Page:Mrs. Siddons (IA mrssiddons00kennrich).pdf/132

120 As to her notion that Lady Macbeth was a small, fair, blue-eyed woman, delicate and fragile, it could have been but a "caprice" of later days, originating in her endeavour to find new readings and impressions.

A short analysis of some of her opinions on the character may be interesting.

"In this astonishing creature," she says, "one sees a woman in whose bosom the passion of ambition has almost obliterated all the characteristics of human nature; in whose composition are associated all the subjugating powers of intellect, and all the charms and graces of personal beauty. You will probably not agree with me as to the character of that beauty; yet, perhaps, this difference of opinion will be entirely attributable to the difficulty of your imagination disengaging itself from that idea of the person of her representative which you have been so long accustomed to contemplate. According to my notion, it is of that character which, I believe, is generally allowed to be most captivating to the other sex—fair, feminine, nay, perhaps, even fragile—

"Such a combination only—respectable in energy and strength of mind, and captivating in feminine loveliness—could have composed a charm of such potency as to fascinate the mind of a hero so dauntless, a character so amiable, so honourable as Macbeth, to seduce him to brave all the dangers of the present and all the terrors of a future world; and we are constrained, even whilst we abhor his crimes, to pity the infatuated victim of such a thraldom.

"His letters, which have informed her of the predictions of those preternatural beings who accosted