Part 26

She does not give Macbeth time to observe that to murder Duncan will exact of him the murder of Malcolm also, who is designated by the King to succeed him. She is in no temper to reflect that the taking-off of Duncan will plunge the husband into ever-renewing complications: her transport carries him away to fruitless crime. But the first blow spends her terrible ardor and disenchants her of murder. She can force it upon her husband, but is not endowed with the complexly woven tissue of talents and motives that can sustain reaction. His muscle drags him through successive scenes of feigning, inures him to the contemplation of fresh murders, and keeps his foot well planted to thrust and parry the foes of his own making. She is all made for love, and for the uttermost that love can suggest: there is no masculine fibre in her heart; it is packed with the invisible, fine-strung nerves of a feminine disposition. And they have been stretched to such a tension that, since no solider flesh sheathes and protects them as they relax, we see them ravelled: they no longer sustain the firm heart-beat and regulate the blood. There are symptoms, even before the murder is committed, that her strength threatens to be inadequate. She must have recourse to wine, to borrow courage from it that may last till morning; and her mood is so intense that the light body can absorb large draughts of it:--

"That which hath made them drunk hath made me bold."

It does not, however, cancel a susceptibility, which was unusual with her, to the weird influences of night and loneliness. It was unusual; for I think it to be no fancy, but a well-attested experience, that the blonde women are the least affected by the physical influences of darkness: they have a certain clarity to repel this infection that penetrates so many darker-looking people,--a certain nonchalance that is manifested even in girlhood's nursery, and prevents spooks from being rocked in the same cradle. Being free from the frailness which is latent in a tendency to project startled feelings into ghostly phenomena, they do, as a general rule, find it easy to translate the queer noises and conspiracies of the darkness into their plain prose. They keep the obscurest entry free from the litter which gathers from tales of superstition: from garret to cellar there's not a nook where creepiness can make a goblin-nest. Up and down lonesome staircases they can go without a light, prowl unperturbed into the uncanniest corners, hurry to investigate the cause of a low moan with a warm heart for a candle, enter the room of the dead without laying a reluctant hand upon the lock or pausing to summon fortitude.

One of these women was Lady Macbeth, who never before experienced, what her husband always had in liability, those paintings of his fear, those flaws and starts, that objectivity of over-wrought imagination. But now this scene, which treads upon the threshold of the murder, shudders with the proximity of something bodiless on the corridors and stairs a spectral gleam is congealing into shapes not known to this world; the wild weather of the "sore night" has hunted the moon and stars out of the heaven; the rain rushes at the panes to get vindictive entrance; the wind utters personal threats at these violators of "the Lord's anointed temple;"--

"The obscure bird Clamor'd the livelong night."

How finely seated in its place is that word "obscure"! Substitute for it the various reading, "obscene," and you destroy the sense which Shakspeare would convey of a creature heard but seldom seen at any time, sitting so moveless in the dark: not a leaf prates of its whereabout; the mysterious hooting seems to be one of the unexplained things of Nature.

Lady Macbeth's breath itself is intent to listen,--"Hark!" Then, as her novel tremor passes off, she interprets it:--

"It was the owl that shriek'd, the fatal bellman, Which gives the stern'st good-night."

Far away, through innocent hamlets, human watchmen go their rounds, and let their "All's well!" mix with the dreams of inviolate chambers. Here is a different bellman to invite an eternal hour to murder sleep. She listens again, and her nerves are tightened by the hand of silence. "He is about it." How awfully does Macbeth's voice come struggling back into this stillness, where the wife begins to feel something personal in the air! So does he. "Who's there? What, ho!" And she expects to see something that was not invited:--

"Alack! I am afraid they have awak'd, And 'tis not done: the attempt, and not the deed, Confounds us."

Shakspeare makes us aware that Macbeth, after killing Duncan, must pass along a passage and descend some stairs to the next story. What a walk of a few moments, protracted into endless awe, with Duncan disembodied close at his heels! The brave soldier's feet weaken at the distance which his own soul creates. Will he ever annihilate a space that is made by a crime and reach his wife again?

"I have done the deed! Did'st thou not hear a noise?"

They listen, looking sidelong at each other:--

"I heard the owl scream, and the crickets cry. Did not you speak? When? Now. As I descended? Ay. Hark! Who lies i' the second chamber?"

The scene is full of pauses of startled listening: it waits with a husband absent upstairs upon an errand, retreats with him through a haunted corridor, thenceforth for ever haunted, and shudders in us as midnight never shuddered before; and the crickets, those carollers of a sacred hearth, cry, as blood drips through it and quenches their content.

When Macbeth relates to her his sensations while he was upstairs, the amen that stuck in his throat, the voice that threatened him with nights devoid of sleep and that still cried, "Macbeth shall sleep no more," Lady Macbeth, intuitively feeling that she could dare no more, and could not risk another thought with her imagination, said,--

"These deeds must not be thought After these ways: so, it will make us mad."

The deed is done, but to her surprise it will not do for her too curiously to consider it. But no, the deed is not yet neatly finished. Macbeth, in his hurry to elude the dead man, has brought the bloody daggers with him. She must carry them back for him: not for his newly bought kingdom would he return along that entry and through that ghastly door. The exigency recalls the fair woman to her native temper. To put the needed finish to her night's business, she resumes her wonted contempt for darkness and the sight of the dead:--

"The sleeping and the dead Are but as pictures."

While she is absent, there comes that knocking at the gate which appals Macbeth; and we quake with him in that moment which lets into the tragedy a human world again.

This world, unconscious of the hell which husband and wife have inaugurated within the castle, has been travelling all night to reach it. What morning redness salutes Lenox's and Macduff's eyes!

"Ring the alarum-bell! Malcolm! awake! Shake off this downy sleep, death's counterfeit, And look on death itself! Up, up, and see The great doom's image! Malcolm! Banquo! As from your graves rise up, and walk like sprites, To countenance this horror. Ring the bell!"

Thereupon Lady Macbeth enters: she has had time to see what color Duncan's blood imparts to water, in the little act of washing the hands which became memorable to her, and seared into the brain as if with a brand heated in nether fires. No constraint of alarm caused her to enter, but she is driven in by the terrible affinity of her feeling: she belongs to the scene,--a part of it which cannot be left out. She must hear what is said, observe what occurs, keep her appointment with the death which she solicited. This fascination of spilt blood, this woman's instinct to see her husband through the first surprise, this dread of some defect in his behavior, this solicitude to repair it by some spirit of her own, takes her into a scene which deals one stroke too much upon her emotion. For the morn broke rapidly, as if to resent the criminal advantage which the midnight took. She has had no chance to calculate what effect this murder will have upon human sensibilities when they are taken by it unawares. She sees the awfulness of it suddenly reflected from the faces and gestures of Macduff, Banquo, and the rest. It beats at the gate, across which she has braced a woman's arm, and breaks it in; and a mob of reproaches rush over her. What have those delicate hands been doing? What is this hideous issue of her slender body, just born, stark naked, in the horror of these men? Nature, in making her, was so little in the male mood, so intently following the woman's model, that it left out the element which carries Macbeth through this scene. To hear her husband describe his simulated rage in butchering the grooms, and draw that painting of Duncan in his blood,--

"And his gash'd stabs look'd like a breach in nature For ruin's wasteful entrance,"--

it is too much, and 'tis plain she is not needed. "Help me hence, ho!" her sex cries. It is the revulsion of nature in a feminine soul. Love has exhaled all its hardihood into the deed which is just now discovered. She, too, has only now really discovered it. The nerves part at the overstrain of seeing what the deed is like, and drop her helpless into a swoon.

She recovers, but her mind wakes to the necessity of playing a part, to the harassing assumption of royal demeanor to hide a slavish dread, to the cruel demands of courtesy, to the effort to sustain her husband's state, to the counterfeit composure of the banquet:--

"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."

She does not say this; but Macbeth avows it for her, since they are partners

"In the affliction of these terrible dreams That shake us nightly."

Banquo would have been safe enough from her; for the scheming love has been too rudely handled. But he is not safe from Macbeth, who does not reflect that, while Malcolm is out of his reach, 'tis a superfluity of naughtiness to slay Banquo and Fleance. His wife might have counselled better, but he did not dare to confide his temper of murder to her. Henceforth, murder is become a necessary of their daily life. But her feeling that nought is had and all is spent does not involve a threat of Banquo's person. She broods in spiritless reaction, and tells Macbeth that "what's done is done." He broods in dangerous recklessness, feeling that it is not yet done:--

"Thou know'st that Banquo and his Fleance live."

She does not perceive what he is darkly hinting, and merely replies that they cannot live for ever. He judges hastily that they must die at once; and "there's comfort yet." But he does not venture to be explicit with her, because, if she cannot detect the murder in his words,--

"There shall be done A deed of dreadful note,"--

it is because there is murder no longer in her heart. He does not dare to risk his resolutions openly with her returning womanhood. So, when she unconsciously asks, "What's to be done?" he cannot muster courage to expose his thought:--

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

Then his imagination, excited by the dire policy which he premeditates, shudders into language that recalls to us her own when she unsexed herself to make a man of him: it is his turn to be demonized, and she simply marvels at his words.

So she goes to the feast where Banquo is expected, without his ghost in her heart: not a hint reaches her of what has happened. It is plain that she misconstrues the distracted behavior of Macbeth; and when he says, "If I stand here, I saw him," she could only suppose that it was the ghost of Duncan which was the painting of his fear: so that she bravely carries Macbeth through the brunt of the guests' wonder, and passes to that night's tormented sleep without a fresh spectre in its train. For Macbeth was either too dispirited or too considerate to tell her; so he lets the news wait till another day divulges it.

When the guests have departed, Macbeth is still absorbed by the terrifying possibilities of disclosure that were suggested by the apparition. Banquo, who can so easily become visible, may hint the manner of his death to somebody, to any thing, making the dumbest object voluble with it,--may even make a stone move to hit the murderer, or a tree's branch point speakingly to him, "the secretest man of blood." But his wife says nothing either to refute the fear or to make him ashamed of it. What palsy has been laid upon that ruffling tongue? It is not silent, as some critics fancy, because her love sets in to pity and to spare him; nor silent because the exigency has passed away, nor because Middleton struck out some speech of hers,--but silent simply from exhaustion. See, between the lines of Macbeth's mood, how the overtaxed woman droops, utterly frayed away, although the guests relieve her by departure. Exhaustion so preoccupies her that love itself is too faint to pity or to cheer, and her only thought is to get to bed. She has begun to feel the drift of a hopeless future, against which she has no strength, by contending, to regain the old mooring-ground where they cut loose and allowed an unseen current to clutch the slim bark. Neither curiosity nor self-interest can rouse her when Macbeth mentions that he has strange things in head which he means to carry to performance.

"You lack the season of all natures, sleep,"

is all that her tired nature has left to say.

Her fortitude just eked her out to reach the gracious action that dismissed the guests, as she wished "A kind good-night to all!" Yes, good-night to all,--to us also. She gains the shelter of her chamber: then she entirely disappears from the action of the tragedy, to sicken in seclusion with the consciousness that her fatal love has purveyed successive murders for her household. She can be of no further use to Shakspeare now: such a terrible requisition of genius has exhausted her; she is removed from our view and consigned to the offices of women. For the courage that was screwed to the sticking-place was screwed by love's wrest one turn too far. But another kind of woman--massive, cruel, prompted by unmixed ambition, guided by pure hatefulness--would have had no trouble in assuming the dogged resolution with which Macbeth began henceforth to outface Fate. Not so this soul, who has known "how tender 'tis to love the babe" that milks her.

"The tackle of her heart is crack'd and burned; And all the shrouds wherewith her life should sail Are turned to one thread, one little hair."

She will soon be "a clod and module of confounded royalty."

For she has been the cause of all; she has thus changed and compromised the man whom she hoped to help to majesty and safety; she, the determined guider of the first blow, must see that wound become a widening crack in the walls of love and honor, to bury what she hoped to shelter; and she has grown powerless to shore them up, or to let them fall upon herself and not upon him. The breaking heart pulls down her wits into its ruin.

Her undaunted mettle was but the over-bracing tonic of a moment, which punishes the structure it exalted.

"A little water clears us of this deed: How easy is it, then!"

So she and Heaven differed; and the husband found it was not easy. A piteous self-arraignment of love is quite as potent to destroy her as a conscience that can sleep no more.

Night after night, her gentlewomen attend the repetition of scenes which she enacts, like a shadowy pageant in Hades of bygone life. Sleep's hammer tolls the castle-bell: "One, two! why, then 'tis time to do't." How Duncan bleeds! Who would have thought it of so old a man? And "here's the smell of the blood still:" how the fastidious woman, who loved the "perfumes of Arabia," sickens at it! The little hands fumble in the spectral water: they are not sweetened; the damned spot still clings. What! are these hands never to be clean again? But there's no time for washing out this deed; for, hark! there's Innocency knocking at the gate. Here no porter will be needed to usher dread disclosure into this sighing heart. "What's done cannot be undone." And what a reminiscence of her sense of wifehood and of the sacredness of pure domestic ties she wakens when she says, "The thane of Fife had a wife: where is she now?" Sent by her first impetuous push into Duncan's grave.

In the "slumbery agitation" of the last night which shuts her from our view, she stretches a winsome hand toward the air-drawn husband of her dream: "Come, come! come, come! give me your hand! to bed, to bed, to bed!"

So, not long after, a cry of women struggles through the castle, and bids Macbeth's desperate engrossment know that the "brief candle" of her night-walking sorrow has gone out. He has no time to permit his queen to die, but she has slipped from his arms. Alas! another shape of Nature's womanhood by Nature destroyed. Malcolm may suspect that she destroyed herself, but Shakspeare furnished no pretext for that palace rumor. And it so disconcerts the pathos which he intended should accumulate around the temper of her crime that many commentators suspect the scene, upon this and other considerations, of having been tampered with. Malcolm may call her "fiend-like," if he will. 'Tis pardonably honest English from a son who slept one night so near to a murdered father. What was to Malcolm a righteous phrasing of the deed does not cover Shakspeare's implication of the mood which led to it. The great poet delivers to us a sprig of rosemary, for remembrance of Nature in a woman, but enjoins us to tie it up with rue.

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 21: Brought from Italy by Mr. Jarves, and now in the possession of J.W. Bigelow, Esq., New York.]

[Footnote 22: Report of M.D. Conway's striking lecture upon the History of the Devil.]

Cambridge: Press of John Wilson & Son.