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Of course, Shakspere does not mean that one regarding that portion of the picture alone, could see the eyes looking sad; but that the sweet observance of the whole so roused the imagination that it supplied what distance had concealed, keeping the far-off likewise in sweet observance with the whole: the rest pointed that way.–In a manner something like this are we conducted to a right understanding of the character of Lady Macbeth. First put together these her utterances:

“You do unbend your noble strength, to think
So brainsickly of things.”

“Get some water,
And wash this filthy witness from your hands.”

“The sleeping and the dead
Are but as pictures.”

“A little water clears us of this deed.”

“When all’s done,
You look but on a stool.”

“You lack the season of all natures, sleep.”–

Had these passages stood in the play unmodified by others, we might have judged from them that Shakspere intended to represent Lady Macbeth as an utter materialist, believing in nothing beyond the immediate communications of the senses. But when we find them associated with such passages as these–

“Memory, the warder of the brain,
Shall be a fume, and the receipt of reason
A limbeck only;”

“Had he not resembled
My father as he slept, I had done’t;

“These deeds must not be thought
After these ways; so, it will make us mad;”–

then we find that our former theory will not do, for here are deeper and broader foundations to build upon. We discover that Lady Macbeth was an unbeliever morally, and so found it necessary to keep down all imagination, which is the upheaving of that inward world whose very being she would have annihilated. Yet out of this world arose at last the phantom of her slain self, and possessing her sleeping frame, sent it out to wander in the night, and rub its distressed and blood-stained hands in vain. For, as in this same “Rape of Lucrece,”

“the soul’s fair temple is defaced;
To whose weak ruins muster troops of cares,
To ask the spotted princess how she fares.”

But when so many lines of delineation meet, and run into, and correct one another, assuming such a natural and vital form, that there is no making of a point anywhere; and the woman is shown after no theory, but according to the natural laws of human declension, we feel that the only way to account for the perfection of the representation is to say that, given a shadow, Shakspere had the power to place himself so, that that shadow became his own–was the correct representation as shadow, of his form coming between it and the sunlight. And this is the highest dramatic gift that a man can possess. But we feel at the same time, that this is, in the main, not so much art as inspiration. There would be, in all probability, a great mingling of conscious art with the inspiration; but the lines of the former being lost in the general glow of the latter, we may be left where we were as to any certainty about the artistic consciousness of Shakspere. I will now therefore attempt to give a few plainer instances of such sweet observance in his own work as he would have admired in a painting.

First, then, I would request my reader to think how comparatively seldom Shakspere uses poetry in his plays. The whole play is a poem in the highest sense; but truth forbids him to make it the rule for his characters to speak poetically. Their speech is poetic in relation to the whole and the end, not in relation to the speaker, or in the immediate utterance. And even although their speech is immediately poetic, in this sense, that every character is idealized; yet it is idealized after its kind; and poetry certainly would not be the ideal speech of most of the characters. This granted, let us look at the exceptions: we shall find that such passages not only glow with poetic loveliness and fervour, but are very jewels of sweet observance, whose setting allows them their force as lawful, and their prominence as natural. I will mention a few of such.