Page:Wit, humor, and Shakspeare. Twelve essays (IA cu31924013161223).pdf/375

 *ing his fortunes more impaired than ever, betrays to us how feverish and impolitic his course becomes. Far better for him if he had not let the desperate crisis of his fate drive him out of the land of dreams. Shakspeare lets us hear Macbeth chiding the brag of his imagination when he says, "But no more sights." He has had enough of them,—too much time wasted in those presentiments which never have the element of prevention. On the contrary, it is a common experience that something is so sure to happen that it can impart to us a fruitless forefeeling of itself, as Henry IV felt the blade of Ravaillac in his side a week before it struck him. Macbeth will humor no more sights. That is the key to Shakspeare's conception of the character. We are to understand that henceforth Macbeth is cured of his hallucinations.

Now let us return to the first scene provided with this pass-key. It unlocks that and all the subsequent super-*nature which had a relish for his society. We feel that the witches express the moral condition of Macbeth's mind, its tumultuous hesitation that is on the point of settling into the definiteness of crime,—"Fair is foul, and foul is fair." All moral discriminations are huddled together and dislocated by the upheaval of his subterranean motive.

He really sends these witches forth to a blasted heath, the avant-couriers of his own visit thither, and of a longing that gains substance and direction the more he entertains it. It is strong enough to be an object behind his retina; and it throws out shapes to limn them