if we put aside all belief in evil 'spirits,' are as
certain, momentous, and terrifying facts as the presence of inchoate
evil in the soul itself; and if we exclude all reference to these facts
from our idea of the Witches, it will be greatly impoverished and will
certainly fail to correspond with the imaginative effect. The union of
the outward and inward here may be compared with something of the same
kind in Greek poetry.[210] In the first Book of the _Iliad_ we are told
that, when Agamemnon threatened to take Briseis from Achilles, 'grief
came upon Peleus' son, and his heart within his shaggy breast was
divided in counsel, whether to draw his keen blade from his thigh and
set the company aside and so slay Atreides, or to assuage his anger and
curb his soul. While yet he doubted thereof in heart and soul, and was
drawing his great sword from his sheath, Athene came to him from heaven,
sent forth of the white-armed goddess Hera, whose heart loved both alike
and had care for them. She stood behind Peleus' son and caught him by
his golden hair, to him only visible, and of the rest no man beheld
her.' And at her bidding he mastered his wrath, 'and stayed his heavy
hand on the silver hilt, and thrust the great sword back into the
sheath, and was not disobedient to the saying of Athene.'[211] The
succour of the goddess here only strengthens an inward movement in the
mind of Achilles, but we should lose something besides a poetic effect
if for that reason we struck her out of the account. We should lose the
idea that the inward powers of the soul answer in their essence to
vaster powers without, which support them and assure the effect of their
exertion. So it is in _Macbeth_.[212] The words of the Witches are fatal
to the hero only because there is in him something which leaps into
light at the sound of them; but they are at the same time the witness of
forces which never cease to work in the world around him, and, on the
instant of his surrender to them, entangle him inextricably in the web
of Fate. If the inward connection is once realised (and Shakespeare has
left us no excuse for missing it), we need not fear, and indeed shall
scarcely be able, to exaggerate the effect of the Witch-scenes in
heightening and deepening the sense of fear, horror, and mystery which
pervades the atmosphere of the tragedy.

3

From this murky background stand out the two great terrible figures, who
dwarf all the remaining characters of t