he drama. Both are sublime, and
both inspire, far more than the other tragic heroes, the feeling of awe.
They are never detached in imagination from the atmosphere which
surrounds them and adds to their grandeur and terror. It is, as it were,
continued into their souls. For within them is all that we felt
without--the darkness of night, lit with the flame of tempest and the
hues of blood, and haunted by wild and direful shapes, 'murdering
ministers,' spirits of remorse, and maddening visions of peace lost and
judgment to come. The way to be untrue to Shakespeare here, as always,
is to relax the tension of imagination, to conventionalise, to conceive
Macbeth, for example, as a half-hearted cowardly criminal, and Lady
Macbeth as a whole-hearted fiend.

These two characters are fired by one and the same passion of ambition;
and to a considerable extent they are alike. The disposition of each is
high, proud, and commanding. They are born to rule, if not to reign.
They are peremptory or contemptuous to their inferiors. They are not
children of light, like Brutus and Hamlet; they are of the world. We
observe in them no love of country, and no interest in the welfare of
anyone outside their family. Their habitual thoughts and aims are, and,
we imagine, long have been, all of station and power. And though in both
there is something, and in one much, of what is higher--honour,
conscience, humanity--they do not live consciously in the light of these
things or speak their language. Not that they are egoists, like Iago;
or, if they are egoists, theirs is an _egoisme a deux_. They have no
separate ambitions.[213] They support and love one another. They suffer
together. And if, as time goes on, they drift a little apart, they are
not vulgar souls, to be alienated and recriminate when they experience
the fruitlessness of their ambition. They remain to the end tragic, even
grand.

So far there is much likeness between them. Otherwise they are
contrasted, and the action is built upon this contrast. Their attitudes
towards the projected murder of Duncan are quite different; and it
produces in them equally different effects. In consequence, they appear
in the earlier part of the play as of equal importance, if indeed Lady
Macbeth does not overshadow her husband; but afterwards she retires more
and more into the background, and he becomes unmistakably the leading
figure. His is indeed far the more complex character: and I will speak
of i