The Character of MacBeth


                          Macbeth is presented as a mature man of definitely
                     established character, successful in certain fields of
                     activity and enjoying an enviable reputation. We must not
                     conclude, there, that all his volitions and actions are
                     predictable; Macbeth's character, like any other man's at a
                     given moment, is what is being made out of potentialities
                     plus environment, and no one, not even Macbeth himself, can
                     know all his inordinate self-love whose actions are
                     discovered to be-and no doubt have been for a long time-
                     determined mainly by an inordinate desire for some temporal
                     or mutable good.

                          Macbeth is actuated in his conduct mainly by an
                     inordinate desire for worldly honors; his delight lies
                     primarily in buying golden opinions from all sorts of people.
                     But we must not, therefore, deny him an entirely human
                     complexity of motives. For example, his fighting in Duncan's
                     service is magnificent and courageous, and his evident joy in
                     it is traceable in art to the natural pleasure which
                     accompanies the explosive expenditure of prodigious physical
                     energy and the euphoria which follows. He also rejoices no
                     doubt in the success which crowns his efforts in battle - and
                     so on. He may even conceived of the proper motive which
                     should energize back of his great deed:

                          The service and the loyalty I owe,
                          In doing it, pays itself.

                     But while he destroys the king's enemies, such motives work
                     but dimly at best and are obscured in his consciousness by
                     more vigorous urges. In the main, as we have said, his nature
                     violently demands rewards: he fights valiantly in order that
                     he may be reported in such terms a "valour's minion" and
                     "Bellona's bridegroom"' he values success because it brings
                     spectacular fame and new titles and royal favor heaped upon
                     him in public. Now so long as these mutable goods are at all
                     commensurate with his inordinate desires - and such is the
                     case, up until he covets the kingship - Macbeth remains an
                     honorable gentleman. He is not a criminal; he has no criminal
                     tendencies. But once permit his self-love  to demand a
                     satisfaction which cannot be honorably attained, and he is
                     likely to grasp any dishonorable means to that end which may
                     be safely employed. In other words, Macbeth has much of
                     natural good in him unimpaired; environment has conspired
                     with his nature to make him upright in all his dealings with
                     those about him. But moral goodness in him is undeveloped and
                     indeed still rudimentary, for his voluntary acts are scarcely
                     brought into harmony with ultimate end.

                          As he returns from victorious battle, puffed up with
                     self-love which demands ever-increasing recognition of his
                     greatness, the demonic forces of evil-symbolized by the Weird
                     Sisters-suggest to his inordinate imagination the splendid
                     prospect of attaining now the greatest mutable good he has
                     ever desired. These demons in the guise of witches cannot
                     read his inmost thoughts, but from observation of facial
                     expression and other bodily manifestations they surmise with
                     comparative accuracy what passions drive him and what dark
                     desires await their fostering. Realizing that he wishes the
                     kingdom, they prophesy that he shall be king. They cannot
                     thus compel his will to evil; but they do arouse his passions
                     and stir up a vehement and inordinate apprehension of the
                     imagination, which so perverts the judgment of reason that it
                     leads his will toward choosing means to the desired temporal
                     good. Indeed his imagination and passions are so vivid under
                     this evil impulse from without that "nothing is but what is
                     not"; and his reason is so impeded that he judges, "These
                     solicitings cannot be evil, cannot be good." Still, he is
                     provided with so much natural good that he is able to control
                     the apprehensions of his inordinate imagination and decides
                     to take no step involving crime. His autonomous decision not
                     to commit murder, however, is not in any sense based upon
                     moral grounds. No doubt he normally shrinks from the
                     unnaturalness of regicide; but he so far ignores ultimate
                     ends that, if he could perform the deed and escape its
                     consequences here upon this bank and shoal of time, he'ld
                     jump the life to come. Without denying him still a complexity
                     of motives - as kinsman and subject he may possibly
                     experience some slight shade of unmixed loyalty to the King
                     under his roof-we may even say that the consequences which he
                     fears are not at all inward and spiritual, It is to be
                     doubted whether he has ever so far considered the possible
                     effects of crime and evil upon the human soul-his later
                     discovery of horrible ravages produced by evil in his own
                     spirit constitutes part of the tragedy. Hi is mainly
                     concerned, as we might expect, with consequences involving
                     the loss of mutable goods which he already possesses and
                     values highly.

                          After the murder of Duncan, the natural good in him
                     compels the acknowledgment that, in committing the unnatural
                     act, he has filed his mind and has given his eternal jewel,
                     the soul, into the possession of those demonic forces which
                     are the enemy of mankind. He recognizes that the acts of
                     conscience which torture him are really expressions of that
                     outraged natural law, which inevitably reduced him as
                     individual to the essentially human. This is the inescapable
                     bond that keeps him pale, and this is the law of his own
                     natural from whose exactions of devastating penalties he
                     seeks release:

                          Come, seeling night...
                          And with thy bloody and invisible hand
                          Cancel and tear to pieces that great bond
                          Which keeps me pale.

                          He conceives that quick escape from the accusations of
                     conscience may possibly be effected by utter extirpation of
                     the precepts of natural law deposited in his nature. And he
                     imagines that the execution of more bloody deeds will serve
                     his purpose. Accordingly, then, in the interest of personal
                     safety and in order to destroy the essential humanity in
                     himself, he instigates the murder of Banquo.

                          But he gains no satisfying peace because hes conscience
                     still obliges him to recognize the negative quality of evil
                     and the barren results of wicked action. The individual who
                     once prized mutable goods in the form of respect and
                     admiration from those about him, now discovers that even such
                     evanescent satisfactions are denied him:

                          And that which should accompany old age,
                          As honor, love, obedience, troops of friends,
                          I must not look to have; but, in their stead,
                          Curses, not loud but deep, mouth-honour, breath,
                          Which the poor heart would fain deny, and dare not.

                     But the man is conscious of a profound abstraction of
                     something far more precious that temporal goods. His being
                     has shrunk to such little measure that he has lost his former
                     sensitiveness to good and evil; he has supped so full with
                     horrors and the disposition of evil is so fixed in him that
                     nothing can start him. His conscience is numbed so that he
                     escapes the domination of fears, and such a consummation may
                     indeed be called a sort of peace. But it is not entirely what
                     expected or desires. Back of his tragic volitions is the
                     ineradicable urge toward that supreme contentment which
                     accompanies and rewards fully actuated being; the peace which
                     he attains is psychologically a callousness to pain and
                     spiritually a partial insensibility to the evidences of
                     diminished being. His peace is the doubtful calm of utter
                     negativity, where nothing matters.

                          This spectacle of spiritual deterioration carried to the
                     point of imminent dissolution arouses in us, however, a
                     curious feeling of exaltation. For even after the external
                     and internal forces of evil have done their worst, Macbeth
                     remains essentially human and his conscience continues to
                     witness the diminution of his being. That is to say, there is
                     still left necessarily some natural good in him; sin cannot
                     completely deprive him of his rational nature, which is the
                     root of his inescapable inclination to virtue. We do not need
                     Hecate to tell us that he is but a wayward son, spiteful and
                     wrathful, who, as other do, loves for his own ends. This is
                     apparent throughout the drama; he never sins because, like
                     the Weird Sisters, he loves evil for its own sake; and
                     whatever he does is inevitably in pursuance of some apparent
                     good, even though that apparent good is only temporal of
                     nothing more that escape from a present evil. At the end, in
                     spite of shattered nerves and extreme distraction of mind,
                     the individual passes out still adhering admirably to his
                     code of personal courage, and the man's conscience still
                     clearly admonishes that he has done evil.

                          Moreover, he never quite loses completely the liberty of
                     free choice, which is the supreme bonum naturae of mankind.
                     But since a wholly free act is one in accordance with reason,
                     in proportion as his reason is more and more blinded by
                     inordinate apprehension of the imagination and passions of
                     the sensitive appetite, his volitions become less and less
                     free. And this accounts for our feeling, toward the end of
                     the drama, that his actions are almost entirely determined
                     and that some fatality is compelling him to his doom. This
                     compulsion is in no sense from without-though theologians may
                     at will interpret it so-as if some god, like Zeus in Greek
                     tragedy, were dealing out punishment for the breaking of
                     divine law. It is generated rather from within, and it is not
                     merely a psychological phenomenon. Precepts of the natural
                     law-imprints of the eternal law- deposited in his nature have
                     been violated, irrational acts have established habits
                     tending to further irrationality, and one of the penalties
                     exacted is dire impairment of the liberty of free choice.
                     Thus the Fate which broods over Macbeth may be identified
                     with that disposition inherent in created things, in this
                     case the fundamental motive principle of human action, by
                     which providence knits all things in their proper order.
                     Macbeth cannot escape entirely from his proper order; he must
                     inevitably remain essentially human.

                          The substance of Macbeth's personality is that out of
                     which tragic heroes are fashioned; it is endowed by the
                     dramatist with an astonishing abundance and variety of
                     potentialities. And it is upon the development of these
                     potentialities that the artist lavishes the full energies of
                     his creative powers. Under the influence of swiftly altering
                     environment which continually furnishes or elicts new
                     experiences and under the impact of passions constantly
                     shifting and mounting in intensity, the dramatic individual
                     grows, expands, developes to the point where, at the end of
                     the drama, he looms upon the mind as a titanic personality
                     infinitely richer that at the beginning. This dramatic
                     personality in its manifold stages of actuation in as
                     artistic creation. In essence Macbeth, like all other men, is
                     inevitably bound to his humanity; the reason of order, as we
                     have seen, determines his inescapable relationship to the
                     natural and eternal law, compels inclination toward his
                     proper act and end but provides him with a will capable of
                     free choice, and obliges his discernment of good and evil.