The sinking of Lady Macbeth’s nature, and the marked change in her demeanour to her husband, are most strikingly shown in the conclusion of the banquet scene; and from this point pathos is mingled with awe.  The guests are gone.  She is completely exhausted, and answers Macbeth in listless, submissive words which seem to come with difficulty.  How strange sounds the reply ‘Did you send to him, sir?’ to his imperious question about Macduff!  And when he goes on, ’waxing desperate in imagination,’ to speak of new deeds of blood, she seems to sicken at the thought, and there is a deep pathos in that answer which tells at once of her care for him and of the misery she herself has silently endured,

     You lack the season of all natures, sleep.

We begin to think of her now less as the awful instigator of murder than as a woman with much that is grand in her, and much that is piteous.  Strange and almost ludicrous as the statement may sound,[230] she is, up to her light, a perfect wife.  She gives her husband the best she has; and the fact that she never uses to him the terms of affection which, up to this point in the play, he employs to her, is certainly no indication of want of love.  She urges, appeals, reproaches, for a practical end, but she never recriminates.  The harshness of her taunts is free from mere personal feeling, and also from any deep or more than momentary contempt.  She despises what she thinks the weakness which stands in the way of her husband’s ambition; but she does not despise him.  She evidently admires him and thinks him a great man, for whom the throne is the proper place.  Her commanding attitude in the moments of his hesitation or fear is probably confined to them.  If we consider the peculiar circumstances of the earlier scenes and the banquet scene, and if we examine the language of the wife and husband at other times, we shall come, I think, to the conclusion that their habitual relations are better represented by the later scenes than by the earlier, though naturally they are not truly represented by either.  Her ambition for her husband and herself (there was no distinction to her mind) proved fatal to him, far more so than the prophecies of the Witches; but even when she pushed him into murder she believed she was helping him to do what he merely lacked the nerve to attempt; and her part in the crime was so much less open-eyed than his, that, if the impossible and undramatic task of estimating degrees of culpability were forced on us, we should surely have to assign the larger share to Macbeth.

‘Lady Macbeth,’ says Dr. Johnson, ‘is merely detested’; and for a long time critics generally spoke of her as though she were Malcolm’s ‘fiend-like queen.’  In natural reaction we tend to insist, as I have been doing, on the other and less obvious side; and in the criticism of the last century there is even a tendency to sentimentalise the character.  But it can hardly be doubted that Shakespeare meant the predominant impression to be one of awe, grandeur, and horror, and that he never meant this impression to be lost, however it might be modified, as Lady Macbeth’s activity diminishes and her misery increases.  I cannot believe that, when she said of Banquo and Fleance,