Page:Wit, humor, and Shakspeare. Twelve essays (IA cu31924013161223).pdf/376

 *selves upon the air into which they make themselves and vanish. And they can appear only at that period of his evil brooding when it gathers and swells, too big for his brain, bursting its barriers to become external. After the actual murder of Duncan has occurred, the brain of Macbeth is depleted for a while: the ominous forms wait till Banquo's ghost can recruit them.

Macbeth has an imagination so keen and unbridled that it outruns the limits of thinking, to become projected outside of his bodily eye in shapes and objects that occupy the focus of his criminal intent. His crimes become ocular deceptions, because they are so palpably real to his mental vision, sharpened as it is by the ambitious sympathy of a wife whose temperament outraces action. Murder is Macbeth's owner before he is conscious that he has made himself the chattel of his wife's suggestions. That same creative fancy built forth into the air the handle of the instrument which he has fated himself to use: he marshalled it the way that he intended to go. No supernatural smith has forged the fatal weapon: it is tempered in the current of his own plastic mind.

But although Macbeth has this mobile imagination, like that which

"If it would but apprehend some joy, It comprehends some bringer of that joy;"

and though he has become one of those madmen who

"Have such seething brains, Such shaping fantasies, that apprehend More than cool reason ever comprehends,"