Bentley's Miscellany, Volume II

Disdaining fortune, with his brandished steel,
Which smoked with bloody execution,
like valour's minion carved out his passage
Until he faced the slave;
And ne'er shook hands, nor bade farewell to him,
Till he unseamed him from the nave to the chops,[39 - Warburton proposes that we should read "from the nape to the chops," as a more probable wound. But this could hardly be called unseaming; and the wound is intentionally horrid to suit the character of the play. So, for the same reason, when Duncan is murdered, we are made to remark that the old man had much blood in him.]
And fixed his head upon our battlements."

After this desperate backstroke, as Warburton justly calls it,[40 - Warburton proposes that we should read "from the nape to the chops," as a more probable wound. But this could hardly be called unseaming; and the wound is intentionally horrid to suit the character of the play. So, for the same reason, when Duncan is murdered, we are made to remark that the old man had much blood in him.]Macbeth engages in another combat equally sanguinary. He and Banquo

"Doubly redoubled strokes upon the foe;
Except they meant to bathe in reeking wounds,
Or memorize another Golgotha,
I cannot tell."

Hot from such scenes, he is met by the witches. They promise him the kingdom of Scotland. The glittering prize instantly affects his imagination; he is so wrapt in thought at the very moment of its announcement that he cannot speak. He soon informs us what is the hue of the visions passing through his mind. The witches had told him he was to be king: they had not said a word about the means. He instantly supplies them:

"Why do I yield to that suggestion
Whose horrid image doth unfix my hair,
And make my seated heart knock at my ribs
Against the use of nature."

The dreaded word itself soon comes:

"My thought, whose murder yet is but fantastical,
Shakes so my single state of man, that function
Is smothered in surmise."

To a mind so disposed, temptation is unnecessary. The thing was done. Duncan was marked out for murder before the letter was written to Lady Macbeth, and she only followed the thought of her husband.

Love for him is in fact her guiding passion. She sees that he covets the throne, – that his happiness is wrapt up in the hope of being a king, – and her part is accordingly taken without hesitation. With the blindness of affection, she persuades herself that he is full of the milk of human kindness, and that he would reject false and unholy ways of attaining the object of his desire. She deems it, therefore, her duty to spirit him to the task. Fate and metaphysical aid, she argues, have destined him for the golden round of Scotland. Shall she not lend her assistance? She does not ask the question twice. She will. Her sex, her woman's breasts, her very nature, oppose the task she has prescribed to herself; but she prays to the ministers of murder, to the spirits that tend on mortal thoughts, to make thick her blood, and stop up the access and passage of remorse; and she succeeds in mustering the desperate courage which bears her through. Her instigation was not in reality wanted. Not merely the murder of Duncan, but of Malcolm, was already resolved on by Macbeth.

"The Prince of Cumberland! That is a step
On which I must fall down, or else o'erleap,
For in my way it lies. Stars! hide your fires,
Let not light see my black and dark desires!"

As the time for the performance of the deed approaches, he is harassed by doubts; but he scarcely shows any traces of compunction or remorse. He pauses before the crime, – not from any hesitation at its enormity, but for fear of its results, – for fear of the poisoned chalice being returned to his own lips, – for fear of the trumpet-tongued indignation which must attend the discovery of the murder of so popular a prince as Duncan, – one who has borne his faculties so meekly, and loaded Macbeth himself with honours. He is not haunted by any feeling for the sin, any compassion for his victim; – the dread of losing the golden opinions he has so lately won, the consequences of failure, alone torment him. His wife has not to suggest murder, for that has been already resolved upon; but to represent the weakness of drawing back, after a resolution has once been formed. She well knows that the momentary qualm will pass off, – that Duncan is to be slain, perhaps when time and place will not so well adhere. Now, she argues, – now it can be done with safety. Macbeth is determined to wade through slaughter to a throne. If he passes this moment, he loses the eagerly desired prize, and lives for ever after, a coward in his own esteem; or he may make the attempt at a moment when detection is so near at hand, that the stroke which sends Duncan to his fate will be but the prelude of the destruction of my husband. She therefore rouses him to do at once that from which she knows nothing but fear of detection deters him; and, feeling that there are no conscientious scruples to overcome, applies herself to show that the present is the most favourable instant. It is for him she thinks – for him she is unsexed – for his ambition she works – for his safety she provides.

Up to the very murder, Macbeth displays no pity – no feeling for anybody but himself. Fear of detection still haunts him, and no other fear.

"Thou sure and steadfast earth,
Hear not my steps which way they walk, for fear
The very stones prate of my whereabout."

As Lady Macbeth says, it is the frustrated attempt, not the crime, that can confound him. When it has been accomplished, he is for a while visited by brain-sick fancies; and to her, who sees the necessity of prompt action, is left the care of providing the measures best calculated to avert the dreaded detection. She makes light of facing the dead, and assures her husband that

"A little water clears us of this deed.
How easy it is then!"

Does she indeed feel this? Are these the real emotions of her mind? Does she think that a little water will wash out what has been done, and that it is as easy to make all trace of it vanish from the heart as from the hand? She shall answer us from her sleep, in the loneliness of midnight, in the secrecy of her chamber. Bold was her bearing, reckless and defying her tongue, when her husband was to be served or saved; but the sigh bursting from her heavily-charged breast, and her deep agony when she feels that, so far from its being easy to get rid of the witness of murder, no washing can obliterate the damned spot, no perfume sweeten the hand once redolent of blood, prove that the recklessness and defiance were only assumed. We find at last what she had sacrificed, how dreadful was the struggle she had to subdue. Her nerve, her courage, mental and physical, was unbroken during the night of murder; but horror was already seated in her heart. Even then a touch of what was going on in her bosom breaks forth. When urging Macbeth to act, she speaks as if she held the strongest ties of human nature in contempt.

"I have given suck, and know
How tender 'tis to love the babe that milks me:
I would, when it was smiling in my face,
Have plucked my nipple from his boneless gums,
And dashed the brains out, had I but so sworn
As you have done to this."

Is she indeed so unnatural, – so destitute of maternal, of womanly feeling? No. In the next scene we find her deterred from actual participation in killing Duncan, because he resembled her father in his sleep. This is not the lady to pluck the nipple from the boneless gums of her infant, and dash out its brains. Her language is exaggerated in mere bravado, to taunt Macbeth's infirmity of purpose by a comparison with her own boasted firmness; but if the case had arisen, she who had recoiled from injuring one whose life stood in the way of her husband's hopes from a fancied resemblance to her father, would have seen in the smile of her child a talisman of resistless protection.

The murder done, and her husband on the throne, she is no longer implicated in guilt. She is unhappy in her elevation, and writhes under a troubled spirit in the midst of assumed gaiety. She reflects with a settled melancholy that

"Nought's had, all's spent,
When our desire is got without content.
'Tis safer to be that which we destroy,
Than by destruction dwell in doubtful joy."

This to herself. To cheer her lord, she speaks a different language in the very next line.

"How now, my lord! why do you keep alone,
Of sorriest fancies your companions making;
Using those thoughts which should indeed have died
With those they think on?"

Her own thoughts, we have just seen, were full as sorry as those of her husband; but she can wear a mask. Twice only does she appear after her accession to the throne; once masked, once unmasked. Once seated at high festival, entertaining the nobles of her realm, full of grace and courtesy, performing her stately hospitalities with cheerful countenance, and devising with rare presence of mind excuses for the distracted conduct of her husband. Once again, when all guard is removed, groaning in despair.

The few words she says to Macbeth after the guests have departed, almost driven out by herself, mark that her mind is completely subdued. She remonstrates with him at first for having broken up the feast; but she cannot continue the tone of reproof, when she finds that his thoughts are bent on gloomier objects. Blood is for ever on his tongue. She had ventured to tell him that the visions which startle him, were but the painting of his brain, and that he was unmanned in folly. He takes no heed of what she says, and continues to speculate, at first in distraction, then in dread, and lastly in savage cruelty, upon blood. The apparition of Banquo almost deprives him of his senses. He marvels that such things could be, and complains that a cruel exception to the ordinary laws of nature is permitted in his case. Blood, he says,

" – has been shed ere now in the olden time,
Ere human statute purged the gentle weal," —

and in more civilized times also; but, when death came, no further consequences followed. Now not even twenty mortal murders [he remembered the number of deadly gashes reported by the assassin] will keep the victim in his grave. As long as Banquo's ghost remains before him, he speaks in the same distracted strain. When the object of his special wonder, by its vanishing, gives him time to reflect, fear of detection, as usual, is his first feeling.

"It will have blood, they say; blood will have blood!"

The most improbable witnesses have detected murder. Stones, trees, magotpies, choughs, have disclosed the secretest man of blood. Then come cruel resolves, to rid himself of his fears. Mercy or remorse is to be henceforward unknown; the firstlings of his heart are to be the firstlings of his hand, – the bloody thought is to be followed instantly by the bloody deed. The tiger is now fully aroused in his soul.

"I am in blood
Stept in so far, that, should I wade no more,
Returning were as tedious as go o'er."

He sees an enemy in every castle; everywhere he plants his spies; from every hand he dreads an attempt upon his life. Nearly two centuries after the play was written, the world beheld one of its fairest portions delivered to a rule as bloody as that of the Scottish tyrant; and so true to nature are the conceptions of Shakspeare, that the speeches of mixed terror and cruelty, which he has given to Macbeth, might have been uttered by Robespierre. The atrocities of the Jacobin, after he had stept so far in blood, were dictated by fear. "Robespierre," says a quondam satellite,[41 - Causes secretes de la Révolution de 9 au 10 Thermidor; by Vilate, ex-juré révolutionnaire de Paris.] "devenait plus sombre; son air renfrogné repoussait tout le monde; il ne parlait que d'assassinat, encore d'assassinat, toujours d'assassinat. Il avait peur que son ombre ne l'assassinât."

Lady Macbeth sees this grisly resolution, and ceases to remonstrate or interfere. Her soul is bowed down before his, and he communicates with her no longer. He tells her to be ignorant of what he plans, until she can applaud him for what he has done. When he abruptly asks her, she, well knowing that she has not said anything about it, and that the question is suggested by his own fear and suspicion, timidly inquires,

"How say'st thou, – that Macduff denies his person
At our great bidding?"

"Have you sent to him, sir?"