Page:Shakespearean Tragedy (1912).djvu/373

RV 357 (Rh) information about his movements which is required for the successful arrangement of his murder. Here he is hateful; and so he is in the conversation with the murderers, who are not professional cut-throats but old soldiers, and whom, without a vestige of remorse, he beguiles with calumnies against Banquo and with such appeals as his wife had used to him. On the other hand, we feel much pity as well as anxiety in the scene ( vii.) where she overcomes his opposition to the murder; and we feel it (though his imagination is not specially active) because this scene shows us how little he understands himself. This is his great misfortune here. Not that he fails to realise in reflection the baseness of the deed (the soliloquy with which the scene opens shows that he does not). But he has never, to put it pedantically, accepted as the principle of his conduct the morality which takes shape in his imaginative fears. Had he done so, and said plainly to his wife, ‘The thing is vile, and, however much I have sworn to do it, I will not,’ she would have been helpless; for all her