Yet these were so insistent, and they offered to his ambition a resistance so strong, that it is impossible to regard him as falling through the blindness or delusion of passion.  On the contrary, he himself feels with such intensity the enormity of his purpose that, it seems clear, neither his ambition nor yet the prophecy of the Witches would ever without the aid of Lady Macbeth have overcome this feeling.  As it is, the deed is done in horror and without the faintest desire or sense of glory,—­done, one may almost say, as if it were an appalling duty; and, the instant it is finished, its futility is revealed to Macbeth as clearly as its vileness had been revealed beforehand.  As he staggers from the scene he mutters in despair,

     Wake Duncan with thy knocking!  I would thou could’st.

When, half an hour later, he returns with Lennox from the room of the murder, he breaks out: 

     Had I but died an hour before this chance,
     I had lived a blessed time; for from this instant
     There’s nothing serious in mortality: 
     All is but toys:  renown and grace is dead;
     The wine of life is drawn, and the mere lees
     Is left this vault to brag of.

This is no mere acting.  The language here has none of the false rhetoric of his merely hypocritical speeches.  It is meant to deceive, but it utters at the same time his profoundest feeling.  And this he can henceforth never hide from himself for long.  However he may try to drown it in further enormities, he hears it murmuring,

                        Duncan is in his grave: 
     After life’s fitful fever he sleeps well: 

or,

better be with the dead: 

or,

I have lived long enough: 

and it speaks its last words on the last day of his life: 

                     Out, out, brief candle! 
     Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player
     That struts and frets his hour upon the stage
     And then is heard no more:  it is a tale
     Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
     Signifying nothing.

How strange that this judgment on life, the despair of a man who had knowingly made mortal war on his own soul, should be frequently quoted as Shakespeare’s own judgment, and should even be adduced, in serious criticism, as a proof of his pessimism!

It remains to look a little more fully at the history of Macbeth after the murder of Duncan.  Unlike his first struggle this history excites little suspense or anxiety on his account:  we have now no hope for him.  But it is an engrossing spectacle, and psychologically it is perhaps the most remarkable exhibition of the development of a character to be found in Shakespeare’s tragedies.