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early part of the third act sum up this stage: he lies "on the torture of the mind in restless ecstasy."

This mental agony is succeeded by a lethargy, or numbness of feeling, which marks the gradual mortification of his soul. Lulled into a false security by the predictions. of the witches, Macbeth forgets the sense of fear and ceases to suffer from the torture of the mind. The report of Ross in the fourth act shows that this period was attended by frequent acts of bloodshed, but Macbeth is no longer troubled by the ghosts of his victims. Yet he is none the less sick at heart. Now that he has ceased to fear, he realizes as never before the utter futility of his crimes. The crown has brought him nothing of all that he had hoped to enjoy with it; and looking forward to a lonely and loveless old age, devoid of “honour, love, obedience, troops of friends," he feels that he has already lived too long. The news of his wife's death fails to rouse in him any emotion of sorrow, for existence in general seems to him in this mood of world-weariness as devoid of purpose or meaning as the babble of an idiot. He seems, indeed, on the point of suicide out of utter disgust with life. From this miserable state, Macbeth is roused by the report of the moving wood. His dream of safety broken, he plunges into action only to discover that the powers he trusted have delivered him into the hands of the avenger of blood. He has already tasted the bitterness of death before he falls under the sword of Macduff. Shakespeare's exposition of his theme, the utter ruin and inevitable punishment of the deliberately sinning soul, is complete and triumphant.

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A few words are necessary to clear the character of the hero from current misconceptions. Macbeth is by no means a representative of the old barbaric Highland chieftains, no rough soldier, or mere man of action. On the contrary he is a noble and courteous gentleman. His wife characterizes him as too full of the milk of human kindness"; and his hesitation before and his suffering after the murder of Duncan show how abhorrent such a deed of blood was to his original disposition. His relation to his wife in the first part of the play and his bitter sense of loneliness at its close, show him to be a man of warm human affections; and he is by no means indifferent to the breath of popular opinion.

Macbeth is a man of vivid imagination: he sees a visionary dagger marshalling him to Duncan's chamber, he hears ghostly voices proclaiming his future punishment, his overwrought mind conjures up the spectre of the murdered Banquo. He is intensely susceptible to the influence of superstition, and has no firm belief in an overruling Providence to protect him against its ravages. In short Macbeth, though by no means base or brutal, is not a strong man mentally or morally. His reasoning. faculties are as simple as his imagination is extraordinary, and hence it comes that he yields so readily to the stronger intellect and the firmer will of his wife. lacks a true ideal of loyalty or duty; mere earthly power appears to him in the stress of temptation as the highest good. And yet we feel as we close the play that in Macbeth there perished a man who under happier cir

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cumstances might have lived an honourable and even glorious life. Susceptible, impulsive, fearless of human foes, he is no bad type of the medieval knights who followed the lead of Peter the Hermit, or the gentlemen adventurers of Shakespeare's own day who singed the beard of the Spanish king. But the height to which he might have risen serves only to measure the depth of his fall.

Inasmuch as the whole interest of this drama centres about Macbeth, all the other personages are, quite properly, subordinated to him. Lady Macbeth alone claims for a time an equal share of our attention. But a very brief consideration of the structure of the drama will show how little, comparatively speaking, Shakespeare cared for her. She does not appear in the story at all until Macbeth has resolved to murder Duncan, and she drops out of it almost unnoticed before the final catastrophe. The truth is that her part in the drama is merely relative; it is a foil which serves to bring out more vividly the character of her husband.

The character of Lady Macbeth, then, must be considered as a masterly sketch dashed in with a few strong strokes rather than as an elaborate piece of portrait painting. And as is often the case with sketches, the significance of the work has been frequently misunderstood. Lady Macbeth is no monster of bloodthirstiness nor incarnate demon of ambition. Nor is she to be thought of as one of the wild heroines of Scandinavian legend. On the contrary there is evidence in the play to show that

Shakespeare thought of her as a slight and delicate woman. We hear of her "little hand"; we learn that she needs the stimulus of wine to carry her through the ordeal of the night of murder.; we see her swooning in the reaction that follows. And Macbeth's caressing phrase, dearest chuck," is hardly the pet name that one would apply to a Valkyrie. So far from being bloodthirsty, it is hardly too much to say that Lady Macbeth is naturally of an affectionate and gentle disposition. She has been a loving daughter and a tender mother; her whole attitude toward her husband is that of a devoted wife. The tremendous invocation to the powers of evil, which Shakespeare puts into her mouth, to unsex her, to fill her "top full of direst cruelty," shows in itself that she is not cruel by nature.

Lady Macbeth is no doubt ambitious; but she is ambitious solely for her husband. There is not a word in the play which can be construed into a shadow of evidence that she desired the crown for her own sake. In this point Shakespeare has departed, with the fine instinct of a great artist, from the sources of his story. Holinshed speaks of Lady Macbeth's insatiable ambition, but to have introduced this motive into the play would at once have destroyed the unity of interest which centres round Macbeth alone.

The dominant note in Lady Macbeth's character is her imperious and masterful will. What she wishes, she wishes most intensely; and she drives herself and her husband relentlessly on to the attainment of the goal. She

has none of his fears and scruples, simply because she will not permit herself to consider anything but the object of her desire. On the other hand she shows no trace of Macbeth's sensitiveness to exterior impressions nor of his exalted imaginative powers. She sees no visions and hears no ghostly voices. Her final ruin is due not so much to remorse as to a complete collapse of body and mind brought about, not only by the reaction from the terrible strain which her fierce will had imposed upon all her faculties, but, in an even greater degree, by the crushing disappointment which followed upon the attainment of her goal. The crown which was to give "solely sovereign sway and masterdom" to her husband, brought him only terrible dreams and bitter misery. And as he drifted farther and farther away from her upon a sea of guilt, she awoke to a realization of the irremediable mistake that she had made, like a traveller who has strained every nerve to reach some fancied fountain in the desert, only to find it a mirage. She is not sustained by any belief like her husband's in the false prophecies of the witches; she has not even the last resource of desperate battle. Nothing is left her but death, and she seems to have sought death by her own hands.

Of the remaining characters of the play only four deserve special notice. Banquo and Macduff are very obviously a pair of figures introduced, not merely for the sake of the action, but, in large measure at least, for the sake of character contrast with Macbeth. The importance of Banquo's relation to the witches has already been

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