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the sight clings to her memory; the smell of the blood is hateful to her and almost insupportable; she had not been without apprehension that her feminine nature might fail to carry her through the terrible ordeal, through which she yet resolved that it should be compelled to pass. She must not waste an atom of her strength of will, which has to serve for two murderers-for her husband as well as for herself. She puts into requisition with the aid of wine and of stimulant words the reserve of nervous force which lay unused. No witches have given her "Hail;" no airy dagger marshals her the way she is going; nor is she afterwards haunted by the terrible vision of Banquo's gory head. As long as her will remains her own she can throw herself upon external facts, and maintain herself in relation with the definite, actual surroundings; it is in her sleep, when the will is incapable of action, that she is persecuted by the past which perpetually renews itself, not in ghostly shapes, but by the imagined recurrence of real and terrible incidents.

The fears of Lady Macbeth upon the night of Duncan's murder are the definite ones that the murderers may be detected, that some omission in the pre-arranged plan may occur, that she or her husband may be summoned to appear before the traces of their crime have been removed. More awful considerations would press in upon her and overwhelm her sanity, but that she forcibly repels them for the time:

These deeds must not be thought

After these ways; so, it will make us mad.

To her the sight of Duncan dead is as terrible as to Macbeth; but she takes the daggers, from her husband; and with a forced jest, hideous in the self-violence which it implies, she steps forth into the dark corridor:

If he do bleed
I'll gild the faces of the grooms withal,
For it must seem their guilt.

"A play of fancy here is like a gleam of ghastly sunshine striking across a stormy landscape."* The knocking at the gate clashes upon her overstrained nerves and thrills her; but she has determination and energy to direct the actions of Macbeth, and rouse him from the mood of abject depression which succeeded his crime. A white flame of resolution glows through her delicate organization, like light through an alabaster lamp:

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.

If the hold which she possesses over her own faculties should relax for a moment, all would be lost.

For dreadful deeds anticipated and resolved upon, she has strength, but the surprise of a novel horror, on which she has not counted, deprives her suddenly of consciousness; when Macbeth announces his butchery of Duncan's grooms, the lady swoons→ not in feigning but in fact—and is borne away insensible. Macbeth wastes himself in vague, imaginative remorse :

Will not great Neptune's ocean wash this blood

Clean from my hand? No, this my hand will rather
The multitudinous seas incarnadine.

Making the green one red.

Thus his imagination serves to dissipate the impression of his conscience. What is the worth of this vague, imaginative remorse? Macbeth retained enough of goodness to make him a haggard, miserable criminal; never enough to restrain him from a crime. His hand soon became subdued to what it worked in-the blood in which it paddled and plashed. And yet the loose, incoherent faculties, ever becoming more and more disorganized and disintegrated, somehow held together till the end. "My hands are of your colour," exclaims Lady Macbeth; "but I shame to wear a heart * Macbeth, Clarendon Press Edition, p. 108,

so white. A little water clears us of this deed." Yet it is she who has uttered no large words about "the multitudinous seas" who will rise in slumbery agitation, and with her accustomed action eagerly essay to remove from her little hand its ineffaceable stain, and with her delicate sense sicken at the smell of blood upon it, which "all the perfumes of Arabia will not sweeten;" and last, will loosen the terrible constriction of her heart with a sigh that longs to be perpetual. It is the queen, and not her husband, who is slain by conscience.

Yet the soul of Macbeth never quite disappears into the blackness of darkness. He is a cloud without water carried about of winds; a tree whose fruit withers, but not even to the last plucked up by the roots. For the dull ferocity of Macbeth is joyless. All his life has gone irretrievably astray, and he is aware of this. His suspicion becomes uncontrollable; his reign is a reign of terror; and as he drops deeper and deeper into the solitude and the gloom, his sense of error and misfortune, futile and unproductive as that sense is, increases. He lives under a dreary cloud, and all things look gray and cold. He has lived long enough, yet he clings to life; that which should accompany old age, 66 as honour, love, obedience, troops of friends," he may not look to have. Finally his sensibility has grown so dull that even the intelligence of his wife's death-the death of her who had been bound to him by such close communion in crime-hardly moves him, and seems little more than one additional incident in the weary, meaningless tale of human life:

She should have died hereafter;

There would have been a time for such a word.

To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow,

Creeps in this petty pace from day to day

To the last syllable of recorded time;

And all our yesterdays have lighted fools

The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!
Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player

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This world-weariness, which has not the energy of Timon's despair, is yet less remote from the joy and glory of true living than is the worm-like vivacity of Iago. Macbeth remembers that he once knew there was such a thing as human goodness. He stands a haggard shadow against the hand'sbreadth of pale sky which yields us sufficient light to see him. But Iago rises compact with fiend-like energy, seen brightly in the godless glare of hell. The end of Macbeth is savage, and almost brutal a death without honour or loveliness. He fights now, not like "Bellona's bridegroom lapp'd in proof," but with a wild and animal clinging to life: They have tied me to a stake; I cannot fly, But, bear-like, I must fight the course.

His followers desert him; he feels himself taken in a trap. The powers of evil in which he had trusted turn against him and betray him. His courage becomes a desperate rage. We are in pain until the horrible necessity is accomplished.

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