children!" is perhaps the most famous in literature; together with less than usual of mere comment on life. If here and there a philosophical thought meets us, it is the outcry of sensation— -as in the magnificent words which sum up the vanity of life in the remembrance of the dusty ending-rather than a reflection in any true sense of the word. Of pathos, even, there is on the whole not much. In that scene from which I have just quoted the crowning words, there is, I think, a note of pathos beyond which language cannot go; and in the scene which leads up to it-a scene full of the most delicate humour, the humour born of the unconscious nearness of things pitiful -there is something truly pathetic, a pathos which clings about all Shakespeare's portraits of children. But elsewhere, even in places where we might expect it, there is but little sign of a quality with which it was not in Shakespeare's plan to lighten the terror or soften the hardness of the impression one receives from this sombre play. Terror-that was the effect at which he seems to have aimed; terror standing out vividly against a background of obscure and yet more dreadful mystery. The "root of horror," from which the whole thing grows, has been planted, one becomes aware, in hell:-do the supernatural solicitings merely foreshow or do they really instigate the deeds to which they bear witness? Omens blacken every page. An "Old Man" is brought into the play for no other purpose than to become the appropriate mouthpiece of the popular sense of the strange disturbance in the order of nature. Macbeth is the prey to superstition, and it seems really as if a hand other than his own forces him forward on the road to destruction. In no other play of Shakespeare's, not even in Hamlet, is the power of spiritual agencies so present with us; nowhere is Fate so visibly the handmaid or the mistress of Retribution. In such a play it is no wonder that pathos is swallowed up in terror, and that the only really frank abandonment to humour is in an interlude of ghastly pleasantry, the Shakespearean authorship of which has been doubted.

In this brief and rapid play, where the

action has so little that is superfluous, and all is ordered with so rigid a concentration, the interest is still further narrowed and intensified by being directed almost wholly upon two persons. Macbeth and Lady Macbeth fill the stage. In painting them Shakespeare has expended his full power. He has cared to do no more than sketch the other characters. As in the sketches of Michelangelo preserved at Oxford, the few lines of the drawing call up a face as truly lifelike as that which fronts us in the completed picture. But in the play these subordinate figures are forgotten in the absorbing interest of the two great primary ones. The real conflict, out of which the action grows, is the conflict between the worse and better natures of these two persons; the real tragedy is one of conscience, and the murder of Duncan, the assassination of Banquo, the slaughters with which the play is studded, are but the outward signs, the bloody signatures, of the terrible drama which is going on within.

When Macbeth, returning victorious from the field of battle, is met by the witches' prediction-"All hail, Macbeth, that shalt be king hereafter!"-is it not curious that his thoughts should turn with such astonishing promptitude to the idea of murder? The tinder, it is evident, is lying ready, and it needs but a spark to set the whole alight. We learn from his wife's analysis of his character that he is ambitious, discontented, willing to do wrong in order to attain to greatness, yet, like so many of the unsuccessful criminals, hampered always in the way of wrongdoing by an inconvenient afterthought of virtue. He has never enough of it to stay his hand from the deed, but he has just sufficient to sicken him of the crime when only half-way through it. He may plan and plot, but at the last he acts always on impulse, and he is never able to pursue a deliberate course coolly. He knows himself well enough to say, once:

No boasting like a fool, This deed I'll do before this purpose cool. Before this purpose cool!-that is always the danger to fear in a nature of this unstable sort. He can murder Duncan, but he cannot

bring himself to return and face his work, though his own safety depends upon it. It is the woman who goes back into the fatal chamber, whither he dares not return. No sooner has he done the deed than he wishes it undone. His conscience is awake now, awake and maundering. With the dawn courage returns; he is able to play his part with calmness, a new impulse having taken the place of the last one. Remorse for the present is put aside. He plots Banquo's death deliberately, and is almost gay in hinting it to his wife. Now, his feeling seems to be, we shall be safe -no need for more crime! And then, perhaps, there will be no more of the "terrible dreams."

When Banquo's ghost appears Macbeth's acting breaks down. He is in the hold of a fresh sensation, and horror and astonishment overwhelm all. After having thought himself at last secure! It is always through the superstitious side of his nature that Macbeth is impressible. His agitation at the sight of the ghost of Banquo is not, I think, a trick of the imagination, but the horror of a man who sees the actual ghost of the man he has slain. Thus he cannot reason it away, as, before the fancied dagger (a heated brain conjuring up images of its own intents) he can exclaim: "There's no such thing!" The horror fastens deeply upon him, and he goes sullenly onward in the path of blood, seeing now that there is no returning by a way so thronged with worse than memories.

Since his initiate step in this path Macbeth has never been free from the mockery of desire to overcome his fears, to be at peace in evildoing, to "sleep in spite of thunder." But his mind becomes more and more divided against itself, and the degradation of his nature goes on apace. When we see him finally at bay in his fortress, he is broken down by agitation and the disturbance of all within and without into a state of savage distraction, in which the individual sense of guilt seems to be lost in a sullen growth of moody distrust and of somewhat aimless ferocity. He is in a state in which "the grasshopper is a burden" and every event presents itself as an unbearable irritation. His nerves are unstrung: he bursts

out into precipitate and causeless anger at the
mere sight of the messenger who enters to him.
One sees his mental and bodily upset in the
impossibility of controlling the least whim.
He calls for his armour, has it put on, pulls it
off, bids it be brought after him. He talks to
the doctor about the affairs of war, and plays
grimly on medical terms. He dares now to
confess to himself how weary he is of every-
thing beneath the sun, and seeks in vain for
what may
"minister to a mind diseas'd."
When, on a cry of women from within, he
learns that his wife is dead, he can say no
word of regret.
"She should have died here-
after"-that is all, and a moralization. He
has "supp'd full with horrors," and the taste
of them has begun to pall. There remains
now only the release of death. As prophecy
after prophecy comes to its fulfilment, and the
last hope is lost, desperation takes the place
of confidence. When, finally, he sees the man
before him by whom he knows he is to die,
his soldier's courage rises at a taunt, and he
fights to the end.

Nothing in his life
Became him like the leaving it.

The "note," as it may be called, of Macbeth is the weakness of a bold and vigorous mind and frame; that of Lady Macbeth is the strength of a finely-strung but perfectly determined nature. She dominates her husband by the persistence of an irresistible will; she herself, her woman's weakness, is alike dominated by the same compelling force. Let the effect on her of the witches' prediction be contrasted with the effect on Macbeth. In Macbeth there is a mental conflict, an attempt, however feeble, to make a stand against the temptation. But the prayer of his wife is not for power to resist, but for power to carry out, the deed. The same ambitions that were slumbering in him are in her stirred by the same spark into life. The flame runs through her and possesses her in an instant, and from the thought to its realization is but a step with her. Like all women, she is practical, swift from starting-point to goal, imperious in disregard of hindrances that may lie in the But she is resolute, also, with a determination which knows no limits; imaginative,

way.

too (imagination being to her in the place of virtue), and it is this she fears, and it is this that wrecks her. Her prayer to the spirits that tend on mortal thoughts, shows by no means a mind steeled to compunction. Why should she cry:

Stop up the accéss and passage to remorse!

if hers were a mind in which no visitings of pity had to be dreaded? Her language is fervid, sensitive, and betrays with her first words the imagination which is her capacity for suffering. She is a woman who can be " magnificent in sin," but who has none of the callousness which makes the comfort of the criminal; - not one of the poisonous women of the Renaissance, who smile complacently after an assassination, but a woman of the North, in whom sin is its own "first revenge." She can do the deed, and she can do it triumphantly; she can even think her prayer has been answered; but the horror of the thing will change her soul, and at night, when the will that supported her indomitable mind by day, slumbers with the overtaxed body, her imagination-the soul she has in her for her torture-will awake and cry at last aloud. On the night of the murder it is Macbeth who falters; it is he who wishes that the deed might be undone, she who says to him

These deeds must not be thought After these ways; so, it will make us mad; but to Macbeth (despite the "terrible dreams") time dulls the remembrance from its first intensity; he has not the fineness of nature that gives the power of suffering to his wife. Guilt changes both, but him it degrades. Hers is not a nature that can live in degradation. To her no degradation is possible. Her sin was deliberate; she marched straight to her end; and the means were mortal, not alone to the man who died, but to her. Macbeth could as little comprehend the depth of her suffering as she his hesitancy in a determined action. It is this fineness of nature, this over-possession by imagination, that renders her interesting, elevating her punishment into a sphere beyond the comprehension of a vulgar criminal.

In that terrible second scene of act ii.-perhaps the most awe-inspiring scene that Shakespeare ever wrote the splendid qualities of Lady Macbeth are seen in their clearest light. She has taken wine to make her bold, but there is an exaltation in her brain beyond anything that wine could give. Her calmness is indeed unnatural, overstrained, by no means so composed as she would have her husband think. But having determined on her purpose, there is with her no returning, no thought of return. It is with a burst of real anger, of angry contempt, that she cries "Give me the daggers!" and her exaltation carries her through the fearful ordeal as she goes back and faces the dead man and the sleeping witnesses. She can even, as she returns, hear calmly the knocking that speaks so audibly to the heart of Macbeth; taking measures for their safety if anyone should enter. She can even look resolutely at her bloody hands, and I imagine she half believes her own cynical words when she says:

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

Her will, her high nature (perverted, but not subdued), her steeled sensitiveness, the intoxication of crime and of wine, sustain her in a forced calmness which she herself little suspects will ever fail her. How soon it does fail, or rather how soon the body takes revenge upon the soul, is seen next morning, when, after overacting her part in the famous words "What, in our house?"--she falls in a swoon, by no means counterfeit, we may be sure, though Macbeth, by his disregard of it, seems to think so. After this, we see her but rarely. A touch of the deepest melancholy ("Naught's had, all's spent") marks the few words spoken to herself as she waits for Macbeth on the night which is, though unknown to her, to be fatal to Banquo. No sooner has Macbeth entered than she greets him in the old resolute spirit; and again on the night of the banquet she is, as ever, full of bitter scorn and contempt for the betraying weakness of her husband, prompt to cover his confusion with a plausible tale to the guests. She is still mistress of herself, and only the

weariness of the few words she utters after the guests are gone, only the absence of the reproaches we are expecting, betray the change that is coming over her. One sees a trace of lassitude, that is all.

From this point Lady Macbeth drops out of the play, until, in the fifth act, we see her for the last time. Even now, it is the body rather than the soul that has given way. What haunts her is the smell and sight of the blood -the physical disgust of the thing. "All the perfumes of Arabia will not sweeten this little hand!" One hears the self-pitying note with which she says the words. Even now, even when unconscious, her scorn still bites at the feebleness of her husband. The will is yet indomitable in her shattered frame.

There is no repentance, no regret-only the intolerable vividness of accusing memory; the sight, the smell, ever present in imagination. It has been thought that the words "Hell is murky!"-the only sign, if sign it be, of fear at the thought of the life to come-are probably spoken in mocking echo of her husband. Even if not, they are a passing shudder. It is enough for her that her hands still keep the sensation of the blood upon them. The imagination which stands to her in the place of virtue has brought in its revenge, and for her too there is left only the release of death. She dies, not of remorse at her guilt, but because she has miscalculated her power of resistance to the scourge of an over-acute imagination.