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she never loses herself in any raptures of meditation; no illusions born 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 remains 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 recover him from them. Which sho that her sympathy with his ambition, intense as it is, has no power to make her sympathize 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 immiately on Lady Macbeth, and on her husband through her, as thinking her more open to superstitious allurements and charms. Shakespeare seems to have judged that aptness of mind for them to work upon would have disqualified her 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 influence, such as could only come from a mind not much accessible to the Weird Sisters.

There was strong dramatic reason, therefore, why Lady 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 mature the guilty purpose or to obstruct the guilty act. It is remarkable that she does not once recur to the Weird Sisters, 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, instead 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 suggest: so that Macbeth's fears as well as his hopes are stimulated, and his fears even more than his hopes, by the recollection of their greetings the instant he reverts to them, his imagination springs into action, an organ of which ambition 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 redintegrate and shame him out of his present weakness: "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."

A 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 unreservedly 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

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reason a moment: it must be done first, and discussed afterwards. And throughout this wrestling match she surveys the whole ground, and darts upon the strongest points with the quickness and sureness 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

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Lady M.

What beast was't, then,

That made you break this enterprise to me?

When you durst do it, then you were a man.'

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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, accordingly, 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 overheat 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 undertake 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 overwhelming, that her husband and many others believe it to be her own. I here refer especially to the speech beginning, "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 appearance 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 her husband, and penetrated far into the heart of his mystery 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 unsexed, but not the power to unsex herself except in words. For, though she invokes the "murdering ministers" to 66 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 desires, who is mastered by a fiery thirst of power, and that for her husband as well as herself."

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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 murderous 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 resemblance 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 feeling 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 not." And it seems to me 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 murdered 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 selfcontrol for once gives way. The announcement of the King's murder had no such effect upon her, for she was prepared for that. And that was when she would have counterfeited 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 answered 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 imagina tion, as that her conscience should be in her senses, causing

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