A dagger of the mind; a false creation, Thou marshal'st me the way that I was going; Mine eyes are made the fool o' th' other senses, And on thy blade and dudgeon, gouts of blood, Thus to mine eyes. Now o'er the one half world Whose howl's his watch, thus with his stealthy pace, Which now suits with it. While I threat he lives; Words to the heat of deeds to cold breath gives. [A bell rings. I go, and it is done; the bell invites me : Hear it not, Duncan; for it is a knell That summons thee to heaven, or to hell. Enter Lady MACBETH. [Exit. Lady M. That which hath made them drunk, hath made me bold: What hath quenched them, hath given me fire.-Hark!-peace! It was the owl that shrieked, the fatal bellman, Which gives the sternest good-night. He is about it— The doors are open; and the surfeited grooms Do mock their charge with snōres: I have drugged their possets, That death and nature do contend about them, 1 Tarquin, two kings of Rome: L.Tarquinius Superbus, here alluded to, seventh in the line of kings, ob tained the throne by the murder of Servius Tullius, whose daughter, Tullia, he had married. Whether they live or die. Macbeth [within.] Who's there?-what, ho! Lady M. Alack! I am afraid they have awaked, And 'tis not done. The attempt, and not the deed, Confounds us. Hark! I laid their daggers ready; He could not miss them.-Had he not resembled My father as he slept, I had don't.—My husband! Macb. I've done the deed!-didst thou not hear a noise? [Looking on his hands. Lady M. A foolish thought, to say a sorry sight. Macb. There's one did laugh in's sleep, and one cried, MURDER! That they did wake each other; I stood and heard them; But they did say their prayers, and addressed them Again to sleep. Lady M. There are two lodged together. Macb. One cried, God bless us! and Amen! the other; As they had seen me with these hangman's hands Listening their fear. I could not say, Amen, When they did say, God bless us. Lady M. Consider it not so deeply. Macb. But wherefore could not I pronounce, Amen? I had most need of blessing, and amen Lady M. These deeds must not be thought After these ways; so, it will make us mad. Macb. Methought I heard a voice cry, Sleep no more! Sleep that knits up the raveled sleeve of care, Chief nourisher in life's feast :— What do you mean? Macb. Still it cried, Sleep no more, to all the house; GLAMIS hath murdered sleep; and therefore CAwDOR Shall sleep no more—MACBETH shall sleep no more! Lady M. Who was it that thus cried? Why, worthy thane, You do unbend your noble strength, to think So brain-sickly of things. Go, get some water, --- hand.your Why did you bring these daggers from the place? They must lie. Go, carry them, and smear The sleepy grooms with blood. Macb. I'll go no mōre : I am afraid to think what I have done : Look on't again, I dare not. Lady M. Infirm of purpose! Give me the daggers. The sleeping and the dead Macb. [Exit. Knocking within. Whence is that knocking? How is't with me, when every noise appalls me? What hands are here ?-Ha! they pluck out mine eyes! Clean from my hands? No: this my hand will rather Making the green-one red. Reënter Lady MACBETH. Lady M. My hands are of your color; but I shame To wear a heart so white. [Knocking.] I hear a knocking At the south entry. Retire we to our chamber : A little water clears us of this deed; How easy is it, then? Your constancy' Hath left you unattended. [Knocking.] Hark! more knocking: Get on your night-gown, lest occasion call us, And show us to be watchers. Be not lost So poorly in your thoughts. 1 Incarnadine, (în kår nā din), to stain red, or of a flesh-color. 2 Con' stan cy, fixedness or firm ness of mind; resolution. Macb. To know my deed,-'twere best not know myself. [Knocking. Wake Duncan with thy knocking! I would thou couldst. SHAKSPEARE. II. 191. THE KNOCKING AT THE GATE, IN MACBETH. FR ROM my boyish days I had always felt a great perplexity on one point in Macbeth'. It was this: the knocking at the gate, which succeeds to the murder of Duncan, produced to my feelings an effect for which I never could account. The effect was, that it reflected back upon the murder a peculiar awfulness and a depth of solemnity; yet, however obstinately I endeavored with my understanding to comprehend this, for many years I never could see why it should produce such an effect. Here I pause for one moment, to exhort the reader never to pay any attention to his understanding when it stands in opposition to any other faculty of his mind. The mere understanding, however useful and indispensable, is the meanèst faculty in the human mind, and the most to be distrusted; and yet the great majority of people trust to nothing else; which may do for ordinary life, but not for philosophical purposes. 2. My understanding could furnish no reason why the knocking at the gate in Macbeth should produce any effect, direct or reflected. In fact, my understanding said positively that it could not produce any effect. But I knew better: I felt that it did; and I waited and clung to the problem until further knowledge should enable me to solve it. At length I solved it to my own satisfaction, and my solution is this: Murder in ordinary cases, where the sympathy is wholly directed to the case of the murdered person, is an incident of coarse and vulgar horror; and for this reason, that it flings the interèst exclusively upon the natural but ignoble instinct by which we cleave to life; an instinct which, as being indispensable to the primal law of selfpreservation, is the same in kind (though different in degree) among all living creatures: this instinct, therefore, because it annihilates all distinctions, and degrades the greatest of men to the level of "the poor beetle that we tread on," exhibits human nature in its most ab'ject and humiliating attitude. 3. Such an attitude would little suit the purposes of the poët. What, then, must he do? He must throw the interest on the murderer. Our sympathy must be with him (of course I mean a sympathy of comprehension, a sympathy by which we enter into his feelings and are made to understand them—not a sympathy of pity or approbation). In the murdered person all strife of thought, all flux and reflux of passion and of purpose, are crushed by one overwhelming panic: the fear of instant death smites him "with its petrific mace." But in the murderer —such a murderer as a poet will condescend to-there must be raging some great storm of passion-jealousy, ambition, vengeance, hatred-which will create a hell within him; and into this hell we are to look. 4. In Macbeth, for the sake of gratifying his own enormous and teeming faculty of creation, Shakspeare has introduced two murderers; and, as usual in his hands, they are remarkably discriminated: but, though in Macbeth the strife of mind is greater than in his wife—the tiger spirit not so ǎwāke, and his feelings caught chiefly by contagion from her,—yet, as both were finally involved in the guilt of murder, the murderous mind of necessity is finally to be presumed in both. This was to be expressed; and on its own account, as well as to make it a mōre proportionable antagonist to the unoffending nature of their victim, “the gracious Duncan," and adequately to expound "the deep damnation of his taking off," this was to be expressed with peculiar energy. We were to be made to feel that the human nature, i. e., the divine nature of love and mercy, spread through the hearts of all creatures, and seldom utterly withdrawn from man, was gone, vanished, extinct; and that the fiendish nature had taken its place. And, as this effect is marvelously accomplished in the dialogues and soliloquies themselves, so it is finally consummated by the expedient under consideration; and it is to this that I now solicit the reader's attention. 5. If the reader has ever witnessed a wife, daughter, or sister in a fainting fit, he may chance to have observed that the most affecting moment in such a spectacle is that in which a sigh and a stirring announce the recommencement of suspended life. Or, if the reader has ever been present in a vast metropolis on the day when some great national idol was carried in funeral pomp to his grave, and chancing to walk near the course through which it passed, has felt powerfully, in the silence and desertion |