Shakespearean Tragedy: Lectures on Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, Macbeth
impressions and is liable to supernatural fears. And through it,
especially, come to him the intimations of conscience and honour.
Macbeth's better nature--to put the matter for clearness' sake too
broadly--instead of speaking to him in the overt language of moral
ideas, commands, and prohibitions, incorporates itself in images which
alarm and horrify. His imagination is thus the best of him, something
usually deeper and higher than his conscious thoughts; and if he had
obeyed it he would have been safe. But his wife quite misunderstands it,
and he himself understands it only in part. The terrifying images which
deter him from crime and follow its commission, and which are really the
protest of his deepest self, seem to his wife the creations of mere
nervous fear, and are sometimes referred by himself to the dread of
vengeance or the restlessness of insecurity.[216] His conscious or
reflective mind, that is, moves chiefly among considerations of outward
success and failure, while his inner being is convulsed by conscience.
And his inability to understand himself is repeated and exaggerated in
the interpretations of actors and critics, who represent him as a
coward, cold-blooded, calculating, and pitiless, who shrinks from crime
simply because it is dangerous, and suffers afterwards simply because he
is not safe. In reality his courage is frightful. He strides from crime
to crime, though his soul never ceases to bar his advance with shapes of
terror, or to clamour in his ears that he is murdering his peace and
casting away his 'eternal jewel.'
It is of the first importance to realise the strength, and also (what
has not been so clearly recognised) the limits, of Macbeth's
imagination. It is not the universal meditative imagination of Hamlet.
He came to see in man, as Hamlet sometimes did, the 'quintessence of
dust'; but he must always have been incapable of Hamlet's reflections on
man's noble reason and infinite faculty, or of seeing with Hamlet's eyes
'this brave o'erhanging firmament, this majestical roof fretted with
golden fire.' Nor could he feel, like Othello, the romance of war or the
infinity of love. He shows no sign of any unusual sensitiveness to the
glory or beauty in the world or the soul; and it is partly for this
reason that we have no inclination to love him, and that we regard him
with more of awe than of pity. His imagination is excitable and intense,
but narrow. That which stimulates it is, almost solely, that which
thrills with sudden, startling, and often supernatural fear.[217] There
is a famous passage late in the play (V. v. 10) which is here very
significant, because it refers to a time before his conscience was
burdened, and so shows his native disposition:
The time has been, my senses would have cool'd
To hear a night-shriek; and my fell of hair
Would at a dismal treatise rise and stir
As life were in't.
This 'time' must have been in his youth, or at least before we see him.
And, in the drama, everything which terrifies him is of this character,
only it has now a deeper and a moral significance. Palpable dangers
leave him unmoved or fill him with fire. He does himself mere justice
when he asserts he 'dare do all that may become a man,' or when he
exclaims to Banquo's ghost,
What man dare, I dare:
Approach thou like the rugged Russian bear,
The arm'd rhinoceros, or the Hyrcan tiger;
Take any shape but that, and my firm nerves
Shall never tremble.
What appals him is always the image of his own guilty heart or bloody
deed, or some image which derives from them its terror or gloom. These,
when they arise, hold him spell-bound and possess him wholly, like a
hypnotic trance which is at the same time the ecstasy of a poet. As the
first 'horrid image' of Duncan's murder--of himself murdering
Duncan--rises from unconsciousness and confronts him, his hair stands on
end and the outward scene vanishes from his eyes. Why? For fear of
'consequences'? The idea is ridiculous. Or because the deed is bloody?
The man who with his 'smoking' steel 'carved out his passage' to the
rebel leader, and 'unseam'd him from the nave to the chaps,' would
hardly be frightened by blood. How could fear of consequences make the
dagger he is to use hang suddenly glittering before him in the air, and
then as suddenly dash it with gouts of blood? Even when he _talks_ of
consequences, and declares that if he were safe against them he would
'jump the life to come,' his imagination bears witness against him, and
shows us that what really holds him back is the hideous vileness of the
deed:
He's here in double trust;
First, as I am his kinsman and his subject,
Strong both against the deed; then, as his host,
Who should against his murderer shut the door,
Not bear the knife myself. Besides, this Duncan
Hath borne his faculties so meek, hath been
So clear in his great office, that his virtues
Will plead like angels, trumpet-tongued, against
The deep damnation of his taking-off;
And pity, like a naked new-born babe,
Striding the blast, or heaven's cherubim, horsed
Upon the sightless couriers of the air,
Shall blow the horrid deed in every eye,
That tears shall drown the wind.
It may be said that he is here thinking of the horror that others will
feel at the deed--thinking therefore of consequences. Yes, but could he
realise thus how horrible the deed would look to others if it were not
equally horrible to himself?
It is the same when the murder is done. He is well-nigh mad with horror,
but it is not the horror of detection. It is not he who thinks of
washing his hands or getting his nightgown on. He has brought away the
daggers he should have left on the pillows of the grooms, but what does
he care for that? What _he_ thinks of is that, when he heard one of the
men awaked from sleep say 'God bless us,' he could not say 'Amen'; for
his imagination presents to him the parching of his throat as an
immediate judgment from heaven. His wife heard the owl scream and the
crickets cry; but what _he_ heard was the voice that first cried
'Macbeth doth murder sleep,' and then, a minute later, with a change of
tense, denounced on him, as if his three names gave him three
personalities to suffer in, the doom of sleeplessness:
Glamis hath murdered sleep, and therefore Cawdor
Shall sleep no more, Macbeth shall sleep no more.
There comes a sound of knocking. It should be perfectly familiar to him;
but he knows not whence, or from what world, it comes. He looks down at
his hands, and starts violently: 'What hands are here?' For they seem
alive, they move, they mean to pluck out his eyes. He looks at one of
them again; it does not move; but the blood upon it is enough to dye the
whole ocean red. What has all this to do with fear of 'consequences'? It
is his soul speaking in the only shape in which it can speak freely,
that of imagination.
So long as Macbeth's imagination is active, we watch him fascinated; we
feel suspense, horror, awe; in which are latent, also, admiration and
sympathy. But so soon as it is quiescent these feelings vanish. He is no
longer 'infirm of purpose': he becomes domineering, even brutal, or he
becomes a cool pitiless hypocrite. He is generally said to be a very bad
actor, but this is not wholly true. Whenever his imagination stirs, he
acts badly. It so possesses him, and is so much stronger than his
reason, that his face betrays him, and his voice utters the most
improbable untruths[218] or the most artificial rhetoric[219] But when
it is asleep he is firm, self-controlled and practical, as in the
conversation where he skilfully elicits from Banquo that information
about his movements which is required for the successful arrangement of
his murder.[220] Here he is hateful; and so he is in the conversation
with the murderers, who are not professional cut-throats but old
soldiers, and whom, without a vestige of remorse, he beguiles with
calumnies against Banquo and with such appeals as his wife had used to
him.[221] On the other hand, we feel much pity as well as anxiety in the
scene (I. vii.) where she overcomes his opposition to the murder; and we
feel it (though his imagination is not specially active) because this
scene shows us how little he understands himself. This is his great
misfortune here. Not that he fails to realise in reflection the baseness
of the deed (the soliloquy with which the scene opens shows that he does
not). But he has never, to put it pedantically, accepted as the
principle of his conduct the morality which takes shape in his
imaginative fears. Had he done so, and said plainly to his wife, 'The
thing is vile, and, however much I have sworn to do it, I will not,' she
would have been helpless; for all her arguments proceed on the
assumption that there is for them no such point of view. Macbeth does
approach this position once, when, resenting the accusation of
cowardice, he answers,
I dare do all that may become a man;
Who dares do more is none.
She feels in an instant that everything is at stake, and, ignoring the
point, overwhelms him with indignant and contemptuous personal reproach.
But he yields to it because he is himself half-ashamed of that answer of
his, and because, for want of habit, the simple idea which it expresses
has no hold on him comparable to the force it acquires when it becomes
incarnate in visionary fears and warnings.
Yet these were so insistent, and they offered to his ambition a
resistance so strong, that it is impossible to regard him as falling
through the blindness or delusion of passion. On the contrary, he
himself feels with such intensity the enormity of his purpose that, it
seems clear, neither his ambition nor yet the prophecy of the Witches
would ever without the aid of Lady Macbeth have overcome this feeling.
As it is, the deed is done in horror and without the faintest desire or
sense of glory,--done, one may almost say, as if it were an appalling
duty; and, the instant it is finished, its futility is revealed to
Macbeth as clearly as its vileness had been revealed beforehand. As he
staggers from the scene he mutters in despair,
Wake Duncan with thy knocking! I would thou could'st.
When, half an hour later, he returns with Lennox from the room of the
murder, he breaks out:
Had I but died an hour before this chance,
I had lived a blessed time; for from this instant
There's nothing serious in mortality:
All is but toys: renown and grace is dead;
The wine of life is drawn, and the mere lees
Is left this vault to brag of.
This is no mere acting. The language here has none of the false
rhetoric of his merely hypocritical speeches. It is meant to deceive,
but it utters at the same time his profoundest feeling. And this he can
henceforth never hide from himself for long. However he may try to drown
it in further enormities, he hears it murmuring,
Duncan is in his grave:
After life's fitful fever he sleeps well:
or,
better be with the dead:
or,
I have lived long enough:
and it speaks its last words on the last day of his life:
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, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.
How strange that this judgment on life, the despair of a man who had
knowingly made mortal war on his own soul, should be frequently quoted
as Shakespeare's own judgment, and should even be adduced, in serious
criticism, as a proof of his pessimism!