SHAKSPEARE.

———

BY THEODORE S. FAY, AUTHOR OF “NORMAN LESLIE,” “THE COUNTESS IDA,” ETC.

———

It is the fashion to consider Macbeth a spotless and noble soul, ensnared by the toils of the fiends, and pulled down from heaven to hell by the chance meeting of the weird sisters on the heath. There is a serious objection to this view. It makes machines of men. It takes from us the most obvious and sublime attribute of an immortal being, viz: free agency. If a high-minded and God-revering mortal is unprotected against the attacks of supernatural beings—if foul witches may watch for him in unguarded moments, and weave around his enchanted feet the fatal snares of crime and death, then are we truly a wretched race. But this is not Shakspeare’s creed. This is not the character of the tragedy. Macbeth was a villain. He had deliberately adopted vice as his god long before the fiends were permitted to patter with him. They come as a consequence not as a cause of wickedness. The withered and wild sisters on the blasted heath were conjured up by his own cherished weaknesses and secret deeds.^[4] They were the haggard and hellish impersonations of his own hidden thoughts and passions. He was not the pure, generous, heaven-adoring person he is represented. The germs of his guilt he had received into his heart by himself years before, and they lay shooting there in silence, only waiting the quickening beam of opportunity—waiting the first, feeblest temptation to start forth in all their force. He was one of those fair-seeming men who pass for honest and noble. The world contains now, as then, many such. Many a man with an uplifted brow and a clear name, waits only occasion to prove himself a scoundrel. It is such specious hypocrites that gather around them (as the smell of carrion does the hawk and vulture) the plotting witches who watch for power over the children of men. They had never tempted the pure good old King Duncan. He might have passed the blasted heath every day of his life, and these hags would never have dreamed of appearing to him. His soul was not prepared for their wiles. But that of Macbeth—as well as that of his stern wife—was corrupted by the whole tenor of their previous life.

Had there been left no evidence of this, I should still have asserted it. The innocent—the pure in heart—they who daily commune with their Maker—who acknowledge their weakness and danger when left to themselves—and implore humbly at his feet his all-sufficient aid—never fall victims to the accursed fiends, whether they appear in the deformity of Paddock and Graymalkin, or disguised under the fair temptations of life.

But Shakspeare has left proof enough in his tragedy. He meant to show, not (as is frequently asserted) the downfall of noble grandeur and unsuspecting innocence, but the destruction of a fair-showing, unsuspected villain—the wreck of a ship whose outward semblance was tall and imposing, but which was unseaworthy and destined to go down before the first gale.

In the first place, why does not Banquo suffer from the fiends? He is with Macbeth when they appear. He even boldly addresses them, and at once—with the frank fearlessness of a noble and virtuous mind, conscious of its honesty, commands them, if they can read the future, to speak to him also.

“Speak then to me, who neither beg nor fear your favors, nor your hate.”

Here is at once a man not to be tampered with. They promise him also as well as Macbeth a dazzling future good—a posterity of kings—but it in no way changes his plans of life, or raises the least idea in his mind of crime or intrigue. Even when, according to the prediction of the witches, Macbeth instantly receives intelligence, of his being thane of Cawdor, Banquo’s clear-seeing sense of right, his innocence of nature takes the true and virtuous view of the affair, looks, at a glance, through all the complicated web of the sisters’ plots, and keeps himself unsoiled, unendangered by them.

Banquo. “But ’tis strange;

And often-times, to win us to our harm,

The instruments of darkness tell us truths;

Win us with honest trifles, to betray us

In deepest consequence.”

And while he is making this just reflection, the obvious impulse of a mind not warped from the erectness of a moral and religious integrity and reverence, Macbeth soliloquizes with a kind of inexpressible anticipatory triumph.

“Two truths are told

As happy prologues to the swelling act

Of the imperial theme.”

And he then goes on, like a ready made, long-matured rascal as he is—like one whose mind had no habit of virtuous or religious contemplation, but which has always had a familiarity with evil and a tendency downward:

——“Why do I yield to that suggestion

Whose horrid image doth unfix my hair,” etc.

The very moment his attention is directed to the subject of his becoming king, he conceives the idea of murdering the actual occupant of the throne, notwithstanding the fact that there are two sons living.

An innocent man, were he told he would become king of England, would not instantly set about murdering the queen. He would (supposing him to have faith in the prediction) say to himself, as indeed Macbeth does at one time:

“If chance will have me king, why chance may crown me, without my stir.”

The very first page of the tragedy marks Macbeth for a villain even before he has made his appearance.

1. Witch. When shall we three meet again

In thunder, lightning, or in rain?

2. Witch. When the hurly-burly’s done,

When the battle’s lost and won;

3. Witch. That will be ere set of sun.

1. Witch. Where the place?

2. Witch. Upon the heath.

3. Witch. Then to meet with Macbeth.

Why have these fiendish women selected the gallant soldier as their victim? What gathers them about the “battle” that is raging near? What but the scent of a sinful heart?

But there are other proofs of an extrinsic nature, which settle the previous character of Lady Macbeth at the same time, and shows how ripe they both were for the fiends.

If a man’s true nature may be supposed to be known to any one it is to his wife. He may put on a smooth face before his best friend; he may write or speak virtuous sentiments to the public; he may give charitable donations, and follow the career of a flaming patriot or a meek saint, but the lady upon whom he has conferred with his name, the right of being with him continually, will be pretty able to tell how matters really are. I do not say that, because a wife abuses her husband and calls him names, he must necessarily be a rascal; but, as a general rule, the partner of his woes and joys has better opportunities of knowing the man than almost any one else—at least, if she be a person of Lady Macbeth’s discrimination. Well then, see what his lady says of him, to herself, on receiving his letter recounting the prediction of the weird sisters.

“Glamis thou art, and Cawdor; and shalt be

What thou art promis’d:—yet I do fear thy nature;

It is too full o’ the milk of human kindness,

To catch the nearest way.”

That she should suppose him too full of the milk of human kindness to do cruel actions is a skilful stroke in the delineation both of his nature and hers. However well she knew him, as he had been till then, an unprincipled man—even she had never fathomed those depths of character, (for good or for evil common to all men, and equally unfathomed probably by himself,) which the subsequent events disclosed. Shakspeare somewhere else says, “It is not a year or so that shows us a man”—and it is an important truth, that we are not thoroughly known by our best friends, and do not know ourselves till late in life. This same person, so full of the milk of human kindness that she feared his “softer nature” could never be brought to the necessary resolution, no sooner finds himself once fairly compromised than his atrocities throw the cruelties of ordinary oppressors quite into the shade.

“Thou would’st be great;

Art not without ambition; but without

The illness should attend it. What thou would’st highly

Thou would’st holily; would’st not play false,

And yet would’st wrongly win,” etc. etc.

This passage has been often misunderstood. “Without the illness” that should attend ambition—“what thou would’st highly thou would’st holily,” does not mean, thou art without the vices which should attend ambition, and, what thou would’st highly—thou would’st in a holy spirit. It means, he is without the courage to bear the risk and odium necessary to the successful carrying out of ambitious plans, although he is willing enough to be guilty if he may not appear to be so. “What he would highly,” he would also with an appearance of holiness. He loves the mask of virtue, but he loves also the sweets of sin. He has thus far enjoyed the good opinion of the world. He cannot bear to throw aside the wreath which he has worn and which flatters his weakness and vanity. It is the world which alone he thinks of. This is his only god. Of the Supreme Being, there is not a word; but of his inclination to assume the moral responsibility there is a distinct acknowledgment:

“Would’st not play false

And yet would’st wrongly win. ‘Thou’d’st have, great Glamis,’

That which cries, ‘Thus thou must do if thou have it!’

And that which thou dost rather fear to do,

Than wishest should be undone.”

Here we have Macbeth’s character. Here we have the secret of his goodness. It is fear and love of the world.

Shakspeare meant to draw a very—very common character, only he has made it colossal. How many men in the common life of this day are irreproachable from the same considerations—fear and love of the world, joined to a certain dislike of the trouble, exertion and risk of wrong. (“If we should fail!”) That these are the moving springs of this seemingly noble and generous but really remorseless and impious character we see again from a remark of his own. After contemplating the murder for some time, he concludes to abandon the plan. Why? Because he will not incur the moral guilt? Because he has thoughts of his God, whose eye is on him, and who cannot but punish a crime? Because the commandment has been written, “Thou shalt do no murder?” Because the Deity himself has decreed “blood for blood?”

No. For reasons much more suited to his irreligious, infidel, worldly mind:

“We will proceed no further in this business!

He hath honored me of late; and I have bought

Golden opinions from all sorts of people,

Which should be worn now in their newest gloss,

Not cast aside so soon.”

These are his reasons for not wishing to proceed. Not a thought of his Maker—not an allusion to a future world. He expressly says, in another passage, if he could but be secure against detection in this world, he does not feel any apprehension respecting the other. He’ll “jump the world to come.”

No man, not corrupt by long previous backslidings either of thought or deed, would act as Macbeth acts. He grasps at the first idea of murder with the true zest of an assassin. All his struggles are only those of fear. The first time he meets the king, his generous, grateful, and gracious master, he seems already to have arranged the murder in his mind, and his hypocrisy and cruelty do not waver an instant. He discovers the self-possession and plausible villany of a practised criminal, and this too before he sees his wife upon the subject. It almost seems as if they had spoken on this point before. When Duncan heaps him with thanks and rewards, he answers:

Mac. “The service and the loyalty I owe,

In doing it, pays itself. Your Highness’ part

Is to receive our duties: and our duties

Are, to your throne and state, children and servants;

Which do but what they should, by doing every thing

Safe toward your love and honor.”

When the King says, as if in dark conformity to the witches’ prediction:

“from hence to Inverness,

And bind us further to you,”

Macbeth, like a hungry leopard trembling with joy at seeing his victim take refuge in his very den, says, with an affectation of grateful submission:

Mac. “The rest is labor which is not used for you:

I’ll be myself the harbinger, and make joyful

The hearing of my wife with your approach.”

And then already, to himself:

Mac. “The Prince of Cumberland! That is a step

On which I must fall down, or else overleap;

For in my way it lies. Stars, hide your fires!

Let not light see my black and deep desires,

The eye wink at the hand, yet let that be

Which the eye fears, when it is done, to see.”

His famous soliloquy, “Out, out, brief candle,” is in itself a superb piece of earthly philosophy, but it becomes resplendently significant when regarded as the creed of infidelity which has brought him where he is; for he is an atheist, and therefore he is a murderer.

“Life’s but a walking shadow; a poor player,

That struts and frets his hour upon the stage,

And then is heard no more: it is a tale

Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,

Signifying nothing.”

These are not the thoughts of the gentle, happy-hearted Shakspeare. These are the blasphemous outbreakings of a blood-drenched, disbelieving soul, vainly striving to make head against God’s vengeance by denying his existence. No. Life’s not a walking shadow. It is more than a poor player—than a tale signifying nothing. It signifies much not to be known by the “ignorant present,” as they find, unhappy lost ones, who mistake such wicked blasphemies for truth.

The pertinacity with which his selfish soul is wedded to the world is again betrayed in one of his last soliloquies, where, in running a kind of balance in his accounts between the gains and losses of his murderous ambition, he complains:

“And that which should accompany old age,

As honor, love, obedience, troops of friends,

I must not look to have; but, in their stead,

Curses, not loud, but deep, mouth-honor, breath,

Which the poor heart would fain deny, and dare not.”

Always the world bounds his hopes and his fears.

The original viciousness of his nature is also betrayed by the readiness with which, once embarked in the career of crime, he plunges in headlong. The very morning of the murder of the king, he stabs in their sleep the two grooms of the chamber, then Banquo and Fleance (which latter escapes by chance.) He rushes on from murder to murder with the rabid fury of a hound maddened with the taste of blood. He adopts the direst principles of action,

Mac. “From this moment

The very firstlings of my heart shall be

The firstlings of my hand.”

Surprises the castle of Macduff, and massacres his wife, his babes,

“And all the unfortunate souls

That trace him in his line.”

That Shakspeare meant to draw, in this remarkable portraiture, a worldly character unsupported by religion, is evident from the tone of piety which runs through the other characters. The gentlewoman’s “Heaven knows what she has known,” and her “pray God it be well.” The doctor’s “God, God forgive us all!” Macduff’s

“Did Heaven look on

And would not take their part? Sinful Macduff,

They were all struck for thee! Naught that I am,

Not for their own demerits, but for mine,

Fell slaughter on their souls: Heaven rest them now.”

This is the oft repeated apprehension of a pious heart which fears still its own weakness, and finds, in the inscrutable and most awful visitatings of God a merited blow—a chastener of its still corrupt desires—a lesson to unlink it yet more from its grasp on mortality.

Immediately again Macduff prays to heaven—and in the same page Malcolm says:

“Macbeth

Is ripe for shaking, and the powers above

Put on their instruments.”

Another instance of the pure christian piety with which the poet invests his good characters, and of which he deprives his bad ones, telling strongly for Dr. Ulrici’s theory, occurs in the third scene of the fourth act, where Malcolm, the heir to the throne, in order to try Macduff, represents himself as being full of vices. Macduff replies,

“Thy Royal Father

Was a most sainted King; the Queen, that bore thee,—

Oftener upon her knees than on her feet.”

In his answer, Malcolm uses the expression, full of pious reverence:

“But God above

Deal between thee and me,” &c.

And still another, the morning after the murder, when Macduff says:

“In the great hand of God I stand,” &c.