If this fortitude which pulls Macbeth through a murder leaves her in our imagination unsexed and brutalized, we deprive ourselves of reasons why he should have loved and married her; for the clouds of moral disaster which whirl around him cannot conceal from us a fine and noble disposition. It breaks through the gathering obscurity in the delicate considerations which urge him to be a loyal host to Duncan; in the imagination so sensitive to life's fitful fever, so shaken nightly by terrible dreams, as she was too; so quick to mark the objects of Nature, and clothe them in poetic feeling; so melted by tender recollections, and capable of noble regrets that call a pause to ruin just as it breaks, a lull that lasts long enough for us to see how much will be ruined:--
"My way of life Is fall'n into the sear, the yellow leaf: And that which should accompany old age, As honor, love, obedience, troops of friends, I must not look to have; but, in their stead, Curses, not loud, but deep, mouth-honor, breath, Which the poor heart would fain deny, and dare not."
What sort of a woman was she, in whose behalf tenderness struggled with despair at last, when he was remembering what a soul had gone delirious, who was too nice for her own fortitude, eminent to be shattered, worse than sick, "as she is troubled with thick-coming fancies"!
"Cure her of that," he replies to the Doctor, but in a tone that repels rather than invites his skill; for those "thick-coming fancies" started from Duncan's room, where he lay looking like her father. Fatal first moment, beyond the reach of medicine! The Doctor has dark misgivings as to the cause of her sleeplessness, though he never heard that midnight cry, "Sleep no more," which the parting soul of Duncan gave as it awoke and fled through the inhospitable palace. Macbeth murdered then the innocent sleep which might have been Nature's resource, but which no doctor can restore. Cure her of that? Cure me first of the infection that was caught at Duncan's bedside, and which spread to the partner of my night-horrors: we are both far gone beyond a doctor's art.
Still he pleads--"Canst thou not minister?"--in piteous forlornness against the better judgment which, when it recurs, prompts him to "throw physic to the dogs." It is a plea which seems to visit the chamber of the wife who ruined herself for love. It is the visit of a yearning that her heart might be cleansed in the oblivion of innocence.