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28 MACBETH.

him, " Sleep no more ! Macbeth does murder sleep.**
Thus his conscience, instead of acting directly in the form
of remorse, comes to act through imaginary terrors, which in
turn react on his conscience, as fire is made hotter by the
current of air which itself generates.

It is probably from oversight of this that some have set
Macbeth down as a timid, cautious, remorseless villain, with-
held from crime only by a shrinking, selfish apprehensive-
ness. He does indeed seem strangely dead to the guilt, and
morbidly alive to the dangers, of his enterprise ; free from
remorses of conscience, and filled with imaginary fears :
but whence his uncontrollable irritability of imagination?
how comes it that his mind so swarms with horrible imagin-
ings, but that his imagination itself is set on fire of Hell?
Such " paintings of fear," it scarce need be said, are not the
offspring of a mind in which the moral sense is weak or
dead ; rather they attest a peculiar strength and quickness
in that sense. Call it insanity, if you will ; but it is an in-
sanity full of moral inspiration. And what a lesson does it
read us of the secret possibilities of evil, ay, and of punish-
ment too, wrapped up in the moral constitution of man !

Macbeth*s conscience thus acting in disguise, the natural
effect is, at first, to make him wavering and irresolute : the
harrowings of "guilty fear have a certain prospective and pre-
ventive operation, causing him to recoil, he scarce knows
why, from the work he has in hand. So that he would
never be able to go through without other instigations. To
launch him fairly in the career of crime, not only his ambi-
tion and thirst of power, but also his household affections
and virtues must be arrayed against his scruples of reason
and conscience. Not so, however, after the first great step
has been t^keo. Then tb$ self-same workings of conscience



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INTRODUCTION. 29

have the effect of goading him on from crime to crime.
He still mistakes his inward pangs for outward perils.
Guilt peoples his whereabout with fantastical terrors, which
he labours to beat down, and thereby only multiplies. In
his efforts to dissimulate he loses his self-control, and spills,
or thinks he spills, the secret he is trying to hide ; and in
giving others cause to suspect him he plants his own heart
full of suspicions against them. Thus his cowardice of con- '
science urges him on to fresh murders, and every murder
adds to that cowardice ; the very blood which he spills to
quiet his fears sprouting up in "gorgons and chimeras dire,"
to awaken new fears and call for more victims.

I suppose it is a natural result of an imagination so redun-
dant and excitable as his, that the agonies of remorse should
project and embody themselves in imaginary terrors, and so
sptir him on to further crimes for security against those ter-
rors. To give himself peace, Macbeth must still keep using
his dagger ; and yet every thrust he makes with it just stabs
a new wound in his own soul. Such is the dreadful madness
which guilt engenders in him ! His moral forces indeed
turn to a downright fury and venom of infatuation, insomuch
that he boldly enters the lists against the very powers in
which he has trusted.

All this comes out in his interview with Lady Macbeth on
the eve of Banquo's murder : —

We have but scotch'd the snake, not kill'd it :
She'll close, and be herself; whilst our poor malice
Remains 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 sem to peacCy



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30 MACBETH.

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 : not steel, nor poison.

Malice domestic, foreign levy, nothing

Can touch him further.

Here we see that crime has filled his mind with scorpions,
and still he thinks of no way to clear them out but by crime.
And the thought of Duncan instantly charms him into a
feverish brooding over the dangers which he seems to have
invited against himself by murdering him. And it is well
worth noting how, in this speech, as in several others, he
goes on kindling more and more with his theme, till he fairly
loses himself in a trance of moral and imaginative thought.
The inward burnings of guilt act as a sort of inspiration to
him. For the preternatural illumination of mind, which so
often transports him, marks the insurgent stress of those
moral forces which I have already noted in him.

Critics of a certain school have, in characteristic fashion,
found fault with the huddling together and confusion of meta-
phors which Macbeth pours forth in his most excited mo-
ments. Here is an instance of what I mean : —

Methought I heard a voice cry. Sleep no morel
Macbeth does murder sleep / — the innocent sleep ;
Sleep, that knits up the ravell'd sleave of care,
The death of each day's life, sore labour's bath,
Balm of hurt minds, great Nature's second course.
Chief nourisher in life's feast.

In this, and other like strains, the aforesaid critics take it
rather ill, that Macbeth does not talk more according to the
rules of grammar and Blair. Shakespeare was content to
let him talk according to his state of mind and the laws of



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INTRODUCTION. 3 1

his character. Nor, in this view, could any thing better serve
than such a preternatural rush and redundancy of imagina-
tion, hurrying him on from thought to thought, and running
and massing a multitude of half-formed images together.
And such a cast of mind in the hero was perhaps necessary
to the health of the drama : otherwise such a manifold trag-
edy had been in danger of turning out a mere accumulation
of horrors. As it is, the inipression is at once softened and
deepened, after a style of art which Shakespeare alone could
evoke and manage ; the terrible treading, sometimes trem-
bling, on the outermost edge, yet never passing over into
the horrible. Thus a much higher degree of tragic effect is
attained than would else stand within the terms of pleasura-
ble emotion. Macbeth's imagination so overwrought and
self-accelerating, — this it is that glorifies the drama with
such an interfusion of tragic rapture and lyrical sweetness,
and pours over the whole that baptism of terrible beauty
which forms its distinctive excellence. If you would move
men deeply, you must stimulate their active powers in pro-
portion as you tax their receptive. And when a man^s imagi-
native forces are duly kindled, he will bear, and even enjoy,
a stress of appeal, which would else defeat itself by stunning
or revolting his sensibilities. Which is one reason, no doubt,
why so many rather ambitious attempts at tragedy have
proved in effect but " lamentable comedies."

Before passing on from the hero, I will advert briefly to one
or two minute, but, I think, highly significant notes of char-
acter. Thus, at the first meeting of Macbeth and his wife : —

Macb. My dearest love, Duncan comes here to-night.
Lady M. And when goes hence ?
Macb, To-morrow, — as he purposes.



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32 MACBETH.

Again in the morning after the murder, when several Thanes
make an early call upon him : —

Lenox, Goes the King hence to-day ?
Macb, He does ; — he did appoint so.

In the former case he meditates defeating the King's pur-
pose by killing him ; in the latter he has made it impossible
for the King's appointment to be kept. And in both his
mind is struck with a sudden impulse to be true to itself.
He is wickedly ambitious, but not meanly false : honour, and
the truthfulness that belongs to it, is something of a passion
with him ; and in these cases the instant conscience of false-
hood pricks him into a mending of his speech. He finds it
not easy at first to keep his tongue and heart from beating
time together : it is hardly in his nature indeed to " look like
the innocent flower, but be the serpent under it " ; and there-
fore it is that his wife so pointedly warns him, " Your face,
my thane, is as a book, where men may read strange mat-
ters." There is indeed much truth in her soliloquized de-
scription of him : —

Thou wouldst be great ;
Art not without ambition, but without
The illness should attend it : what thou wouldst highly.
That wouldst thou holily ; wouldst not play false,
And yet wouldst wrongly win.

Character of Lady Macbeth.

In the structure and working of her mind and moral
frame, Lady Macbeth is the opposite of her husband, and
therefore all the fitter to countervail his infirmity of purpose ;
that is, she differs from him in just the right way to supple-
ment him. Of a firm, sharp, wiry, matter-of-fact intellect,
doubly charged with energy of will, she has little in common



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INTRODUCTION. 33

with him save a red-hot ambition : hence, while the Weird
disclosures act on her will just as on his, and she jumps
forthwith into the same purpose, the effect on her mind is
wholly different. Without his irritability of understanding
and imagination, she is therefore subject to no such involun-
tary transports of thought. Accordingly she never loses her-
self in any raptures of meditation ; no illusions bom of guilty
fear get the mastery of her ; at least, not when her will is in
exercise : in her waking moments, her senses are always so
thoroughly in her keeping, that she hears and sees things
just as they are. As conscience draws no visions before her
eyes, and shapes no voices in her hearing ; so, while he is
shaken and quite unmanned with fantastical terrors, she re-
mains externally calm, collected, and cool. Her presence
of mind indeed seems firmest when his trances of illusion
run highest ; so that, instead of being at all infected with his
agitations, her forces then move in the aptest order to re-
cover him from them. Which shows that her sympathy with
his ambition, intense as it is, has no power to make her sym-
pathize with his mental workings. It may almost be said
indeed, that what stimulates his imagination stifles hers.

Almost any other dramatist would have brought the Weird
Sisters to act immediately on Lady Macbeth, and on her
husband through her, as thinking her more open to supersti-
tious allurements and charms. Shakespeare seems to have
judged that aptness of mind for them to work upon would
have disqualified he** for working upon her husband in aid
of them. Enough of such influence has already been brought
to bear : what is needed further, is quite another sort of in-
fluence, such as could only come from a mind not much ac-
cessible to the Weird Sisters.

There was stroner dramatic reason, therefore, why Lady



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34 MACBETH.

•Macbeth should have such a mind and temper as to be
moved and impressed, when awake, by nothing but facts.
She ought to be, as indeed she is, so constituted, that the evil
which has struck its roots so deep within never comes back
to her in the elements and aspects of Nature, either to ma-
ture the guilty purpose or to obstruct the guilty act. It is
remarkable that she does not once recur to the Weird Sis-
ters, nor make any use of their salutations : they seem to have
no weight with her, but for the impression they have wrought
on her husband. That this impression may grow to the
desired effect, she refrains from meddling with it, and seeks
only to fortify it with impressions of another sort. And what
could better approve her shrewdness and tact than that, in-
stead of overstraining this one motive, and so weakening it,
she thus lets it alone, and labours to strengthen it by mixing
others with it. For, in truth, the Weird Sisters represent, in
most appalling sort, the wickedness of the purpose they sug-
gest : so that Macbeth*s fears as well as his hopes are stimu-
lated, and his fears even more than his hopes, by the recol-
lection of their greetings : the instant he reverts to them, his
imagination springs into action, — an organ of which ambi-
tion works the bellows indeed, but conscience still governs
the stops and keys. The very thought of them indeed seems
to put him at once under a fascination of terror. All this
does not escape his wife ; who therefore judges it best rather
to draw his thoughts off from that matter, and fix them on
other inducements. He had thought of the murder, when
as yet he could see no opportunities for doing it. When
those opportunities come, they are the arguments that tell
with her ; and she therefore makes it her business to urge
them upon him, invoking his former manhood withal, to re-
dintegrate and shame him out of his present weakness : —



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INTRODUCTION. 35

Nor time nor place
Did then adhere, and yet you would make both :
They've made themselves, and that their fitness now
Does unmake you.

Coleridge justly remarks upon her adroit boldness in first
pressing those very considerations which most stagger her
husband*s purpose. That the King has cast himself unre-
servedly on their loyalty and hospitality, this she puts forth
as the strongest argument for murdering him ! An awful
stroke of character indeed, and therefore awful, because
natural. By thus anticipating his greatest drawbacks, and
urging them as the chief incentives, she forecloses all debate.
Which is just what she wants ; for she knows full well that
the thing will not stand the tests of reason a moment : it
must be done first, and discussed afterwards. And through-
out this wrestling-match she surveys the whole ground, and
darts upon the strongest points with the quickness and sure-
ness of instinct ; the sharpness of the exigency being to her
a sort of practical inspiration. The finishing stroke in this
part of the work is when, her husband's resolution being all
in a totter, she boldly cuts the sinews of retreat, casting the
thing into a personal controversy, and making it a theme of
domestic war : —

Lady Af. Art thou afeard

To be the same in thine own act and valour
As thou art in desire ? Wouldst thou lack that
Which thou esteem 'st the ornament of life,
And live a coward in thine own esteem,
Letting / dare not wait upon / would.
Like the poor cat i' the adage ?

Afacb, Pr'ythee, peace I

I dare do all that may become a man ;
Who dares do more is none.

Lady M. What beast was't then,

That made you break this enterprise to me ?



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$6 MACBETH.

After this, it is hardly possible they should live together,
unless he do the deed. The virtues and affections of the
husband are now drawn up against the conscience of the
man. For, to be scorned and baited as a coward by the
woman he loves, and by whom he is loved, is the last thing
a soldier can bear: death is nothing to it. Macbeth, ac-
cordingly, goes about the deed, and goes through it, with an
assumed ferocity caught from his wife.

Nor is that ferocity native to her own breast : surely, on
her part too, it is assumed ; for though in her intense over-
heat of expectant passion it is temporarily fused into her
character, it is disengaged and thrown off as soon as that
heat passes away ; as men, in the ardour of successful effort,
sometimes pass for a while into a character which they un-
dertake to play. Lady Macbeth begins with acting a part
which is really foreign to her ; but which, notwithstanding,
such is her energy of will, she braves out to issues so over-
whelming, that her husband and many others believe it to
be her own. I here refer especially to the speech begin-
ning, " I have given suck, and know how tender ^tis to love
the babe that milks me." It is said that Mrs. Siddons used
to utter the closing words of that speech in a scream, as
though scared from her propriety by the audacity of her own
tongue. And I can well conceive how a spasmodic action of
fear might lend to such a woman as Lady Macbeth an appear-
ance of superhuman or inhuman boldness. At all events,
it seems clear enough that in this case her fierce vehemence
of purpose rasps her woman's feelings to the quick ; and the
pang thence resulting might well utter itself in a scream.

Lady Macbeth is indeed a great bad woman whom we
fear and pity ; but neither so great nor so bad, I am apt to
think, as is commonly supposed. She has closely studied



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INTRODUCTION. 37

her husband, and penetrated far into the heart of his mys-
tery : yet she knows him rather as he is to her than as he is
in himself; hence in describing his character she interprets
her own. She has indeed the ambition to wish herself un-
sexed, but not the power to unsex herself except in words.
For, though she invokes the " murdering ministers " to
" come to her woman's breasts, and take her milk for gall,"
still she cannot make them come ; and her milk, in spite of
her invocation, continues to be milk. Verplanck describes
her as " a woman of high intellect, bold spirit, and lofty de-
sires, who is mastered by a fiery thirst of power, and that for
her husband as well as herself."

Two characters, however, may easily be made out for
Lady Macbeth, according as we lay the chief stress on what
she says or what she does. For, surely, no one can fail to
remark that the anticipation raised by her earlier speeches is
by no means sustained in her subsequent acts. When she
looks upon the face of the sleeping King, and sees the mur-
derous thought passing, as it were, into a fact before her, a
gush of womanly feeling or of native tenderness suddenly
stays her hand. " Had he not resembled my father as he
slept, I had done*t." That such a real or fancied resem-
blance should thus rise up and unsinew her purpose in the
moment of action, is a rare touch of nature indeed ; and
shows that conscience works even more effectually through
the feelings in her case than through the imagination in that
of her husband. And the difference of imagination and feel-
ing in this point is, that the one acts most at a distance, the
other on the spot. This sharp contradiction between her
tongue and her hand has often reminded me of a line which
Schiller puts into the mouth of Wallenstein : " Bold were my
words, because my deeds were notP And it seems to me



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38 MACBETH.

that the towering audacity of her earlier speeches arises, at
least in part, from an overstrained endeavour to school herself
into a firmness and fierceness of which she feels the want.

Her whole after-course, I think, favours this view. For
instance, when she hears from Macbeth how he has mur-
dered the two grooms also, she sinks down at the tale.
For I can by no means regard that as a counterfeit swoon.
The thing takes her by surprise, and her iron-ribbed self-
control for once gives way. The announcement of the
King's murder had no such effect upon her, for she was pre-
pared for that. And that was when she would have counter-
feited fainting, if at all. So bold of tongue, she could
indeed say, " the sleeping and the dead are but as pictures ;
'tis the eye of childhood, that fears a painted devil " ; but
the sequel proves her to have been better than she was
aware. In truth, she has undertaken too much : in her
efforts to screw her own and her husband's courage to the
sticking-place, there was exerted a force of will which an-
swered the end indeed, but at the same time flawed the core
of her being. She has quite as much of conscience as her
husband ; but no such sensitive redundancy of imagination,
as that her conscience should be in her senses, causing the
bowlings of the storm to syllable the notes of remorse.
Here, again, we see her characteristic matter-of-factness.
It is deeds, not thoughts, that kindle the furies in her soul.
And because the workings of guilt do not pass out of her, as
it were, and take on the form of spectral illusions, therefore
they just eat back and consume all the more fatally within :
had she an organ to project and shape them outwardly in
fantastical terrors, their action would be tempered more
equally to her powers of endurance. With her prodigious
force of will, she may indeed keep them hidden from others,



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INTRODUCTION. 39

but she can neither repress nor assuage them. And for the
same cause she is free alike from the terrible apprehensions
which make her husband flinch from the first crime, and
from the maddening and merciless suspicions that sting him
on to other crimes.

Accordingly she gives no waking sign of the dreadful work
that is doing within : the unmitigable corrodings of her rooted
sorrow, even when busiest in destruction, do not once betray
her, except when her self-rule is dissolved in sleep. But the
truth comes out, with an awful mingling of pathos and ter-
ror, in the scene where her conscience, sleepless amidst the
sleep of nature, nay, most restless even then when all other
cares are at rest, drives her forth, open-eyed yet sightless, to
sigh and groan over spots on her hands that are visible to
none but herself, nor even to herself save when she is blind
to every thing else : a living automaton worked by the ago-
nies of remorse ! How perfectly her senses are then domi-
nated by the conscience, is shown with supreme effect in
" Here's the smell of blood still *' ; which has been aptly
noted as the only instance in modem times where the sense
of smell has been successfully employed in high tragic ex-
pression. An awful mystery, too, hangs over her death.
We know not, the Poet himself seems not to know, whether
the knawings of the undying worm drive her to suicidal vio-
lence, or themselves cut asunder the cords of her Hfe : all
we know is, that the death of her body springs somehow
from the inextinguishable life and the immedicable wound
of her soul. What a history of her woman's heart is written
in her thus sinking, sinking away where imagination shrinks
from following her, under the violence of an invisible yet un-
mistakable disease, which still sharpens its inflictions and at
the same time quickens her sensibilities !



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40 , MACBETH.

Lady Macbeth dies before her husband. This is one of
the most judicious points of the drama. Her death touches
Macbeth in the only spot where he seems to retain the feel-
ings of a man, and draws from him some deeply-solemn,
soothing, elegiac tones ; so that one rises from the contem-
plation of his history " a sadder and a wiser man " : —

Macb, Wherefore was that cry ?

Seyton, The Queen, my lord, is dead.

Macb, She should have died hereafter :
There would have been a time for such a word. —
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, fiiU of sound and fury.
Signifying nothing.

It has been justly observed that " Macbeth, left alone, re-
sumes much of that connection with humanity which he had
so long abandoned : his thoughtfulness becomes pathetic ;
and when at last he dies the death of a soldier, the stem sat-
isfaction, with which we contemplate the act of justice that
destroys him, is unalloyed by feelings of personal wrath or
hatred. His fall is a sacrifice, and not a butchery." *

This guilty couple are patterns of conjugal virtue. A ten-
der, delicate, respectful affection sweetens and dignifies their
intercourse ; the effect of which is rather heightened than
otherwise by their ambition, because they seem to thirst for
each other's honour as much as for their own. And this sen-
timent of mutual respect even grows by their crimes, since

* The Edinburgh Review, July, 1840.



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INTRODUCTION. 4I

their inborn greatness is developed through them. For they
both sin heroically, and they both suffer heroically too. And
when they find that the crown, which they have waded
through so much blood to grasp, does but scald their brows
and stuff their pillow with thorns, this begets a still deeper
and finer play of sympathy between them. Thenceforth
(and how touching its effect I) a soft subdued undertone of
inward sympathetic woe and anguish mingles audibly in the
wild rushing of the moral tempest which hangs round their