His punishment comes swiftly, much more swiftly than Macbeth’s, and saves him from any further fall.  He is a very fearless man, and still so far honourable that he has no thought of acting to bring about the fulfilment of the prophecy which has beguiled him.  And therefore he has no fear of Macbeth.  But he little understands him.  To Macbeth’s tormented mind Banquo’s conduct appears highly suspicious. Why has this bold and circumspect[237] man kept his secret and become his chief adviser?  In order to make good his part of the predictions after Macbeth’s own precedent.  Banquo, he is sure, will suddenly and secretly attack him.  It is not the far-off accession of Banquo’s descendants that he fears; it is (so he tells himself) swift murder; not that the ’barren sceptre’ will some day droop from his dying hand, but that it will be ‘wrenched’ away now (III. i. 62).[238] So he kills Banquo.  But the Banquo he kills is not the innocent soldier who met the Witches and daffed their prophecies aside, nor the man who prayed to be delivered from the temptation of his dreams.

Macbeth leaves on most readers a profound impression of the misery of a guilty conscience and the retribution of crime.  And the strength of this impression is one of the reasons why the tragedy is admired by readers who shrink from Othello and are made unhappy by Lear.  But what Shakespeare perhaps felt even more deeply, when he wrote this play, was the incalculability of evil,—­that in meddling with it human beings do they know not what.  The soul, he seems to feel, is a thing of such inconceivable depth, complexity, and delicacy, that when you introduce into it, or suffer to develop in it, any change, and particularly the change called evil, you can form only the vaguest idea of the reaction you will provoke.  All you can be sure of is that it will not be what you expected, and that you cannot possibly escape it.  Banquo’s story, if truly apprehended, produces this impression quite as strongly as the more terrific stories of the chief characters, and perhaps even more clearly, inasmuch as he is nearer to average human nature, has obviously at first a quiet conscience, and uses with evident sincerity the language of religion.

3

Apart from his story Banquo’s character is not very interesting, nor is it, I think, perfectly individual.  And this holds good of the rest of the minor characters.  They are sketched lightly, and are seldom developed further than the strict purposes of the action required.  From this point of view they are inferior to several of the less important figures in each of the other three tragedies.  The scene in which Lady Macduff and her child appear, and the passage where their slaughter is reported to Macduff, have much dramatic value, but in neither case is the effect due to any great extent to the special characters of the persons concerned.  Neither they, nor Duncan, nor Malcolm, nor even Banquo