and honour.  Macbeth’s better nature—­to put the matter for clearness’ sake too broadly—­instead of speaking to him in the overt language of moral ideas, commands, and prohibitions, incorporates itself in images which alarm and horrify.  His imagination is thus the best of him, something usually deeper and higher than his conscious thoughts; and if he had obeyed it he would have been safe.  But his wife quite misunderstands it, and he himself understands it only in part.  The terrifying images which deter him from crime and follow its commission, and which are really the protest of his deepest self, seem to his wife the creations of mere nervous fear, and are sometimes referred by himself to the dread of vengeance or the restlessness of insecurity.[216] His conscious or reflective mind, that is, moves chiefly among considerations of outward success and failure, while his inner being is convulsed by conscience.  And his inability to understand himself is repeated and exaggerated in the interpretations of actors and critics, who represent him as a coward, cold-blooded, calculating, and pitiless, who shrinks from crime simply because it is dangerous, and suffers afterwards simply because he is not safe.  In reality his courage is frightful.  He strides from crime to crime, though his soul never ceases to bar his advance with shapes of terror, or to clamour in his ears that he is murdering his peace and casting away his ‘eternal jewel.’

It is of the first importance to realise the strength, and also (what has not been so clearly recognised) the limits, of Macbeth’s imagination.  It is not the universal meditative imagination of Hamlet.  He came to see in man, as Hamlet sometimes did, the ’quintessence of dust’; but he must always have been incapable of Hamlet’s reflections on man’s noble reason and infinite faculty, or of seeing with Hamlet’s eyes ’this brave o’erhanging firmament, this majestical roof fretted with golden fire.’  Nor could he feel, like Othello, the romance of war or the infinity of love.  He shows no sign of any unusual sensitiveness to the glory or beauty in the world or the soul; and it is partly for this reason that we have no inclination to love him, and that we regard him with more of awe than of pity.  His imagination is excitable and intense, but narrow.  That which stimulates it is, almost solely, that which thrills with sudden, startling, and often supernatural fear.[217] 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: 

     The time has been, my senses would have cool’d
     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,