Part 24

On the way to it he was a little delayed by being murdered; but, though late, he does not fail.

This tragedy was slowly conceived during the married life of Macbeth and his Lady. Their ambitious desires spent years in collusion before an heir of opportunity was born to them. The rapid and breathless action of the earlier scenes makes clear to us that it does not flow from any sudden resolution. The past years topple in the wave that combs to break into this sweeping surge. The movement of the play is unnatural, unless we admit that the married couple have grown familiar with many projects, all of which make them languish for occasion. Macbeth has revelled in the idea that if the chance offered he possesses every other quality to supplant Duncan,--ambition, audacity, swiftness, all good fortune, except a turn of circumstance. He discovers at the juncture that his wife is the only aptitude he can contribute to it. She remembers his profuse suggestions with a touch of scorn. Is he a man?

"What beast was it, then, That made you break this enterprise to me? When you durst do it, then you were a man; ... Nor time, nor place, Did then adhere, and yet you would make both; They have made themselves, and that their fitness now Does unmake you."

Strenuous in fantasy, "infirm of purpose." The sudden crisis betrays the secret pinings of past years for such an hour. The whispered conferences swell into a din: it shouts to tell us how their pillows touched, when darkness brooded in vain upon eyelids that were set wide open with a stare at a gleam of greatness far outside their chamber. We overhear, without ever having played eavesdropper, the anxious interchange of feeling beneath the garden aspens, which might catch their tremor from these two beings who passed hankering to and fro; he encouraging a reverie, she trying to chastise it into action with the valor of her tongue. Thus the years passed, while he alternated between the grand loyalty of many a fight and the treachery which grew warm upon the bosom of his wife. Much given to pondering and pleased with vivid day-dreams, he sought no way to realize them. Well as she knew this musing vein of his, and much as it displeased her spirit of action, she will have to be re-enforced by opportunity. Then the deed, now rusting in its sheath of speculation, may possibly leap forth. His mind did not have the coupling which makes up wishing and doing into one train; so the doing stands some distance off idle on the track. The track which emerged from Hamlet's resolution met so many diverging lines at the controlling switch that he was in doubt upon which to run: at length, impatient chance unlocked the switch, and set the rail for a disaster. When Macbeth's wishing became linked to acting, he was not over-nice about his route. The subtle Hamlet considered till he could not start. The inconsiderate Macbeth, when he ceased to vapor and began to move, blundered with a full head of fantasy into ruin.

When a man's brain is well charged with blood, his powers are unified; but Macbeth's current was addicted to the lobes of figment to some defrauding of the rest. His wife's brain blushed all at once, and expanded to give the measure of her structure; so that her hope, implicating the whole of her, had all the substantiality of a deed. She was already the deed from which Macbeth's ambition swerved. He spawned spectres: she gave birth to men-children only. A woman inspired through and through with love for him, discontented with the slowness of his fortune, longing to touch the top and finish of her own; a helpmeet, whose unextinguished bridal ardor kept burning up all scruples as fast as her lover could rake them together. He, the still perfect object of her pride and passion, must become great: he must be lifted to a place whence all his qualities shall shine beyond cramped horizons with their petty crowds. She would kiss him into the compass of a throne, if lips could waft her soldier so far. Her whole soul, imagining him in statelier guises, grows so impatient to speak out its action, that love itself becomes for a moment inarticulate, though it is all the time the life-blood of her hope; as when he returns to her after the perils of the campaign which overthrew rebellion, her embrace is grave, as if her arms enclosed the coming state: they do not radiate the touch of love. He is not her darling husband, but

"Great Glamis! worthy Cawdor! Greater than both by the all-hail hereafter!"

His letters transported her not only beyond the "ignorant present," but beyond him, away beyond the familiar circle of his arms, to which she had so often committed soul and body,--away so far that she does not feel him. "The future in the instant" is embracing her; and it is against that splendor that her heart-beats break.

The first exclamation which follows the reading of his letter betrays this passionate attachment: "_and shalt be_ what thou art promis'd." There runs through the tone a vibration from her own desire, no doubt; but it is dominated by exulting love, and bursts into a chord. The time has come: he shall, he must be, what he has always longed to be. The weird sisters are in luck when they promised so fairly to a man who is so profoundly loved. 'Tis the good will of Nature that I love him.

Yet she knows him thoroughly. So close is her appraisement of him that she instinctively postpones love to the immediate exigency,--that is, to pour her spirits in his ear, to beat down every thing that might intercept him when putting forth that one decisive hand-grasp toward the crown. She fears his nature, because scruples hamper his unscrupulous ambition. They are not entirely, as she conceives them, the results of inborn mildness. He has a politic disposition which grows all the more considerate as he sees the widening of his popularity. He will proceed no farther against Duncan, because

"He hath honored me of late; and I have bought Golden opinions from all sorts of people, Which would be worn now in their newest gloss, Not cast aside so soon."

He discusses the project of murdering Banquo in the same way:--

"Though I could With bare-fac'd power sweep him from my sight, And bid my will avouch it, yet I must not, For certain friends that are both his and mine, Whose loves I may not drop, but wail his fall, Whom I myself struck down."

His wife must needs have sore dealings with such a non-committal spirit:--

"Thou'd'st have, great Glamis, That which cries, 'Thus thou must do, if thou have it; And that which rather thou dost fear to do, Thou wishest should be undone.'"

He wants to win a game to which his hand does not entitle him; and the desire to win is as great as the dread of cheating.

This tainted mood of her beloved husband makes her almost frantic. Dreams satisfy her thirst as the mirage quenches the craving of a caravan. Here comes my Macbeth and--"thou'rt mad to say it"--Duncan with him,--a lifetime's opportunity: 'twill never come again. Heaven drives Duncan "under my battlements,"--yes, _mine_, for this night only; Macbeth's at every other time, but mine this once, to hold out with against my husband's mood. The raven himself is hoarse with chiding his delay. What need the tone of my language be, when the bird croaks Duncan's fatal entrance? Let it be unsexed. Here I tear every rag of woman's garments from it, in this my frenzy of dread lest Macbeth elude Fate's purpose:--

"Come to my woman's breasts And take my milk for gall, you murd'ring ministers, Wherever in your sightless substances You wait on Nature's mischief."

For love's sake her tongue becomes unlovely; and the delicate woman, with blue eyes sparkling like an electric firmament, and that little hand, snatched out of its old dalliance and clenched as if to drive a weapon, is transformed by the spirit of some ruthless Medea who has lent herself to contrive and enjoy another murder.

It has been said that Lady Macbeth did not reflect upon consequences as Macbeth did, because that is not the way of her sex. But the sex varies in this respect. The average woman is less selfish than we are, not from a feebler gift for calculation, but from a stronger capacity of love; for sex was invented before arithmetic. Macbeth reflected, not merely because he was male, but a selfish male, eager to be great, yet admiring to be popular: he would drive the sharpest bargain with Destiny. His wife's impetuous movement of love oversets and spills out her calculation. Many a woman is capable of regarding all the consequences of an act, but she must not love too deeply: if she does, she will stick at nothing. If there be motive enough, she can turn a lover into a criminal, and then, with perjury, deceit, unblushing cheek, will screen him: they twain are one, for better, for worse. They are too deeply compromised to haggle about salvation. The very intercourse of sex devotes a woman: she has become flesh and blood of another. This complicity of nature engages the most imperious nerve-centres of her life. Were she aware of this beforehand, as she is not, it would not be evaded nor entitled bondage. If her lover has been always above her suspicion, the discovery on his part of some ill-doing is seldom violent enough to tear this bond: her revulsion is against a prying world that is no better than it should be; and she will help to secrete what she is too proud to have attributed to him. It is one article in the creed of a detective that a man's wife is more baffling than circumstance, more loyal than conscience. She is chaste clear through and single-hearted. Only when love itself is wounded and disgraced will she resign the culprit lover to the scorn of men; but not always even then, for it is her concern, and earth and heaven may keep out of it. But let him forge, she will secrete him, smuggle him out of the country, join him afterward to comfort him. Let him counterfeit any thing but love, and she will help to put the spurious values on the town. Let him come home with murder on his cheek and blood upon his garments, she, fainting, will cleanse the stain that falls athwart her vision like a lurid sunset of her peace. Selfishness would turn informer, but perfect love casts out the fear of becoming that! Do you say this, too, is criminal? I say nothing, because it is my concern only to refer you to the facts. She is a partner, for better, for worse,--married and interpenetrated by the husband's fate. For love is charity: _it rejoiceth not in iniquity_, and yet it "beareth all things, believeth all things, hopeth all things, endureth all things."

Thackeray imagines the officers calling upon Mrs. Dodd, wife of that clerical scoundrel of the reign of George II.: "is my wife, Mrs. Dodd, to show them into the dining-room, and say, 'Pray step in, gentlemen! My husband has just come home from church. That bill with my Lord Chesterfield's acceptance, I am bound to own, was never written by his lordship; and the signature is in the doctor's handwriting'? I say, would any man of sense or honor or fine feeling praise his wife for telling the truth under such circumstances? Suppose she made a fine grimace and said, 'Most painful as my position is, most deeply as I feel for my William, yet truth must prevail; and I deeply lament to state that the beloved partner of my life _did_ commit the flagitious act with which he is charged, and is at this present moment located in the two-pair back, up the chimney, whither it is my duty to lead you.' Why, even Dodd himself, who was one of the greatest humbugs who ever lived, would not have had the face to say that he approved of his wife telling the truth in such a case. If ever I steal a teapot, and _my_ women don't stand up for me, pass the article under their shawls, whisk down the street with it, outbluster the policeman, and utter any amount of fibs before Mr. Beak, those beings are not what I take them to be."

A bronze lioness was dedicated to Leæna, a girl of humble birth, beloved by Aristogiton, who, with Harmodius, conspired to kill the tyrant Hippias. She "was sentenced to the torture, and, that the pain might not wring from her any confession of the secrets of the conspiracy, she bit out her tongue." Some scoffer will say, What greater sacrifice _could_ a woman make?

But she earned, and ought to have had, a verse in the poem of Kallistratus,[20] to wreathe around her name the myrtle-bough of the two patriots.

In "Far from the Madding Crowd," a novel written by Thomas Hardy, Bathsheba has hotly denied being in love; but she resents being taken in earnest by her confidant. "O God, what a lie it was! Heaven and my love forgive me! And don't you know that a woman who loves at all thinks nothing of perjury when it is balanced against her love?"

Lady Macbeth has the kind of wifehood which devotes itself. Hurried by her husband's hopes, she throws herself without reserve into the abyss they dig at her feet. All her character is lavished to consolidate his state. She is not a vulgar murderess, because her soul is without a flaw of egotism. She is not a perfect woman; but she is most perfectly and irrevocably married. The imperfect wives are egotistical, from various motives. They have some knack or talent which craves airing, and earns the superficial admiration which is the discord of a household. Harlots are not the only women who live upon the street. Lady Macbeth's mind has no specialty, no gift that itches to be noticed, no facility save that of aggrandizing at any expense the man she loves and is absorbed in.

To be perfectly married, and perfectly bound up in a husband for weal or woe, does not imply loss of personality. Lady Macbeth is still immensely personal, even in the devotion of her love. For love alone _preserves_ the person such as she intrinsically is. A feebler love, a more imperfect attachment, may favor idiosyncrasy, and permit the woman to assert some traits in isolation instead of letting them be merged in the total influence of her attachment. Greater love hath no man--and no woman--than this, that an individuality lays down its life to sustain a personality.

So when Macbeth tells her that he cannot proceed any farther in the business, for Duncan is in the castle, "in double trust," as king and guest,--and, besides, he does not like to risk the golden opinions he has lately won,--her language is an affront to the womanly sentiments which always charmed Macbeth and drew from him such phrases of fondness: all the horrors of this tragedy cannot frighten them from his lips. She is "my dearest love," the "dear wife," and "dearest chuck." After the murderer has told him that Banquo is slain, he falls into musing which she strives to dispel: her words recall to him what a "sweet remembrancer" she is.

Therefore she hammers stern sentences out of the "undaunted mettle" of her love. They are iron levers to swing him out of the slough of his moods: disdainful smitings on the lover's cheek, they are, to bring them up to regal purple:--

"Shame itself! Why do you make such faces?" "Fie! for shame!"

She could never be capable of risking this style if she had not been wont to soothe his ear with words selected by choice moments of inclination. She would fain recur to them, but there must be a coronation first. When the day comes, there will be bystanders and observers, else she would bend over him with the old-time prattle and remarry him as king.

But, "if we should fail," he suggests, revolving possibilities. What deliberate forethought of contempt her answer yields, if it be properly emphasized,--"_We_ fail!" That is, I'll parrot your phrase, and say "_we_," but out of disdain. Of us two, the one who fails will not be myself. _We_, indeed! there's one too much of us for that. Only screw _your_ courage to the point, and _we_, as you say, will not fail.

If this fortitude which pulls Macbeth through a murder leaves her in our imagination unsexed and brutalized, we deprive ourselves of reasons why he should have loved and married her; for the clouds of moral disaster which whirl around him cannot conceal from us a fine and noble disposition. It breaks through the gathering obscurity in the delicate considerations which urge him to be a loyal host to Duncan; in the imagination so sensitive to life's fitful fever, so shaken nightly by terrible dreams, as she was too; so quick to mark the objects of Nature, and clothe them in poetic feeling; so melted by tender recollections, and capable of noble regrets that call a pause to ruin just as it breaks, a lull that lasts long enough for us to see how much will be ruined:--

"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, and dare not."

What sort of a woman was she, in whose behalf tenderness struggled with despair at last, when he was remembering what a soul had gone delirious, who was too nice for her own fortitude, eminent to be shattered, worse than sick, "as she is troubled with thick-coming fancies"!

"Cure her of that," he replies to the Doctor, but in a tone that repels rather than invites his skill; for those "thick-coming fancies" started from Duncan's room, where he lay looking like her father. Fatal first moment, beyond the reach of medicine! The Doctor has dark misgivings as to the cause of her sleeplessness, though he never heard that midnight cry, "Sleep no more," which the parting soul of Duncan gave as it awoke and fled through the inhospitable palace. Macbeth murdered then the innocent sleep which might have been Nature's resource, but which no doctor can restore. Cure her of that? Cure me first of the infection that was caught at Duncan's bedside, and which spread to the partner of my night-horrors: we are both far gone beyond a doctor's art.

Still he pleads--"Canst thou not minister?"--in piteous forlornness against the better judgment which, when it recurs, prompts him to "throw physic to the dogs." It is a plea which seems to visit the chamber of the wife who ruined herself for love. It is the visit of a yearning that her heart might be cleansed in the oblivion of innocence.

"Canst thou not minister to a mind diseas'd, Pluck from the memory a rooted sorrow, Raze out the written troubles of the brain, And with some sweet oblivious antidote Cleanse the stuff'd bosom of that perilous stuff, Which weighs upon the heart?"

If he had married a female butcher of the strongest-minded type, there would have been no fees to pay for doctor's attendance, and the bloom of regret would have been rubbed from Macbeth's language. Such a wife's muscle would have been perilous to any stuff that conscience might venture to suggest. A virago who could dash out the brains of her smiling babe as easily as nurse it,--more easily, forsooth, for how could Nature have endowed her person with the founts of maternity?--was not the kind of woman Shakspeare selected for the ruin of Macbeth.

If the poet had intended Lady Macbeth to be a fury, a person of abnormal wildness and cruelty, who had exhausted love and craved the fire-water of ambition, he would have prepared us to throw such a conception over her, by hinting some motive or circumstance for this divergence from the normal feminine nature. On the contrary, he purposely neglected the opportunity which the old story furnished toward the warping and poisoning of a woman's mind. The historical Lady Macbeth was the grand-daughter of Kenneth IV., who fell in the fight against Malcolm II., Duncan's father. Shakspeare has carefully suppressed any allusion which might recall the bitter family feud to unsex her and make revenge an element of her ambition.

Her shape, complexion, tone of voice, and style of feeling cannot be constructed for us out of the brawn of those lines which she throws out from the shoulder to hit Macbeth's irresolution. They do not provide us with the essence of her material. If we build a woman out of that literal clay, she would be square-shouldered, big-limbed, stout-bodied, sharp-boned, and pachydermatous, with a skin of bronzed leather tightened over knobs of cheek-bones, hairs woven in a wire-mill, and eyebrows like two heavy dashes from the circus charcoal. Prometheus would connive with Billingsgate to o'er-inform that clay. We confess that such a female lingers among the traditional properties of theatres; but she is too shop-worn to dare again the blaze of footlights. We would not so defame a Jason, and blast his life by constructing the mother of his children out of the language which the jealous, frenzied moment drove by heart-spasms from her lips. Still less can we subject Macbeth to the matrimonial luck of such a ferocious contrast. How truculently married would numerous husbands be if their wives' temper corresponded to the abandoned use of language which domestic virtue sometimes will employ, when every hair upon the head, both native and naturalized, seems twisted into the coils of a fell purpose to turn a thing of beauty into a fury for ever! The gust passes, the familiar features of the landscape reappear, and the lips transpire with mellower salutes; as when Lady Macbeth, who has been regretting that her husband should stay so much apart, greets him with the blandishing rhythm of those two lines:--

"How now, my lord? why do you keep alone, Of sorriest fancies your companions making?"

There the old feeling strays out beyond the flaming swords which forbid paradise to follow in the track of this tragedy. The mutual crime closes a double gate, and posts inexorable sentinels against the endearments of the past.

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 19: _Grau Mariechen_: Malkin is endearing diminutive for Mary: the cat is Little Gray Mary.]

[Footnote 20: Ἑν μὑοτου κλαδἱ τὁ ἑἱφος φορἡσω,--In myrtle will I wear my blade.]

BLONDE WOMEN.

LADY MACBETH.

BLONDE WOMEN.

Those colors of complexion and of hair which mark a feminine type that is distinct from the brunette announce also a different style of temper and action. Virtue and vice, in these two types of women, differ in quality and in mode of manifestation. If we construct too strict a theory upon this difference, it will savor of affectation: a great many exceptions might spring up to discredit it, and to threaten its advocate with being called fantastic. He would spend all his time in lame refutations, and lose the benefit of a moderate statement. We must be content to observe in general that there are distinctions of behavior between the blonde and the brunette, which are by no means cutaneous, but reside deep within the temperament. The superficial color and the physical structure announce what methods and gestures we may expect, but do not guarantee that our expectation shall be invariably fulfilled. Shares of goodness and of faultiness are impartially distributed to both kinds of women; but subtle differences of color and movement describe the transactions of their conscience and their passion.

The poets instinctively build fair-haired and fair-colored women around deeds which have the flavor of risk and daring; as Tennyson, who describes Godiva when she is disrobed to ride through Coventry that she may strip a burdensome tax from her husband's subjects:--

"She shook her head, And showered the rippled ringlets to her knee; Unclad herself in haste; adown the stair Stole on, and, like a creeping sunbeam, slid From pillar unto pillar."

So the brave and constant Imogen has eyes which are the "blue of heaven's own tinct;" and the flower that is like her face is the "pale primrose:" through her complexion the veins show like "the azur'd harebell."