The murder scene,as was to be expected,pleased the audience best.Macbeth's voice,in the talk with his wife,was a thing not to be forgotten;and when he spoke of his hangman's hands he seemed to have blood in his utterance.Never for a moment,even in the very article of the murder,does he possess his own soul.He is a man on wires.From first to last it is an exhibition of hideous cowardice.For,after all,it is not here,but in broad daylight,with the exhilaration of conflict,where he can assure himself at every blow he has the longest sword and the heaviest hand,that this man's physical bravery can keep him up;he is an unwieldy ship,and needs plenty of way on before he will steer.
In the banquet scene,while the first murderer gives account of what he has done,there comes a flash of truculent joy at the 'twenty trenched gashes'on Banquo's head.Thus Macbeth makes welcome to his imagination those very details of physical horror which are so soon to turn sour in him.As he runs out to embrace these cruel circumstances,as he seeks to realise to his mind's eye the reassuring spectacle of his dead enemy,he is dressing out the phantom to terrify himself;and his imagination,playing the part of justice,is to 'commend to his own lips the ingredients of his poisoned chalice.'With the recollection of Hamlet and his father's spirit still fresh upon him,and the holy awe with which that good man encountered things not dreamt of in his philosophy,it was not possible to avoid looking for resemblances between the two apparitions and the two men haunted.But there are none to be found.Macbeth has a purely physical dislike for Banquo's spirit and the 'twenty trenched gashes.'He is afraid of he knows not what.He is abject,and again blustering.In the end he so far forgets himself,his terror,and the nature of what is before him,that he rushes upon it as he would upon a man.When his wife tells him he needs repose,there is something really childish in the way he looks about the room,and,seeing nothing,with an expression of almost sensual relief,plucks up heart enough to go to bed.And what is the upshot of the visitation?It is written in Shakespeare,but should be read with the commentary of Salvini's voice and expression:-'O!SIAM NELL'
OPRA ANCOR FANCIULLI'-'We are yet but young in deed.'
Circle below circle.He is looking with horrible satisfaction into the mouth of hell.There may still be a prick to-day;but to-morrow conscience will be dead,and he may move untroubled in this element of blood.
In the fifth act we see this lowest circle reached;and it is Salvini's finest moment throughout the play.From the first he was admirably made up,and looked Macbeth to the full as perfectly as ever he looked Othello.From the first moment he steps upon the stage you can see this character is a creation to the fullest meaning of the phrase;for the man before you is a type you know well already.He arrives with Banquo on the heath,fair and red-bearded,sparing of gesture,full of pride and the sense of animal wellbeing,and satisfied after the battle like a beast who has eaten his fill.But in the fifth act there is a change.This is still the big,burly,fleshly,handsome-looking Thane;here is still the same face which in the earlier acts could be superficially good-humoured and sometimes royally courteous.
But now the atmosphere of blood,which pervades the whole tragedy,has entered into the man and subdued him to its own nature;and an indescribable degradation,a slackness and puffiness,has overtaken his features.He has breathed the air of carnage,and supped full of horrors.Lady Macbeth complains of the smell of blood on her hand:Macbeth makes no complaint -he has ceased to notice it now;but the same smell is in his nostrils.A contained fury and disgust possesses him.He taunts the messenger and the doctor as people would taunt their mortal enemies.And,indeed,as he knows right well,every one is his enemy now,except his wife.About her he questions the doctor with something like a last human anxiety;and,in tones of grisly mystery,asks him if he can 'minister to a mind diseased.'When the news of her death is brought him,he is staggered and falls into a seat;but somehow it is not anything we can call grief that he displays.There had been two of them against God and man;and now,when there is only one,it makes perhaps less difference than he had expected.And so her death is not only an affliction,but one more disillusion;and he redoubles in bitterness.The speech that follows,given with tragic cynicism in every word,is a dirge,not so much for her as for himself.From that time forth there is nothing human left in him,only 'the fiend of Scotland,'Macduff's 'hell-hound,'whom,with a stern glee,we see baited like a bear and hunted down like a wolf.He is inspired and set above fate by a demoniacal energy,a lust of wounds and slaughter.Even after he meets Macduff his courage does not fail;but when he hears the Thane was not born of woman,all virtue goes out of him;and though he speaks sounding words of defiance,the last combat is little better than a suicide.
The whole performance is,as I said,so full of gusto and a headlong unity;the personality of Macbeth is so sharp and powerful;and within these somewhat narrow limits there is so much play and saliency that,so far as concerns Salvini himself,a third great success seems indubitable.