Part 23

It is also a very common procedure to illustrate the excellences of Shakspeare by comparing them with the inferior work of the contemporary dramatists. Either Shakspeare at his best ought to be matched with the other playwrights at their best, or else we ought to concede that his occasional weaknesses, which are like theirs, are not theirs, but his own. It is absurd to keep Shakspeare posturing incessantly in the finest attitude of the several periods of his style. During the Elizabethan age, England's soil stood thick with true poets whose fragrance often makes us suspect that Shakspeare is near. It is dangerous to be too positive upon the matter of sentiment as well as style. Take for an instance this:--

"I am so light At any mischief, there's no villainy But is a tune methinks."

That lightness of heart is Middleton's. It is stray pollen from the garden of Shakspeare. But nothing is fructified: there is no tune in the villainous stuff which precedes and follows.

The wounded sergeant easily justifies his mangled metre and ragged pomposity of style. We should suspect a more polished messenger of shamming faintness from loss of blood. He talks exactly as a common soldier should who is fresh from the great fight, puffed up with "valor's minion," and steadying himself upon reeking lines to deliver his message of victory. Middleton could not have so caught the color of the moment.

It is also supposed that Middleton wrote the scene, because when Ross enters he tells the King that

"Norway himself, with terrible numbers, Assisted by that most disloyal traitor The thane of Cawdor, 'gan a dismal conflict."

A discrepancy is charged between this and the report of Angus, in Scene 3 (acknowledged to be Shakspeare's), who enters with Ross, and says, concerning the thane of Cawdor,--

"Whether he was combin'd With those of Norway; or did line the rebel With hidden help and vantage; or that with both He labour'd in his country's wreck, I know not."

Perhaps Ross did not either. But he knew that Cawdor "assisted." He did not say that he was personally engaged in the fight.

The opening chant of the witches is denied to Shakspeare by one critic, because it seems to occupy the opening scene merely to inform us that they are to meet somewhere again; and by another it is attributed to Middleton because it does not flow in the usual trochaic manner of Shakspeare, and contains imperfect lines. Middleton may have Paddock and Graymalkin for his share in the attempt to spoil this grand chant, whose accent ought to have sung Shakspeare's feeling into the critic's ear; for so the foot of Fate would fall in order to pitch the key of the tragedy, and lead its crime into our presence. Its measured step seems to issue out of some foreboding by Macbeth of his ambition's purpose. The weird sisters are not merely enjoying a thunderstorm, and wondering when they shall meet again in similar favorable weather. Their lips put a stress of destiny upon every syllable. The poet's pen unconsciously follows in their traces.

The same metre is employed in the "Tempest" and "Midsummer-Night's Dream," by Ariel, Oberon, and Puck, when they are on sublunary business. But they

"Foot it featly here and there:"

the lines skim or flutter, and do not tread. The accent is not so persistent: it does not sound like the hinge on which a pause swings open to admit the foot of a thing that is burdened with a solemn message. On the blasted heath of Macbeth, the verses of Ariel would be like a strayed butterfly:--

"Where the bee sucks, there suck I."

He spurs the omen out of owls and bats, and rides them away from the chill of the evening, "after summer, merrily." Prospero, hearing him sing, says, "That's my dainty Ariel." Puck likewise, too mercurial for chanting, carols with a broom on his shoulder to make a clean sweep of mischief:--

"And we fairies, that do run By the triple Hecate's team, From the presence of the sun, Following darkness like a dream, Now are frolic."

The lines go lilting like a little boat over the accent which can hardly raise a ripple. It is a supernature in the best of humor, beguiling or blessing men and women in a dulcet style.

But the witches chant holding torches of the lightning while the thunder slowly scans their verse:--

1 WITCH. When shall we three meet again, In thunder, lightning, or in rain?

2 WITCH. When the hurlyburly's done, When the battle's lost and won.

3 WITCH. That will be ere set of sun.

It will be on the same day, then, to intercept Macbeth as homeward his ambitious mood hurries. The battle, which the rebels against Duncan's rule have just lost, Macbeth has won. What else has he won? His thoughts, out-travelling his body's utmost speed, will change into witches by the way and inform him. Hitherto his fateful Self has remained vague and disembodied. Now it will meet itself, and hear it utter a threefold "Hail!"

For thus I conceive that when Macbeth's crime had fully infected Shakspeare's imagination, and was urging it into the appalling swiftness of the first scenes of this tragedy, he endowed Macbeth with its own shaping quality. The witches were not decoys of another world to lure him into acquaintanceship with crime. They were his own intention grown to be so ravenous that it framed a prelude to his deed, as the condition of starving sets a phantom banquet before a person's eyes. Shakspeare had no need of them to start the business of his play or to keep alive his plot. Macbeth and his wife did their own tempting so thoroughly that spirits might applaud and refrain from interfering. But these witches were characters of the second-sight which Shakspeare imputed to Macbeth, a distinguishing trait born into Macbeth's mind from the conception of this tragedy. The prosaic supernature of the old chronicle, on which the play is based, is transformed into a psychological peculiarity.

So we observe that these weird sisters were no posters of vulgar ill, horsed on nursery broomsticks, to deliver murrain in the fold and rheumatism at the hearth, in gratification of a vicious whim. But they became vulgarized into this whenever Macbeth was absent from the scene. Then they shrank from Fates to hags, such as Banquo's undistempered eyes saw them, withered, hairy-faced, laying chappy fingers upon skinny lips,--old women dreaded by the common people for reputed powers of bewitching. All such Celtic superstitions breed nobly in Macbeth's fancy: he knows all about the village gossip. The eldritch women are the nearest hint of supernature which he had; but his kingly anticipations tolerate no common pranks from them. When Macbeth is absent, Shakspeare shows what stale witcheries they traffic in. The critics blame the incongruity, or attribute it to some interpolating pen. But Shakspeare rightly intended to place in contrast with Macbeth's fantasy the popular material of his age in which it worked. So we hear the witches relating their trumpery exploits. This one has been killing poor people's swine. Another threatens to water-log a shipmaster because his wife refused to give her chestnuts. They put their spiteful heads together, and gloat over a drowned pilot's thumb. When Macbeth enters, this ghastly twaddle is hushed by a domineering thought which meets in these crones his "all-hail hereafter."

In the scene which follows the banquet, Shakspeare brings the witches and their mistress Hecate together. The stage direction, "Enter Hecate to the other three witches," simply includes her as one witch more. She has a Greek name that was representative of the Moon in her baleful and haunting phase. But on this Northern heath she displays a genuine Celtic temper, and scolds the witches for having unbidden dealings with Macbeth; while she, "the close contriver of all harms," was never called to bear her part. Of course not, as Macbeth's imagination had no personal _rapport_ with her; and all that Shakspeare wants of her is to keep the popular witch-element upon the stage, and set it to creating "artificial sprites" in collusion with the greater incantation in Macbeth's heart. The witches provide him nothing but the cave and the cauldron. The scene never rises into dignity until he arrives. Three old women, hovering around a kettle, throw in a number of nauseous curiosities which they have got by foraging in disreputable quarters: they stir the slab gruel to verses which are as realistic as a wooden spoon; yet neither Middleton nor any other of Shakspeare's contemporaries, save Marlowe perhaps, could have written them. But mark how the tone alters when Macbeth comes to conjure with them. What is it they do? "A deed without a name." Then there is only one more culinary interruption; but we shudder and cannot sneer, for it uses an ingredient furnished by a man who has committed crimes against nature: the spell catches the drippings of a murderer's gibbet. Macbeth's secret divinings of the future fill the scene: the visions incorporate his own anxiety. Out of his perturbed soul rise the armed head, the bloody child. He reassures himself with the phantom of a child crowned, with a tree in his hand, and misinterprets it into a "sweet bodement" of safety, so long as trees do not take to travelling. But the recollection of Banquo is the great disturber: that spirit sits at every feast of solace which the King partakes. His heart "throbs to know one thing:" Will Banquo's issue ever reign? The King's flaming soul throws shadows on the screen of his dread,--a show of kings, Banquo first and last, eight of them between Banquo blood-bolter'd and Banquo crowned. But the Banquo that smiles is bathed in blood. Blood let it be, then.

"From this moment, The very firstlings of my heart shall be The firstlings of my hand."

But no critical theory can hold a work of imagination to a strict account. You may clap John Locke into the witness-box and riddle him with cross-questions: the same court has no authority to put a poet on oath to justify himself in every line; he is satisfied to let the drift of his thought be traced through the material in which he works. Quartz that is found in certain localities is as good as gold, and rewards us for suspecting it. We need not strain Shakspeare's page into too minute an adaptation to our views in order to avoid rejecting it. If he convinces us that Macbeth and his wife have composed the tragedy before his pen touches the paper, the witches may appear just what we and Macbeth choose to have them,--at one moment concocters of country spells to give him a drench of murder, at another moment concocted themselves by a spell which his soul has brewed.

This spiritual gift is the main cause of all his practical hesitations. His strongest passion discharges and exhausts itself in a pulse of fantasy; as the electric fish lies awhile torpid after the transmission of a shock. In his case, there is imperfect connection of the motor nerves that run between imagining and doing; so that his milk of human kindness has time to mingle with his mood. When his wife has grown sick and incompetent to stimulate, dire necessity alone can do it for him; as we see after he has had the vision of Banquo's line of kings, when somebody informs him that Macduff, his most formidable enemy, has fled. This is his self-chiding:--

"Time, thou anticipat'st my dread exploits: The flighty purpose never is o'ertook, Unless the deed go with it. But no more sights."

Macduff's "wife, children, servants, all that could be found," are slaughtered by him. It is a deed that, making his fortunes more impaired than ever, betrays to us how feverish and impolitic his course becomes. Far better for him if he had not let the desperate crisis of his fate drive him out of the land of dreams. Shakspeare lets us hear Macbeth chiding the brag of his imagination when he says, "But no more sights." He has had enough of them,--too much time wasted in those presentiments which never have the element of prevention. On the contrary, it is a common experience that something is so sure to happen that it can impart to us a fruitless forefeeling of itself, as Henry IV. felt the blade of Ravaillac in his side a week before it struck him. Macbeth will humor no more sights. That is the key to Shakspeare's conception of the character. We are to understand that henceforth Macbeth is cured of his hallucinations.

Now let us return to the first scene provided with this pass-key. It unlocks that and all the subsequent supernature which had a relish for his society. We feel that the witches express the moral condition of Macbeth's mind, its tumultuous hesitation that is on the point of settling into the definiteness of crime,--"Fair is foul, and foul is fair." All moral discriminations are huddled together and dislocated by the upheaval of his subterranean motive.

He really sends these witches forth to a blasted heath, the avant-couriers of his own visit thither, and of a longing that gains substance and direction the more he entertains it. It is strong enough to be an object behind his retina; and it throws out shapes to limn themselves upon the air into which they make themselves and vanish. And they can appear only at that period of his evil brooding when it gathers and swells, too big for his brain, bursting its barriers to become external. After the actual murder of Duncan has occurred, the brain of Macbeth is depleted for a while: the ominous forms wait till Banquo's ghost can recruit them.

Macbeth has an imagination so keen and unbridled that it outruns the limits of thinking, to become projected outside of his bodily eye in shapes and objects that occupy the focus of his criminal intent. His crimes become ocular deceptions, because they are so palpably real to his mental vision, sharpened as it is by the ambitious sympathy of a wife whose temperament outraces action. Murder is Macbeth's owner before he is conscious that he has made himself the chattel of his wife's suggestions. That same creative fancy built forth into the air the handle of the instrument which he has fated himself to use: he marshalled it the way that he intended to go. No supernatural smith has forged the fatal weapon: it is tempered in the current of his own plastic mind.

But although Macbeth has this mobile imagination, like that which

"If it would but apprehend some joy, It comprehends some bringer of that joy;"

and though he has become one of those madmen who

"Have such seething brains, Such shaping fantasies, that apprehend More than cool reason ever comprehends,"

he is still capable of reverting to this cool reason, at least so far as to appreciate that his desperate dreams are the poetry of desperate consequences which will tax all his waking powers. When the apparitions vanish, in Act iv. 1, one of the witches gives a voice to Macbeth's perturbation; but why

"Stands Macbeth thus amazedly?"

It was but the voice of revulsion from amazement, to "cheer up his sprites" and summon resolution.

When Macbeth originates any thing out of himself, that Self is not daunted, for it is too deeply compromised in fact and fancy. But when some phenomenon threatens him from a quarter that is outside the limit of his own creative power, as when Birnam Wood is descried coming toward Dunsinane, he is puzzled, and says:--

"I pull in resolution; and begin To doubt th' equivocation of the fiend, That lies like truth. I 'gin to be a-weary of the sun."

Nothing has disturbed him till he appreciates that some agency which he does not control can transplant a forest at his castle gate. The apparition of the witches scarcely lifts his eyebrows. "Speak, if you can," is the calm greeting. When he starts, and seems to fear "things that do sound so fair," it is because the shapes he conjures become suddenly endowed with tongues, and he hears his own ambition syllabled. For a man is not proof against shrinking at the first moment that lends to the "airy nothing" of his desire a distinct name and purpose. He is astonished at the audacious phrasing of his hopes, and he resents at first what seems definite enough to be an impeachment from something not himself; yet not until that moment was it really his Self. What phantoms have thus leaped out of vacuity into the midnight chambers of desire! What voices have drawn the startled answers of a crime that did not suspect this overlooking! But when the man's Self has undergone this real birth, and the secret parturition becomes a breathing child of consciousness, he soon accepts his own new self, and forgets that it was irritated into a cry by the first salutes of the atmosphere. Casting away all repugnance, Macbeth exclaims to his wicked wishes, before they have a chance to vanish,--

"Stay, you imperfect speakers, tell me more! ... Speak, I charge you!"

So the dagger that wavers in the heated air of his soul does not surprise him,--"Come, let me clutch thee!" Really, he expected to grasp it; for it was precisely the kind of instrument he thought of using, the very shape and workmanship thereof. There's nothing to perturb until he draws from his belt its counterpart, yet sees the other still solid in the air. That sets him to pondering: his

"Eyes are made the fools o' the other senses, Or else worth all the rest."

But, in spite of that, the murder in his brain reddens, sprinkles the blade and dudgeon with drops of blood, "which was not so before." Now when the illusion becomes the most intense, it is dispersed, as if the brain's own climax swelled to breaking. The collapse reminds him that the deed still waits to be accomplished: his dagger is yet clean. But its form is the bloody business which he has on hand to get through with before sweet morning. It seemed so clearly cut in his mind, and stayed so long before he could turn it out, that he thought it worth describing to his wife, as she indicates to us when at the banquet she calls his vision of Banquo

"Proper stuff! This is the very painting of your fear; This is the air-drawn dagger which, you said, Led you to Duncan."

Now when the ghost of Banquo enters to occupy Macbeth's chair, the actor of the king's part need not strain himself to put on the highest degree of an appalled feeling. "Are you a man?" whispers his wife; and Macbeth gives the true tone to his share of the scene when he answers,--

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

He starts, to be sure; but he simply remarks, "The table's full." "Here is a place reserved, sir." "Where?" he exclaims, so little annihilated by the painting of his own consciousness. It has dazed him, as when a mirror shifts distant sunlight full into the eyes: they blink, and judgment cannot readjust the sight. So he dimly asks, "Which of you have done this?" He is not "distilled to jelly with the act of fear," but simply amazed at this reproduction, so quick and palpable, of the deed just described to him by the hired murderer who, by doing that, put those "twenty trenched gashes" into his mind, whence they dripped over the chair of state. His talent for this spectral extemporizing has been indulged too often to overtake him with a special wonder. This unexpected Banquo may be dared, and even threatened:--

"Thou canst not say I did it: never shake Thy gory locks at me."

His wife blames his "flaws and starts" at such a moment of festivity when ceremony ought to be the sauce to meat; but they are not the ague-fits of a man who is dropping to pieces at a dreadful sight. The image of his guilt absorbs and diverts his behavior from the guests in a way that suggests to them a sudden flightiness:--

"Prythee, see there! behold! look! lo! how say you? Why, what care I? If thou canst nod, speak too."

This is not bravado trying to steady itself in a breeze of horror.

In order to break Macbeth down, and fully identify him with the deed of which Banquo was the horrible shadow, his temperament required that the ghost should vanish and reappear at the moment when he recovers composure. Shakspeare has marked, by Macbeth's sudden change of demeanor, that he was usually familiar with these coinages of his brain. To whatever ecstasy his feeling rose, with or without his wife's complicity, Shakspeare would have us understand that Macbeth was so fluent with these bodiless creations that he had naturalized the night-side of his mind. Therefore, Banquo must re-enter precisely when Macbeth drinks to the general joy, and to the dead man in particular. Shakspeare knew the moment when to spill Macbeth's wine and all his hardihood by putting out a disembodied hand to strike the goblet from his grasp. It was the very nick of time, but it was in the man's own temper.

Let us see how it was. The alteration of demeanor from astonishment to the abjectness of a guilty terror slips out of Macbeth's conviviality into the company, as he calls for wine and drinks "love and health to all." At the rim of his goblet he can even banter with his consciousness of murder: he is in a frame to enjoy proposing the health of

"Our dear friend, Banquo, whom we miss; Would he were here!"

Now this pretence of desiring Banquo's presence uses up what resistance Macbeth has to spare. No sooner are the words out of his mouth than he imagines how they might be answered: the imagining it is the vivid answer. When you try jauntily to job off suspicion before other persons, the cheek grows pale with dread of being contradicted. A door is thrown ajar by this wind of pretending that nothing has been committed. Come on, there! the villain cries. Has any thing happened? Is anybody outside? Let him enter and take a look around! Sure enough, 'tis there: his mind's eye sees it enter. Even when the small faults of social life are denied or disclaimed by us, a ghost is raised upon the face, a dubious semblance of your guilt in the evasive eye, or just a flicker in the corner of the mouth. Most people overestimate their strength to make a flat denial of misdeeds when their soul is reflected in the polished mirrors of watchful eyes. There is a non-committal look which collars a man, puts him in the dock, and sends him to jail before he knows that he has been apprehended.

Prosaic men with no imagination to defy can preserve a smug complacency after the commission of a crime, because they cannot vibrate to it. Give a stroke to their thick temper, and it only answers with a thud. Their face is an emotionless Sahara, over which no showery gusts or smiles of April linger. But Macbeth was delicately strung: the slightest stir of the invisible air was registered by a vibration. When the ghost slips out of his own phrase, 'twas too pat,--this coming at the toast, "to the general joy of the whole table," at this pretence of thirst to drink a dead man's welfare; too nicely timed for flesh and blood to bear; too suggestive of continual liability to see the eyes glaring across the brim of any moment. Observing how easily the awful figure can thicken out of invisibility, he cries, "Take any shape but that!" And his mind is desperate to exorcise it into an "unreal mockery," and vainly struggles with his own personifying power.

"It will have blood; they say, blood will have blood."

It is a cold, calculating vengeance, marrowless, bloodless, but alert in a shape against which Macbeth's nerves at any time may stumble, on the midnight staircase, in the gallery's pale shimmer, in sleep between his wife and his embrace, and always at his own suggestion of a phrase, a dream. His fancy never yet inflicted such a frightful recoil of an offended Heaven. It comes at his own invitation; for he had said in the forenoon of that day,--

"To-night we hold a solemn supper, sir, And I'll request your presence;"

to which Banquo acquiesced,--

"Lay your highness' Command upon me." "Fail not our feast." "My lord, I will not."