By DR. U. C. NAG, M.A., PH. D. (LOND.)

It is universally accepted that the personality of Shakespeare is elusive, but attempts have been always made at interpreting some of the great truths that underlie his plays–particularly his tragedies. And such attempts are not always wit upon ill employment, provided we bear in mind that he is many-sided, and that "his mind is not small enough to be comprehended with ease." He is not to be labelled according to anyone of his aspects, and ticketed with a comfortably precise description.

Again, though he may not be labelled with a party name, we are not to suppose that he has no distinct and distinctive ideas upon human life. We are to guard against narrowing those ideas to the dimensions of our lesser minds and claiming that he means just what we assert and no more.

We assume then the intelligibility of Shakespeare while bearing in mind his rare comprehensiveness; we look to him for criticism of life without seeking to force that criticism to the moulds of narrow creeds and dogmas, or to limit to one significance a criticism that may have as many meanings as there are glints of colour in a piece of shot-silk. I shall attempt in my own humble way to record some of the impressions that I have gathered about some of the profoundest thoughts of Shakespeare upon certain aspects of human life as presented in the play of Macbeth. Macbeth was written at a time when Shakespeare's powers were full-grown, and his knowledge of life and art, mature and deep. We may, therefore, expect to find in it a noble and profound application of his ideas to life. The play is so complex in its dramatic combinations, so rapid in its action that it needs no little effort to keep in view the course of each individual character and to be awake all through to the ethical sense which underlies the whole. But the character and history of Macbeth himself form, as it were, a point of concentration for the various elements of life and character mingled in the play, and if we limit our study, for the present, to the central character of the piece we are, at any rate, at the centre of the poet's thoughts and may hope to catch something of his meaning. There is, however, a view of the play which reduces its criticism of life to a statement, at once meagre and pitiless.

Macbeth is, it is said, a picture of a man goaded on to crime by supernatural agencies, or victimised by the iron-hand of fate–as are the characters of Hardy–from whose grip there could be no escape. If this view of Shakespeare's intention be true, it is obvious that we must abandon much of the hope wherein we have dressed ourselves, The human interest of the play would necessarily decrease, its presentment of life would be merely depressingly barren of all inspiring suggestions, and its author would be setting the seal of his approval upon the pessimism which is reached by Macbeth only in his spiritual paralysis. But it is impossible to accept this view as truly representing Shakespeare's mind. To a man of such intense reality as Shakespeare, to one who had taken life so seriously as Shakespeare had, to one whose genius was so vigorously human as Shakespeare's was, it would have been impossible to revert to a conception possible only to such mind in the ancient days of the Greek drama. The two modes of thought were separated by a gulf of centuries, and Christianity lay between. That the conception is capable of artistic treatment has been shown to the full by Aeschylus and Sophocles. But truth is higher than art, and if Macbeth is an instance of a great character degraded by demon agencies which he could not be expected to resist, we are driven to suppose that Shakespeare was false to himself and to the truth of his experience and that merely to create an artistic effect, he spent his genius upon a history he did not mean to stamp as real and true.

Apart, however, from these considerations, to think thus of the play is to mistake completely the nature and function of the Weird Sisters in Macbeth. In this wonderful creation of art, Shakespeare, as has been well said, "took enough of traditionary matter to enlist old credulity in behalf of agents suited to his peculiar purpose; representing to the age its own thoughts, and at the same time informing that representation with a moral significance suited to all ages alike."¹ They have, therefore, a literal character drawn from the traditionary and contemporary ideas about witch-craft, and they have a symbolical character in which they answer to a permanent fact in human life and "represent the mysterious action and reaction between the evil mind and external nature," which invites man to crime because his own heart is depraved. They are not goddesses or fates whom Macbeth is powerless to resist–nor does Macbeth anywhere betray a suspicion that his actions have been forced upon him from without. They represent rather the evil in the hero's own soul. They are to some extent projections of his own heart, but they symbolise also the influences of evil in the world around which are quickened into activity by, the evil in the soul and come to reinforce it. They may, thus, be aptly enough described as poetical or mythical impersonations of evil influences. They body forth in living form the fearful echo which the natural world gives back to the evil that speaks out from the human heart. And the secret of their power over Macbeth lies mainly in that they present to him "his embryonic wishes and half-formed thoughts," and stand for forces at work in the world around him which are called into activity by the half-conscious soliciting of his own heart. Their office is not properly to deprave the evil heart. They merely untie the evil hands, and act as mediators between the secret purpose and the final accomplishment of crime. Their effect upon Macbeth is to hasten an action he has already dimly thought of; their effect upon Banquo is merely to draw from him utterances which display to us the loyal nature and an honest heart.²

In the course of the play it is made clear to us that the idea of attaining the throne by fair means or foul, was not new to Macbeth's mind. He has spoken with his wife about the matter, and when, afterwards, he falters in his purpose, it is no small part of the sting of his wife's reproaches that she can taunt him with his previous plans to secure an object placed at last well within his reach:

It is not unnatural that Macbeth should have dreamt of the throne. His claim, prior to the elective vote, is as good as Duncan's. He has given more than satisfactory proof of his fitness to govern such an unruly people as the Scots were. He has quelled at a single stroke, as it were, an insurrection within the kingdom and an invasion from without. He was like Duncan a direct descendant of Malcolm II through his daughter. His blood, therefore, was as royal as that of Duncan; and Duncan was temperamentally unsuited to rule a people that required a masterful, bold, and martial king. Macbeth can very well be excused for feeling that he was better capable of ruling than the gentle but inefficient ruler under whom he served; who was not warrior enough to fight for his own throne against foreign foes, nor statesman enough to discern and deal with enemies near home. Besides, Duncan was getting on in years, and it was but natural for Macbeth sometimes to think of the future when the throne should again be put to the elective vote. Who could then be regarded as fitter for the throne than himself, particularly when he had rendered such signal service to the country and was practically its saviour? Besides, it was the custom of the North to elect the nearest kinsman of full age, and as such Macbeth's claims were the strongest; because Malcolm and Donalbain were mere youngsters of unripe years. They could in no way be compared to Macbeth. Thus, at any rate, we may conclude that the salutation of the Weird Sisters merely objectifies a suggestion that was no unfamiliar tenant of Macbeth's heart.

This prospect of future greatness he must have frequently discussed with his wife, between whom and himself there has been always a perfect understanding and loving confidence. It is not, also, unnatural that as they both warmed over the future, the possibility of Duncan not doing rightly by Macbeth would sometimes cross his mind or his wife might have suggested such a disappointing possibility. It is very probable that it was at such moments the dark hint of crime would suggest itself to him, without its taking any definite shape in his mind. Besides, as they anticipated the future grandeur to which they would ascend, their minds were too actively engaged in rearing the aerial castle to let them think, in any consequential way, of the steps they would take, if their hopes were frustrated. Besides, their perfect understanding of each other removed the likelihood of any discussion of plans to be undertaken to realise their hopes, should chance prove inadequate. Thus, though the suggestion of crime was there in the mind of Macbeth, his ideas on the matter remained vague and indefinite in the absence of any situation insisting upon him to clarify them. It should also be borne in mind that they were both young–much younger than at the time the play opens, when the average healthy mind always dwells upon the pleasantest aspect of life and is optimistic enough to believe that everything will come all right.

So much by way of preface. We may now follow the course of Macbeth's career in the play. He is introduced to us on the day of his success, returning from the battle-field filled with the exultation of victory and it is in this ardent and enkindled spirit that he is met by the Weird Sisters, and their promises of greatness. Their salutation startles him, throws him into a rapture of meditation. He startles not at the mere prediction that he shall be king, for, though he professes that "to be king stands not within the prospect of belief," the kingship was no more than he might reasonably have expected. The promise that he should be the Thane of Cawdor would have been the more surprising of the two. But it is the sudden flash of revelation thrown upon his own criminal aptitudes that keeps him fixed in thought. The weird salutation has taught him in a moment to know himself better, and the knowledge is disquieting. "Macbeth that shall be king hereafter"–it is his own thought uttered aloud, and the innocent prediction takes the colour of that thought and becomes shrined with the hues of murder. And it is precisely because these supernatural beings embody and objectify the secret evil working in Macbeth that in their appearance is laid the keynote of the whole play. That this is so, becomes apparent as we proceed. The sisters vanish "as breath into the wind" and will not abide his questions. But their disappearance is the signal for the fulfillment of their prophecy to begin. On Macbeth the effect of the news which he hears in part fulfillment of the prophetic salutation is sudden and striking. He accepts at once the truth of the whole prophecy, but it is deeply significant that his mind indulges in no dreams of future grandeur such as might only be natural at such a moment, but hurries at once to a vision of the means whereby the prophecy is to be fulfilled. The road has evidently been traversed before; and his mind takes the line of least resistance. The mere prediction need have suggested no sinister thoughts. Duncan was old and the kingship in the ordinary course of nature might be fast approaching. But conspiracy and kingship have been mentally associated in the past, and the proffer of the one inevitably suggests the other. Murder has, however, not been definitely planned. His vaulting ambition might have vaguely suggested the dark hints of crime by which means the crown was to be attained, and opportunity created. Now, therefore, that the image of murder is brought near and floats vividly before the mind, it is horrible to him; and he yields to it with a sense of horror which throws his whole being into turmoil and confusion:

He is no hardened villain.³ His imagination is, on the other hand, afire with the horrors of hell. He knows that he is capable of the deed, and feels within himself a purpose answering to the suggestion which has so appalled even while attracting him. It is his consciousness that fie has nothing to oppose to so powerful a temptation which lends sting to the terrors of thought; for, in it he reads a dim prophecy of what awaits him and it is the same consciousness which bids him resort to procrastination–the common expedient of shallow and unprincipled minds. He does not altogether dismiss the idea as wicked but shrinks from it as terrible; he does not resolutely put it from him but merely refuses to look it in the face when a new hope of fulfillment of his desire is engendered by his unexpected elevation to the Thanedom of Cawdor coupled with Ross's announcement that this was but an earnest of greater honour yet to come.

In this frame of mind he meets the King, who greets him with the profoundest expressions of gratitude:

Such a phrase can carry with it only one interpretation. All that Duncan can give to Macbeth is his due; and the best that Duncan had to give was the succession. Macbeth had shown himself fit for the Kingship by being kingly: his bravery was unimpeachable, his presence carried respect, his address was dignified, his character, so far as it had been known, was unstained. How could Duncan have provided better for the future? Was there anything unconstitutional in the arrangement? Macbeth was of the royal house. Malcolm and Donalbain, the King's sons, were, by their years, unfit to rule. They had taken no part in the fight. The succession of the kinsman of full age was the usual rule in the North.⁴

Imagine then Macbeth's feeling when, immediately after his superlative promises to his victorious cousin, Duncan nominates Malcolm the Prince of Cumberland and heir-apparent to the throne. The reaction is intense, and immediately lets in, only with far more definiteness of conception, the visions of murder, which have already visited his brain. They have now a fresh stimulus in a sudden and unlooked-for reaction of disappointment, and much of their terror for Macbeth is, thus, for the moment dissipated, while the prospect of having Duncan within the walls of his own castle gives them a new definiteness of form:

There is a pathos in the position of unconscious Duncan, which, were it not pathos, might also be scoffing irony. How unconsciously he paves the way to his own destruction! Macbeth wanted but little to spur his excited indecision to action, and that little Duncan is not slow to supply. The deed would never, perhaps, have been one of stupendous difficulty, but Duncan must make it as easy as possible. What a pregnant commentary alike on his virtues and his weakness!

Meanwhile, apparently before Malcolm's appointment, Macbeth has written to his wife of the strange apparition of the Weird Sisters, and we are now in a position to obtain a view of Macbeth through the eyes of the person who knows him best. Some such commentary we feel to be necessary at this stage of the story. Much that has gone before has been puzzling. Why did Macbeth catch so strongly at the weird prophecy only to dismiss the idea of crime with such relief immediately afterwards? And why was he so ready to revive again when the way to the natural succession was barred to him? Lady Macbeth seems already to know much of the mental process through which her husband has passed.

Macbeth is, in the view of his wife, ‘too full of the milk of human kindness’; too full, that is, of the ordinary weakness of human nature, too apt to shrink from what is not natural, too thoroughly human to catch ‘the nearest way.’ He would be great but is not sufficiently unscrupulous to be a villain of the resolute, unshrinking kind. He cherished unholy aims and wrong desires of gain, but shrinks from unholy means, from playing false. He kept from crimes, as she thinks, not because it was in itself abhorrent to his nature, not because it was infinitely repugnant to his conscience, but from a vague fear of the results of evil-doing associated to a great extent with thoughts of failure and disgrace. Perhaps, too, because he would still preserve for himself some show of self-respect. And what an echo do we find in Lady Macbeth's words of the thought which her husband has already uttered:

Much that has puzzled us heretofore is now made clear. But we tremble to think of the awful possibilities of crime latent in the character such as Lady Macbeth has drawn. There is in it no principles which make for good and are against evil. Lady Macbeth, on the other hand, is not imaginative. Like most of Shakespeare's women she is quick-witted and practical; and her lack of imagination is at once her strength and her weakness. It strengthens her for immediate action but it is fatal to her in the end and to her husband, too. Had she understood him she could never have spurred him on. Had she imagined the full cruelty of her deed, she could never have done it. With this light thrown upon Macbeth we can not only understand what has gone before, but can already foresee much of what is to follow.

But we are also in a position to know that Lady Macbeth's account, true as it must be so far as it goes, does not cover the whole ground of her husband's nature. Built as she was in a different and almost antithetical mould, she could not appreciate the immense force of her husband's imagination, morbidly set alight, as it was, by a conscience which still wielded a scourge. Macbeth's vivid powers of imagination form a very important part of his character. We have seen already how it is through them that his conscience works when its direct voice fails to touch his will, and is driven almost to refuse its office. And we already guess that through them his earthly punishment will begin; nay, has begun already, though the crime is not yet translated into action. For his terrors before the deed, those horrible imagining's which made his seated heart beat against his ribs, are no less a substitute for the remorse he will not feel than the picture of the horrors which will haunt him when the deed is done. Macbeth's scourge will not be remorse, but he will create round himself an atmosphere of imagined horrors which will cling to him without ceasing. It was some consciousness of this which made him shrink from catching the nearest way. And though under the stimulus of a bitter disappointment, he partly overcomes his fears, we know, as we watch him, that they are not dead but merely dormant. But to revert once more to Lady Macbeth, her husband's letter has carried her beyond "the ignorant present" and she feels "the future in the instant." Just at this moment of tense excitement comes a messenger with the unexpected news that the King is coming to the castle of Macbeth that very night. The news is so sudden, so unlooked for, that Lady Macbeth almost staggers and is appalled by its suddenness. "Thou art mad to say it: Is not thy master with him?" is the unsuitable reply with which she confronts the man who brings the tidings; but in an instant she recovers herself sufficiently to be able to falter out–"who, were't so, would have inform'd for preparation," lest the grim and hideous suggestion implied in her startled reply becomes palpable to the man. When the messenger is gone and her mind comes back once more to gloat over the possibilities of this unexpected development, when the murder is something more than a mere prospect in a yet uncertain future, and when her resolution is taken, the appalling suddenness of the situation and the fierceness of her resolve raises her to an ecstasy of horror which is almost sublime, though so evil; because of the spirit of total self-forgetfulness.

At this moment her husband enters and the quick colloquy which ensues tells Macbeth that she has already decided on the course which has suggested itself to him. Rapidly she sketches for Macbeth the part he must play. His work it will be to lull Duncan to security–no difficult task we should imagine. She herself, she says, will strike the fatal blow:

Brought face to face with the necessity of immediate decision Macbeth wavers once more. Once more he would procrastinate, "we will speak further!" But the former horror at the revelation of his own criminal aptitudes does not revive. Familiarity indeed breeds indifference and he yields to a pressure which he does not wish to resist.

Macbeth is progressing in wickedness. His mind has lived a life-time in the last few hours, and he, is now "experiencing that inexorable law of human souls that we prepare ourselves for sudden deeds by reiterated choice of good or evil which gradually determines character."⁵ Rapid as his progress seems, in reality it has been gradually determined; his whole life has been a preparation for this moment. How far he is progressing we shall be able to appreciate when we see him self-displayed and exhibiting the innermost workings of his mind in the famous soliloquy:

All horror at the deed itself is gone and we find him calmly summing up the objections which, to his mind, urge themselves against the deed he meditates, and lamenting that he has not sufficient motive to afford the smallest justification of what he knows will be universally damned as crime of the deepest dye. It has been said that there is in this soliloquy no trace of any thought of sin; no trace of any horror at the enormity of the crime he contemplates; no trace, even of the lowest moral incentives, hope of heaven or fear of hell. It amounts to this, says Dr. Moulton,⁶ "that murder is a game at which two can play, that heartlessness has the effect of drawing general attention, that ambition is apt to defeat its own object."

But such a view must, it seems to me, be qualified to be made tenable. Macbeth could not describe the horror of the deed as it would appear to others, were there no horror in his own heart. He talks of consequences, because he is trying to get away from the power of that imagination which shakes him in its grasp. He is striving with all his might to break its power and is forcing himself to look at the matter from a practical point of view. And he is so far successful that though he cannot stifle his imagination he changes its centre. The awful image which a few days ago made his seated heart beat at the ribs, has given place to that of pity striding the blast. It is not the horror of the deed but the horror of its consequences which now holds him. He is not in any ordinary sense afraid of these consequences but he shrinks from the picture he has drawn of an execrated name and a horror-stricken world. On the appearance of his wife he tells her that he will proceed no further in the business. It is however very characteristic and significant that he does not tell her his true reasons.

He is afraid of seeming a coward if he says that he desists through fear of consequences and he cannot explain to his wife the imaginative horror he has memories of. He is driven therefore to a certain lameness of speech:

This is not altogether pretence. It puts forward a feeling which, doubtless, he knew he ought to feel, and he would fain delude himself into the belief that this is really his motive and deceive himself, as men only too easily may do, into regarding himself still with some degree of complacence. But with ready instinct his wife sees through the pretence, hits him hard on his weakest point:

Just as in the time of her disease she speaks the same words with the unconscious lips of the sleep-walker; "Fie, My Lord, fie: a soldier and afeard?" To be scorned as a coward by the woman he loves is more than Macbeth can bear, or for the matter of that any man. In a burst of irritation he bids her hold her peace:

But an indignation, which arises with suspicious tardiness only at the moment when the consequences of sin are urging their argument, is too conscious of its own hollowness to stand resolutely against an attack which takes its hollowness for granted. Ignoring the exalted morality of Macbeth’s last utterance, Lady Macbeth hits him again where she knows she most flinches from a blow, and in answer to his wife's passionate address he can only falter out: "If we should fail?" But the business is already settled. Conscience, as we have seen, had no real part in this debate, and insistent realism of Lady Macbeth's remonstrances has overcome imagined fears which were the real ground of Macbeth's reluctance. Macbeth catches some of his wife's fire, and moves on to the deed not only with determination but also with some zeal.

This closes, what we may call, the third chapter of Macbeth's crime. The first chapter which brings us to the opening of the drama, was at a time when, unstained as yet by actual crime, Macbeth had dallied nevertheless with the thought of crime as a means to ends which he greatly desired. It was a time of wrong desires and ambitions, working slowly but surely their inevitable result upon the character. The second chapter shows us Macbeth horrified at the awful shape in which his own thoughts stand revealed as they come back upon him from without like a fearful echo, and for the first time show themselves to him stripped of the gloss in which he had wrapped them even from his own gaze. In the third, we find him striving to grow callous to the awfulness of the form at first so dreadful. The horror of the deed is mitigated as its face grows familiar, and its place is taken by a statesman-like summing up of consequences and a picture of the public horror which they include; the process resulting in a feeling of repulsion too weak to abide the touch of passion and the breath of scorn.

There remain but two brief chapters to complete the history–the consummation of the deed, and the results it generates.

Now that the practical details have been supplied him, now that the nameless vision of murder assumes, finally, a concrete and a definite shape, Macbeth moves forward to the murder even with animation. He is not fearful but excited: his imagination is wrought up to its highest pitch, and is so fired by the lonely horror amid which he moves, that he can even have an eye to the dramatic environments of the deed:

What an awful curse is latent in an imagination which can work thus! But for the time it stands its victim's friend, and nerves him for a task whose horror is hidden only in the moment of execution. Even Lady Macbeth is not equal to the strain, and when she gives way to an irresistible instinct of feminine delicacy, Macbeth rises to the occasion and the deed is done. But from this moment his punishment begins too. He becomes, till he can feel no longer, a prey to those supernatural imaginings whereby his conscience wields its scourge–though but now these had stood his helper. He is utterly unnerved, and as he views his hands red with blood he has a foretaste of what is to be his punishment:

In the events which follow Macbeth is attended by the greatest possible good luck. The murder is discovered in the most natural way, and even the blunder of slaying the grooms is lost sight of in the sensation which follows discovery of the flight of the King's sons. Lady Macbeth had fainted–perhaps she really did faint just at the right moment, and had tided her husband over what may have been an ugly pause. And thus the close of the second Act of the drama leaves Macbeth in apparently secure possession of all he sinned to get.

It will not be necessary to follow the course of his future with the same detail as hitherto. What concerns us is the mental history, and that can be soon told.

The horrible imaginings which might have betokened at first, if Macbeth could but have understood himself aright, a prophetic warning of what was to come, have returned upon him in a new character:

His mind is full of scorpions, but it is a terrible irony that while crime has put them there, Macbeth can think of no way to get rid of them but by a further course of crime.

It is as if an outraged conscience can inflict no greater punishment than to goad the sinner on to fresh sins:

With Milton's Satan, Macbeth would say:

Not only does Macbeth press on to fresh crimes, but he grows more self-reliant in executing them. His wife gradually passes out of his life. Her nerves have snapped beneath the strain. Her part is played out. But her husband's career continues. He has deeper depths of moral evil and despair to sound before he follows her to the grave. 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 is not the mother of her children, but their grave:

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

Says Malcolm: and two of these epithets surprise us. Who would have expected avarice or lechery in Macbeth? His ruin seems complete.⁷

It is at any rate a testimony to an ancient and perhaps not wholly extinguished sense for goodness that Macbeth does not like Iago, glory in his evil; it is perhaps a redeeming feature that he is only infinitely weary and not relentlessly wicked when he looks forward. But in no case can paralysis be called a form of life. Fresh crimes do but make him less sensible of crime, and he attains at last an incapacity for feeling which is his final punishment on earth.

Even his wife's death cannot stir this stagnancy. There has indeed been a progress of the soul on the path of death. The man who at Duncan's death shuddered because he could not say "Amen" now holds the sombre creed of the fatalist.

Macbeth's candle is almost burnt out. He is all but dead now. One more flicker of animation, one more burst of flame, as old courage returns with despair, and the tyrant falls beneath the sword of Justice, while his funeral oration writes him down a "dead butcher" with a "fiend-like queen."

Before he entered upon a career of crime there was much that was attractive and noble in Macbeth. Physically he was a fine man. His courage was dauntless. As a warrior he was renowned. He had fine gifts of intellect and sensibility, a powerful imagination, a capacity for thought, and, better than these, a capacity for love and tenderness which is clearly shown us, even in his evil day, by the undoubtedly sincere affection he bears his wife. He would seem to have had also the soldier's regard for honour and truth, and dislike for chicanery and fraud. Deceit and dissimulation did not come natural to him, and he needs to be schooled by his wife to look like the innocent flower while being really the serpent under it.

Moreover, Macbeth seems to show some indications of moral education. His moral perceptions were by no means blunt and must have once done their work. Some of his utterances are really fine and profoundly true, and though they evidently do not come from the depths of an earnest heart, he at any rate makes as though they do; they are not cynically uttered or spoken out of a deliberate ant smiling hypocrisy. He would like to believe that he meant them.

In reality, however, Macbeth's character was never truly noble. He is not, as some critics would have us think, a noble nature degraded by the coarser but stronger nature of his wife. But neither, as others think, is he meant to be a cold, cautious, "resolute, remorseless" villain, restrained from crime only by mean and cowardly apprehension." He was a man blest with many natural gifts from which a noble character might have been produced. But he utterly lacked the basis or principle by which alone nobility can be attained. This is no natural gift. It is the fruit of self-discipline and honourable purposes sustained through stress of trial. And he who fails to plant his feet upon this basis stands upon a thin crust beneath which are working forces that may one day burst through and overwhelm him. The tyranny of accumulated impulses is so grinding that they seem to owe their power to forces greater than man and to rise by virtue of that force beyond human control. It is for this reason Shakespeare has given them an independent life and often embodies them in the supernatural beings who are exhibited on his stage. "His witches and ghosts and fairies do not come uncalled: they are the shadows and reflections of human minds, creatures of the mirror, who, by a startling and true psychology are brought alive, released from the true dominion of Man's will, and established as his masters."⁸ Macbeth excited by the dark hints of ambition, falls in with the witches and thereafter is carried with fearful speed into an abyss of crime. Hamlet saddened by the death of his father, and tortured by the infidelity of his mother, receives the message of the ghost, which brings his suspicions and broodings to a point, and makes him thenceforward an instrument in the hands of destiny. In A Midsummer Night's Dream, the inexplicable whims and changes of inconsistent love seems to be the work of fairies, sporting, not malevolently, with human weakness. In each case we see very different phases of life, and with gradations from fancy to sadness, from sadness to terror, the almost ultra-human power which gathers round impulses and passions that have stirred within the human breast. Once this power is let loose upon man he seems to be but the plaything of destiny, but its forces have been gathering slowly within before they burst upon him from without.

Thus though the character of Macbeth is individual, its significance is universal, and the story of his life is played around us every day on many a stage of life with every variety of accessory circumstance.

The growing mastery of wrong impulses, wrong in many degrees of a descending scale when unchecked by fixed and settled principles results in just such a process, however it may disguise itself, as Macbeth undergoes.⁹

There is the gradual drifting away from a hold on the great truths of life, into a commonplace and traditional morality which rises readily to the lips but has no power on the heart. There may be, just at the beginning, the same quick growth of moral sentiment in the shallow soil, followed as quickly by the rapid withering away of the plant which has no root. This is the first stage of deterioration, and as yet its terrible potentialities are not revealed. For with all this there may yet exist a vague fear of wrong; the conscience may still act as a deterrent, and pronounced crime may still seem horrible and repulsive.

But there comes a time, and surely it will not tarry, when in a moment all the laxity and thinness and growing falsity of the man's life gather themselves together into one startling temptation: and though perhaps the relics of an once innocent past still urge revolt, the end is certain. For each single motive which might have placed the man upon his feet, firm and unflinching though all the winds of evil blow upon him, has been successively strangled by the successive, perhaps, imperceptible lapses of the unprincipled and unspiritual life in the past. His life has created for him a tradition which acts with all the greater force because its powers have been slowly accumulating. And so, though the temptation passes as a lightning flash, and the struggle lasts but an hour, it has been prepared of old, and it has been determined in days that are past that the issue shall be evil.

Beyond this there lies, as all students of the human heart have known, a state, the most awful that can be conceived. A period when God leaves, as it were, the soul that He has made, and when His hand presses no more upon the sinner. A time of utter callousness of heart, a time when terrors of sin depart, when the heart knows not any more the fears which once it obeyed. Terrible indeed is such a state, for, for it, there seems no way back to repentance and restoration,–terrible because it presents to us an image of Death in the midst of life itself.

Such seems to me to be the criticism which Shakespeare offers in this wonderful tragedy. And it should be observed that with consummate skill he succeeds in retaining for Macbeth at the end some measure of our sympathy. We do not hate Macbeth as we do Iago or Richard III. It may be because he suffers terribly before our eyes, unlike Iago who suffers not at all, or Richard who suffers only when his will is laid at rest in sleep. But it is also because we feel that the distance between ourselves and Macbeth is not infinite–that he is far more normal than the two villains with whom we have compared him. Macbeth, we feel, might have been a good man had he not been ‘possessed.’ It is a term we use, happily not often, to describe the unaccountable delinquencies of men we have known as friends, and it may be even of ourselves. Shakespeare has in this play analysed for us the process of possession, he has shown us its small beginnings in the secret recesses of the heart, and traced its development into a power which defies human mastery. He has shown it to be the tyranny of accumulated impulse unchecked by fixity of principle.

In reading the play, thus, we can hope that we have followed the author's mind and caught at least one glint of actual colour from a fabric spun by the poet himself.