From this murky background stand out the two great terrible figures, who dwarf all the remaining characters of the drama.  Both are sublime, and both inspire, far more than the other tragic heroes, the feeling of awe.  They are never detached in imagination from the atmosphere which surrounds them and adds to their grandeur and terror.  It is, as it were, continued into their souls.  For within them is all that we felt without—­the darkness of night, lit with the flame of tempest and the hues of blood, and haunted by wild and direful shapes, ’murdering ministers,’ spirits of remorse, and maddening visions of peace lost and judgment to come.  The way to be untrue to Shakespeare here, as always, is to relax the tension of imagination, to conventionalise, to conceive Macbeth, for example, as a half-hearted cowardly criminal, and Lady Macbeth as a whole-hearted fiend.

These two characters are fired by one and the same passion of ambition; and to a considerable extent they are alike.  The disposition of each is high, proud, and commanding.  They are born to rule, if not to reign.  They are peremptory or contemptuous to their inferiors.  They are not children of light, like Brutus and Hamlet; they are of the world.  We observe in them no love of country, and no interest in the welfare of anyone outside their family.  Their habitual thoughts and aims are, and, we imagine, long have been, all of station and power.  And though in both there is something, and in one much, of what is higher—­honour, conscience, humanity—­they do not live consciously in the light of these things or speak their language.  Not that they are egoists, like Iago; or, if they are egoists, theirs is an egoisme a deux.  They have no separate ambitions.[213] They support and love one another.  They suffer together.  And if, as time goes on, they drift a little apart, they are not vulgar souls, to be alienated and recriminate when they experience the fruitlessness of their ambition.  They remain to the end tragic, even grand.

So far there is much likeness between them.  Otherwise they are contrasted, and the action is built upon this contrast.  Their attitudes towards the projected murder of Duncan are quite different; and it produces in them equally different effects.  In consequence, they appear in the earlier part of the play as of equal importance, if indeed Lady Macbeth does not overshadow her husband; but afterwards she retires more and more into the background, and he becomes unmistakably the leading figure.  His is indeed far the more complex character:  and I will speak of it first.