ds impossible
to her husband, to whom it suggested something quite other than sensuous
disgust or practical danger. The literalism of her mind appears fully in
two contemptuous speeches where she dismisses his imaginings; in the
murder scene:

Infirm of purpose!
Give me the daggers! The sleeping and the dead
Are but as pictures: 'tis the eye of childhood
That fears a painted devil;

and in the banquet scene:

O these flaws and starts,
Impostors to true fear, would well become
A woman's story at a winter's fire,
Authorised by her grandam. Shame itself!
Why do you make such faces? When all's done,
You look but on a stool.

Even in the awful scene where her imagination breaks loose in sleep she
uses no such images as Macbeth's. It is the direct appeal of the facts
to sense that has fastened on her memory. The ghastly realism of 'Yet
who would have thought the old man to have had so much blood in him?' or
'Here's the smell of the blood still,' is wholly unlike him. Her most
poetical words, 'All the perfumes of Arabia will not sweeten this little
hand,' are equally unlike his words about great Neptune's ocean. Hers,
like some of her other speeches, are the more moving, from their greater
simplicity and because they seem to tell of that self-restraint in
suffering which is so totally lacking in him; but there is in them
comparatively little of imagination. If we consider most of the passages
to which I have referred, we shall find that the quality which moves our
admiration is courage or force of will.

This want of imagination, though it helps to make Lady Macbeth strong
for immediate action, is fatal to her. If she does not feel beforehand
the cruelty of Duncan's murder, this is mainly because she hardly
imagines the act, or at most imagines its outward show, 'the motion of a
muscle this way or that.' Nor does she in the least foresee those inward
consequences which reveal themselves immediately in her husband, and
less quickly in herself. It is often said that she understands him well.
Had she done so, she never would have urged him on. She knows that he is
given to strange fancies; but, not realising what they spring from, she
has no idea either that they may gain such power as to ruin the scheme,
or that, while they mean present weakness, they mean also perception of
the future. At one point in the murder scene the force o