CHAP. VI. purpose in his plot against Banquo and Fleance, by which the rival family would be extirpated. The plot only half succeeds, and by its half-success contributes to the exactness with which the destiny is fulfilled. Had Macbeth's attempt fully succeeded, Banquo would neither have got kings nor been one; had no such attempt at all been made, then, for anything we see to the contrary in the play, Banquo would have preceded his sons on the throne, and so again the oracle would not have been fulfilled which made Banquo lesser than Macbeth. But by the mixture of success and failure in Macbeth's plot Banquo is slain before he can attain the crown, and Fleance lives to give a royal house to Scotland. Once more, then, mockery appears a characteristic of the Destiny that finds in human resistance just the one peculiar device needed for effecting the peculiar distribution of fortune it has promised. Summary. Such is the subtlety with which Shakespeare has constructed this plot of Macbeth, and interwoven in it Nemesis and Destiny. To outward appearance it is connected with the rise and fall of a sinner: the analysis that searches for inner principles of construction traces through its incidents three forms of action working harmoniously together, by which the rise and fall of Macbeth are so linked as to exhibit at once a crime with its Nemesis, an Oracle with its fulfilment, and the Irony which works by the agency of that which resists it. Again the separate halves of the play, the rise and the fall of the hero, are found to present each the same triple pattern as the whole. Once more, with the career of Macbeth are associated the careers of Banquo and Macduff, and these also reflect the threefold spirit. Macbeth's rise involves Banquo's fall: this fall is the subject of oracular prediction, it is the starting-point of nemesis on Macbeth, and it has an element of irony in the fact that Banquo all but escaped. With Macbeth's fall is bound up Macduff's rise: this also had been predicted in oracles, it is an agency in the main nemesis, and Macduff's fate has the irony that CHAP. VI. he all but perished at the outset of his mission. Through all the separate interests of this elaborate plot, the three forms of action-Nemesis, the Oracular, Irony-are seen perfectly harmonised and perfectly complete. And over all this is thrown the supernatural interest of the Witches, who are agents of nemesis working by the means of ironical oracles. CHAP. VII. outer and VII. MACBETH, LORD AND LADY. A Study in Character-Contrast. CONTRASTS of character form one of the simplest elements of dramatic interest. Such contrasts are often obvious; at other times they take definitiveness only when looked at from a particular point of view. The contrast of character which it is the object of the present study to sketch rests upon a certain distinction which is one of the fundamental The anti- ideas in the analysis of human nature-the distinction thesis of the between the outer life of action and the inner life of our inner life. own experience. The recognition of the two is as old as the Book of Proverbs, which contrasts the man that ruleth his spirit with the man that taketh a city. The heathen oracle, again, opened out to an age which seemed to have exhausted knowledge a new world for investigation in the simple command, Know thyself. The Stoics, who so despised the busy vanity of state cares, yet delighted to call their ideal man a king; and their particular tenet is universalised by Milton when he says: Therein stands the office of a king, And the modern humourist finds the idea indispensable for Sir,' says one of Thackeray's personages, a distinct universe walks about under your hat and under mine . . . You and I are but a pair CHAP. VII. of infinite isolations with some fellow-islands more or less near to us.' And elsewhere the same writer says that each creature born has a little kingdom of thought of his own, which it is a sin in us to invade.' This antithesis of the practical and inner life is so accepted a commonplace of the pulpit and of the essayist on morals and culture that it may seem tedious to expound it. But for the very reason that it belongs to all these spheres, and that these spheres overlap, the two sides of the antithesis are not kept clearly distinct, nor are the terms uniformly used in the same sense. For the present purpose the exact distinction is between the outer world, the world of practical action, the sphere of making and doing, in which we mingle with our fellow men, join in their enterprises, and influence them to our ideas, in which we investigate nature and society, or seek to build up a fabric of power and, on the other hand, the inner intellectual life, in which our powers as by a mirror are turned inwards upon ourselves, finding a field for enterprise in self-discipline and the contest with inherited notions and passions, exploring the depths of our consciousness and our mysterious relations with the unseen, until the thinker becomes familiar with strange situations of the mind and at ease in the presence of its problems. The antithesis is thus not at all the same as that between worldly and religious, for the inner life may be cultivated for evil self-anatomy, as Shelley says, Shall teach the will Dangerous secrets: for it tempts our powers, Knowing what must be thought and may be done, Still less is it the antithesis between intellectual and common- L CHAP. VII. Practical experience is a totally different thing from what the religious thinker means by his 'experience.' The discipline given by the world often consists in the dulling of those powers which self-discipline seeks to develope. Knowledge of affairs, with its rapid and instinctive grasp, is often possessed in the highest degree by the man who is least of all men versed in the other knowledge, which could explain and analyse the processes by which it operated. And every observer is struck by the different forms which courage takes in the two spheres, courage in action, and courage where nothing can be done and men have only to endure and wait. Macaulay in a well-known passage contrasts the active and passive courage as one of the distinctions between the West and the East. The antithesis an element in An European warrior, who rushes on a battery of cannon with a loud hurrah, will sometimes shriek under the surgeon's knife, and fall into an agony of despair at the sentence of death. But the Bengalee, who would see his country overrun, his house laid in ashes, his children murdered or dishonoured, without having the spirit to strike one blow, has yet been known to endure torture with the firmness of Mucius, and to mount the scaffold with the steady step and even pulse of Algernon Sidney. The two lives are complete, each with its own field, its own qualities, culture, and fruit. It is obvious that relation to these two lives will have a very great effect in determining individual character. In the Character- same man the two sides of experience may be most unInterpreta- equally developed; an intellectual giant is often a child in tion. the affairs of the world, and a moral hero may be found in the person of some bedridden cripple. On the other hand, to some the inner life is hardly known: familiar perhaps with every other branch of knowledge they go down to their graves strangers to themselves. A All things without, which round about we see, We seek to know and how therewith to do; |