hardly credible: how or when did the weather change? You almost doubt the evidence of sense. Darnley must have been blown up by accident. There will always be two parties relative to any transaction which implicates a blonde woman, because her resources of demeanor are so ample, she can recurto them so nimbly, she can meet gathering suspicions with such angelic refutation in her smile, and the sluice-gates of emotion are so nicely hung that a touch of taper fingers can let into the scene a freshet of disclaimer that sweeps your rubbishy doubts away. Not a smut escapes from the internal simmering to settle upon the snow-white guarantee of appearance. She reminds us of that adaptation to machines which exercise a driving-power, by which they are enabled to consume their own smoke and cinders. Her transparency of skin, and the freshness of color that spreads up to the temple's whiteness like an after-glow upon the glacier, lend the proper blush to all her actions. She enjoys the constant advantage of a face that has the traditional tint of innocency: when delicate culture and mobile gifts are behind, sportive moods come out to make a charming din that just drowns the blab of mischief.
If the poets have assigned good and noble actions to the blonde women of the imagination, the same function working in legendary lore has attributed from the most ancient times, and with striking persistency, mankind's woes to golden beauties. "Lilith, the first wife of Adam, was a cold, passionless, splendid woman, with wondrous golden hair. She was created Adam's equal in every respect, therefore properly enough refused to obey him. For this she was driven from the Garden of Eden; and Eve was made to order out of one of Adam's ribs. Then the Golden-haired Lilith, jealous, enraged, pining for her lost home in Paradise, took the form of aserpent, crept into the garden, and tempted Adam and Eve to their destruction. And from that day to this, Lilith, the cold, passionless beauty with golden hair, has roamed up and down the earth, snaring the sons of Adam and destroying them. You may always know her dead victims; for, whenever a man has been destroyed by the hands of Lilith, you will always find a single golden hair wrapped tight around his lifeless heart."[22]
A late poet unwinds into verse the fatal hair around his heart:—
"Seeing thy face, with all thy fluctuant hairFalling in dull gold opulence from thy brow,Watching thy light blue eyes, now fired, or nowLaughterful, or now dim as with despair,I wonder, friend, that it should be God's careTo have made at all (what matter when or how?)A being so sadly, desolately rare,So beautifully incomplete as thou!"O rank, black pool, with one star's imaged form!O deep, rich-hearted rose, with rot at core!O summer heaven, half-purpled with stern storm!O lily, with one white leaf dipt in gore!O angel shape, whom over curves and clingsThe awful imminence of a devil's wings!"
Greek genius understood of course that when Pandora was endowed with gifts, Aphrodite took a double handful of the golden foam off Cyprus, whence her own blondness rose, and gilded Pandora's clay. What a pity that the mischievous Hermes put a thieving flattery into that gracious form! It ran into the fingers with aninstinct to baffle man's profoundest forethought. In one of her Greek aspects she was called Ἁνησἱδωδοϛ, bestower of presents, like those of Ceres, colored like the golden-bearded rye and corn.
Lydgate married Miss Rosamond, that piece of unexceptionable blondness, whose temper during matrimonial crises was so cool and even as to amount to the highest provocation. A perfectly well-regulated bit of Nature's chasteness was this wife, who went about the town prevaricating and misrepresenting when her husband's affairs had become involved, telling fresh fibs to cover the flanks of her first ones; thus building a track that shunted him off into ever new embarrassments. Infantile bloominess of flesh and even-tempered eyes were nothing but the skim of tortuous pride; and a lie dropped from her lips the prettiest product in the world.
Shakspeare fancied that Caliban's mother, Sycorax, was a "blue-eyed hag." Bianca Capello, a woman of solid and whole-souled powers of mischief, was the "golden-haired" sorceress of Venice.
The women of the Huzules, a Sclavonic tribe that has settled in the Carpathian range, are vastly superior to the men. The blonde type predominates. They ride horses astride, and in morals are perfect Messalinas, filling the villages with intrigues which frequently have most tragic terminations.
So was Helen Jegado a pure blonde. She lived in the time of Louis Philippe; and a great many persons fell victims to her genius for murder. No less thantwenty-five are positively known to have been taken off by her. She managed wonderfully to use two innocent women to cover these crimes and to be suspected instead of herself. At the place of execution she exonerated them.
Charlotte Corday's hair "seemed black when fastened in a large mass around her head: it seemed gold-colored at the points of the tresses, like the ear of corn,—deeper and more lustrous than the wheat-stalk in the sunlight." Her variable eyes were "blue when she reflected, almost black when called into animated play." Her skin had the wholesome and marbled whiteness of perfect health.
Rebecca Sharp had "a knack of adopting a demureingénueair, under which she was most dangerous. She said the wickedest things with the most simple, unaffected air when in this mood, and would take care artlessly to apologize for her blunders, so that all the world should know that she had made them."
Ninon de l'Enclos, and Madame de Chevreuse, the famous conspirator who baffled two cardinals with an admirable mixture of pluck and cunning, were pure blondes. Such women court their objects and pursue their schemes in a manifold and sprightly fashion: their magnetic power flits to and fro, many-colored, subtle, silent, swift as an aurora. They have complicated the policy of courts and sown dissension in cabinets. They misrepresent a statesman's secrets, set one clique against another, stir about in society till it becomes one stupendous snarl; and perhaps you cannot point to a spotupon their reputation. They give slander itself no opportunity to lie as they can do, while they immaculately defy truth to brand as counterfeit the phrases of their charming insincerity. Look at the smooth brow that sheds your scrutiny: there's not a crease nor wrinkle on it where suspicion may lodge to fester. The eyes embrace you with the frankness of Joab, who took Abner aside to speak with him, quietly, asking, "Art thou in health, my brother?" and smote him there under the fifth rib, and left him far from well.
Among blonde women we can easily observe two kinds, which may be called, for brevity, the lunar and the solar. The one kind seems as if blanched by sunlight that has been reflected: it wilts from defect rather than excess of warming power. The passions are low-toned, like the body: a sort of scrofulous habit seems indicated by a too delicate and thin complexion; it lurks in the lifeless yellow or chestnut of the hair, in the unsound teeth and the languid speech. There is little valor for mischief in them, as there is little ambition for achievement. Their virtue seems only a temper that is kept faint as if by constant exudation of the blood.
But the Mary Stuart of history and the Lady Macbeth of Shakspeare belong to a different type. We know that the former had a delicate exterior, auburn hair, and beaming blue eyes: her tone of speaking was gentle and sweet, excellently soft and low. Mrs. Siddons, whose style and color were altogether different, became so saturated with Lady Macbeth as to be convinced she must have been a blonde. We think thatShakspeare implies and justifies this delicate perception, and turns it into history. Both the queens of Scotland represented the kind of blonde women who are fired by sunlight: it crisps the golden or the chestnut hair, becomes quicksilver in the veins, hits every brain-cell with its actinic ray, and chases over the yielding hair in ripples like a blown wheat-field. The voice is low, but ever clear and even,—a fabric closely woven throughout, capable of sustaining the strongest moments of the soul, and of vibrating with them: the whole gamut of passion may be swept by it, from the enticing whisper to the peal of defiance. It is a trumpet, made of silver, and not one note of it is brassy; but it pierces the distance none the less directly, and summons Macbeth by sonorous phrases out of the mist and pointlessness of dreams.
But Nature drew the character of Mary Stuart from elements less simple than were used by Shakspeare in constructing Lady Macbeth. Mary, to all the culture of her times, added various tastes and a delicate susceptibility for art: she loved music, plays, minstrels, games, and was passionately devoted to the chase. Her great pace in hunting, her fiery dash through the underbrush, was observed and has been long remembered. Once, having been thrown from her horse, the attendants found her on the ground, gayly laughing as she put up the dishevelled hair.
In the cold autumn of 1562, she went in person upon an expedition to punish a Highland clan. She jested with fatigues and hardships, "and was as much at herease," says Froude, "galloping a half-broken stallion over the heather as when languishing in her boudoir over a love-sonnet." She said "she wished she was a man, to know what life it was to lie all night in the field, or to walk on the causey with a Glasgow buckler and a broadsword."
She reminds us of Bathsheba in the novel which has been already quoted. Talking with her maid Liddy, she said, "I hope I am not a bold sort of maid,—mannish?" she continued, with some anxiety. To which Liddy replied, "Oh, no, not mannish; but so almighty womanish that 'tis getting on that way sometimes."
At the age of nineteen, the delicately nurtured woman set sail from France for Scotland, to begin that long, indomitable struggle to succeed Elizabeth, and to break the Reformation in England. The wiliest and most inflexible of Queen Elizabeth's counsellors shivered their weapons against the guard of her swift tact, until imprisonment, which was twice escaped from, and death,—
"That fell arrest,Without all bail,"—
became England's last resource against this dangerous, lovable, bewildering, fateful woman. Her bronze effigy in St. Mary's Church at Warwick lifts features whose clearly cut delicacy implies her resolution, and the magnetic power of all her loves and plots.
Her attachments were sometimes inspired by politics, sometimes by sentiment. All her mental and emotional ability was pledged to honor drafts which came in the interest of the Pope, of France, of hatred of Protestantism, of desire to govern England. She was in a frame of constant pique at the influence and reputation of Elizabeth. The Scottish reformers kept her skirmishing talent well employed. Defending her amusements or her mass against John Knox, she braved him till his bitter speech gathered into brine in her eyes. But, as it flowed, the lines of resolution upon her face were etched more clearly. She could lend her person to Bothwell with the hope of consolidating a party. With power and beauty at command, she lavished every wile to control the transitional epoch into which she was born. Her life was a series of shifts and dramatic surprises. But no dark recollections ever disturbed her sleep; nor did she carry a candle through the midnight of a shattered mind, to throw light upon suspected murders.
In love she was less constant than Macbeth's wife, who felt but one great passion, and had no art nor culture to lavish in retaining its object. She might have said,—
"I am as true as truth's simplicity,And simpler than the infancy of truth."
We shall find this sun-lighted heart less capable of endurance than the other blondes of history.
LADY MACBETH.
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 everHave 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 comestoo 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 IOf 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 uponMy perch, thy hand; this violence to plot,Scarce this, against thy person venturing here;But see, my knees invoke great Heaven's restUpon thy stay and slumber; all good angelsHie 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 excisionof 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, anyenthusiasm 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 afeardTo be the same in thine own act and valorAs thou art in desire? Would'st thou have thatWhich 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, whichwas 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 wildweather 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 birdClamor'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?"
They listen, looking sidelong at each other:—
"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 sleepand 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 thoughtAfter 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 deadAre 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 seeThe 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 followingthe 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 natureFor 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 lieIn restless ecstasy."
She does not say this; but Macbeth avows it for her, since they are partners
"In the affliction of these terrible dreamsThat 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 doneA 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 ofhim: 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 Macbethbegan 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 sailAre turned to one thread, one little hair."
She will soon be "a clod and module of confounded royalty."
For she has been the cause of all; she has thus changed and compromised the man whom she hoped to help to majesty and safety; she, the determined guider of the first blow, must see that wound become a widening crack in the walls of love and honor, to bury what she hoped to shelter; and she has grown powerless to shore them up, or to let them fall upon herself and not upon him. The breaking heart pulls down her wits into its ruin.
Her undaunted mettle was but the over-bracing tonic of a moment, which punishes the structure it exalted.
"A little water clears us of this deed:How easy is it, then!"
So she and Heaven differed; and the husband found it was not easy. A piteous self-arraignment of love is quite as potent to destroy her as a conscience that can sleep no more.
Night after night, her gentlewomen attend the repetition of scenes which she enacts, like a shadowy pageant in Hades of bygone life. Sleep's hammer tolls the castle-bell: "One, two! why, then 'tis time to do't." How Duncan bleeds! Who would have thought it ofso old a man? And "here's the smell of the blood still:" how the fastidious woman, who loved the "perfumes of Arabia," sickens at it! The little hands fumble in the spectral water: they are not sweetened; the damned spot still clings. What! are these hands never to be clean again? But there's no time for washing out this deed; for, hark! there's Innocency knocking at the gate. Here no porter will be needed to usher dread disclosure into this sighing heart. "What's done cannot be undone." And what a reminiscence of her sense of wifehood and of the sacredness of pure domestic ties she wakens when she says, "The thane of Fife had a wife: where is she now?" Sent by her first impetuous push into Duncan's grave.
In the "slumbery agitation" of the last night which shuts her from our view, she stretches a winsome hand toward the air-drawn husband of her dream: "Come, come! come, come! give me your hand! to bed, to bed, to bed!"
So, not long after, a cry of women struggles through the castle, and bids Macbeth's desperate engrossment know that the "brief candle" of her night-walking sorrow has gone out. He has no time to permit his queen to die, but she has slipped from his arms. Alas! another shape of Nature's womanhood by Nature destroyed. Malcolm may suspect that she destroyed herself, but Shakspeare furnished no pretext for that palace rumor. And it so disconcerts the pathos which he intended should accumulate around the temper of her crime that many commentators suspect the scene, uponthis and other considerations, of having been tampered with. Malcolm may call her "fiend-like," if he will. 'Tis pardonably honest English from a son who slept one night so near to a murdered father. What was to Malcolm a righteous phrasing of the deed does not cover Shakspeare's implication of the mood which led to it. The great poet delivers to us a sprig of rosemary, for remembrance of Nature in a woman, but enjoins us to tie it up with rue.