part--her will never fails her. Its
grasp upon her nature may destroy her, but it is never relaxed. We are
sure that she never betrayed her husband or herself by a word or even a
look, save in sleep. However appalling she may be, she is sublime.

In the earlier scenes of the play this aspect of Lady Macbeth's
character is far the most prominent. And if she seems invincible she
seems also inhuman. We find no trace of pity for the kind old king; no
consciousness of the treachery and baseness of the murder; no sense of
the value of the lives of the wretched men on whom the guilt is to be
laid; no shrinking even from the condemnation or hatred of the world.
Yet if the Lady Macbeth of these scenes were really utterly inhuman, or
a 'fiend-like queen,' as Malcolm calls her, the Lady Macbeth of the
sleep-walking scene would be an impossibility. The one woman could never
become the other. And in fact, if we look below the surface, there is
evidence enough in the earlier scenes of preparation for the later. I do
not mean that Lady Macbeth was naturally humane. There is nothing in the
play to show this, and several passages subsequent to the murder-scene
supply proof to the contrary. One is that where she exclaims, on being
informed of Duncan's murder,

Woe, alas!
What, in our house?

This mistake in acting shows that she does not even know what the
natural feeling in such circumstances would be; and Banquo's curt
answer, 'Too cruel anywhere,' is almost a reproof of her insensibility.
But, admitting this, we have in the first place to remember, in
imagining the opening scenes, that she is deliberately bent on
counteracting the 'human kindness' of her husband, and also that she is
evidently not merely inflexibly determined but in a condition of
abnormal excitability. That exaltation in the project which is so
entirely lacking in Macbeth is strongly marked in her. When she tries to
help him by representing their enterprise as heroic, she is deceiving
herself as much as him. Their attainment of the crown presents itself to
her, perhaps has long presented itself, as something so glorious, and
she has fixed her will upon it so completely, that for the time she sees
the enterprise in no other light than that of its greatness. When she
soliloquises,

Yet do I fear thy nature:
It is too full o' the milk of human kindness
To catch the nearest way: thou wouldst be great;