the season of all natures, sleep.

We begin to think of her now less as the awful instigator of murder than
as a woman with much that is grand in her, and much that is piteous.
Strange and almost ludicrous as the statement may sound,[230] she is, up
to her light, a perfect wife. She gives her husband the best she has;
and the fact that she never uses to him the terms of affection which, up
to this point in the play, he employs to her, is certainly no indication
of want of love. She urges, appeals, reproaches, for a practical end,
but she never recriminates. The harshness of her taunts is free from
mere personal feeling, and also from any deep or more than momentary
contempt. She despises what she thinks the weakness which stands in the
way of her husband's ambition; but she does not despise _him_. She
evidently admires him and thinks him a great man, for whom the throne is
the proper place. Her commanding attitude in the moments of his
hesitation or fear is probably confined to them. If we consider the
peculiar circumstances of the earlier scenes and the banquet scene, and
if we examine the language of the wife and husband at other times, we
shall come, I think, to the conclusion that their habitual relations are
better represented by the later scenes than by the earlier, though
naturally they are not truly represented by either. Her ambition for her
husband and herself (there was no distinction to her mind) proved fatal
to him, far more so than the prophecies of the Witches; but even when
she pushed him into murder she believed she was helping him to do what
he merely lacked the nerve to attempt; and her part in the crime was so
much less open-eyed than his, that, if the impossible and undramatic
task of estimating degrees of culpability were forced on us, we should
surely have to assign the larger share to Macbeth.

'Lady Macbeth,' says Dr. Johnson, 'is merely detested'; and for a long
time critics generally spoke of her as though she were Malcolm's
'fiend-like queen.' In natural reaction we tend to insist, as I have
been doing, on the other and less obvious side; and in the criticism of
the last century there is even a tendency to sentimentalise the
character. But it can hardly be doubted that Shakespeare meant the
predominant impression to be one of awe, grandeur, and horror, and that
he never meant this impression to be lost, however it might be modified,
as Lady Macbeth's activity diminishes and her misery increas