Part 18

During all these scenes, up to the murder of Duncan, Lady Macbeth is laboring under an excitement of mind which sustains her in carrying out the design of her husband. The time is purposely made very short—only a few hours between the arrival of Duncan and his death—so that she may not break down. All is hurry and movement, and arrangement of detail. There is no time for reaction. The very necessity for immediate action serves as an irritant to the nerves, and strains all her thoughts and feelings to an unnatural pitch. Still, when the murder is on the point of being done, she keeps up her courage by drink; for the strain is almost too great. In this excited state her inflamed will has got completely the command of her; and to have it all over, and not caring about the dreadful design longer, she says that had Duncan “not resembled my father as he slept, I had done it.” But though she can talk of dashing out the brains of her babe while it was smiling in her face, she was not, even in this excitement, able to strike Duncan, because she thought he looked like her father. Her woman’s hand would have failed her had she attempted it. But all her powers are bound up in this one design. She has come to a violent determination, and this she will carry out, come what may. She thrusts aside all compunction of conscience, and makes such a noise by action in her brain, that its still small voice cannot be heard.

Macbeth, on the contrary, is of a colder and more brutal nature. His determination is sullen, and it lies like an immovable rock on which the flames of his imagination burn like momentary fires of straw, and over which his superstitious visions pass like clouds or fogs, and then clear away, leaving the rock unchanged. Just before he commits the murder, Banquo comes in and tells him that the king

“hath been in unusual pleasure, and Sent forth great largess to your offices. This diamond he greets your wife withal, By the name of most kind hostess; and shut up In measureless content.”

But this does not touch Macbeth, nor induce a moment’s hesitation. Banquo then speaks of the three weird sisters, and says, “To you they have show’d some truth;” and Macbeth answers falsely:—

“I think not of them; Yet, when we can entreat an hour to serve, We’d spend it in some words upon that business, If you would grant the time.”

Thus, cold and collected, he bids him “Good repose,” sends off the servant, and waits for the bell to ring, which is the sign that all is ready for him to murder Duncan. In this interval we have his three characteristic features brought out one after the other: the cloudy vision of the air-drawn dagger; then the straw-fire of his poetry about Hecate and withered murder’s sentinel, the wolf, and Tarquin’s ravishing strides; and, as these clear off, the stern, sullen resolution underneath—“Whiles I threat he lives;” “I go, and it is done.”

When the murder is done, the two are equally distinct in character,—she energetic and practical, he visionary and superstitious; and so they part.

Thus far, be it observed, Lady Macbeth has supposed her husband to be merely “infirm of purpose;” but the next scene is to open her eyes to a glimpse of his real character.

Macbeth has become perfectly calm and cold again in a few minutes, and makes his appearance immediately after the knocking. He is completely master of himself, offers to conduct Macduff to the king, and when Macduff says he knows it will be a “joyful trouble” to him, answers like a proverb, calmly, “The labor we delight in physics pain.” The king is then found dead, and the noise brings Lady Macbeth from her room. What a difference is now visible in the way in which she and he speak and act! When Macduff says, “Our royal master’s murdered!” she cries out, “Woe! alas! what, in our house?” and says not a word more. Macbeth, however, who is only afraid of shadows, but who, with the daylight, has no fear of looking at dead bodies, or adding one or two more with his sword, goes to the room of Duncan, and then reappears, without the faintest shadow of feeling, and makes a little hypocritical poem on the event:—

“Had I but died an hour before this chance, I had liv’d a blessed time; for, from this instant, There’s nothing serious in mortality: All is but toys: renown and grace is dead; The wine of life is drawn, and the mere lees Is left this vault to brag of.”

“What is amiss?” says Donalbain. And Macbeth cries, “You are, and do not know’t. The spring, the head, the fountain of your blood is stopp’d; the very source of it is stopp’d.”

This is Macbeth’s rant and fustian. He has no feeling, and, as usual, he makes the pretense of poetry serve him. The head, the spring, the fountain, the source is stopped, is stopped.

And this stuff he recites coolly, although he has but a moment before wantonly killed the two grooms; nay, he does not mention it until afterwards, on their being spoken of by Lenox, when this hypocritical villain cries:—

“O, yet I do repent me of my fury, That I did kill them.

_Macd._ Wherefore did you so?

_Macb._ Who can be wise, amaz’d, temperate and furious, Loyal and neutral, in a moment? No man: The expedition of my violent love Outrun the pauser, reason.—Here lay Duncan, His _silver_ skin lac’d with his _golden_ blood; And his gash’d stabs look’d like a breach in nature, For ruin’s wasteful entrance: there, the murderers, Steep’d in the colors of their trade, their daggers Unmannerly breech’d with gore: who could refrain, That had a heart to love, and in that heart Courage to make’s love known?”

During this amazing speech, in which he poetizes so elaborately, and with such curious artifice coldly paints the picture of the man and friend he had just murdered, Lady Macbeth has been looking and listening in silence. Suddenly, for the first time, she sees what her husband really is; she sees that he has neither heart nor conscience; for no man possessing either could have acted or talked as he has since the murder of Duncan. So far from having any feeling of shame or remorse, he, without provocation, wantonly, and with no sufficient object, has added two other murders to it; and, with a cold-blooded artificial hypocrisy, he paints in his stilted way the scene of Duncan’s death, and has command enough of himself to seek out elaborate and high-flown phrases. But Lady Macbeth, whose courage, stimulated by excitement, has carried her through the murder, now suddenly breaks down. This new revelation of her husband’s character, and the ghastly picture which he summons up before her of the scene of the murder, are too much for her. She swoons, loses all consciousness, and is carried out. In her violent excitement, while there was something practical to busy her mind and her body with, she could carry back the daggers and smear the grooms with blood; but she could not bear the vivid remembrance of it when there was nothing to do, and when the excitement was over: as women will go through extreme dangers, stand at the surgeon’s table during terrible operations, be great and strong in a great crisis, and then suddenly faint and fall when the work is over, unable to bear the remembrance of what they have gone through.

This swooning of Lady Macbeth is the crisis of her nature. From this time forward she is no more what she has appeared; we hear no more urging of Macbeth to strengthen his throne by other crimes; no more taunts by her that he is infirm of purpose; no more allusions to his amiable weaknesses of character. She has begun to know him and to fear him. She only endeavors to tranquilize him and content him with what he has got. But still she does not know him; for his nature, before hidden, like secret writing, comes out little by little before the fire of his heated ambition and superstitious fears.

At this swooning-point the two characters of Lady Macbeth and her husband cross each other. She has thus far only made the running for Macbeth, and he now takes up the race and passes her; she not only does not follow, but withdraws. Henceforth he rushes to his goal alone; alone he arranges the death of Banquo and Fleance.

When next they meet she is no longer the same person we have known; she feels the gnawing tooth of remorse; she is calmed and cowed by what she has done:—

“Nought’s had, all’s spent, Where our desire is got without content: ’Tis safer to be that which we destroy, Than, by destruction, dwell in doubtful joy.”

And as Macbeth enters she endeavors to tranquilize his mind. She has his confidence no longer; he avoids her, and keeps alone after the murder of the king. She, not yet aware of the abysses of his nature, and little imagining that he has been plotting the murder of Banquo, supposes that the secret of his perturbations, of the solitude he now seeks, and of his avoidance of her, is the remorse that he begins to feel, and says as he enters:—

“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.”

His answer shows it is no remorse which is haunting him; his sorry fancies are new plots of murder:

“We have scotch’d the snake, not kill’d it;”

and we are still “in danger of her former tooth.”

“But let The frame of things disjoint, both the worlds suffer, Ere we will eat our meal in _fear_, and sleep In the affliction of these terrible dreams That shake us nightly: better be with the dead, Whom we, to gain our place, have sent to peace, Than on the torture of the mind to lie In restless ecstasy. Duncan is in his grave; After life’s fitful fever, he sleeps well; Treason has done his worst: nor steel, nor poison, Malice domestic, foreign levy, nothing, Can touch him further!”

Here is one of those cases where he uses his poetry as a cloak to his real thoughts. Yet despite his hypocrisy, which takes in his wife, his real meaning is clear. He would rather die than to go on in this fear: rather be like Duncan, whom they have at all events “sent to peace,” and whom nothing can “touch further,” than on “the torture of the mind to lie in restless ecstasy.” What is this “fear”? what is this “torture of the mind”? Is it, as Lady Macbeth supposes, from remorse? Oh, no! he tells us himself what it is; it is solely because Banquo and Fleance are alive:—

“O, full of scorpions is my mind, dear wife! Thou know’st that Banquo, and his Fleance, lives.”

This it is that tortures him, and this only.

“But in them nature’s copy’s not eterne,”

says she; meaning, as she has throughout this scene, solely to console him and draw his thoughts away. They may die; a thousand accidents may happen to them; you may outlive them; don’t torture yourself with vain fears. “_There’s_ comfort yet,” he cries, “they are assailable;” and now, after his old fashion, he breaks into poetry:

“Then be thou _jocund_: ere the bat hath flown His cloister’d flight; ere, to black Hecate’s summons, The shard-borne beetle, with his drowsy hums, Hath rung night’s yawning peal, there shall be done A deed of dreadful note.”

“What’s to be done?” she cries; for having completely misunderstood him through all the previous part of this interview, she completely fails to see what he now means. But he has no longer confidence in her; and so, with caressing words, and probably with some caressing act, he answers her:

“Be innocent of the knowledge, dearest chuck, Till thou applaud the deed.”

How could she suspect his real meaning? This murdering hypocrite had just told her that Banquo was coming to the feast that night, and bade her be jovial, and said to her,—

“Let your remembrance apply to Banquo; Present him eminence, both with eye and tongue.”

And this he proposes to her after having just left the murderers whom he has hired to waylay and kill Banquo, and entertaining no real doubt in his mind that Banquo will never reach the supper—certainly never reach it unless his plot miscarries. Well might she “marvel at his words.” What follows is full of poetry and wickedness; but it is plain that he was a mystery to her now, a riddle which she could not read.

The banquet-scene now comes, and Macbeth, believing that he has secured the death of Banquo and Fleance, is happy, until the murderers come in and tell him that Fleance has escaped. This upsets him:—

“Then comes _my fit_ again: I had else been perfect, Whole as the marble, founded as the rock, As broad and general as the casing air: Now I am cabin’d, cribb’d, confin’d, bound in To saucy doubts and fears.”

So he poetizes his condition, for superstitious fears always inflame his imagination; but he cannot regain his composure; his “fit” is on him, as it “hath been from his youth.” He conjures up the phantom of Banquo to threaten him and his throne, and this ghost shakes him with superstitious terror. Lady Macbeth, to whom it is invisible, rouses herself at this; and not only not comprehending these starts and flaws of fear, but having a contempt for him, endeavors to recall him to himself by sharp words; but it is useless, his fit will not leave him, and the company is dismissed in confusion. When the guests have gone, Lady Macbeth’s spirit and courage, which were momentary, have fled. She does not taunt him, but soothes him. He, as soon as he recovers himself, begins with Macduff, whom he also means to murder:—

“Strange things I have in head, that will to hand, Which must be acted, ere they may be scann’d.”

To this she only says, not imagining his meaning,

“You lack the season of all natures, sleep.”

Henceforward Lady Macbeth disappears; we hear nothing of her save in the terrible sleep-walking scene; she is dying of remorse. But Macbeth goes to the weird sisters, to learn whether “Banquo’s issue shall ever reign in this kingdom.” They answer, “Seek to know no more:” and he cries out, “I _will_ be satisfied; deny me this, and an eternal curse fall on you.” And when they show him the issue of Banquo, kings, he is enraged beyond control, and curses them. Henceforth for him no hesitations, no delays. He speaks directly enough now.

“From this moment The firstlings of my heart shall be The firstlings of my hand. And even now, To crown my thoughts with acts, be it thought and done: The castle of Macduff I will surprise; Seize upon Fife; give to the edge o’ th’ sword His wife, his babes, and all unfortunate souls That trace him in his line. No boasting like a fool; This deed I’ll do before this purpose cool: But no more _sights_!”

And no more _sights_ he has; but he is still haunted by fears. And when “the English power is near, led on by Malcolm, his uncle Siward, and the good Macduff,” burning for revenge, Macbeth’s spirit falters. He rushes into violent rages and then subsides into vague fears, and then endeavors to strengthen his heart by recalling the mysterious promises of the weird sisters that he shall not fall by the hand of any man of woman born, or before Birnam wood come to Dunsinane; but, do all he can, “he cannot buckle his distempered cause within the belt of rule,” though he declares,—

“The mind I sway by and the heart I bear Shall never sag with doubt, nor shake with fear.”

Still he does fear; and in one of his dispirited moods, after blazing out at the messenger who tells him of the approach of Birnam wood,—

“The devil damn thee black, thou cream-fac’d loon! Where got’st thou that goose look?”

he says, finding that there are ten thousand men coming to attack him, and his followers are not stanch,—

“This push Will chair me ever, or disseat me now. I have liv’d long enough: my way of life Is fall’n into the sear, the yellow leaf: And that which should accompany old age, As honor, love, obedience, troops of friends, I must not look to have; but, in their stead, Curses, not loud, but deep, mouth-honor, breath, Which the poor heart would fain deny.”

But in a moment he is himself again, and cries:—

“I’ll fight till from my bones the flesh be hack’d. Give me my armor.”

In this mood the illness and death of the queen is nothing to him; he fights bravely to the end; though, superstitious to the last, his “better part of man” is cowed by the knowledge that Macduff “was from his mother’s womb untimely ripped,” and so not of woman born.

And so, by the sword of Macduff, perishes the worst villain, save Iago, that Shakespeare ever drew.

We have called the witches the projections of Macbeth’s evil thoughts, and suggested that they were only objective representations of his inward being. To this it may be objected that they were seen also by Banquo. But this may well be; for Banquo also seems to have had evil intentions, which are vaguely hinted at in the play. He constantly harps on the idea that his children are to be kings. Approaching the castle of Inverness at night, before the murder of the king, he says,—

“Hold, take my sword.... A heavy summons lies like lead upon me, And yet I would not sleep: merciful powers! Restrain in me the cursed thoughts that nature Gives way to in repose!—Give me my sword.”

Meeting then Macbeth, he gives him the diamond sent by the king to Lady Macbeth; and after speaking of Duncan’s “measureless content,” he says,—

“I dreamt last night of the three weird sisters: To you they have show’d some truth.”

At which Macbeth proposes an interview, to

“Spend it in some words upon _that_ business.”

To which he readily consents.

The “cursed thoughts,” then, are connected with his dreams about the weird sisters.

At his next appearance the same thoughts agitate him in Macbeth’s palace at Fores. His first words are—in soliloquy—

“Thou hast it now, king, Cawdor, Glamis, all, As the weird women promis’d; and, I fear, Thou play’dst most foully for’t: yet it was said It should not stand in thy posterity, But that myself should be the root and father Of many kings. If there come truth from them (As upon thee, Macbeth, their speeches shine), Why, by the verities on thee made good, May they not be my oracles as well, And set me up in hope? But, hush! no more.”

When it is recollected that, after the scene on the heath with the soldiers, these are nearly all the words we have from Banquo, it seems to be pretty clearly indicated that his thoughts at least were not perfectly honest and what they should have been.

The weird sisters are but outward personifications of the evil thoughts conceived and fermenting in the brains of Banquo and Macbeth; both high in station, both generals in the king’s army, both friends, and both nourishing evil wishes. They are visible only to these two friends; and though they are represented as having an outer existence independent of them, they are, metaphysically speaking, but embodiments of the hidden thoughts and desires of Banquo and Macbeth; as such they are a new and terrible creation, differing from the vulgar flesh-and-blood witches of Middleton. They look not like the inhabitants of the earth; they vanish into thin air; wild, vague, mysterious, they come and go, like devilish thoughts that tempt us, and take shape before us, as if they had come from the other world. The devils that haunt us and tempt us come out of ourselves, like the weird sisters of Macbeth.

INDEX.

Actors, in England, 234–239.

Adam, figure of, by Michel Angelo, 26.

Adriani, Giovanni Battista, letter of, to Vasari, 140.

Æschines, statement by, regarding Miltiades, 129, _note_.

Æschylus and Euripides, 30; quotation from, 206.

Agasias the Ephesian, 109.

Agathenor, 94.

Ageledas, teacher of Polyclitus, 88.

Agoracrites, 66, 67, 70; and Alcamenes, 71; and Phidias, 72; statue of Nemesis, at Rhamnus, by, 70, 91.

Ajax, the antique, 6.

Alberti, Leon Battista, 3, 8.

Alcamenes, 55; the Venus of the Gardens, by, 68, 90; and Agoracritos, 71; and Phidias, 72, 96; high distinction of, as an artist, 90; works in the Temple of Zeus, 93.

Alcimus Avitus, quotation from his _De Origine Mundi_, 127.

Alexander, taming Bucephalus, statue of, at Rome, 77, 78; praises Apelles and Lysippus, 131.

Alfieri, 8.

Ammonius, 108.

Anacreon, quotations from, 144.

“Ancora imparo,” a motto used by Michel Angelo in old age, 13.

Androsthenes, 88, 92.

Angelo, Michel, 4–7; everything in Florence recalls, 8; his house, 8, 9; birth, 9; death, 10; early studies, 10; early efforts as a sculptor, 10; his Cupid and Bacchus, 10; his Pietà, 11, 20; colossal figure of David, 11, 20; Sistine Chapel, 11; the Moses, 11, 20; Medici Chapel, 11; Pauline Chapel, 11; the Last Judgment, 11; sculptor, painter, architect, engineer, and poet, 11, 43; erection of St. Peter’s, 11; his circumstances and characteristics, 12; always learning, 13; his later poetry, 13; his power as a sculptor, 13, 20, 39; his great works in the Medicean Chapel, 13–21; meaning of his statues of Day, Night, Aurora, and Crepuscule, 16–18; quatrain by, 17; influence of Savonarola and Dante on, 17; his works bad models for imitation 20; figure of Christ by, in the Church of the Minerva, 20; his struggles against ill-health and overwork, 20, 21; his frescoes in the Sistine Chapel, 21–29; Bramante’s jealousy of, 21, 22, 24; Pope Julius II. strikes him with a cane, 25; his extraordinary rapidity in working, 25, 26; greater as a painter than as a sculptor, 26; of heroic spirit, 29; fragments of letters by, 30, 36; Rafaelle and, 30–33, 35; anecdote of, 32; personal characteristics of, 33, 34; and Vittoria Colonna, 34; extract from a sonnet by, 34; Dante the favorite poet of, 35; Savonarola the friend of, 35; originality of, 35; devotion to his family, 36; generosity of, 36, 37; violent temper of, 33, 37; patience of, 37; difficulties under which he labored, 37, 38; described by Vigenero, 38; the impatience of his genius, 39; appointed architect of St. Peter’s when sixty years old, 39; Palazzo Farnese, the Church of Sta. Maria degli Angeli, and the Laurentian Library, designed by, 41; not responsible for St. Peter’s as it now stands, 42; poetry of, 42, 43; trained in all the arts, 43; the greatest monuments of his artistic power, 44; enduring kingdom of, 48; popular errors about, 49, 50, 69; compared with Phidias, 79, 80.

Antenor, the first maker of iconic statues, 129.

Antoninus Pius, 230.

Apelles, and Alexander, 131; praised by Nicephorus Chumnus, 132; price paid for one of his portraits of Alexander, 132; portraits of Campaspe and Phryne by, 132; story about, by Pliny, 132.

Aphrodite Urania, chryselephantine statue of, by Phidias, 53, 58.

Apollo, the Temple of, at Phigaleia, 53.

Apollodorus, 182.

Apollonius, 109.

Appian hymn, the, 206.

Arcesilaus, sketches by, 135; price received by, for a drinking-cup, 170; for a statue of Fabatus, 170, 176.

Aretino, 3, 8.

Arezzo, discoveries at, 178.

Arezzo, Guido di, 4.

Argos, the Temple of Juno at, 53.

Ariosto, 3; Dante and, 30; lively spirit of, 42.

Aristotle, distinction drawn by, between Phidias and Polyclitus, 99–102.

Arrian, cited, 66, 70.