acbeth, for
the sake of gratifying his own enormous and teeming faculty of
creation, Shakspeare has introduced two murderers: and, as usual in
his hands, they are remarkably discriminated: but though in Macbeth
the strife of mind is greater than in his wife, the tiger spirit not
so awake, and his feelings caught chiefly by contagion from her,--yet,
as both were finally involved in the guilt of murder, the murderous
mind of necessity is finally to be presumed in both. This was to be
expressed; and on its own account, as well as to make it a more
proportionable antagonist to the unoffending nature of their victim,
"the gracious Duncan," and adequately to expound "the deep damnation
of his taking off," this was to be expressed with peculiar energy. We
were to be made to feel that the human nature, _i.e._ the divine
nature of love and mercy, spread through the hearts of all creatures,
and seldom utterly withdrawn from man,--was gone, vanished, extinct;
and that the fiendish nature had taken its place. And, as this effect
is marvellously accomplished in the dialogues and soliloquies
themselves, so it is finally consummated by the expedient under
consideration; and it is to this that I now solicit the reader's
attention. If the reader has ever witnessed a wife, daughter, or
sister, in a fainting fit, he may chance to have observed that the
most affecting moment in such a spectacle, is _that_ in which a sigh
and a stirring announce the recommencement of suspended life. Or, if
the reader has ever been present in a vast metropolis on the day when
some great national idol was carried in funeral pomp to his grave, and
chancing to walk near to the course through which it passed, has felt
powerfully in the silence and desertion of the streets and in the
stagnation of ordinary business, the deep interest which at that
moment was possessing the heart of man,--if all at once he should hear
the death-like stillness broken up by the sound of wheels rattling
away from the scene, and making known that the transitory vision was
dissolved, he will be aware that at no moment was his sense of the
complete suspension and pause in ordinary human concerns so full and
affecting as at that moment when the suspension ceases, and the
goings-on of human life are suddenly resumed. All action in any
direction is best expounded, measured, and made apprehensible, by
reaction. Now apply this to the case in Macbeth. Here, as I have said,
the retiring of the