Macbeth, Lord and Lady.

A Study in Character-Contrast.

Contrasts of character form one of the simplest elements of dramatic interest. Such contrasts are often obvious; at other times they take definitiveness only when looked at from a particular point of view. The contrast of character which it is the object of the present study to sketch rests upon a certain distinction which is one of the fundamental ideas in the analysis of human nature—The antithesis of the outer and inner life.the distinction between the outer life of action and the inner life of our own experience. The recognition of the two is as old as the Book of Proverbs, which contrasts the man that ruleth his spirit with the man that taketh a city. The heathen oracle, again, opened out to an age which seemed to have exhausted knowledge a new world for investigation in the simple command, Know thyself. The Stoics, who so despised the busy vanity of state cares, yet delighted to call their ideal man a king; and their particular tenet is universalised by Milton when he says:

And the modern humourist finds the idea indispensable for his pourtrayal of character and experience. 'Sir,' says one of Thackeray's personages, 'a distinct universe walks about under your hat and under mine ... You and I are but a pair of infinite isolations with some fellow-islands more or less near to us.' And elsewhere the same writer says that 'each creature born has a little kingdom of thought of his own, which it is a sin in us to invade.'

This antithesis of the practical and inner life is so accepted a commonplace of the pulpit and of the essayist on morals and culture that it may seem tedious to expound it. But for the very reason that it belongs to all these spheres, and that these spheres overlap, the two sides of the antithesis are not kept clearly distinct, nor are the terms uniformly used in the same sense. For the present purpose the exact distinction is between the outer world, the world of practical action, the sphere of making and doing, in which we mingle with our fellow men, join in their enterprises, and influence them to our ideas, in which we investigate nature and society, or seek to build up a fabric of power: and, on the other hand, the inner intellectual life, in which our powers as by a mirror are turned inwards upon ourselves, finding a field for enterprise in self-discipline and the contest with inherited notions and passions, exploring the depths of our consciousness and our mysterious relations with the unseen, until the thinker becomes familiar with strange situations of the mind and at ease in the presence of its problems. The antithesis is thus not at all the same as that between worldly and religious, for the inner life may be cultivated for evil: self-anatomy, as Shelley says,

Still less is it the antithesis between intellectual and commonplace; the highest intellectual powers find employment in practical life. The various mental and moral qualities belong to both spheres, but have a different meaning for each. Practical experience is a totally different thing from what the religious thinker means by his 'experience.' The discipline given by the world often consists in the dulling of those powers which self-discipline seeks to develope. Knowledge of affairs, with its rapid and instinctive grasp, is often possessed in the highest degree by the man who is least of all men versed in the other knowledge, which could explain and analyse the processes by which it operated. And every observer is struck by the different forms which courage takes in the two spheres, courage in action, and courage where nothing can be done and men have only to endure and wait. Macaulay in a well-known passage contrasts the active and passive courage as one of the distinctions between the West and the East.

The two lives are complete, each with its own field, its own qualities, culture, and fruit.

It is obvious that relation to these two lives will have a very great effect in determining individual character. In the same man the two sides of experience may be most unequally developed; an intellectual giant is often a child in the affairs of the world, and a moral hero may be found in the person of some bedridden cripple. On the other hand, to some the inner life is hardly known: familiar perhaps with every other branch of knowledge they go down to their graves strangers to themselves.

The antithesis then between the outer and inner life will be among the ideas which lie at the root of Character-Interpretation.

When the idea is applied to an age like that of Macbeth, the antithesis between the two lives almost coincides with the distinction of the sexes: amid the simple conditions of life belonging to such an age the natural tendency would be for genius in men to find scope in the outer and practical world, while genius in women would be restricted to the inner life. And this is the idea I am endeavouring to work out in the present study:—The antithesis the key to the characters of Macbeth and Lady Macbeth.that the key to Shakespeare's portraiture of Macbeth and Lady Macbeth will be found in regarding the two as illustrations of the outer and inner life. Both possess force in the highest degree, but the two have been moulded by the exercise of this force in different spheres; their characters are in the play brought into sharp contrast by their common enterprise, and the contrast of practical and intellectual mind is seen maintained through the successive stages of their descent to ruin.

Thus Macbeth is essentially the practical man, the man of action, of the highest experience, power, and energy in military and political command, accustomed to the closest connection between willing and doing. He is one who in another age would have worked out the problem of free trade, or unified Germany, or engineered the Suez Canal. On the other hand, he has concerned himself little with things transcendental; he is poorly disciplined in thought and goodness; prepared for any emergency in which there is anything to be done, yet a mental crisis or a moral problem afflicts him with the shock of an unfamiliar situation. This is by no means a generally accepted view: amongst a large number of readers the traditional conception of Macbeth lingers as a noble disposition dragged down by his connection with the coarser nature of his wife. His nobility conventional.According to the view here suggested the nobility of Macbeth is of the flimsiest and most tawdry kind. The lofty tone he is found at times assuming means no more than virtuous education and surroundings. When the purely practical nature is examined in reference to the qualities which belong to the intellectual life, the result is not a blank but ordinariness: the practical nature will reflect current thought and goodness as they appear from the outside. So Macbeth's is the morality of inherited notions, retained just because he has no disposition to examine them; he has all the practical man's distrust of wandering from the beaten track of opinion, which gives the working politician his prejudice against doctrinaires, and has raised up stout defenders of the Church amongst men whose lives were little influenced by her teaching. And the traditionary morality is more than merely retained. When the seed fell into stony ground forthwith it sprang up because it had no deepness of earth: the very shallowness of a man's character may lend emphasis to his high professions, just as, on the other hand, earnestness in its first stage often takes the form of hesitation. So Macbeth's practical genius takes in strongly what it takes in at all, and gives it out vigorously. But that the nobility has gone beyond the stage of passive recognition, that it has become absorbed into his inner nature, there is not a trace; on the contrary, it is impossible to follow Macbeth's history far without abundant evidence that real love of goodness for its own sake, founded on intelligent choice or deep affection, has failed to root a single fibre in his nature.

First, we have the opportunity of studying Macbeth's character in the analysis given of it in the play itself by the one person who not only saw Macbeth in his public life, but knew also the side of him hidden from the world.

I believe that this phrase, the 'milk of human kindness,' divorced from its context and become the most familiar of all commonplaces, has done more than anything else towards giving a false twist to the general conception of Macbeth's character. The words kind, kindness are amongst the most difficult words in Shakespeare. The wide original signification of the root, natural, nature, still retained in the noun kind, has been lost in the adjective, which has been narrowed by modern usage to one sort of naturalness, tender-heartedness; though in a derivative form the original sense is still familiar to modern ears in the expression 'the kindly fruits of the earth.' In Elizabethan English, however, the root signification still remained in all usages of kind and its derivatives. In Schmidt's analysis of the adjective, two of its four significations agree with the modern use, the other two are 'keeping to nature, natural,' and 'not degenerate and corrupt, but such as a thing or person ought to be.' Shakespeare delights to play upon the two senses of this family of words: Much Ado, i. i. 26.tears of joy are described as a 'kind overflow of kindness'; the Fool says of Regan that she will use Lear 'kindly,' i.e. according to her nature; Lr. i. v. 15.'the worm will do his kind,' i.e. bite. Ant. and Cleop. v. ii. 264.How far the word can wander from its modern sense is seen in a phrase of the present play, ii. i. 24.'at your kind'st leisure,' where it is simply equivalent to 'convenient.' Still more will the wider signification of the word obtain, when it is associated with the word human; 'humankind' is still an expression for human nature, and the sense of the passage we are considering would be more obvious if the whole phrase were printed as one word, not 'human kindness,' but 'humankind-ness':—that shrinking from what is not natural, which is a marked feature of the practical nature. The other part of the clause, milk of humankind-ness, no doubt suggests absence of hardness: but it equally connotes natural, inherited, traditional feelings, imbibed at the mother's breast. The whole expression of Lady Macbeth, then, I take to attribute to her husband an instinctive tendency to shrink from whatever is in any way unnatural. That this is the true sense further appears, not only from the facts—i. ii. 54.for nothing in the play suggests that Macbeth, 'Bellona's bridegroom,' was distinguished by kindness in the modern sense—but from the context. The form of Lady Macbeth's speech makes the phrase under discussion a summing up of the rest of her analysis, or rather a general text which she proceeds to expand into details. Not one of these details has any connection with tender-heartedness: on the other hand, if put together the details do amount to the sense for which I am contending, that Macbeth's character is a type of commonplace morality, the shallow unthinking and unfeeling man's lifelong hesitation between God and Mammon.

If the delicate balancing of previous clauses had left any doubt as to the meaning, the last two lines remove it, and assert distinctly that Macbeth has no objection to the evil itself, but only a fear of evil measures which must be associated to a practical mind with failure and disgrace. i. iv. 48-53.It is striking that at the very moment Lady Macbeth is so meditating, her husband is giving a practical confirmation of her description in its details as well as its general purport. i. iii. 143, 146.He had resolved to take no steps himself towards the fulfilment of the Witches' prophecy, but to leave all to chance; then the proclamation of Malcolm, removing all apparent chance of succession, led him to change his mind and entertain the scheme of treason and murder: the words with which he surrenders himself seem like an echo of his wife's analysis.

But we are not left to descriptions of Macbeth by others. We have him self-displayed; and that in a situation so framed that if there were in him the faintest sympathy with goodness it must here be brought into prominence. i. vii. 1-28.Macbeth has torn himself away from the banquet, and, his mind full of the desperate danger of the treason he is meditating, he ponders over the various motives that forbid its execution. A strong nobility would even amid incentives to crime feel the attraction of virtue and have to struggle against it; but surely the weakest nobility, when facing motives against sin, would be roused to some degree of virtuous passion. Yet, if Macbeth's famous soliloquy be searched through and through, not a single thought will be found to suggest that he is regarding the deep considerations of sin and retribution in any other light than that of immediate practical consequences. First, there is the thought of the sureness of retribution even in this world. It may be true that hope of heaven and fear of hell are not the highest of moral incentives, but at least they are a degree higher than the thought of worldly prosperity and failure; Macbeth however is willing to take his chance of the next world if only he can be guaranteed against penalties in this life.

So far he has reached no higher consideration, in reference to treason and murder, than the fear that he may be suggesting to others to use against himself the weapon he is intending for Duncan. Then his thoughts turn to the motives against crime which belong to the softer side of our nature.

At all events it is clear this is no case of a man blinded for the moment to the emotions which resist crime; and as we hear him passing in review kinship, loyalty, hospitality, pity, we listen for the burst of remorse with which he will hurl from him the treachery he had been fostering. But, on the contrary, his thoughts are still practical, and the climax to which this survey of motives is to lead up is no more than the effect they will have on others: pity

And then he seems to regret that he cannot find more incentives to his villainy.

So Macbeth's searching self-examination on topics of sin and retribution, amid circumstances specially calculated to rouse compunction, results in thoughts not more noble than these—that murder is a game which two parties can play at, that heartlessness has the effect of drawing general attention, that ambition is apt to defeat its own object.

Again: that Macbeth's union of superficial nobility with real moral worthlessness is connected with the purely practical bent of his mind will be the more evident the wider the survey which is taken of his character and actions. It may be observed that Macbeth's spirits always rise with evil deeds: however he may have wavered in the contemplation of crime, its execution strings him up to the loftiest tone. ii. i, from 31; and iii. ii, from 39.This is especially clear in the Dagger Scene, and in the scene in which he darkly hints to his wife the murder of Banquo, which is in a brief space to be in actual perpetration. As he feels the moment of crime draw near, his whole figure seems to dilate, the language rises, and the imagery begins to flow. Like a poet invoking his muse, Macbeth calls on seeling night to scarf up the tender eye of pitiful day. He has an eye to dramatic surroundings for his dark deeds.

The man who had an hour or two before been driven from the table of his guests by the mere thought of a crime moves to the deed itself with the exalted language of a Hebrew prophet. On the other hand, in his spiritual struggles there is a simpleness that sometimes suggests childishness. ii. ii. 31. His trouble is that he could not say 'Amen' when the sleepers cried 'God bless us'; his conscience seems a voice outside him; ii. ii. 35-46.finally, the hardened warrior dare not return to the darkness and face the victim he had so exultingly done to death.

Macbeth, then, is the embodiment of one side of the antithesis with which we started; his is pre-eminently the practical nature, moulded in a world of action, but uninfluenced by the cultivation of the inner life. Yet he is not perfect as a man of action: for the practical cannot reach its perfection without the assistance of the inner life. Two flaws in Macbeth as an embodiment of the practical: his superstition;There are two flaws in Macbeth's completeness. For one, his lack of training in thought has left him without protection against the superstition of his age. He is a passive prey to supernatural imaginings. v. v. 10.He himself tells us he is a man whose senses would cool to hear a night-shriek, and his fell of hair rouse at a dismal treatise. And we see throughout the play how he never for an instant doubts the reality of the supernatural appearances: e.g. iii. iv. 60; i. iii. 107, 122. a feature the more striking from its contrast with the scepticism of Lady Macbeth, and the hesitating doubt of Banquo. and his helplessness under suspense. Again: no active career can be without its periods when action is impossible, iii. i. 6.and it is in such periods that the training given by the intellectual life makes itself felt, with its self-control and passive courage. All this Macbeth lacks: in suspense he has no power of self-restraint. compare i. iii. 137, and iii. ii. 16.When we come to trace him through the stages of the action we shall find that one of these two flaws springing out of Macbeth's lack of the inner life, his superstition and his helplessness in suspense, is at every turn the source of his betrayal.

In the case of Lady Macbeth, the old-fashioned view of her as a second ClytÆmnestra has long been steadily giving way before a conception higher at least on the intellectual side. Lady Macbeth as an embodiment of the inner life.The exact key to her character is given by regarding her as the antithesis of her husband, and an embodiment of the inner life and its intellectual culture so markedly wanting in him. She has had the feminine lot of being shut out from active life, and her genius and energy have been turned inwards; v. i. 58.her soul—like her 'little hand'—is not hardened for the working-day world, but is quick, delicate, sensitive. She has the keenest insight into the characters of those around her. She is accustomed to moral loneliness and at home in mental struggles. She has even solved for herself some of their problems. In the very crisis of Duncan's murder she gives utterance to the sentiment:

When we remember that she must have started with the superstitions of her age such an expression, simple enough in modern lips, opens up to us a whole drama of personal history: we can picture the trembling curiosity, the struggle between will and quivering nerves, the triumph chequered with awe, the resurrection of doubts, the swayings between natural repulsion and intellectual thirst, the growing courage and the reiterated victories settling down into calm principle. Accordingly, Lady Macbeth has won the grand prize of the inner life: in the kingdom of her personal experience her WILL is unquestioned king. It may seem strange to some readers that Lady Macbeth should be held up as the type of the inner life, so associated is that phrase to modern ears with the life fostered by religion. But the two things must not be confused—religion and the sphere in which religion is exercised. 'The kingdom of God is within you,' was the proclamation of Christ, but the world within may be subjugated to other kings than God. Mental discipline and perfect self-control, like that of Lady Macbeth, would hold their sway over evil passions, but they would also be true to her when she chose to contend against goodness, and even against the deepest instincts of her feminine nature. A struggle against not absence of the softer qualities.This was ignored in the old conception of the character, and a struggle against the softer side of her nature was mistaken for its total absence. But her intellectual culture must have quickened her finer sensibilities at the same time that it built up a will strong enough to hold them down; nor is the subjugation so perfect but that a sympathetic insight can throughout trace a keen delicacy of nature striving to assert itself. i. v. 41.In particular, when she calls upon the spirits that tend on mortal thoughts to unsex and fill her from crown to toe with direst cruelty, she is thrilling all over with feminine repugnance to the bloody enterprise, which nevertheless her royal will insists upon her undertaking. Lady Macbeth's career in the play is one long mental civil war: and the strain ends, as such a strain could only end, in madness.

Such is the general conception of Lord and Lady Macbeth from the point of view of the antithesis between the outer and inner life. We have now to turn from character to action, and trace the contrasted pair through the stages of their common career.

The two opposing natures have been united in a happy marriage, the happier because a link between characters so forceful and so antithetic, if it held at all, must be a source of interest: compare i. v. 55-60; i. vii. 38; iii. ii. 27, 29, 36, 45; iii. iv. 141.the dark tragedy of this unhappy pair is softened by the tenderness of demeanour which appears on both sides. Another source of marriage happiness is added: there is not a trace of self-seeking in Lady Macbeth. Throughout the play she is never found meditating upon what she is to gain by the crown; wife-like, she has no sphere but the career of her husband. The original impulse to evil came from Macbeth.In a picture of human characters, great in their scale, overwhelmed in moral ruin, the question of absorbing interest is the commencement of the descent, and the source from which the impulse to evil has come. This, in the present case, Shakespeare has carefully hidden from us: before the play opens the essential surrender of spirit has taken place, and all that we are allowed to see is its realisation in life and fact. If, however, we use the slight material afforded us for speculation on this point, it would appear that the original choice for evil has for both been made by Macbeth. In the partnership of man and wife it is generally safe to assume that the initiative of action has come from the husband, if nothing appears to the contrary. i. vii. 48.In the present case we are not left to assumptions, Lady Macbeth distinctly speaks of her husband as first breaking to her the enterprise of treacherous ambition.

The reference can only be to a period before the commencement of the play; and the general drift of the passage suggests that it was no mere choice, made by Macbeth with deliberation during which he would be open to conviction, but an impulse of uncontrollable passion that it would have been vain for his wife to resist, supposing that she had had the desire to resist it—so uncontrollable, indeed, i. vii. 54.that it appears to Lady Macbeth stronger than the strongest of feminine passions, a mother's love.

The only sense in which Lady Macbeth can be pronounced the ruin of her husband is that her firm nature holds him in the path to which he has committed them both, and will not allow his fatal faltering to lose both the virtue he has renounced and the price for which he has bartered it. Denied by her feminine position, the possibility—even if she had had the desire—of directing the common lot for good, she has recognised before we make her acquaintance that this lot has been cast for evil, and she is too well-trained in self-knowledge to attempt the self-deception her husband tries to keep up. i. vii. 54.And to this evil lot she applies her full force. Her children have died, and this natural outlet for passion is wanting; the whole of her energy is brought to bear upon her husband's ambition, and she is waiting only an occasion for concentrating her powers upon some definite project.

With such mutual relations between the hero and the heroine the play opens: we are to watch the contrasted characters through the successive stages of the Temptation, the Deed, the Concealment, the Nemesis.

The Temptation accosts the two personages when separated from one another, and we thus have the better opportunity of watching the different forms it assumes in adapting itself to the different characters. The expedition, which has separated Macbeth from his wife, is one which must have led him to brood over his schemes of ambition. Certainly it exhibits to him an example of treason and shows him the weakness of his sovereign. Probably he sees events shaping in a direction that suggests opportunity; he may have known that the king must pass in the direction of his castle, or in some other way may have anticipated a royal visit; at all events the king's intimation of this visit in the play itself—

does not look like a first mention of it. i. iii. 38-78.To a mind so prepared the supernatural solicitation brings a shock of temptation; and as the Witches in their greeting reach the promise, 'Thou shalt be King hereafter,' Macbeth gives a start that astonishes Banquo:

To Banquo this prediction of the Witches seems no more than curious; for it must be remembered that Macbeth's position in the kingdom was not such as to exclude hope of succession to the crown, though the hope was a remote one. But Macbeth's start tells a tale of his inner thoughts at the time. This alone should be sufficient to vindicate Shakespeare from the charge sometimes brought against him of turning a great character from virtue to vice by demoniac agency; his is the higher conception that a soul which has commenced the surrender to evil will find in the powers of darkness agencies ready to expedite its descent, it matters not what form these agencies assume. Macbeth has been for years playing with the idea of treason, while never bracing himself up to the point of acting it: suddenly the thought he fancied so safe within his bosom appears outside him in tangible form, gleaming at him in the malignant glances of recognition the Witches are casting at him. To a mind utterly undefended by culture against superstitious terror this objective presentation of his own thought proves a Rubicon of temptation which he never attempts to recross. i. v. 1-55. On Lady Macbeth the supernatural incident makes not the slightest impression of any kind; we see her reading her husband's excited account of the interview with the most deliberate calmness, weighing its suggestions only with reference to the question how it can be used upon her husband. To her temptation comes with the suggestion of opportunity. The messenger enters during her quiet meditation;

The shock that passes over her is like the shock of chemical change. In an instant her whole nature is strung up to a single end; the long-expected occasion for the concentration of a whole life's energy upon a decisive stroke is come. So rapidly does her imagination move that she sees the deed before her as already done, and, as she casts her eyes upwards, the very ravens over her head seem to be croaking the fatal entrance of Duncan under her battlements.

The stage of Temptation cannot be considered complete without taking in that important section of the play which intervenes between the meeting of the two personages after their separate temptations and the accomplishment of the treason. This is essentially a period of suspense, and accordingly exhibits Macbeth at his weakest. As he enters his castle his tell-tale face is as a book where men may read strange matters; and his utter powerlessness of self-control throws upon his wife's firm will the strongest of all strains, that of infusing her own tenacity into a vacillating ally. I have already dealt with the point at which Macbeth's suspense becomes intolerable, and he leaves the supper-table; and I have drawn attention to the eminently practical nature of his thoughts even at this crisis. The scene which follows, when his wife labours to hold him to the enterprise he has undertaken, illustrates perhaps better than any other incident in the play how truly this practical bent is the key to Macbeth's whole character. At first he takes high ground, and rests his hesitation on considerations of gratitude. Lady Macbeth appeals to consistency, to their mutual love, and, her anger beginning to rise at this wavering of will in a critical moment, she taunts her husband with cowardice. Then it is that Macbeth, irritated in his turn, speaks the noble words that have done so much to gain him a place in the army of martyrs to wifely temptations.

But it is difficult to share Macbeth's self-deception long. At his wife's reminder how he had been the one to first moot the undertaking, and swear to it in spite of overwhelming obstacles, already the noble attitude looks more like the sour grapes morality of the man who begins to feel indignation against sin at the precise moment when the sin becomes dangerous. And the whole truth comes sneaking out at Macbeth's next rejoinder: 'If we should fail?' Here is the critical point of the scene. i. vii, from 61.At its beginning Macbeth is for abandoning the treason, at its end he prepares for his task of murder with animation: where does the change come? The practical man is nerved by having the practical details supplied to him. Lady Macbeth sketches a feasible scheme: how that the King will be wearied, his chamberlains can by means of the banquet be easily drugged, their confusion on waking can be interpreted as guilt—before she has half done her husband interrupts her with a burst of enthusiasm, and completes her scheme for her. The man who had thought it was manliness that made him shrink from murder henceforward never hesitates till he has plunged his dagger in his sovereign's bosom.

In the perpetration of the Deed itself we have the woman passing from weakness to strength, the man from strength to weakness. To Lady Macbeth this actual contact with a deed of blood is the severest point of the strain, the part most abhorrent to her more delicate nature. For a single moment she feels herself on the verge of the madness which eventually comes upon her:

And at the beginning of the scene she has been obliged to have recourse to stimulants in order to brace her failing nerves: