I question if either this scene or the exhibition of Macduff’s grief is required to heighten our abhorrence of Macbeth’s cruelty.  They have a technical value in helping to give the last stage of the action the form of a conflict between Macbeth and Macduff.  But their chief function is of another kind.  It is to touch the heart with a sense of beauty and pathos, to open the springs of love and of tears.  Shakespeare is loved for the sweetness of his humanity, and because he makes this kind of appeal with such irresistible persuasion; and the reason why Macbeth, though admired as much as any work of his, is scarcely loved, is that the characters who predominate cannot make this kind of appeal, and at no point are able to inspire unmingled sympathy.  The two passages in question supply this want in such measure as Shakespeare thought advisable in Macbeth, and the play would suffer greatly from their excision.  The second, on the stage, is extremely moving, and Macbeth’s reception of the news of his wife’s death may be intended to recall it by way of contrast.  The first brings a relief even greater, because here the element of beauty is more marked, and because humour is mingled with pathos.  In both we escape from the oppression of huge sins and sufferings into the presence of the wholesome affections of unambitious hearts; and, though both scenes are painful and one dreadful, our sympathies can flow unchecked.[243]

Lady Macduff is a simple wife and mother, who has no thought for anything beyond her home.  Her love for her children shows her at once that her husband’s flight exposes them to terrible danger.  She is in an agony of fear for them, and full of indignation against him.  It does not even occur to her that he has acted from public spirit, or that there is such a thing.

     What had he done to make him fly the land?

He must have been mad to do it.  He fled for fear.  He does not love his wife and children.  He is a traitor.  The poor soul is almost beside herself—­and with too good reason.  But when the murderer bursts in with the question ‘Where is your husband?’ she becomes in a moment the wife, and the great noble’s wife: 

     I hope, in no place so unsanctified
     Where such as thou may’st find him.

What did Shakespeare mean us to think of Macduff’s flight, for which Macduff has been much blamed by others beside his wife?  Certainly not that fear for himself, or want of love for his family, had anything to do with it.  His love for his country, so strongly marked in the scene with Malcolm, is evidently his one motive.

     He is noble, wise, judicious, and best knows
     The fits o’ the season,

says Ross.  That his flight was ‘noble’ is beyond doubt.  That it was not wise or judicious in the interest of his family is no less clear.  But that does not show that it was wrong; and, even if it were, to represent its consequences as a judgment on him for his want of due consideration is equally monstrous and ludicrous.[244] The further question whether he did fail in due consideration, or whether for his country’s sake he deliberately risked a danger which he fully realised, would in Shakespeare’s theatre have been answered at once by Macduff’s expression and demeanour on hearing Malcolm’s words,