Part 11

On the threshold of this terrible adventure in what mood do we find them? The project, as we have seen, is no stranger to the breast of either, and yet with what strangely different effect has the poison worked its spell! They have been apart, and the soul of each has been thrown back upon itself. In the thick of action, “disdaining fortune with his brandished steel,” Macbeth has become infirm of purpose: alone in her castle at Inverness, Lady Macbeth has brooded over the crime until it has completely possessed her. With the concentration of a woman’s nature, she has driven from her brain all other thoughts save this: and she waits now with impatient expectancy for the hour that shall put her courage to the proof. Here, as we see, the divergence of sex has already asserted itself, working such a transformation that when they meet they scarcely recognise one another. The sudden coming of the occasion so long plotted and desired by both has hastened the development of individual character. He finds in the “dearest partner” of his greatness a being so formidable that he regards her for the moment with feelings of mingled admiration and dismay:

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

And though, with the woman’s finer instinct, she has partly divined and anticipated his mood, she is appalled at the extent of the change it has wrought in him. Beneath the armour of the valiant soldier she finds, as she thinks, the trembling heart of a coward, and struck with sudden terror at his failing purpose, she tries to recall him to his former self:

When you durst do it, then you were a man; And, to be more than what you were, you would Be so much more the man.

From this moment they are strangers in spirit, though the old bond still holds them together. And yet to us, who view the whole picture with the poet’s larger vision, the process of development moves in obedience to inevitable law. For at such a crisis it is natural in a man to anticipate: in a woman to remember; on the eve of action he looks forward with apprehension: on the morrow she looks back with regret; and while his nature is stronger in restraint, hers, on the contrary, surrenders itself more completely to the passion of remorse. The finer moral feelings of a woman are retrospective, for her imagination feeds and broods upon the past. She is often more intrepid in action because the intensity of her purpose bars the view of consequence; and whether the enterprise be heroic or malign, her indifference to danger, which then far surpasses the courage of man, is never so superbly illustrated as when she labours in his service, and not for any ends of her own. And so it happens that where she only follows she sometimes seems to lead, and the man, who has devised the policy which her readier resource only avails to carry into execution, appears in the guise of the reluctant victim of her stronger purpose and more undaunted will.

In order the better to exhibit these tendencies of her sex, Shakespeare has pictured for us in Lady Macbeth a woman of the highest nervous organisation, whose deep devotion gives to her character a passionate intensity of purpose that seems at times to be more than human. While the troubled surface of Macbeth’s mind sends back but a blurred image of the dark secret that it hides, in her transparent nature the guilty project of his ambition is clearly and sharply mirrored. Before the murder of Duncan she can see nothing but the crime and its reward, that crime--

Which shall to all our nights and days to come Give solely sovereign sway and masterdom.

Macbeth’s message has reminded her that the time is drawing near, and she resolves to chase from his brain--

All that impedes thee from the golden round,

which the witches have placed upon his brow. In the next moment she hears of the king’s expected arrival, and then she knows that the hour so long awaited has come at last, and she nerves herself for the one supreme effort of her life:

The raven himself is hoarse That croaks the fatal entrance of Duncan Under my battlements. Come, you spirits That tend on mortal thoughts, unsex me here; And fill me, from the crown to the toe, top-full Of direst cruelty!

But it is a vain cry; for throughout the terrible experiences of the next few hours the feminine nature is ever dominant. If there are no women save those who deal in gentle deeds, then Jael did not drive the nail into the forehead of Sisera, and it was not Judith’s hand that compassed the death of Holofernes. And yet, if such as they were truly of the sex which claims them, by a still firmer title may we say of Lady Macbeth that she is every inch a woman. It is the woman who in this same scene greets her husband on his return:

Great Glamis! worthy Cawdor! Greater than both, by the all-hail hereafter! Thy letters have transported me beyond This ignorant present, and I feel now The future in the instant.

And in “the instant” she now lives, looking neither before nor after; for the future that she sees stretches no further than the dreaded deed which is to bring fulfilment of all their cherished hopes. As she has shut out the past, with whatever compassionate scruples it might recall, so in like manner her fixed concentration on the business in hand excludes all vision of the time to come. If she had been endowed with Macbeth’s imagination, which could ride so swiftly on the track of consequence, Duncan would indeed have gone forth on the morrow as he purposed. It needed this fatal combination to effect what neither would have accomplished alone--the man’s guilty conception poisoning and possessing the woman’s soul, the woman’s surrender to his will so complete and passionate that when he falters she stands before him as the glittering image of his former self, a superb creation of his own brain, endowed with all, and more than all, the courage he had lost. This is Lady Macbeth on the eve of Duncan’s murder. From the moment that she perceives his wavering resolution she takes the yoke of action on to her own shoulders. She contrives and schemes every detail of the crime, and with ever-increasing impetuosity urges his failing footsteps towards the goal he now fears to reach. But the precious moments are speeding onward, and her passionate arguments seem powerless to lift his sickened spirit; till at the last, with all the rhetoric of despair, she presents to his affrighted gaze a blackened image of herself, thinking, as well she may, that such a vision will prove more potent than curses to fan into flame the dying embers of his resolve:

I have given suck, and know How tender ’tis to love the babe that milks me; I would, while it was smiling in my face, Have pluck’d my nipple from his boneless gums, And dash’d the brains out, had I so sworn as you Have done to this.

It seems almost incredible, but it is nevertheless true, that this frenzied appeal has over and again been accepted as Lady Macbeth’s judicial report upon her own character. A speech which is conceived in the most daring spirit of dramatic fitness, and which bears in every word the stamp of the special purpose for which it is uttered, is transformed into a prosaic statement of fact; and we can only wonder we are not also invited to believe that this somewhat rigorous treatment of the young accounts for the fact that the play contains no mention of the lady’s surviving offspring.

When the scene in which the awful passage occurs has drawn to its close, Lady Macbeth’s task is already more than half accomplished. Her fiery eloquence has roused him from his stupor, and, inspired by the dauntless spirit which he had himself inspired, he bends up “each corporal agent to this terrible feat.” But she does not rest until all is finished; she never falters till the goal is passed. The woman’s quivering nerves, more potent than the iron sinews of a giant, bear her up safely to the end; and then, with a woman’s weakness, they break, not beneath the weight they bear, but beneath the weight they have borne. So long as the need of action endures she remains unflinching and undismayed. It is she who drugs the grooms in preparation for the murder: it is she who at the supreme moment, when he can do no more, revisits the chamber of death to complete what he has left undone:

Infirm of purpose! Give me the daggers: the sleeping and the dead Are but as pictures: ’tis the eye of childhood That fears a painted devil.

A speech which shows how little she knew herself; for throughout all her brief after-life this picture of “the sleeping and the dead” is set in flames before her haunted vision and burnt with fire into the depths of her soul.

From this time forward Macbeth and his wife change places. In outward seeming at least, their positions are reversed, though when we look beneath the surface there is an inexorable consistency in the conduct of both. He, whose imagination had foreseen all the consequences of this initial step in crime, braces himself without hesitation to the completion of his fatal task; she, who had foreseen nothing, is thrown back upon the past, her dormant imagination now terribly alert, and picturing to her broken spirit all the horrors she had previously ignored. As the penalty of his crime is unresting action, her heavier doom is isolated despair; and it is significant to observe that it is she who suffers most acutely all the moral torments he had only anticipated for himself. Macbeth indeed had “murdered sleep,” but it was her sleep he had murdered as well as his own; and the blood that, he feared, not “all great Neptune’s ocean” would wash away, counts for little with one who afterwards plunged breast-high into the full tide of blood, but remains with her a haunting memory to the end. This change is already well marked in the scene immediately following the murder, when he suddenly wrests the conduct of affairs from her hands, and she sinks appalled at the dark vista of unending crime which his readiness in resource now first opens to her view. He who before had stood with trembling feet upon the brink of the stream now rushes headlong into the flood; to complete the chain of suspicion, he murders the two grooms without an instant’s hesitation; and before the next Act opens he has already planned the death of Banquo and his son.

But from this point he proceeds alone. Her help is no longer needed, and even if it were not so, she has none now to give. “Naught’s had, all’s spent.” Her dream is shattered; the vision of glory is fled away into the night, and she who had felt “the future in the instant” can only brood over the wreck of the past. The crown for which she had struggled presses like molten lead into her brain; the lamp which has lighted her so far only flings its rays backward on the blood-stained pathway she has trodden; and, bitterest of all to her woman’s soul, the evil she had wrought for his sake now breaks their lives asunder and parts them for ever. For his spirit has no access to the anguish of remorse that is fast hurrying her to the tomb, and she on her side can take no part in those darker projects with which he seeks to buttress the tottering fabric of his ambition. In all tragedy there is nothing so pitiful in its pathos as the passage in which she strives to grant to her husband the support of which she herself stands so sorely in need. She feels instinctively that he shuns her company, and surmises that he too is suffering the lonely pangs of remorse, little guessing that he comes to her fresh from a new scheme of murder:

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 all remedy, Should be without regard: what’s done, is done.

With what a jarring note comes his answer:

We have scotched the snake, not killed it.

And yet, despite this answer, with its clear indication of the true drift of his thoughts, she still fails to realise the gulf that divides them. All through the banquet scene she cannot rid herself of the belief that he is haunted, as she is haunted, by the vision of the murdered king, and even when he strips off the mask and bares the inner workings of his breast--

For mine own good, All causes shall give way; I am in blood Stepp’d in so far, that, should I wade no more, Returning were as tedious as go o’er,

she listens without understanding, and still interpreting his sufferings by her own, answers him from the sleepless anguish of her own soul:

You lack the season of all natures, sleep.

In the interval, before we meet Lady Macbeth again, and for the last time, she has learnt all; and beneath the weight of her guilty knowledge her shattered nerves have snapped and broken. Throughout the wandering utterances of her dying hours her imagination is unalterably fixed upon the scene and circumstances of Duncan’s death, but across this unchanging background flit other spectres besides that of the murdered king. Banquo is there, and Macduff’s unhappy wife: she is spared no item in the dreary catalogue of her husband’s crimes; and yet, always overpowering these more recent memories, come the thick-crowding thoughts of that one fatal hour, when her spirit shot like a flame across the sky, and then fell headlong down the dark abyss of night.

The character of Macbeth standing in vivid contrast to that of his wife, has been subject to an equal amount of misconception, though of a different sort. He is commonly represented as being pursued by the constant warnings of conscience, which are only silenced by the evil ascendancy of the commanding figure at his elbow. But this is to antedate the action of the drama, and to mistake the real basis of his nature. If the voice of conscience ever gained a hearing, it was in some earlier hour, not pictured by Shakespeare, before this settled scheme of murder had taken firm possession of his soul. The opening chorus of the witches, no less than the bearing of the man himself, warn us that he has long ceased to wrestle with the messengers of Heaven, and that he is now under the dominion of influences that have a different origin. The forces that sway Macbeth as we know him are intellectual rather than moral, and in order to exhibit more effectively that tendency to deliberation which is characteristic of his sex, Shakespeare has endowed him with the most potent imagination, which presents the consequences of conduct as clearly as though the secrets of the future were mirrored in a glass. It is not conscience, the whispered echo of eternal law, which causes him to falter on the verge of action: it is the instinct of security, which, as Hecate sings:

Is mortal’s chiefest enemy.

And so indeed it proved; for the initial step in crime once past, the very forces that had been strongest in restraint now carry him with unhalting speed through crime after crime, until his headlong course is stayed by the hand of Macduff. And seeing that Macbeth’s keen vision had pictured what was in store for him, it is no wonder that he trembles with irresolute purpose while his wife’s blind impulse moves with unbroken strength. In his case it is neither conscience nor cowardice that cries halt, but an imagination morbidly vivid and alert, which sees the oak in the acorn, and converts the trickling spring into the full tide of the river that rushes to the sea. All this is plainly imaged for us in the soliloquy that follows his first interview with his wife:

If it were done, when ’tis done, then ’twere well It were done quickly: if the assassination Could trammel up the consequence, and catch, With his surcease, success; that but this blow Might be the be-all and the end-all here, But here, upon this bank and shoal of time, We’d jump the life to come. But, in these cases, We still have judgment here; that we but teach Bloody instructions, which, being taught, return To plague the inventor: this even-handed justice Commends the ingredients of our poisoned chalice To our own lips.

Then in the passage that follows he realises in more particular detail the horror and execration which such a deed will awaken. Duncan’s virtues, he sees,

Will plead like angels, trumpet-tongued, against The deep damnation of his taking-off: And pity, like a naked new-born babe, Striding the blast, or heaven’s cherubin, hors’d Upon the sightless couriers of the air, Shall blow the horrid deed in every eye, That tears shall drown the wind.

Here we see set forth in clearest language both the scope and the limit of Macbeth’s moral vision; and as we note his growing irresolution, it is impossible not to be reminded of another of Shakespeare’s characters in whom the imaginative temperament worked with equal potency. Macbeth and Hamlet are in some points strangely allied, but when they are placed side by side the elements of antagonism quickly overpower the outward appearance of similarity. Both were men in whom the supremacy of the imagination induced paralysis of action, but in the one case its exercise is bounded by the limits of our present world, and in the other it starts from the confines of mortal life and seeks to pierce the veil of eternity. Macbeth takes no heed of what may lurk in those dark recesses beyond the grave; if he can only be assured of safety here he is ready to “jump the life to come.” To Hamlet, on the other hand, the fortune of this world, and even death itself, are but as shadows, for his imagination is haunted by the mysteries of that unseen realm of which death is but the portal--

The undiscovered country, from whose bourne No traveller returns.

It is this which “puzzles the will” and arrests the uplifted arm, and though the voice that urges him to action comes to him from the grave, the very fact that the command is borne by a supernatural messenger suffices to ensure its neglect, and sends the imagination once more adrift upon the limitless ocean of eternity. Macbeth too trafficks in the supernatural, but with what different purpose and result! He holds converse with the weird sisters only that Fate may echo the dark project he fears to utter; and when he consults these “black and midnight hags” again, it is to wring from their lips the knowledge that may guide him still further in his settled career of crime. And they answer him according to his will. He is already far advanced in blood, but they beckon him still onward, and, speaking with the double tongue of hope and fear, bid him beware, and yet be bold, leading him by such sure steps to his doom that the struggle at last becomes almost sublime, and Fate, which he had rashly challenged, enters the lists against him.

When we have once grasped the motive-power of Macbeth’s character, it is not difficult to reconcile the apparent inconsistency in his conduct before and after the murder of Duncan. By this one act his trembling hesitation is suddenly converted into an iron consistency of purpose. The view of consequence that had held him for a while irresolute on the threshold of crime now becomes the strongest incentive to whatever may be needed to make his position secure. His imagination is thus both the source of inaction and the spur that urges him to morbid activity: it is at once the friend of conscience and its bitterest foe: at one moment the lamp that reveals to him his hideous design and all its attendant train of evil, in the next a lurid flame that lights up a thousand avenues of danger, only to be guarded by the exercise of a relentless cruelty and an unflinching courage. In nearly every utterance of Macbeth after the murder we are allowed to see how clearly he himself apprehends the danger of his position, and the sinister policy which it demands. “Things bad begun make strong themselves by ill”; and accordingly, with no more compunction than an executioner might feel, he proceeds in the course of action which he had foreseen from the first to be inevitable. Even his superstitious fears do not shake him in his resolve, and he has no sooner recovered from the vision of Banquo’s ghost than he determines to visit again the weird sisters, that he may know “by the worst means the worst.”

Strange things I have in head, that will to hand, Which must be acted ere they may be scanned.

This is the first intimation that we have of any menace to the safety of Macduff, and when, in a following scene, Macbeth hears of his flight to England, he is full of self-reproaches for his procrastination in crime:

The flighty purpose never is o’ertook Unless the deed go with it: from this moment, The very firstlings of my heart shall be The firstlings of my hand.

And then, baulked in his guilty designs upon the husband, he straightway resolves to wreak his vengeance upon his family:

The castle of Macduff I will surprise; Seize upon Fife; and give to the edge o’ the sword His wife, his babes, and all unfortunate souls That trace him in his line.

Truly indeed and with prophetic vision had he said to his wife that he was “but young in deed,” and that his terror at Banquo’s ghost was only “the initiate fear that wants hard use.”

And yet, despite this full revelation of the man’s nature, who can fail to be moved by the splendid despair of his closing hours, when, with all the forces of heaven and earth arrayed against him, he struggles with dauntless courage to the end? His imagination, still informing his shattered spirit, lights up the ruin of his life, and presents to his wearied gaze the hated object that he has become in the sight of all men:

My way of life Is fallen into the sear, the yellow leaf: And that which should accompany old age, As honour, love, obedience, troops of friends, I must not look to have; but, in their stead, Curses not loud, but deep, mouth-honour, breath, Which the poor heart would fain deny, and dare not.

There is no refuge of madness for him. He has seen the end from the beginning, and even when the end has come it has no terror which he had not known long ago. This only is added to his earlier knowledge, though the truth, alas! comes too late, that this present life, which he had held so dear, and for which he had sacrificed all, this life, which had been the tomb of his virtue, and of his honour, is

... but a walking shadow; a poor player, That struts and frets his hour upon the stage, And then is heard no more: it is a tale Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, Signifying nothing.

And so, with the “sound and fury” of this present world still ringing in his ears, he passes out into that “life to come” of which he had never dreamed at all.

HENRY IRVING

The value of personality on the stage has rarely been exhibited with greater force than in the case of Sir Henry Irving. Nature had not specially equipped him for his calling; in several respects, indeed, she had weighted him with disabilities which were destined to prove a serious hindrance in the progress of his career. But she had dowered him, as if by way of compensation, with a force and persistence of character that finally shaped for themselves a mode of expression which satisfied the demands of his ambition. And this sense of resident power was mirrored in the man himself, even in the earlier days when those physical peculiarities, which he never wholly lost, were, for the time, gravely imperilling his success upon the stage.