The record-union., 1896-03-07

sonalities and their expression in a
highly cultivated and naturally keen
conscience, which have relation almost
altogether to abstract principles and
their consequences when reduced to
acts. 1t was not remorse but con-
science which pricked Macbeth, while
Lady Macbeth, beirg destitute of con-
science, was killed by remorse which
had in it no touch of moral sentiment.
While her husband is fighting against
moral principles or yielding to the awful
powers of the air, Lady Macbeth exhib-
its but definite and altogether mate
rial fears. Nor can it be said that she
has any temptations, for the reason
that she has given herself wholly and
unreservedly UP to the work she has IN
hand She is afraid that the murderers
may be detected. She is troubled be-
cause perhaps some omission on hitch
in the prearranged plan, which was her
own, not her husbands, devising, may
occur. She fears that she or her hus-
band may be compelled to show them
selves to their guests ere the traces of
their crime have been remove-L So far
as the moral consequences and consid-
erations of the crime are concerned she
ocations whatever.
To the last, in her waking moments,
she is a woman wholly dominated by
the material and physical sides of her
nature. Her decay is not the decay of
the moral and mental but of the physi-
cal part of her. Her body, not her mind,
succumbs to the untoward results of the
crime which she was the first to con-
ceive, and also the first to feel the
definite and desperate consequences of.
Even in her sleep -walkings the one idea
which dominates her is the best method
| of concealing the crime and of escaping
its consequent punishment. Thus while
the soul of Macbeth never quite disap-
pears into the blackness of darkness,
that of the woman who tempted him to
his moral and physical destruction
sinks like lump of lead into the incar-
nadine sea of crime,
If ever play was written with the in
| tent to show that from the beginning
| the tempter of man has found an en-
trance to the tabernacle of his person
ality by and through the emotional part
| of him, represented by a woman not
only in the Garden of Eden-the orig
| nal state of religious and social pros
| perity-but in thousands of other hui
man situations, it is Shakespeare's play
| CT Macbeth" In the history of human
| life the man and the woman are "of
| one flesh; they are not on what is
| called an equality, for they are almost
! totally dissimilar; the man is forensic,
| logical, ever clinging to the reasonable
ness and the logical framework of
| things, homely and rough on the out
side but smooth within; the woman, on
! the other hand, is emotional, lovable,
beautiful and smooth on the outside,
and concealing the rougher parts of her
character and even her desires and pas
sions under a winning exterior. They
are thus compliments of each other
And nowhere does Shakespeare so
closely and perfectly draw the radical
and fundamental distinction between
the sexes as in the drama of Macbeth" !"
From the first to the last of the play
/ he presents Macbeth as the represent
ative of a man originally of noble
impulses; finally, after yielding to the
temptations which beset him, dipping
deeper and deeper into the state and
condition of haggard, miserable
criminal, with never enough of even
natural goodness to restrain him from
crimes which he considered essential
to the successful carrying out of his
original departure from the line of rec
titude on the other hand, from first
to last, he represents Lady Macbeth as
an essentially bad woman. In the
hight of her prosperous viciousness
her predominant trait is an utter dis
regard for moral principle. She never,
like Macbeth, let Il dare not wait
upon II would Her idea always was
"A little water clears us of this deed, I"
while of the deed itself she always said:
who'll question our power when it is
done?"
She had no large words about the
''multitudinous incarnadine seas nor
high thoughts and purposes as opposed
to fell desires and wicked deeds. 1t is
true that she is prosecuted by her past
Yet not as Macbeth is prosecuted,
| through ghostly shapes and appari
| tions Her punishment consists and
subsists in the imagined recurrence Of
real and terrible incidents, not in her
waking hours, but when her wicked
will succumbs to sleep. So long as
| her will remains her own she can throw
/ herself upon the visible facts of life.
| Nor does she finally succumb to con-
science, for she never possessed that at
tribute She succumbs to remorse and
disappointed ambition. AS to Macbeth,
his conscience had become so scared
that it no longer pleaded with him.
And yet, to the last, he ceased not to
| be the brave man he was before the
| fiends of hell, aided by his monster
wife, fit sister of those two terrible
| creatures, Goneril and Reagan, had
] M o De him thai. own