human life that marks the really ruthless
assassin. Lady Macbeth has the stronger will of the two for the
commission of the deed. It is doubtful whether without her help Macbeth
would ever have undertaken it. But even she, when her husband hesitates
to strike, cannot bring herself to murder the aged Duncan with her own
hands because of his resemblance as he sleeps to her father. It is only
after a deal of boggling and at serious risk of untimely interruption
that the two contrive to do the murder, and plaster with blood the
"surfeited grooms." In thus putting suspicion on the servants of Duncan
the assassins cunningly avert suspicion from themselves, and Macbeth's
killing of the unfortunate men in seeming indignation at the discovery
of their crime is a master-stroke of ingenuity. "Who," he asks in a
splendid burst of feigned horror, "can be wise, amazed, temperate and
furious, loyal and natural in a moment?" At the same time Lady Macbeth
affects to swoon away in the presence of so awful a crime. For the time
all suspicion of guilt, except in the mind of Banquo, is averted from
the real murderers. But, like so many criminals, Macbeth finds it
impossible to rest on his first success in crime. His sensibility grows
dulled; he "forgets the taste of fear"; the murder of Banquo and his
son is diabolically planned, and that is soon followed by the outrageous
slaughter of the wife and children of Macduff. Ferri, the Italian writer
on crime, describes the psychical condition favourable to the commission
of murder as an absence of both moral repugnance to the crime itself and
the fear of the consequences following it. In the murder of Duncan, it
is the first of these two states of mind to which Macbeth and his wife
have only partially attained. The moral repugnance stronger in the
man has not been wholly lost by the woman. But as soon as the crime is
successfully accomplished, this repugnance begins to wear off until the
King and Queen are able calmly and deliberately to contemplate those
further crimes necessary to their peace of mind. But now Macbeth, at
first the more compunctious of the two, has become the more ruthless;
the germ of crime, developed by suggestion, has spread through his whole
being; he has begun to acquire that indifference to human suffering with
which Richard III. and Iago were gifted from the first. In both
Macbeth and Lady Macbeth the germ of crime was latent; they wanted only
favourable circumstances to c