NO. VIII.—MACBETH.

If man in all ranks is liable to be thus betrayed by appearances, the king is peculiarly exposed to this danger. Nearly all the beautiful forms around him are but the disguises of treachery and selfishness. He is at once master, dupe and victim. All the wisdom and philosophy he can learn from the experience of others, or from his own, are feeble protection against the profound and subtle duplicity which pervades the air he breathes and every moment of his contact with his fellow creatures. A king is as much confined within a certain circle of information and action as the salamander girt with fire. I have heard of the most extraordinary events of public notoriety being concealed from royal knowledge in a manner almost passing credit. In the following passage see how kings are duped:

ACT I.—Scene IV.

King. Is execution done on Cawdor? Are not

Those in commission yet returned?

Malcolm. My liege,

They are not yet come back. But I have spoke

With one who saw him die: who did report,

That very frankly he confess’d his treasons;

Implored your highness’ pardon; and set forth

A deep repentance: nothing in his life

Became him, like the leaving it; he died

As one that had been studied in his death,

To throw away the dearest thing he ow’d

As ’twere a careless trifle.

King. There’s no art,

To find the mind’s construction in the face:

He was a gentleman on whom I built

An absolute trust. O worthiest cousin!!

[Enter Macbeth, etc.

I do not know whether we may safely at all times ascribe the remarkable reflection of facts upon each other in the works of Shakspeare to the deliberate intention of the poet, or whether we may suppose them in some degree accidental. I am inclined to think, however, that it belongs to the high order of genius with which he was invested to exercise a power which, in its sphere, and with reverence be it spoken, is not without something of omnipresence. Here the king has just rid himself of one traitor of the blackest dye, whose guilt is placed beyond doubt, as it is almost beyond parallel, by his open and nearly successful treason in the late battle, and by his own confession. The betrayed sovereign then, just barely escaped from the ruinous treachery of one villain—yet one in whom he had built “an absolute trust”—after all the experience which we may suppose him to have acquired, for he is an old man, turns to another gentleman in whom also he builds “an absolute trust,” and, with a wise and just reflection scarcely ceased sounding from his lips—(a reflection to which every passing century will bear more and more ample testimony,

There’s no art

To find the mind’s construction in the face,)

he turns to the new arch villain whose dark mind is even at the moment busily employed in calculating the risks and gains of killing him in his sleep—he turns to his new “Cawdor” with

O worthiest cousin!

The sin of my ingratitude even now

Lies heavy on me: thou art so far before,

That swiftest wing of recompense is slow

To overtake thee. Would thou hadst less deserved;

That the proportion both of thanks and payment

Might have been mine! only I have left to say,

More is thy due, than more than all can pay.

Certainly were I a king I should either not read Macbeth, or the reading of it would often disturb my peace and check the flow of my feelings and opinions. Hence royalty is, and is obliged to be, closed in itself—surrounded by cold forms and highly artificial ceremonies, removed from the action of the common, simple and sweet impulses and emotions of life—removed from friendship—love—ordinary social society—from the pleasures of confidence and independence—from visits and acquaintance-making, and many others which the private subject enjoys and derives as much unconscious pleasure from as from the air and sun. If I were a king I should never trust a human being. I should feel ever as if I were led along blindfold to suit purposes, of the existence of which I could not be aware—to injure people whom perhaps, if I knew them, I should desire to protect—and to aid others, who, were their real natures open to my inspection, I might perhaps be the first to punish. I should shrink from offers of service lest, even in them who had most served me, might lurk a Macbeth to defend, honor and ruin me. The master of a household finds it impossible to follow with his eye or his mind the daily course of his own domestics. Watch them as he may they are sure of continually returning opportunities to deceive and cheat him. Neglect and fraud and duplicity, although on a minute scale, are in perpetual operation, the prevention of which, even when detected, baffles his utmost address. There are few families in the world—at least in the old European metropolises—where a certain description of dishonesty is not almost openly practiced and even consciously permitted. I have heard an anecdote of a master who made his servant an offer to add twenty pounds a year to his annual wages on condition of his swearing not to cheat him out of a cent. The valet, after calculating half an hour, declined the proposition. In humanity, the great central pervading principle is selfishness. It exists in every bosom, as attraction exists in every object. In some it is modified, mastered and even beautified by warmth of heart, sincerity of religion and clearness of understanding. In others it is augmented beyond its natural proportions, by the peculiar temperament and the want of moral and intellectual cultivation. In the slender opportunities I have had of observing the world I have been particularly and painfully struck with the humiliating truth that selfishness—deepening, from the mere instinct of preservation, into various shades of meanness, dishonesty and crime, is the great passion of the world. Men are often intellectually and politically great notwithstanding it and perhaps in consequence of it, but no one is morally great without escaping from its earth-attracting and inglorious influence. This passion increases in the bosom of the bad, in proportion to the greatness of the object. In the precincts of a court, (although it is a vulgar error to suppose virtue and disinterestedness may not exist there also,) it becomes more condensed—more profound, more plausibly disguised, but more quietly and universally pervading than elsewhere. In a royal circle nearly every other feeling is extinct, and the pressure for favor and the sacrifice of minor (and how much more graceful and noble) considerations at the shrine of courtly or fashionable ambition are, to the observing eye, very visible beneath the glittering surface of society. The king knows no body. He has no opportunity of seeing, hearing or judging. The good and the bad address him alike in the language of homage and adulation, and he comes at last to lose his natural sympathies with the human race—to regard them as inferiors—machines, cattle. To him they are so. Before him they are contemptible. They too often lay aside in his presence, and in proportion as they approach his throne, their claims to respect and their habits of candor, dignity and goodness, and a crowd of people are rarely presented to a king without their overvaluing some things and undervaluing others most lamentably. At the same time the sovereign himself, however good and great he may be, cannot well be considered without a certain degree of regret and commiseration, when one reflects that the hypocrisy always more or less existing in polite society is redoubled in his presence, and that he has always lived and is destined ever to continue to live in a mist. The unveiled face of human nature he is doomed never to see. He is continually trusting things which nearly concern him to men of whom he knows literally nothing. Then Duncan with his kingly credulity hears his murderer declare⁠—

Macbeth. 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.

It is worthy of remark here, and is another instance of the exhaustless room there is in these plays for the observation of ages, that while Macbeth, who is ready crouched like a ferocious leopard to leap upon his prey, is warm and ardent in his expressions of loyalty and submission, Banquo, who is that somewhat rare character a really honest man, says but very few words to his sovereign.

I have always been accustomed to think that the murder scene of Macbeth involved one of those violations of probability so often found in works of fiction. It seemed that the murder, which is committed as soon as the guests in the castle are asleep, could not very well be interrupted by the knocking of Macduff entering in the morning to awake the king. This objection, like most of those advanced against the inspired bard, disappears upon a closer examination and the supposed fault turns out to be an exquisite beauty. Inverness is in a very northern latitude, and in the summer (the season in which the crime is perpetrated) the day dawns almost as soon as the night falls. I have never been more struck with the beauty of nature than while watching the coming on and passing away of one of these northern summer nights. The change is so brief and lovely—the sun sets so lingeringly and leaves behind him such a heaven of mild and scarcely fading glory, the stars come forth so sparklingly and in such small numbers, and the pale silver opening of day rises in the east so soon after the world has fallen under the shadowy silence of the night, that, to one who has only seen the nights of lower latitudes and who associates ten or twelve hours of darkness with every revolution of the globe, it appears almost the luminous change of some heavenlier planet.

That Macbeth’s deed is committed in this season, we learn from the scene already noticed of the previous day when the king enters the castle and remarks, for the last time, the soothing effect of the summer air upon his senses.

I do not feel sure that all these corresponding beauties and proprieties were intended by Shakspeare, and we have all often heard it questioned whether he himself would not be surprised to see the exquisite things discovered in his works. It is possible; but I do not think that alters his merit, since the beauties really exist. In his advances into the story he keeps everywhere nature and truth in view, and hence consequences and effects of that wonderful proportion and perfection may be visible to the reader not thought of in detail by the writer.

It is certain that, in the instance above alluded to, had the fatal incident occurred in the winter, and had the murderers thus been interrupted almost in the act by the incoming of Macduff and the commencement of the routine of the subsequent day, there would have been an inconsistency which does not now exist.