impression of a black night broken by flashes of light and colour,
sometimes vivid and even glaring. They are the lights and colours of the
thunder-storm in the first scene; of the dagger hanging before Macbeth's
eyes and glittering alone in the midnight air; of the torch borne by the
servant when he and his lord come upon Banquo crossing the castle-court
to his room; of the torch, again, which Fleance carried to light his
father to death, and which was dashed out by one of the murderers; of
the torches that flared in the hall on the face of the Ghost and the
blanched cheeks of Macbeth; of the flames beneath the boiling caldron
from which the apparitions in the cavern rose; of the taper which showed
to the Doctor and Gentlewoman the wasted face and blank eyes of Lady
Macbeth. And, above all, the colour is the colour of blood. It cannot be
an accident that the image of blood is forced upon us continually, not
merely by the events themselves, but by full descriptions, and even by
reiteration of the word in unlikely parts of the dialogue. The Witches,
after their first wild appearance, have hardly quitted the stage when
there staggers onto it a 'bloody man,' gashed with wounds. His tale is
of a hero whose 'brandished steel smoked with bloody execution,' 'carved
out a passage' to his enemy, and 'unseam'd him from the nave to the
chaps.' And then he tells of a second battle so bloody that the
combatants seemed as if they 'meant to bathe in reeking wounds.' What
metaphors! What a dreadful image is that with which Lady Macbeth greets
us almost as she enters, when she prays the spirits of cruelty so to
thicken her blood that pity cannot flow along her veins! What pictures
are those of the murderer appearing at the door of the banquet-room with
Banquo's 'blood upon his face'; of Banquo himself 'with twenty trenched
gashes on his head,' or 'blood-bolter'd' and smiling in derision at his
murderer; of Macbeth, gazing at his hand, and watching it dye the whole
green ocean red; of Lady Macbeth, gazing at hers, and stretching it away
from her face to escape the smell of blood that all the perfumes of
Arabia will not subdue! The most horrible lines in the whole tragedy are
those of her shuddering cry, 'Yet who would have thought the old man to
have had so much blood in him?' And it is not only at such moments that
these images occur. Even in the quiet conversation of Malcolm and
Macduff, Macbeth is imagined as holding a bloody sceptre, an