But there
is in Macbeth one marked peculiarity, the true apprehension of which is
the key to Shakespeare's conception.[215] This bold ambitious man of
action has, within certain limits, the imagination of a poet,--an
imagination on the one hand extremely sensitive to impressions of a
certain kind, and, on the other, productive of violent disturbance both
of mind and body. Through it he is kept in contact with supernatural
impressions and is liable to supernatural fears. And through it,
especially, come to him the intimations of conscience and honour.
Macbeth's better nature--to put the matter for clearness' sake too
broadly--instead of speaking to him in the overt language of moral
ideas, commands, and prohibitions, incorporates itself in images which
alarm and horrify. His imagination is thus the best of him, something
usually deeper and higher than his conscious thoughts; and if he had
obeyed it he would have been safe. But his wife quite misunderstands it,
and he himself understands it only in part. The terrifying images which
deter him from crime and follow its commission, and which are really the
protest of his deepest self, seem to his wife the creations of mere
nervous fear, and are sometimes referred by himself to the dread of
vengeance or the restlessness of insecurity.[216] His conscious or
reflective mind, that is, moves chiefly among considerations of outward
success and failure, while his inner being is convulsed by conscience.
And his inability to understand himself is repeated and exaggerated in
the interpretations of actors and critics, who represent him as a
coward, cold-blooded, calculating, and pitiless, who shrinks from crime
simply because it is dangerous, and suffers afterwards simply because he
is not safe. In reality his courage is frightful. He strides from crime
to crime, though his soul never ceases to bar his advance with shapes of
terror, or to clamour in his ears that he is murdering his peace and
casting away his 'eternal jewel.'

It is of the first importance to realise the strength, and also (what
has not been so clearly recognised) the limits, of Macbeth's
imagination. It is not the universal meditative imagination of Hamlet.
He came to see in man, as Hamlet sometimes did, the 'quintessence of
dust'; but he must always have been incapable of Hamlet's reflections on
man's noble reason and infinite faculty, or of seeing with Hamlet's eyes
'this brave o'erhanging firmament, this majestical