No, he need fear no more 'sights.' The Witches have done their work, and after this purposeless butchery his own imagination will trouble him no more.1 He has dealt his last blow at the conscience and pity which spoke through it.

The whole flood of evil in his nature is now let loose. He becomes an open tyrant, dreaded by everyone about him, and a terror to his country. She sinks beneath the yoke.'

Each new morn

New widows howl, new orphans cry, new sorrows

Strike heaven on the face.

She weeps, she bleeds, and each new day a gash is added to her wounds.' She is not the mother of her children, but their grave;

where nothing,

But who knows nothing, is once seen to smile:

Where sighs and groans and shrieks that rend the air
Are made, not mark'd.

For this wild rage and furious cruelty we are prepared; but vices of another kind start up as he plunges on his downward way.

I grant him bloody,
Luxurious, avaricious, false, deceitful,

Sudden, malicious,

says Malcolm; and two of these epithets surprise us. Who would have expected avarice or lechery in Macbeth? His ruin seems complete.

1The Immediate reference in 'But no more sights' is doubtless to the visions called up by the Witches; but one of these, the 'blood-bolter'd Banquo,' recalls to him the vision of the preceding night, of which he had said,

You make me strange
Even to the disposition that I owe,

When now I think you can behold such sights,

And keep the natural ruby of your cheeks,

When mine is blanch'd with fear.

2'Luxurious' and 'luxury' are used by Shakespeare only in this older sense. It must be remembered that these lines are spoken by Malcolm, but it seems likely that they are meant to be taken as true throughout.

Yet it is never complete. To the end he never totally loses our sympathy; we never feel towards him as we do to those who appear the born children of darkness. There remains something sublime in the defiance with which, even when cheated of his last hope, he faces earth and hell and heaven. Nor would any soul to whom evil was congenial be capable of that heart-sickness which overcomes him when he thinks of the 'honour, love, obedience, troops of friends' which he must not look to have' (and which Iago would never have cared to have), and contrasts with them

Curses, not loud but deep, mouth-honour, breath,

Which the poor heart would fain deny, and dare not,

(and which Iago would have accepted with indifference). Neither can I agree with those who find in his reception of the news of his wife's death proof of alienation or utter carelessness. There is no proof of these in the words,

She should have died hereafter;

There would have been a time for such a word,

He

spoken as they are by a man already in some measure prepared for such ported by the frenzy of his has no time now to feel.1 the morrow when time to thing comes, the vanity of

news, all how translast fight for life. Only, as he thinks of feel will come-if anyall hopes and forward

'I do not at all suggest that his love for his wife remains what it was when he greeted her with the words 'My dearest love, Duncan comes here to-night.' He has greatly changed; she has ceased to help him, sunk in her own despair; and there is no intensity of anxiety in the questions he puts to the doctor about her. But his love for her was probably never unselfish, never the love of Brutus, who, in somewhat similar circumstances, uses, on the death of Cassius, words which remind us of Macbeth's:

I shall find time, Cassius, I shall find time.

For the opposite strain of feeling cf. Sonnet 90:

Then hate me if thou wilt; if ever, now,
Now while the world is bent my deeds to cross.

lookings sinks deep into his soul with an infinite weariness, and he murmurs,

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.

In the very depths a gleam of his native love of goodness, and with it a touch of tragic grandeur, rests upon him. The evil he has desperately embraced continues to madden or to wither his inmost heart. No experience in the world could bring him to glory in it or make his peace with it, or to forget what he once was and Iago and Goneril

never were.

LECTURE X

MACBETH

1

To regard Macbeth as a play, like the lovetragedies Romeo and Juliet and Antony and Cleopatra, in which there are two central characters of equal importance, is certainly a mistake. But Shakespeare himself is in a measure responsible for it, because the first half of Macbeth is greater than the second, and in the first half Lady Macbeth not only appears more than in the second but exerts the ultimate deciding influence on the action. And, in the opening Act at least, Lady Macbeth is the most commanding and perhaps the most aweinspiring figure that Shakespeare drew. Sharing, as we have seen, certain traits with her husband, she is at once clearly distinguished from him by an inflexibility of will, which appears to hold imagination, feeling, and conscience completely in check. To her the prophecy of things that will be becomes instantaneously the determination that they shall be:

Glamis thou art, and Cawdor, and shalt be

That thou art promised.

She knows her husband's weakness, how he scruples 'to catch the nearest way' to the object he desires; and she sets herself without a trace of doubt or conflict to counteract this weakness. To her there

is no separation between will and deed; and, as the deed falls in part to her, she is sure it will be done :

The raven himself is hoarse

That croaks the fatal entrance of Duncan

Under my battlements.

On the moment of Macbeth's rejoining her, after braving infinite dangers and winning infinite praise, without a syllable on these subjects or a word of affection, she goes straight to her purpose and permits him to speak of nothing else. She takes the superior position and assumes the direction of affairs, appears to assume it even more than she really can, that she may spur him on. She animates

him by picturing the deed as heroic, 'this night's great business,' or 'our great quell,' while she ignores its cruelty and faithlessness. She bears down his faint resistance by presenting him with a prepared scheme which may remove from him the terror and danger of deliberation. She rouses him with a taunt no man can bear, and least of all a soldier,— the word 'coward.' She appeals even to his love for her:

from this time

Such I account thy love;

—such, that is, as the protestations of a drunkard. Her reasonings are mere sophisms; they could persuade no man. It is not by them, it is by personal appeals, through the admiration she extorts from him, and through sheer force of will, that she impels him to the deed. Her eyes are fixed upon the crown and the means to it; she does not attend to the consequences. Her plan of laying the guilt upon the chamberlains is invented on the spur of the moment, and simply to satisfy her husband. Her true mind is heard in the ringing cry with which she answers his question, Will it not be received . . . that they have done it?'

Who dares receive it other?