Page:The Psychology of Shakespeare.pdf/49

34 “knits up the ravell'd sleave of care, The death of each day's life, sore labour's bath, Balm of hurt minds, great nature's second course, Chief nourisher in life's feast.”

When these remedies had produced their effect, and the patient's remorse was no longer of that “brainsickly” kind accompanying disorders of the organization, then, and only then, might the divine step in with those consolations of reli gious faith which assure us, that “Though your sins be as scarlet, they shall be as white as snow; though they be red like crimson, they shall be as wool.”

What was Lady Macbeth's form and temperament. In Maclise's great painting of the banquet scene, she is repre sented as a woman of large and coarse development; a Scandinavian amazon, the muscles of whose brawny arms could only have been developed to their great size by hard and frequent use ; a woman of whose fists her husband might well be afraid; but scarcely one who would present that Satanic spiritualization of character which we find in this awful im

personation of dauntless and ruthless ambition; an instrument, in fact, to do coarse things coarsely ; a butcher's cleaver per haps, but by no means the keen scimitar whose rapid blow destroys ere it is seen. We do not so figure Lady Macbeth to the mind's eye—no, not even as the large and majestic figure of Siddons, whose impersonation of the character so moved our fathers. Shakespeare was not in the habit of painting big and brawny women. There is a certain femininity in all his female characters, which is distinguishable even in those whom he has filled with the coarser passions. But that Lady Macbeth, whose soul is absorbed, and whose devilish deeds are

instigated by ambition, the highest of all earthly passions, “the last infirmity of noble minds,” which, like Aaron's rod, consumes and destroys the meaner desires,-that this woman should have had the physical conformation of a cook, is a