MEN I HAVE PAINTED
attitude, and demeanour indicated so truly the scoundrel, that I wondered how Duncan could address him as "worthy," and I turned to my wife and said, "He takes Macbeth to be a rogue from the first," and that notion was so much in dissonance to my own that the night's entertainment was spoiled for me, and I never saw him again in the rôle.
The play becomes utterly commonplace and meaningless if the assumption be made that Macbeth is an ordinary criminal. What becomes of the witches' prophecies, the wife's "screwing up your courage to the sticking point," the hesitation of the tender-hearted but ambitious Cawdor, the cowardly remorse, followed by the recklessness of despair? All these subtleties were thrown away on a man really bad, and fearless of the consequences of his misdeeds—or was he just trying to fool himself and all the others by pretending to be tempted by ambition, by soothsayers, and a relentlessly ambitious woman?
If the play is not intended to show by degrees how a brave, superstitious, and ambitious man of honourable character can be led astray by occult warnings of the inevitableness of destiny, by the taunts of a contemptuous wife, and by the spurrings of a vaulting ambition, then it was written to small purpose.
The author clearly intended to depict the wavering moods of a weak mind in a brave body, tortured by temptation. To make Macbeth's villainy innate and premeditated is equalled by the attempt of Mrs. Stille of Philadelphia to show that Lady Macbeth is a much misunderstood and maligned woman, whose chief fault lay in her over-devotion to a weak and wicked husband.
When I questioned Irving about his reading of Macbeth, he explained his views without convincing me of their merit.
256
