Shakespearean Tragedy: Lectures on Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, Macbeth
This mistake in acting shows that she does not even know what the
natural feeling in such circumstances would be; and Banquo's curt
answer, 'Too cruel anywhere,' is almost a reproof of her insensibility.
But, admitting this, we have in the first place to remember, in
imagining the opening scenes, that she is deliberately bent on
counteracting the 'human kindness' of her husband, and also that she is
evidently not merely inflexibly determined but in a condition of
abnormal excitability. That exaltation in the project which is so
entirely lacking in Macbeth is strongly marked in her. When she tries to
help him by representing their enterprise as heroic, she is deceiving
herself as much as him. Their attainment of the crown presents itself to
her, perhaps has long presented itself, as something so glorious, and
she has fixed her will upon it so completely, that for the time she sees
the enterprise in no other light than that of its greatness. When she
soliloquises,
Yet do I fear thy nature:
It is too full o' the milk of human kindness
To catch the nearest way: thou wouldst be great;
Art not without ambition, but without
The illness should attend it; what thou wouldst highly,
That wouldst thou holily,
one sees that 'ambition' and 'great' and 'highly' and even 'illness' are
to her simply terms of praise, and 'holily' and 'human kindness' simply
terms of blame. Moral distinctions do not in this exaltation exist for
her; or rather they are inverted: 'good' means to her the crown and
whatever is required to obtain it, 'evil' whatever stands in the way of
its attainment. This attitude of mind is evident even when she is alone,
though it becomes still more pronounced when she has to work upon her
husband. And it persists until her end is attained. But, without being
exactly forced, it betrays a strain which could not long endure.
Besides this, in these earlier scenes the traces of feminine weakness
and human feeling, which account for her later failure, are not absent.
Her will, it is clear, was exerted to overpower not only her husband's
resistance but some resistance in herself. Imagine Goneril uttering the
famous words,
Had he not resembled
My father as he slept, I had done 't.
They are spoken, I think, without any sentiment--impatiently, as though
she regretted her weakness: but it was there. And in reality, quite
apart from this recollection of her father, she could never have done
the murder if her husband had failed. She had to nerve herself with wine
to give her 'boldness' enough to go through her minor part. That
appalling invocation to the spirits of evil, to unsex her and fill her
from the crown to the toe topfull of direst cruelty, tells the same tale
of determination to crush the inward protest. Goneril had no need of
such a prayer. In the utterance of the frightful lines,
I have given suck, and know
How tender 'tis to love the babe that milks me:
I would, while it was smiling in my face,
Have pluck'd my nipple from his boneless gums,
And dash'd the brains out, had I so sworn as you
Have done to this,
her voice should doubtless rise until it reaches, in 'dash'd the brains
out,' an almost hysterical scream.[227] These lines show unmistakably
that strained exaltation which, as soon as the end is reached, vanishes,
never to return.
The greatness of Lady Macbeth lies almost wholly in courage and force of
will. It is an error to regard her as remarkable on the intellectual
side. In acting a part she shows immense self-control, but not much
skill. Whatever may be thought of the plan of attributing the murder of
Duncan to the chamberlains, to lay their bloody daggers on their
pillows, as if they were determined to advertise their guilt, was a
mistake which can be accounted for only by the excitement of the moment.
But the limitations of her mind appear most in the point where she is
most strongly contrasted with Macbeth,--in her comparative dulness of
imagination. I say 'comparative,' for she sometimes uses highly poetic
language, as indeed does everyone in Shakespeare who has any greatness
of soul. Nor is she perhaps less imaginative than the majority of his
heroines. But as compared with her husband she has little imagination.
It is not _simply_ that she suppresses what she has. To her, things
remain at the most terrible moment precisely what they were at the
calmest, plain facts which stand in a given relation to a certain deed,
not visions which tremble and flicker in the light of other worlds. The
probability that the old king will sleep soundly after his long journey
to Inverness is to her simply a fortunate circumstance; but one can
fancy the shoot of horror across Macbeth's face as she mentions it. She
uses familiar and prosaic illustrations, like
Letting 'I dare not' wait upon 'I would,'
Like the poor cat i' the adage,
(the cat who wanted fish but did not like to wet her feet); or,
We fail?
But screw your courage to the sticking-place,
And we'll not fail;[228]
or,
Was the hope drunk
Wherein you dress'd yourself? hath it slept since?
And wakes it now, to look so green and pale
At what it did so freely?
The Witches are practically nothing to her. She feels no sympathy in
Nature with her guilty purpose, and would never bid the earth not hear
her steps, which way they walk. The noises before the murder, and during
it, are heard by her as simple facts, and are referred to their true
sources. The knocking has no mystery for her: it comes from 'the south
entry.' She calculates on the drunkenness of the grooms, compares the
different effects of wine on herself and on them, and listens to their
snoring. To her the blood upon her husband's hands suggests only the
taunt,
My hands are of your colour, but I shame
To wear a heart so white;
and the blood to her is merely 'this filthy witness,'--words impossible
to her husband, to whom it suggested something quite other than sensuous
disgust or practical danger. The literalism of her mind appears fully in
two contemptuous speeches where she dismisses his imaginings; in the
murder scene:
Infirm of purpose!
Give me the daggers! The sleeping and the dead
Are but as pictures: 'tis the eye of childhood
That fears a painted devil;
and in the banquet scene:
O these flaws and starts,
Impostors to true fear, would well become
A woman's story at a winter's fire,
Authorised by her grandam. Shame itself!
Why do you make such faces? When all's done,
You look but on a stool.
Even in the awful scene where her imagination breaks loose in sleep she
uses no such images as Macbeth's. It is the direct appeal of the facts
to sense that has fastened on her memory. The ghastly realism of 'Yet
who would have thought the old man to have had so much blood in him?' or
'Here's the smell of the blood still,' is wholly unlike him. Her most
poetical words, 'All the perfumes of Arabia will not sweeten this little
hand,' are equally unlike his words about great Neptune's ocean. Hers,
like some of her other speeches, are the more moving, from their greater
simplicity and because they seem to tell of that self-restraint in
suffering which is so totally lacking in him; but there is in them
comparatively little of imagination. If we consider most of the passages
to which I have referred, we shall find that the quality which moves our
admiration is courage or force of will.
This want of imagination, though it helps to make Lady Macbeth strong
for immediate action, is fatal to her. If she does not feel beforehand
the cruelty of Duncan's murder, this is mainly because she hardly
imagines the act, or at most imagines its outward show, 'the motion of a
muscle this way or that.' Nor does she in the least foresee those inward
consequences which reveal themselves immediately in her husband, and
less quickly in herself. It is often said that she understands him well.
Had she done so, she never would have urged him on. She knows that he is
given to strange fancies; but, not realising what they spring from, she
has no idea either that they may gain such power as to ruin the scheme,
or that, while they mean present weakness, they mean also perception of
the future. At one point in the murder scene the force of his
imagination impresses her, and for a moment she is startled; a light
threatens to break on her:
These deeds must not be thought
After these ways: so, it will make us mad,
she says, with a sudden and great seriousness. And when he goes panting
on, 'Methought I heard a voice cry, "Sleep no more,"' ... she breaks in,
'What do you mean?' half-doubting whether this was not a real voice that
he heard. Then, almost directly, she recovers herself, convinced of the
vanity of his fancy. Nor does she understand herself any better than
him. She never suspects that these deeds _must_ be thought after these
ways; that her facile realism,
A little water clears us of this deed,
will one day be answered by herself, 'Will these hands ne'er be clean?'
or that the fatal commonplace, 'What's done is done,' will make way for
her last despairing sentence, 'What's done cannot be undone.'
Hence the development of her character--perhaps it would be more
strictly accurate to say, the change in her state of mind--is both
inevitable, and the opposite of the development we traced in Macbeth.
When the murder has been done, the discovery of its hideousness, first
reflected in the faces of her guests, comes to Lady Macbeth with the
shock of a sudden disclosure, and at once her nature begins to sink. The
first intimation of the change is given when, in the scene of the
discovery, she faints.[229] When next we see her, Queen of Scotland, the
glory of her dream has faded. She enters, disillusioned, and weary with
want of sleep: she has thrown away everything and gained nothing:
Nought's had, all's spent,
Where our desire is got without content:
'Tis safer to be that which we destroy
Than by destruction dwell in doubtful joy.
Henceforth she has no initiative: the stem of her being seems to be cut
through. Her husband, physically the stronger, maddened by pangs he had
foreseen, but still flaming with life, comes into the foreground, and
she retires. Her will remains, and she does her best to help him; but he
rarely needs her help. Her chief anxiety appears to be that he should
not betray his misery. He plans the murder of Banquo without her
knowledge (not in order to spare her, I think, for he never shows love
of this quality, but merely because he does not need her now); and even
when she is told vaguely of his intention she appears but little
interested. In the sudden emergency of the banquet scene she makes a
prodigious and magnificent effort; her strength, and with it her
ascendancy, returns, and she saves her husband at least from an open
disclosure. But after this she takes no part whatever in the action. We
only know from her shuddering words in the sleep-walking scene, 'The
Thane of Fife had a wife: where is she now?' that she has even learned
of her husband's worst crime; and in all the horrors of his tyranny over
Scotland she has, so far as we hear, no part. Disillusionment and
despair prey upon her more and more. That she should seek any relief in
speech, or should ask for sympathy, would seem to her mere weakness, and
would be to Macbeth's defiant fury an irritation. Thinking of the change
in him, we imagine the bond between them slackened, and Lady Macbeth