le--has usurped the true moral order and reversed
it, he not without misgivings: the spectators all the while knowing the
true order, yet held silent, watching the event. Outside the castle an
owl hoots as Duncan is slain. The guilty man and woman creep back,
whispering; and thereupon--what happens? A knocking on the door--a
knocking followed by the growls of a drowsy if not drunken porter:
"Here's a knocking indeed! If a man were porter of hell-gate, he should
have old turning the key. (Knocking again.) Knock, knock, knock! Who's
there, i' the name of Beelzebub?" The stage direction admits Macduff,
who in due course is to prove the avenger of blood: but the hand that
knocks, the step on the threshold, are in truth those of the moral order
returning _pede claudo_, demanding to be readmitted. From the instant of
that first knock the ambitions of the pair roll back toward their doom
as the law they have offended reasserts itself, and the witches'
palindrome _In girum imus noctu, ecce!_ steadily spells itself backward,
letter by letter, to the awful sentence, _Ecce ut consumimur igni!_

* * * * *

This is to "idealise" in the right sense of the word. Fixing his mind on
the Idea of two human beings, a man and a woman who trespass from the
law of the great moral powers ordering the Universe (Man along with it)
and are overtaken in that trespass and punished, Shakespeare
disencumbers it of all that is trivial, irrelevant, non-essential. He
takes the wickedest crime of which man can be guilty; not a mere naked
murder, nor even a murder for profit, but the murder of a king by his
sworn soldier, of a guest by his host, of a sleeping guest by the hand
on which he has just bestowed a diamond. Can criminality be laid barer?
He illustrates it again in two persons lifted above the common station;
and he does this not (as I think) for the practical reason for which
Aristotle seems to commend it to tragic writers--that the disasters of
great persons are more striking than those of the small fry of
mankind--that, as the height is, so will be the fall--or not for that
reason alone; but, still in the process of "idealising," because such
persons, exalted above the obscuring petty cares of life, may reasonably
be expected to see the Universe with a clearer vision than ours, to have
more delicate ears for its harmonies. Who but a King should know most
concerning moral law? Why is he with our consent lifted up