ly shape in which it can speak freely,
that of imagination.

So long as Macbeth's imagination is active, we watch him fascinated; we
feel suspense, horror, awe; in which are latent, also, admiration and
sympathy. But so soon as it is quiescent these feelings vanish. He is no
longer 'infirm of purpose': he becomes domineering, even brutal, or he
becomes a cool pitiless hypocrite. He is generally said to be a very bad
actor, but this is not wholly true. Whenever his imagination stirs, he
acts badly. It so possesses him, and is so much stronger than his
reason, that his face betrays him, and his voice utters the most
improbable untruths[218] or the most artificial rhetoric[219] But when
it is asleep he is firm, self-controlled and practical, as in the
conversation where he skilfully elicits from Banquo that information
about his movements which is required for the successful arrangement of
his murder.[220] Here he is hateful; and so he is in the conversation
with the murderers, who are not professional cut-throats but old
soldiers, and whom, without a vestige of remorse, he beguiles with
calumnies against Banquo and with such appeals as his wife had used to
him.[221] On the other hand, we feel much pity as well as anxiety in the
scene (I. vii.) where she overcomes his opposition to the murder; and we
feel it (though his imagination is not specially active) because this
scene shows us how little he understands himself. This is his great
misfortune here. Not that he fails to realise in reflection the baseness
of the deed (the soliloquy with which the scene opens shows that he does
not). But he has never, to put it pedantically, accepted as the
principle of his conduct the morality which takes shape in his
imaginative fears. Had he done so, and said plainly to his wife, 'The
thing is vile, and, however much I have sworn to do it, I will not,' she
would have been helpless; for all her arguments proceed on the
assumption that there is for them no such point of view. Macbeth does
approach this position once, when, resenting the accusation of
cowardice, he answers,

I dare do all that may become a man;
Who dares do more is none.

She feels in an instant that everything is at stake, and, ignoring the
point, overwhelms him with indignant and contemptuous personal reproach.
But he yields to it because he is himself half-ashamed of that answer of
his, and because, for want of habit, the simple idea which it expresses
ha