s no hold on him comparable to the force it acquires when it becomes
incarnate in visionary fears and warnings.

Yet these were so insistent, and they offered to his ambition a
resistance so strong, that it is impossible to regard him as falling
through the blindness or delusion of passion. On the contrary, he
himself feels with such intensity the enormity of his purpose that, it
seems clear, neither his ambition nor yet the prophecy of the Witches
would ever without the aid of Lady Macbeth have overcome this feeling.
As it is, the deed is done in horror and without the faintest desire or
sense of glory,--done, one may almost say, as if it were an appalling
duty; and, the instant it is finished, its futility is revealed to
Macbeth as clearly as its vileness had been revealed beforehand. As he
staggers from the scene he mutters in despair,

Wake Duncan with thy knocking! I would thou could'st.

When, half an hour later, he returns with Lennox from the room of the
murder, he breaks out:

Had I but died an hour before this chance,
I had lived a blessed time; for from this instant
There's nothing serious in mortality:
All is but toys: renown and grace is dead;
The wine of life is drawn, and the mere lees
Is left this vault to brag of.

This is no mere acting. The language here has none of the false
rhetoric of his merely hypocritical speeches. It is meant to deceive,
but it utters at the same time his profoundest feeling. And this he can
henceforth never hide from himself for long. However he may try to drown
it in further enormities, he hears it murmuring,

Duncan is in his grave:
After life's fitful fever he sleeps well:

or,

better be with the dead:

or,

I have lived long enough:

and it speaks its last words on the last day of his life:

Out, out, brief candle!
Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage
And then is heard no more: it is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.

How strange that this judgment on life, the despair of a man who had
knowingly made mortal war on his own soul, should be frequently quoted
as Shakespeare's own judgment, and should even be adduced, in serious
criticism, as a proof of his pessimism!

It remains to look a little more fully at the history of Macbeth after
the murder of