narrow. That which stimulates it is, almost solely, that which thrills with sudden, startling, and often supernatural fear.[1] There is a famous passage late in the play (V. v. 10) which is here very significant, because it refers to a time before his conscience was burdened, and so shows his native disposition:
To hear a night-shriek; and my fell of hair
Would at a dismal treatise rise and stir
As life were in’t.
This ‘time’ must have been in his youth, or at least before we see him. And, in the drama, everything which terrifies him is of this character, only it has now a deeper and a moral significance. Palpable dangers leave him unmoved or fill him with fire. He does himself mere justice when he asserts he ‘dare do all that may become a man,’ or when he exclaims to Banquo’s ghost,
Approach thou like the rugged Russian bear,
The arm’d rhinoceros, or the Hyrcan tiger;
Take any shape but that, and my firm nerves
Shall never tremble.
What appals him is always the image of his own guilty heart or bloody deed, or some image which derives from them its terror or gloom. These, when they arise, hold him spell-bound and possess him wholly, like a hypnotic trance which is at the same time the ecstasy of a poet. As the first ‘horrid image’ of Duncan’s murder—of himself murdering Duncan—rises from unconsciousness and confronts him, his hair stands on end and the outward scene vanishes from his eyes. Why? For fear of ‘consequences’? The idea is ridiculous. Or because the deed is bloody? The man who with his ‘smoking’ steel ‘carved out his passage’ to the
- ↑ It is the consequent insistence on the idea of fear, and the frequent repetition of the word, that have principally led to misinterpretation.
