possibility, seems to me, however attractive
at first sight, quite out of harmony with Lady Macbeth's mood throughout
these scenes.]

[Footnote 229: See Note DD.]

[Footnote 230: It is not new.]

[Footnote 231: The words about Lady Macduff are of course significant of
natural human feeling, and may have been introduced expressly to mark
it, but they do not, I think, show any fundamental change in Lady
Macbeth, for at no time would she have suggested or approved a
_purposeless_ atrocity. It is perhaps characteristic that this human
feeling should show itself most clearly in reference to an act for which
she was not directly responsible, and in regard to which therefore she
does not feel the instinct of self-assertion.]

[Footnote 232: The tendency to sentimentalise Lady Macbeth is partly due
to Mrs. Siddons's fancy that she was a small, fair, blue-eyed woman,
'perhaps even fragile.' Dr. Bucknill, who was unaquainted with this
fancy, independently determined that she was 'beautiful and delicate,'
'unoppressed by weight of flesh,' 'probably small,' but 'a tawny or
brown blonde,' with grey eyes: and Brandes affirms that she was lean,
slight, and hard. They know much more than Shakespeare, who tells us
absolutely nothing on these subjects. That Lady Macbeth, after taking
part in a murder, was so exhausted as to faint, will hardly demonstrate
her fragility. That she must have been blue-eyed, fair, or red-haired,
because she was a Celt, is a bold inference, and it is an idle dream
that Shakespeare had any idea of making her or her husband
characteristically Celtic. The only evidence ever offered to prove that
she was small is the sentence, 'All the perfumes of Arabia will not
sweeten this little hand'; and Goliath might have called his hand
'little' in contrast with all the perfumes of Arabia. One might as well
propose to prove that Othello was a small man by quoting,

I have seen the day,
That, with this little arm and this good sword,
I have made my way through more impediments
Than twenty times your stop.

The reader is at liberty to imagine Lady Macbeth's person in the way
that pleases him best, or to leave it, as Shakespeare very likely did,
unimagined.

Perhaps it may be well to add that there is not the faintest trace in
the play of the idea occasionally met with, and to some extent embodied
in Madame Bernhardt's impersonation of Lady Macbeth, that her hold upon
her