Part 15 (1/2)
Macduff persuades Duncan's son, Malcolm, to attempt the recovery of the Scottish crown.
Malcolm and Macduff make the attempt. They attack Macbeth and kill him.
Macbeth is one of the seven supreme Shakespearean plays. In the order of composition it is either the fourth or the fifth of the seven. In point of merit it is neither greater nor less than the other six. It is different from them, in that it belongs more wholly to the kingdom of vision.
Like most Shakespearean tragedy, Macbeth is the tragedy of a man betrayed by an obsession. Caesar is betrayed by an obsession of the desire of glory, Antony by pa.s.sion, Tarquin by l.u.s.t, Wolsey by worldly greed, Coriola.n.u.s and Timon by their n.o.bleness, Angelo by his righteousness, Hamlet by his wisdom. All fail through having some hunger or quality in excess. Macbeth fails because he interprets with his worldly mind things spiritually suggested to him. G.o.d sends on many men ”strong delusion, that they shall believe a lie.” Oth.e.l.lo is one such.
Many things betray men. One strong means of delusion is the half-true, half-wise, half-spiritual thing, so much harder to kill than the lie direct. The sentimental treacherous things, like women who betray by arousing pity, are the dangerous things because their attack is made in the guise of great things. Tears look like grief, sentiment looks like love; love feels like n.o.bility; spiritualism seems like revelation.
Among these things few are stronger than the words spoken in unworldly states, in trance, in ecstasy, by oracles and diviners, by soothsayers, by the wholly excited people who are also half sane, by whoever obtains a half knowledge of the spirit by destruction of intellectual process.
”to win us to our harm, The instruments of darkness tell us truths, Win us with honest trifles, to betray's In deepest consequence.”
Coming weary and excited from battle, on a day so strange that it adds to the strangeness of his mood, Macbeth hears the hags hail him with prophecy. The promise rankles in him. The seed scattered in us by the beings outside life comes to good or evil according to the sun in us.
Macbeth, looking on the letter of the prophecy, thinks only of the letter of its fulfilment, till it becomes an obsession with him.
Partial fulfilment of the prophecy convinces him that all will be fulfilled. The belief that the veil over the future has been lifted for him gives him the recklessness of one bound in the knots of fate. So often, the thought that the soul is in a trap, playing out something planned of old, makes man take the frantic way, when the smallest belief in life would lead to peace. This thought pa.s.ses through his mind. Then fear that it is all a contriving of the devils makes him put it manfully from his mind. The talk about the Cawdor whose place he holds is a thrust to him. That Cawdor was a traitor who has been put to death for treachery. The king had an ”absolute trust” in him; but there is no judging by appearances. This glimpse of the ugliness of treachery makes Macbeth for an instant free of all temptation to it. Then a word stabs him again to the knowledge that if he take no step the king's young son will be king after Duncan. Why should the boy rule? From this point he goes forward, full of all the devils of indecision, but inclining towards righteousness, till his wife, girding and railing at him with definite aim while all his powers are in mutiny, drives him to the act of murder.
The story of the double treachery of the killing of a king, who is also a guest, is so written that we do not feel horror so much as an unbearable pity for Macbeth's mind. The horror is felt later, when it is made plain that the treachery does not end with that old man on the bed, but proceeds in a spreading growth of murder till the man who fought so knightly at Fife is the haunted awful figure who goes ghastly, killing men, women and little children, till Scotland is like a grave. At the end, the ”worthy gentleman,” ”n.o.ble Macbeth,” having fallen from depth to depth of degradation, is old, hag-haunted, sick at heart, and weary.
He has no friends. He knows himself silently cursed by every one in his kingdom. His queen is haunted. There is a curse upon the pair of them.
The birds of murder have come to roost. All that supports him is his trust in his reading of the words of the hags. He knows himself secure.
”And you all know security Is mortal's chiefest enemy,”
He has supped full with horrors. His b.l.o.o.d.y base mind is all a blur with gore. But he is resolute in evil still. At the end he sees too late that he has been tricked by--
”the equivocation of the fiend That lies like truth.”
His queen has killed herself. All the welter of murder has been useless.
All that he has done is to d.a.m.n his soul through the centuries during which the line of Banquo will reign. He dies with a courage that is half fury against the fate that has tricked him.
No play contains greater poetry. There is nothing more intense. The mind of the man was in the kingdom of vision, hearing a new speech and seeing what worldly beings do not see, the rush of the powers, and the fury of elemental pa.s.sions. No play is so full of an unspeakable splendour of vision--
”his virtues Will plead like angels trumpet-tongued.”
”And pity, like a naked new-born babe, Striding the blast, or heaven's cherubin, horsed Upon the sightless couriers of the air.”
”Our chimneys were blown down, and, as they say, Lamentings heard i' the air, strange screams of death, And prophesying with accents terrible.”
”In the great hand of G.o.d I stand.”
”A falcon towering in her pride of place Was by a mousing owl hawk'd at and killed.
And Duncan's horses--a thing most strange and certain-- Beauteous and swift, the minions of their race, Turn'd wild in nature, broke their stalls, flung out, Contending 'gainst obedience, as they would make War with mankind.
'Tis said they eat each other.”
”the time has been That, when the brains were out, the man would die.”
All the splendours and powers of this great play have been praised and re-praised. n.o.ble inventions, like the knocking on the door and the mutterings of the hags, have thrilled thousands. One, not less n.o.ble, is less noticed. It is in Act IV, sc. i, Macbeth has just questioned the hags for the last time. He calls in Lennox, with the words--
”I did hear The galloping of horse: who was't came by?”