She weeps, she bleeds, ‘and each new day a gash is added to her wounds.’  She is not the mother of her children, but their grave;

                          where nothing,

But who knows nothing, is once seen to smile: 
Where sighs and groans and shrieks that rend the air
Are made, not mark’d.

For this wild rage and furious cruelty we are prepared; but vices of another kind start up as he plunges on his downward way.

I grant him bloody,
Luxurious, avaricious, false, deceitful,
Sudden, malicious,

says Malcolm; and two of these epithets surprise us.  Who would have expected avarice or lechery[225] in Macbeth?  His ruin seems complete.

Yet it is never complete.  To the end he never totally loses our sympathy; we never feel towards him as we do to those who appear the born children of darkness.  There remains something sublime in the defiance with which, even when cheated of his last hope, he faces earth and hell and heaven.  Nor would any soul to whom evil was congenial be capable of that heart-sickness which overcomes him when he thinks of the ‘honour, love, obedience, troops of friends’ which ’he must not look to have’ (and which Iago would never have cared to have), and contrasts with them

Curses, not loud but deep, mouth-honour, breath,
Which the poor heart would fain deny, and dare not,

(and which Iago would have accepted with indifference).  Neither can I agree with those who find in his reception of the news of his wife’s death proof of alienation or utter carelessness.  There is no proof of these in the words,

                     She should have died hereafter;
     There would have been a time for such a word,

spoken as they are by a man already in some measure prepared for such news, and now transported by the frenzy of his last fight for life.  He has no time now to feel.[226] Only, as he thinks of the morrow when time to feel will come—­if anything comes, the vanity of all hopes and forward-lookings sinks deep into his soul with an infinite weariness, and he murmurs,

To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow,
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day
To the last syllable of recorded time,
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
The way to dusty death.

In the very depths a gleam of his native love of goodness, and with it a touch of tragic grandeur, rests upon him.  The evil he has desperately embraced continues to madden or to wither his inmost heart.  No experience in the world could bring him to glory in it or make his peace with it, or to forget what he once was and Iago and Goneril never were.

FOOTNOTES: 

[Footnote 194:  See note BB.]

[Footnote 195:  ‘Hell is murky’ (V. i. 35).  This, surely, is not meant for a scornful repetition of something said long ago by Macbeth.  He would hardly in those days have used an argument or expressed a fear that could provoke nothing but contempt.]