Part 16

Macbeth and his wife, so far from being the characters above described, are their direct opposites. He is the villain, who can never satiate himself with crimes. She, having committed one crime, dies of remorse. She is essentially a woman—acts suddenly and violently, and then breaks down, and wastes her life and thoughts in bitter repentance. He is, on the contrary, essentially a man—who resolves slowly and with calculation, but once determined and entered upon a course of action, obstinately pursues it to the end, haunted by no remorse for his crimes, and agitated by no regrets and doubts, so long as his wicked plans do not miscarry. The spring of his nature is ambition;[28] and in working out his ends he is cruel, pitiless, and bloody. He is without a single good trait of character; and from the beginning to the end of the play, at every step, he develops deeper abysses of cruelty and inhumanity in his nature. When he is first presented to us, we, in common with Lady Macbeth, are completely unaware of his baseness. He is a thorough hypocrite, and deceives us, as he deceived her. We see that he has a grasping ambition, but we believe that he is amiable and weak of purpose, for so Lady Macbeth tells us; but as the play goes on, his character develops itself, and at last we find that he has neither heart nor tenderness for anybody or anything; that his will is unconquerable; that he is utterly without moral sense, is hopelessly selfish, and wickedly cruel. All he loves is power. His ambition is insatiable. It grows by what it feeds on. The more he has, the more he desires, and he is ready to commit every kind of horror for the sake of attaining his object. He is restrained by no scruples of honor, by no claims of friendship, by no sensitiveness of conscience. He murders his sovereign, from whom he has just received large gifts and honors in his own house; and then instantly compasses the death of his nearest friend and guest, Banquo. Not content with this, he then seeks the life of Macduff; and, enraged because he has fled, savagely and in cold blood puts the whole of his family to the sword. There is a steady growth of evil in his character from the beginning to the end, or rather a steady development of his evil nature.

Malcolm and Macduff, who at first were his friends and companions, afterwards, when they had learned to “know” him, call him “treacherous” and “devilish.” So far from agreeing in the character given of him by Lady Macbeth, they say,—

“_Macduff._ Not in the legions Of horrid hell can come a devil more damned In evil to top Macbeth.

_Malcolm._ I grant him bloody, Luxurious, avaricious, false, deceitful, Sudden, malicious, smacking of every sin That has a name.”

Yet even they admit that

“This tyrant, whose sole name blisters our tongues, Was once thought honest.”

As he had deceived the world, so he deceived his wife. His bloody and treacherous nature was at first as unknown to her as to his friends. As they thought him “honest,” she thought him amiable and infirm of purpose, greatly ambitious, and one who would “wrongly win,” but yet kindly of nature. Fiery temptations had not as yet brought out the secret writing of his character. It was with Macbeth as it was with Nero: their real natures did not exhibit themselves at first; but when once they began to develop, their growth was rapid and terrible. And in each of them there was a vein of madness. Essentially a hypocrite, and secretive by nature, Macbeth had passed for only a brave and stern soldier when he first makes his appearance. Yet even in his fierce Norwegian fight we see a violent and bloody spirit. In the very beginning of the play, one of his soldiers describes him, in his encounter with Macdonald, as one who,—

“Disdaining fortune, with his brandished steel, Which smoked with bloody execution, Like Valour’s minion, Carved out his passage till he faced the slave; And ne’er shook hands nor bade farewell to him Till he unseamed him from the nape to the chaps, And fixed his head upon our battlements.”

This is rather a grim picture, and scarcely corresponds to the character usually assigned to Macbeth. Here is not only no infirmity of purpose, but a stern, unwavering resolution, carving its way through all difficulties and against all opposition. Thus far, however, all his deeds had been loyal and for a lawful purpose. Still within his heart burnt, as he himself says, “black and deep desires,” and only circumstances and opportunities were needed to show that he could be as fierce and bloody in crime as he had shown himself in doing a soldier’s duty. They were already urging him in the very first scene; but, secretive of nature, he kept them out of sight.

“Stars, hide your fires; Let not light see my black and deep desires; The eye wink at the hand; yet let that be, Which the eye fears, when it is done, to see.”

Thus he cries to himself as he speeds to his wife. The “murder,” which was but an hour before “fantastical,” has now become a fixed resolve.

A nature like this, secretive, false, deceitful, and wicked, which had thus far satisfied itself in a legitimate way, and, having no temptation in his own house, had never shown its real shape there, would naturally not have been understood by his wife. Glimpses she might have of what he was, but not a thorough understanding of him. Blinded by her personal attachment to him, and herself essentially his opposite in character, as we shall see, she would naturally have misinterpreted him. The secretive nature is always a puzzle to the frank nature. Accustomed to go straight to her object, whether good or bad, she was completely deceived by his hypocritical and sentimental pretenses, and supposed his nature to be “full of the milk of human kindness.” But time also opened her eyes, though, perhaps, never, even to the last, did she fully comprehend him. “What thou wouldst highly, that wouldst thou holily,” she would never have said after the murder of the king. But however this may be, that her view of his character is false is proved by the whole play. When did he ever show an iota of kindness? What crime did his conscience or the desire to act “holily” ever prevent his committing? When did he ever exhibit any want of bloody determination? Infirm of purpose? He was like a tiger in his purposes and in his deeds. The murder of Duncan did not satisfy him. The next morning, he kills the two chamberlains, in cold blood, to gratify his wanton cruelty. It was impossible that they should testify against him—they had been drugged, and he could have had no fear of them. Then immediately he plots the murder of Banquo and Fleance, and all the while hypocritically conceals his foul purposes even from his wife; and because Macduff “failed his presence at the tyrant’s feast,” he determines also to murder him. Foiled of this, he then cruelly and hideously puts to the sword his wife and little children. In all these murders, after the king’s, Lady Macbeth not only takes no part, but she is even kept in ignorance of them. She drive him to the commission of his crimes? She does not know of them till they are done. They are plotted and determined upon in secret by Macbeth alone, and carried into execution with a bloody directness and suddenness. He is “bloody, false, deceitful, sudden,”—essentially a hypocrite, false in his pretenses, secret in his plotting, loud in his showy talk, but sudden and bloody in his crimes and in his malice.

Thus far, however, we have seen but one side of Macbeth. The other side was its opposite. Bold, ambitious, and treacherous, he was also equally imaginative and superstitious. In action he feared no man. Brave as he was cruel, and ready to meet anything in the flesh, he was equally visionary of head, a victim of superstitious fears, and a mere coward before the unreal fancies evoked by his imagination. He has the Scottish second-sight, and visions and phantoms shake his soul. Show him twenty armed men who seek his life, he encounters them with a fierce joy. Show him a white sheet on a pole, and tell him it is a ghost, and he trembles abjectly. He conjures up for himself phantoms that “unfix his hair and make his seated heart knock at his ribs;” he is distracted with “horrible imaginings.” His excited imagination always plays him false and fills him with momentary and superstitious fears; but these fears never ultimately control his action. They are fumes of the head, and being purely visionary, they are also temporary. They come in moments of excitement, obscure for a time his judgment, and influence his ideas; but having regard solely to things unreal, they vanish with the necessity of action.

These superstitious fears have nothing to do with conscience or morals. He has no morals; there is no indication of a moral sense in any single word of the whole play. The only passage which faintly indicates a sense of right and wrong is when he urges to himself, as reasons why he should not kill Duncan, not only that the king is his kinsman, his king, and his guest, but that he has borne his faculties so meekly, that his virtues would plead like angels trumpet-tongued against the deep damnation of his taking-off. This, however, is mere talk, and has reference only to the indignation which his murder will excite, not to any sorrow Macbeth has for the crime. His sole doubt is lest he may not succeed; for, as he says,—

“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.”

The idea of being restrained from committing this murder by any religious or moral scruples is very far from his thought. Right or wrong, good or bad, have nothing to do with the question; and as for the “life to come,” that is mere folly.

But while his moral sense is dead, his imagination is nervously alive. It engenders visions that terrify him: after the murder is done, he thinks he hears phantom-voices crying, “Sleep no more! Glamis hath murdered sleep; and therefore Cawdor shall sleep no more, Macbeth shall sleep no more;” and these voices so work upon his superstitious fears, that he is afraid for the moment to return to the chamber, and carry the daggers back and smear the grooms with blood. He is, as Lady Macbeth says, “brainsickly,” and “fears a painted devil.” This is superstition, not remorse—a momentary imaginative fear, not a permanent feeling. In a few minutes he has changed his dress, and calmly makes speeches as if nothing had occurred,—nay, this cold-blooded hypocrite is ready within the hour to commit two new and wanton murders on the chamberlains, and boastfully to refer them to his loyal spirit and loving heart, inflamed by horror at the hideous murder of the king, which he has himself committed.

The same superstitious fear attacks him when he hears that Birnam Wood is moving to Dunsinane Hill; but it does not prevent this creature, so “full of the milk of human kindness,” from striking the messenger, calling him “liar and slave,” and threatening,—

“If thou speak’st false, Upon the next tree shalt thou hang alive Till famine cling thee.”

So, too, when Macduff tells him that he was “not of woman born,” awed for a moment by his superstitious fears, he cries,—

“Accursed be that tongue that tells me so, For it hath cow’d my better part of man! ... I’ll not fight with thee.”

At times, under the influence of an over-excitable imagination acting upon a nature thoroughly superstitious, his intellect wavers, and he is subject to sudden aberrations of mind resembling insanity. They are, however, evanescent, and in a moment he recovers his poise, descending through a poetical phase into his real and settled character of cruelty and wickedness. In the dagger-scene, where he is alone, these three phases are perfectly marked. The visionary dagger “proceeding from the heat-oppressed brain” soon vanishes, then follows the poetic mania, and then the stern resolution of murder. In the banquet-scene, when the ghost of Banquo rises, the poetic interval is less marked, for Macbeth is under the restraint of the company and under the influence of his wife; but scarce has the company gone when his real character returns. He is again forming new resolutions of blood. His mind reverts to Macduff, whose life he threatens. He is bent “to know, by the worst means, the worst;” “strange things I have in head, that will to hand.”

This aberration of mind Macbeth has in common with Lear, Hamlet, and Othello. But in Macbeth alone does it take a superstitious shape. The trance of Othello is but a momentary condition, in which his goaded imagination, acting upon an irritated sense of honor, love, and jealousy, obliterates for an instant the real world. Hamlet’s aberration, when it is not feigned, as for the most part it is, is but the “sore distraction” of a mind upon which the burden of a great action is fixed, which he is bound either to accept or to reject, but in regard to which he hesitates, not because he lacks decision of character, but solely because he cannot satisfy himself that he has sure grounds for action, and that he is not deceived as to the facts which are the motive of his action; once satisfied as to the grounds for action, he is decisive and prompt, as is clearly shown in the manner in which he disposes of Guildenstern and Rosencrantz on board the vessel, and in the instant slaying of the king himself, when the evidence of his infamy is clear. But while he is yet undecided and struggling with himself to solve this sad problem of the king’s guilt, he rejects all ideas of love as futile and impertinent, and, more than that, doubts whether Ophelia herself is not, unconsciously to herself, made a tool of by the king and queen. Lear, again, is “heart-struck.” His madness comes from wounded pride and affection. The ingratitude and cruelty of his daughters shake his mind, and to his excited spirit the very elements become his “pernicious daughters:” “I never gave you kingdoms, called you children.” In all except Macbeth, the nature thus driven to madness is noble in itself, moral in its character, and warm in its affections. The aberrations of Macbeth are superstitious, and have nothing to do with the morals or the affections.

Macbeth’s imagination is, however, a ruling characteristic of his nature. His brain is always active; and when it does not evoke phantoms, it indulges in fanciful and poetic images. He is a poet, and turns everything into poetry. His utterance is generally excited and high-flown, rarely simple and real, and almost never expresses his true feelings and thoughts. His heart remains cold while his head is on fire. On all occasions his first impulse is to poetize a little; and having done this, he goes about his work without regard to what he has said. His sayings are one thing; his doings are quite another. Shakespeare makes him rant intentionally, as if to show that in such a character the imagination can and does work entirely independently of real feelings and passions. There is no serious character in all Shakespeare’s plays who constantly rants and swells in his speech like Macbeth; and this is plainly to show the complete unreality of all his imaginative bursts. In this he differs from every other person in this play. Yet when he is really in earnest, and has some plain business in hand, he can be direct enough in his speech, as throughout the second interview with the weird sisters, and in the scene with the two murderers whom he sends to kill Banquo and Fleance; or when, enraged at the escape of Fleance, he forgets to be a hypocrite, and his real nature clearly expresses itself in direct words, full of savage resolve. But on all other occasions, when he is not in earnest and intends to deceive, or when his brain is excited, he indulges in sentimental speeches, violent figures of speech, extravagant personifications, and artificial tropes and conceits. Even in the phantom-voices he imagines crying to him over Duncan’s body, he cannot help this peculiarity. He curiously hunts out conceits to express sleep. He “murders sleep, the innocent sleep; sleep, that knits up the ravell’d sleeve of care, the death of each day’s life, sore labor’s bath, balm of hurt minds, great nature’s second course, chief nourisher in life’s feast.” No wonder that Lady Macbeth, amazed, cries out, “What do you mean?” But he cannot help going on like a mad poet. His language is full of alliteration, fanciful juxtaposition of words, assonance, and jingle. At times, so strong is this habit, he makes poems to himself, and for the moment half believes in them. Only compare, in this connection, the natural, simple pathos of the scene where Macduff hears of the barbarous murder of his wife and children, with the language of Macbeth, when the death of Lady Macbeth is announced to him. Macduff “pulls his hat upon his brows,” and gives vent to his agony in the simplest and most direct words. Here the feeling is deep and sincere:—

“All my pretty ones? Did you say, all?—O hell-kite!—All? What, all my pretty chickens, and their dam, At one fell swoop?

_Mal._ Dispute it like a man.

_Macd._ I shall do so; But I must also feel it like a man: I cannot but remember such things were, And were most precious to me.—Did heaven look on, And would not take their part? Sinful Macduff, They were all struck for thee! naught that I am, Not for their own demerits, but for mine, Fell slaughter on their souls. Heaven rest them now!

* * * * *

O, I could play the woman with my eyes.”

But when Macbeth is told of the death of his wife, he makes a little poem, full of alliterations and conceits. It is an answer to the question, What is life like? What can we say about it now?

“To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow, Creeps in this petty pace from day to day, To the last syllable of recorded time; And all our yesterdays have lighted fools The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle! Life’s 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.

_Enter a Messenger._

Thou com’st to use thy tongue; thy story quickly.”

Has this any relation to true feeling? Do men of any feeling, whose hearts are touched, fall to improvising poems like this, filled with fanciful images, when great sorrows come upon them? This speech is full of “sound and fury, signifying nothing.” There is no accent from the heart in it. It is elaborate, poetic, cold-blooded. “Life is a candle,” “a poor player,” “a walking shadow,” “a tale told by an idiot.” We have his customary alliterations: “petty pace,” “dusty death,” “day to day;” his love of repeating the same word, “to-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow,” just as we have “If it were done when ’tis done, then ’twere well it were done quickly;” and his “Sleep no more, Macbeth does murder sleep,—sleep, that knits up,” etc.; “Sleep no more! Glamis hath murdered sleep; and therefore Cawdor shall sleep no more, Macbeth shall sleep no more.” He cannot forget himself enough to cease to be ingenious in his phrases. As a poem this speech is striking; as an expression of feeling it is perfectly empty. At the end of it he has quite forgotten the death of his wife; he is only employed in piling up figure after figure to personify life. What renders the unreality of this still more striking is the sudden change which comes over him upon the entrance of the messenger. In an instant he stops short in his poem, and his tone becomes at once decided and harsh; his wife’s death has passed utterly out of his mind. When the messenger tells him that Birnam Wood is beginning to move, with a sudden burst of rage he turns upon him, calls him liar and slave, and threatens to hang him alive till famine cling him, if his report prove to be incorrect. This is the real Macbeth. From this time forward he never alludes to Lady Macbeth; but, in a strange condition of superstitious fear and soldierly courage, he calls his men to arms, and goes out crying,—

“Blow, wind! come, wrack! At least we’ll die with harness on our back.”

And this throughout is the character of Macbeth’s utterances. He is not like Tartuffe, a religious hypocrite; he is a poetical and sentimental hypocrite. His phrases and figures of speech have no root in his real life; they are only veneered upon them. “His words fly up, his thoughts remain below.” When he is poetical he is never in earnest. Sometimes his speeches are merely oratorical, and made from habit and for effect; sometimes they are hypocritical, and used to conceal his real intentions; and sometimes they are the expression of an inflamed and diseased imagination stimulated by superstition. But they are generally bombastic and swelling in tone, and are so intended to be. His habit of making speeches and inventing curious conceits is so strong, that he even “unpacks his heart with words” when alone, so as to leave himself free and direct to act. Thus, in one of his famous soliloquies, mark the unreal quality of all the pretended feeling, the mixture of immorality, bombast, and hypocrisy, the assonances and alliterations, the plays upon words, the extravagant figures, all showing the excitability of the brain and not of the heart:—

“If _it were done_ when ’tis _done_, then _’twere_ well _It were done_ quickly. If th’ assassination _C_ould trammel up the _c_onsequence, and _c_atch, 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.”

Then, after some questions about killing his guest, his kinsman, his king, which would seem honest, but for what comes after and for the utter reckless immorality which has gone before these words, his imagination excites itself, and runs into a wild and extravagant figure which means nothing. Duncan’s virtues, he says,—

“Will plead like angels _t_rumpet-_t_ongued against The _d_eep _d_amnation of his _t_aking-off.”

No sooner does he begin to swell and alliterate again than he goes wild:—

“And pity, like a _n_aked _n_ew-_b_orn _b_abe, 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_.”

This is pure rant, and intended to be so. It is the product of an unrestrained imagination which exhausts itself in the utterance. But it neither comes from the heart nor acts upon the heart.

Again, in the soliloquy of the air-drawn dagger, the superstitious, visionary Macbeth, who always projects his fancies into figures and phantoms, after addressing this

“false creation Proceeding from the heat-oppressed brain,”

falls at once into poetic declamation about the night, and indulges himself in strange images and personifications. A man about to commit a murder who invents these conceits must be a poetical villain:—

“Now witchcraft celebrates Pale Hecate’s offerings; and wither’d murder, Alarum’d by his sentinel, the wolf, Whose howl’s his watch, thus with his stealthy pace, With Tarquin’s ravishing strides, towards his design Moves like a ghost.”

Can anything be more extraordinary and elaborate than this pressing of one conceit upon another? Wither’d murder has a sentinel, the wolf, who howls his watch, and who with stealthy pace strides with Tarquin’s ravishing strides like a ghost! Shakespeare makes no other character systematically talk like this.