Page:Wit, humor, and Shakspeare. Twelve essays (IA cu31924013161223).pdf/382

 the face, a dubious semblance of your guilt in the evasive eye, or just a flicker in the corner of the mouth. Most people overestimate their strength to make a flat denial of misdeeds when their soul is reflected in the polished mirrors of watchful eyes. There is a non-committal look which collars a man, puts him in the dock, and sends him to jail before he knows that he has been apprehended.

Prosaic men with no imagination to defy can preserve a smug complacency after the commission of a crime, because they cannot vibrate to it. Give a stroke to their thick temper, and it only answers with a thud. Their face is an emotionless Sahara, over which no showery gusts or smiles of April linger. But Macbeth was delicately strung: the slightest stir of the invisible air was registered by a vibration. When the ghost slips out of his own phrase, 'twas too pat,—this coming at the toast, "to the general joy of the whole table," at this pretence of thirst to drink a dead man's welfare; too nicely timed for flesh and blood to bear; too suggestive of continual liability to see the eyes glaring across the brim of any moment. Observing how easily the awful figure can thicken out of invisibility, he cries, "Take any shape but that!" And his mind is desperate to exorcise it into an "unreal mockery," and vainly struggles with his own personifying power.

"It will have blood; they say, blood will have blood."

It is a cold, calculating vengeance, marrowless, bloodless, but alert in a shape against which Macbeth's nerves