Chapter 26

LADY MACBETH.

Consider it not so deeply!

MACBETH.

But wherefore could not I pronounce, amen? I had most need of blessing, and amen Stuck in my throat.

LADY MACBETH.

These deeds must not be thought After these ways: so, it will make us mad.

MACBETH.

Methought I heard a voice cry, "Sleep no more," &c. &c.

LADY MACBETH.

What do you mean? who was it that thus cried? Why, worthy Thane, You do unbend your noble strength, to think So brainsickly of things.--Go, get some water, &c. &c.

Afterwards, in act iii., she is represented as muttering to herself,

Nought's had, all's spent, When our desire is got without content;

yet immediately addresses her moody and conscience-stricken husband--

How now, my lord? why do you keep alone, Of sorriest fancies your companions making? Using those thoughts, which should indeed have died With them they think on? Things without remedy, Should be without regard; what's done, is done.

But she is nowhere represented as urging him on to new crimes, so far from it, that when Macbeth darkly hints his purposed assassination of Banquo, and she inquires his meaning, he replies,

Be innocent of the knowledge, dearest chuck, Till thou approve the deed.

The same may be said of the destruction of Macduff's family. Every one must perceive how our detestation of the woman had been increased, if she had been placed before us as suggesting and abetting those additional cruelties into which Macbeth is hurried by his mental cowardice.

If my feeling of Lady Macbeth's character be just to the conception of the poet, then she is one who could steel herself to the commission of a crime from necessity and expediency, and be daringly wicked for a great end, but not likely to perpetrate gratuitous murders from any vague or selfish fears. I do not mean to say that the perfect confidence existing between herself and Macbeth could possibly leave her in ignorance of his actions or designs: that heart-broken and shuddering allusion to the murder of Lady Macduff (in the sleeping scene) proves the contrary:--

The thane of Fife had a wife; where is she now?

But she is nowhere brought before us in immediate connection with these horrors, and we are spared any flagrant proof of her participation in them. This may not strike us at first, but most undoubtedly has an effect on the general bearing of the character, considered as a whole.

Another more obvious and pervading source of interest arises from that bond of entire affection and confidence which, through the whole of this dreadful tissue of crime and its consequences, unites Macbeth and his wife; claiming from us an involuntary respect and sympathy, and shedding a softening influence over the whole tragedy. Macbeth leans upon her strength, trusts in her fidelity, and throws himself on her tenderness.

O full of scorpions is my mind, dear wife!

She sustains him, calms him, soothes him--

Come on; Gentle my lord, sleek o'er your rugged looks; Be bright and jovial 'mong your guests to-night.

The endearing epithets, the terms of fondness in which he addresses her, and the tone of respect she invariably maintains towards him, even when most exasperated by his vacillation of mind and his brain-sick terrors, have, by the very force of contrast, a powerful effect on the fancy.

By these tender redeeming touches we are impressed with a feeling that Lady Macbeth's influence over the affections of her husband, as a wife and a woman, is at least equal to her power over him as a superior mind. Another thing has always struck me. During the supper scene, in which Macbeth is haunted by the spectre of the murdered Banquo, and his reason appears unsettled by the extremity of his horror and dismay, her indignant rebuke, her low whispered remonstrance, the sarcastic emphasis with which she combats his sick fancies, and endeavors to recall him to himself, have an intenseness, a severity, a bitterness, which makes the blood creep.

LADY MACBETH.

Are you a man?

MACBETH.

Ay, and a bold one, that dare look on that Which might appall the devil.

LADY MACBETH.

O proper stuff! This is the very painting of your fear: This is the air-drawn dagger, which, you said, Led you to Duncan. O, these flaws and starts (Impostors to true fear) would well become A woman's story, at a winter's fire, Authoriz'd by her grandam! Shame itself! Why do you make such faces? When all's done You look but on a stool. What! quite unmann'd in folly?

Yet when the guests are dismissed, and they are left alone, she says no more, and not a syllable of reproach or scorn escapes her: a few words in submissive reply to his questions, and an entreaty to seek repose, are all she permits herself to utter. There is a touch of pathos and of tenderness in this silence which has always affected me beyond expression: it is one of the most masterly and most beautiful traits of character in the whole play.

Lastly, it is clear that in a mind constituted like that of Lady Macbeth, and not utterly depraved and hardened by the habit of crime, conscience must wake some time or other, and bring with it remorse closed by despair, and despair by death. This great moral retribution was to be displayed to us--but how? Lady Macbeth is not a woman to start at shadows; she mocks at air-drawn daggers; she sees no imagined spectres rise from the tomb to appall or accuse her.[115] The towering bravery of _her_ mind disdains the visionary terrors which haunt her weaker husband. We know, or rather we feel, that she who could give a voice to the most direful intent, and call on the spirits that wait on mortal thoughts to "unsex her," and "stop up all access and passage of remorse"--to that remorse would have given nor tongue nor sound; and that rather than have uttered a complaint, she would have held her breath and died. To have given her a confidant, though in the partner of her guilt, would have been a degrading resource, and have disappointed and enfeebled all our previous impressions of her character; yet justice is to be done, and we are to be made acquainted with that which the woman herself would have suffered a thousand deaths of torture rather than have betrayed. In the sleeping scene we have a glimpse into the depths of that inward hell: the seared brain and broken heart are laid bare before us in the helplessness of slumber. By a judgment the most sublime ever imagined, yet the most unforced, natural, and inevitable, the sleep of her who murdered sleep is no longer repose, but a condensation of resistless horrors which the prostrate intellect and powerless will can neither baffle nor repel. We shudder and are satisfied; yet our human sympathies are again touched: we rather sigh over the ruin than exult in it; and after watching her through this wonderful scene with a sort of fascination, we dismiss the unconscious, helpless, despair-stricken murderess, with a feeling which Lady Macbeth, in her waking strength, with all her awe-commanding powers about her, could never have excited.

It is here especially we perceive that sweetness of nature which in Shakspeare went hand in hand with his astonishing powers. He never confounds that line of demarcation which eternally separates good from evil, yet he never places evil before us without exciting in some way a consciousness of the opposite good which shall balance and relieve it.

I do deny that he has represented in Lady Macbeth a woman "_naturally cruel_,"[116] "_invariably savage_,"[117] or endued with "_pure demoniac firmness_."[118] If ever there could have existed a woman to whom such phrases could apply--a woman without touch of modesty, pity or fear,--Shakspeare knew that a thing so monstrous was unfit for all the purposes of poetry. If Lady Macbeth had been _naturally_ cruel, she needed not so solemnly to have abjured all pity, and called on the spirits that wait on mortal thoughts to _unsex_ her; nor would she have been loved to excess by a man of Macbeth's character; for it is the sense of intellectual energy and strength of will overpowering her feminine nature, which draws from him that burst of intense admiration--

Bring forth men children only, For thy undaunted metal should compose Nothing but males.

If she had been _invariably_ savage, her love would not have comforted and sustained her husband in his despair, nor would her uplifted dagger have been arrested by a dear and venerable image rising between her soul and its fell purpose. If endued with _pure demoniac firmness_, her woman's nature would not, by the reaction, have been so horribly avenged, she would not have died of remorse and despair.

* * * * *

We cannot but observe that through the whole of the dialogue appropriated to Lady Macbeth, there is something very peculiar and characteristic in the turn of expression: her compliments, when she is playing the hostess or the queen, are elaborately elegant and verbose: but, when in earnest, she speaks in short energetic sentences--sometimes abrupt, but always full of meaning; her thoughts are rapid and clear, her expressions forcible, and the imagery like sudden flashes of lightning: all the foregoing extracts exhibit this, but I will venture one more, as an immediate illustration.

MACBETH.

My dearest love, Duncan comes here to-night.

LADY MACBETH.

And when goes hence?

MACBETH.

To-morrow,--as he purposes.

LADY MACBETH.

O never Shall sun that morrow see! Thy face, my thane, is as a book, where men May read strange matters;--to beguile the time, Look like the time; bear welcome in your eye Your tongue, your hand; look like the innocent flower, But be the serpent under it.

What would not the firmness, the self-command, the enthusiasm, the intellect, the ardent affections of this woman have performed, if properly directed? but the object being unworthy of the effort, the end is disappointment, despair, and death.

The power of religion could alone have controlled such a mind; but it is the misery of a very proud, strong, and gifted spirit, without sense of religion, that instead of looking upward to find a superior, looks round and sees all things as subject to itself. Lady Macbeth is placed in a dark, ignorant, iron age; her powerful intellect is slightly tinged with its credulity and superstition, but she has no religious feeling to restrain the force of will. She is a stern fatalist in principle and action--"what is done, is done," and would be done over again under the same circumstances; her remorse is without repentance, or any reference to an offended Deity; it arises from the pang of a wounded conscience, the recoil of the violated feelings of nature: it is the horror of the past, not the terror of the future; the torture of self-condemnation, not the fear of judgment; it is strong as her soul, deep as her guilt, fatal as her resolve, and terrible as her crime.

If it should be objected to this view of Lady Macbeth's character, that it engages our sympathies in behalf of a perverted being--and that to leave her so strong a power upon our feelings in the midst of such supreme wickedness, involves a moral wrong, I can only reply in the words of Dr. Channing, that "in this and the like cases our interest fastens on what is _not_ evil in the character--that there is something kindling and ennobling in the consciousness, however awakened, of the energy which resides in mind; and many a virtuous man has borrowed new strength from the force, constancy, and dauntless courage of evil agents."[119]

This is true; and might he not have added, that many a powerful and gifted spirit has learnt humility and self-government, from beholding how far the energy which resides in mind may be degraded and perverted?

* * * * *

In general, when a woman is introduced into a tragedy to be the presiding genius of evil in herself, or the cause of evil to others, she is either too feebly or too darkly portrayed; either crime is heaped on crime, and horror on horror, till our sympathy is lost in incredulity, or the stimulus is sought in unnatural or impossible situations, or in situations that ought to be impossible, (as in the Myrrha or the Cenci,) or the character is enfeebled by a mixture of degrading propensities and sexual weakness, as in Vittoria Corombona. But Lady Macbeth, though so supremely wicked, and so consistently feminine, is still kept aloof from all base alloy. When Shakspeare created a female character purely detestable, he made her an accessory, never a principal. Thus Regan and Goneril are two powerful sketches of selfishness, cruelty, and ingratitude; we abhor them whenever we see or think of them, but we think very little about them, except as necessary to the action of the drama. They are to cause the madness of Lear, and to call forth the filial devotion of Cordelia, and their depravity is forgotten in its effects. A comparison has been made between Lady Macbeth and the Greek Clytemnestra in the Agamemnon of Eschylus. The Clytemnestra of Sophocles is something more in Shakspeare's spirit, for she is something less impudently atrocious; but, considered as a woman and an individual, would any one compare this shameless adulteress, cruel murderess, and unnatural mother, with Lady Macbeth? Lady Macbeth herself would certainly shrink from the approximation.[120]

The Electra of Sophocles comes nearer to Lady Macbeth as a poetical conception, with this strong distinction, that she commands more respect and esteem, and less sympathy. The murder in which she participates is ordained by the oracle--is an act of justice, and therefore less a murder than a sacrifice. Electra is drawn with magnificent simplicity and intensity of feeling and purpose, but there is a want of light, and shade, and relief. Thus the scene in which Orestes stabs his mother within her chamber, and she is heard pleading for mercy, while Electra stands forward listening exultingly to her mother's cries, and urging her brother to strike again, "another blow! another!" &c. is terribly fine, but the horror is too shocking, too _physical_--if I may use such an expression: it will not surely bear a comparison with the murdering scene in Macbeth, where the exhibition of various passions--the irresolution of Macbeth, the bold determination of his wife, the deep suspense, the rage of the elements without, the horrid stillness within, and the secret feeling of that infernal agency which is ever present to the fancy, even when not visible on the scene--throw a rich coloring of poetry over the whole, which does not take from "the present horror of the time," and yet relieves it. Shakspeare's blackest shadows are like those of Rembrandt; so intense, that the gloom which brooded over Egypt in her day of wrath was pale in comparison--yet so transparent that we seem to see the light of heaven through their depth.

In the whole compass of dramatic poetry, there is but one female character which can be placed near that of Lady Macbeth; the MEDEA. Not the vulgar, voluble fury of the Latin tragedy,[121] nor the Medea in a hoop petticoat of Corneille, but the genuine Greek Medea,--the Medea of Euripides.[122]

There is something in the _Medea_ which seizes irresistibly on the imagination. Her passionate devotion to Jason, for whom she had left her parents and country--to whom she had given all, and

Would have drawn the spirit from her breast Had he but asked it, sighing forth her soul Into his bosom;[123]

the wrongs and insults which drive her to desperation--the horrid refinement of cruelty with which she plans and executes her revenge upon her faithless husband--the gush of fondness with which she weeps over her children, whom in the next moment she devotes to destruction in a paroxysm of insane fury, carry the terror and pathos of tragic situation to their extreme height. But if we may be allowed to judge through the medium of a translation, there is a certain hardness in the manner of treating the character, which in some degree defeats the effect. Medea talks too much: her human feelings and superhuman power are not sufficiently blended. Taking into consideration the different impulses which actuate Medea and Lady Macbeth, as love, jealousy, and revenge on the one side, and ambition on the other, we expect to find more of female nature in the first than in the last: and yet the contrary is the fact: at least, my own impression as far as a woman may judge of a woman, is, that although the passions of Medea are more feminine, the character is less so; we seem to require more feeling in her fierceness, more passion in her frenzy; something less of poetical abstraction,--less art, fewer words: her delirious vengeance we might forgive, but her calmness and subtlety are rather revolting.

These two admirable characters, placed in contrast to each other, afford a fine illustration of Schlegel's distinction between the ancient or Greek drama, which he compares to sculpture, and the modern or romantic drama, which he compares to painting. The gothic grandeur, the rich chiaroscuro, and deep-toned colors of Lady Macbeth, stand thus opposed to the classical elegance and mythological splendor, the delicate yet inflexible outline of the Medea. If I might be permitted to carry this illustration still further, I would add, that there exists the same distinction between the Lady Macbeth and the Medea, as between the Medusa of Leonardo da Vinci and the Medusa of the Greek gems and bas reliefs. In the painting, the horror of the subject is at once exalted and softened by the most vivid coloring, and the most magical contrast of light and shade. We gaze--until, from the murky depths of the background, the serpent hair seems to stir and glitter as if instinct with life, and the head itself, in all its ghastliness and brightness, appears to rise from the canvass with the glare of reality. In the Medusa of sculpture, how different is the effect on the imagination! We have here the snakes convolving round the winged and graceful head: the brows contracted with horror and pain; but every feature is chiselled into the most regular and faultless perfection; and amid the gorgon terrors, there rests a marbly, fixed, supernatural grace, which, without reminding us for a moment of common life or nature, stands before us a presence, a power, and an enchantment!

FOOTNOTES:

[66] Milton.

[67] "That the treachery of King John, the death of Arthur, and the grief of Constance, had a real truth in history, sharpens the sense of pain, while it hangs a leaden weight on the heart and the imagination. Something whispers us that we have no right to make a mock of calamities like these, or to turn the truth of things into the puppet and plaything of our fancies."--See Characters of Shakspeare's Plays.--To consider _thus_ is not to consider _too_ deeply, but not deeply _enough_.

[68] _Grave_, in the sense of mighty or potent.

[69] Fulvia, the first wife of Antony.

[70] The well-known violence and coarseness of Queen Elizabeth's manners, in which she was imitated by the women about her, may in Shakspeare's time have rendered the image of a royal virago less offensive and less extraordinary.

[71] She was as good as her word. See the life of Antony in Plutarch.

[72] _i. e._ retinue.

[73] _i. e._ silver coins, from the Spanish _plata_.

[74] Cleopatra replies to the first word she hears on recovering her sense, "No more _an empress_, but a mere woman!"

[75] _i. e._ sedate determination.--JOHNSON

[76] The Cleopatra of Jodelle was the first regular French tragedy: the last French tragedy on the same subject was the Cleopatre of Marmontel. For the representation of this tragedy Vaucanson, the celebrated French mechanist, invented an automaton asp, which crawled and hissed to the life,--to the great delight of the Parisians. But it appears that neither Vaucanson's asp, nor Clairon, could save Cleopatre from a deserved fate. Of the English tragedies, one was written by the Countess of Pembroke, the sister of Sir Philip Sydney; and is, I believe, the first instance in our language, of original dramatic writing, by female.

[77] "The sober eye of dull Octavia."--Act v. scene 2.

[78] Octavia was never in Egypt.

[79] "The Octavia of Dryden is a much more important personage than in the Antony and Cleopatra of Shakspeare. She is, however, more cold and unamiable, for in the very short scenes in which the Octavia of Shakspeare is introduced, she is placed in rather an interesting point of view. But Dryden has himself informed us that he was apprehensive that the justice of a wife's claim would draw the audience to her side, and lessen their interest in the lover and the mistress. He seems accordingly to have studiously lowered the character of the injured Octavia who, in her conduct to her husband, shows much duty and little love." Sir W. Scott (in the same fine piece of criticism prefixed to Dryden's All for Love) gives the preference to Shakspeare's Cleopatra.

[80] In all, about two thousand pounds.

[81] The corresponding passage in the old English Plutarch runs thus: "My son, why dost thou not answer me? Dost thou think it good altogether to give place unto thy choler and revenge, and thinkest thou it not honesty for thee to grant thy mother's request in so weighty a cause? Dost thou take it honorable for a nobleman to remember the wrongs and injuries done him, and dost not in like case think it an honest nobleman's part to be thankful for the goodness that parents do show to their children, acknowledging the duty and reverence they ought to bear unto them? No man living is more bound to show himself thankful in all parts and respects than thyself, who so universally showest all ingratitude. Moreover, my son, thou hast sorely taken of thy country, exacting grievous payments upon them in revenge of the injuries offered thee; besides, thou hast not hitherto showed thy poor mother any courtesy. And, therefore, it is not only honest, but due unto me, that without compulsion I should obtain my so just and reasonable request of thee. But since by reason I cannot persuade ye to it, to what purpose do I defer my last hope?" And with these words, herself, his wife, and children, fell down upon their knees before him.

[82] _Vide_ Daru, Histoire de Bretagne.

[83] _Vide_ Sir Peter Leycester's Antiquities of Chester.

[84] By the treaty of Messina, 1190

[85] Malone says, that "In expanding the character of the bastard, Shakspeare seems to have proceeded on the following slight hint in an old play on the story of King John:--

Next them a bastard of the king's deceased-- A hardy wild-head, rough and venturous."

It is easy to _say_ this; yet who but Shakspeare could have expanded the last line into a Falconbridge?

[86] The Greek Merope, which was esteemed one of the finest of the tragedies of Euripides, is unhappily lost; those of Maffei, Alfieri, and Voltaire, are well known. There is another Merope in Italian, which I have not seen: the English Merope is merely a bad translation from Voltaire.

[87] "Queen Elinor saw that if he were king, how his mother Constance would look to bear the most rule in the realm of England, till her son should come of a lawful age to govern of himself."--HOLINSHED.

[88] King John, Act iii, Scene 1.

[89] Louis VII. of France, whom she was accustomed to call, in contempt, _the monk_. Elinor's adventures in Syria, whither she accompanied Louis on the second Crusade, would form a romance.

[90] Henry II. of England. It is scarcely necessary to observe that the story of Fair Rosamond, as far as Elinor is concerned, is a mere invention of some ballad-maker of later times.

[91] _Vide_ Mezerai.