roof fretted with
golden fire.' Nor could he feel, like Othello, the romance of war or the
infinity of love. He shows no sign of any unusual sensitiveness to the
glory or beauty in the world or the soul; and it is partly for this
reason that we have no inclination to love him, and that we regard him
with more of awe than of pity. His imagination is excitable and intense,
but narrow. That which stimulates it is, almost solely, that which
thrills with sudden, startling, and often supernatural fear.[217] There
is a famous passage late in the play (V. v. 10) which is here very
significant, because it refers to a time before his conscience was
burdened, and so shows his native disposition:

The time has been, my senses would have cool'd
To hear a night-shriek; and my fell of hair
Would at a dismal treatise rise and stir
As life were in't.

This 'time' must have been in his youth, or at least before we see him.
And, in the drama, everything which terrifies him is of this character,
only it has now a deeper and a moral significance. Palpable dangers
leave him unmoved or fill him with fire. He does himself mere justice
when he asserts he 'dare do all that may become a man,' or when he
exclaims to Banquo's ghost,

What man dare, I dare:
Approach thou like the rugged Russian bear,
The arm'd rhinoceros, or the Hyrcan tiger;
Take any shape but that, and my firm nerves
Shall never tremble.

What appals him is always the image of his own guilty heart or bloody
deed, or some image which derives from them its terror or gloom. These,
when they arise, hold him spell-bound and possess him wholly, like a
hypnotic trance which is at the same time the ecstasy of a poet. As the
first 'horrid image' of Duncan's murder--of himself murdering
Duncan--rises from unconsciousness and confronts him, his hair stands on
end and the outward scene vanishes from his eyes. Why? For fear of
'consequences'? The idea is ridiculous. Or because the deed is bloody?
The man who with his 'smoking' steel 'carved out his passage' to the
rebel leader, and 'unseam'd him from the nave to the chaps,' would
hardly be frightened by blood. How could fear of consequences make the
dagger he is to use hang suddenly glittering before him in the air, and
then as suddenly dash it with gouts of blood? Even when he _talks_ of
consequences, and declares that if he were safe against them he would
'jump the life