CHAP. VI. Ghost at the banquet, realised the turn of fate, than his first thoughts are of Macduff:

iii. iv. 128.

iv. i. 74. iv. i, from

139.

Macbeth. How say'st thou, that Macduff denies his person
At our great bidding?

Lady M.

Did you send to him, sir?

Macbeth. I hear it by the way; but I will send.

When the Apparitions bid Macbeth 'beware Macduff,' he

answers,

Thou hast harp'd my fear aright!

On the vanishing of the Apparition Scene, the first thing that
happens is the arrival of news that Macduff has fled to
England, and is out of his enemy's power; then Macbeth's
bloody thoughts devise a still more cruel purpose of vengeance
to be taken on the fugitive's family.

Time, thou anticipatest my dread exploits :
The flighty purpose never is o'ertook
Unless the deed go with it....

The castle of Macduff I will surprise;

Seize upon Fife; give to the edge o' the sword

His wife, his babes, and all unfortunate souls
That trace him in his line.

iv. ii, iii. In succeeding scenes we have this diabolical massacre carried

out, and see the effect which the news of it has in rousing Macduff to his revenge; until in the final scene of all he feels that if Macbeth is slain and by no stroke of his, his wife and children's ghosts will for ever haunt him. Thus Macduff's function in the play is to be the agent not only of the grand nemesis which constitutes the whole plot, but also of a nemesis upon a private wrong which occupies the latter half of the play. And, putting our results together, we find that a Nemesis Action is the description alike of the whole plot and of the rise and fall which are its two halves.

With Nemesis is associated in the play of Macbeth Destiny in two distinct phases. The first of these is the Oracular. In Destiny was the supreme governor of the

ht as

Oracular

the term 'the Oracles of God' is appropriately applied to CHAP. VI. the Bible as the Christian revelation. With the advent of Christianity the oracles became dumb. But the triumph of Christianity was for centuries incomplete; heathen deities were not extirpated, but subordinated to the supernatural personages of the new religion; and the old oracles declined A minor into oracular beings such as witches and wizards, and form of the oracular superstitions, such as magic mirrors, dreams, appa- in modern ritions—all means of dimly revealing hidden destiny. Shake- oracular beings. speare is never wiser than the age he is pourtraying; and accordingly he has freely introduced witches and apparitions into the machinery of Macbeth, though in the principles that govern the action of this, as of all his other plays, he is true to the modern notions of Providence and moral law. An The Oracular Action: oracle and its fulfilment make up a series of events eminently Destiny fitted to constitute a dramatic interest; and no form of working ancient Drama and Story is more common than this of the from 'Oracular Action.' Its interest may be formulated as Destiny clearness; working from mystery to clearness. At the commencement of an oracular story the fated future is revealed indeed, but in a dress of mystery, as when the Athenians are bidden to defend themselves with only wooden walls; but as the story of Themistocles develops itself, the drift of events is throwing more and more light on to the hidden meaning of the oracle, until by the naval victory over the Persians the oracle is at once clear and fulfilled.

mystery to

The Oracular Action is so important an element in plot, that it may be worth while to prolong the consideration of it by noting the three principal varieties into which it falls, all of which are illustrated in the play of Macbeth. In each case the interest consists in tracing the working of Destiny out of mystery into clearness: the distinction between the varieties depends upon the agency by which Destiny works, and the (1) by the relation of this agency to the original oracle. In the first obedi agency of

CHAP. VI. The Spartans, unfortunate in their war with the Messenians, enquire of an oracle, and receive the strange response that they must apply for a general to the Athenians, their hereditary enemies. But they resolve to obey the voice of Destiny, though to all appearance they obey at their peril; and the Athenians mock them by selecting the most unfit subject they can find a man whose bodily infirmities had excluded him from the military exercises altogether. Yet in the end the faith of the Spartans is rewarded. It had been no lack of generalship that had caused their former defeats, but discord and faction in their ranks; now Tyrtæus turned out to be a lyric poet, whose songs roused the spirit of the Spartans and united them as one man, and when united, their native military talent led them to victory. Thus in its fulfilment the hidden meaning of the oracle breaks out into clearness : and blind obedience to the oracle is the agency by which it has been fulfilled.

(2) by the agency of free will;

In the second variety the oracle is fulfilled by the agency of indifference and free will: it is neither obeyed nor disobeyed, but ignored. One of the best illustrations is to be found in the plot of Sir Walter Scott's novel, The Betrothed. Its heroine, more rational than her age, resists the family tradition that would condemn her to sleep in the haunted chamber; overborne, however, by age and authority, she consents, and the lady of the bloody finger appears to pronounce her doom:

Widow'd wife, and wedded maid;
Betrothed, Betrayer, and Betrayed.

This seems a mysterious destiny for a simple and virtuous girl. The faithful attendant Rose declares in a burst of devotion that betrayed her mistress may be, but betrayer never; the heroine herself braces her will to dismiss the foreboding from her thoughts, and resolves that she will not be influenced by on the other. Yet it all comes about.

Constable, who on the very day of betrothal is summoned CHAP. VI. away to the Crusade, from which, as it appears, he is never to return, leaving his spouse at once a widowed wife and a wedded maid. In the troubles of that long absence, by a perfectly natural series of events, gratitude again leads the heroine to admit to her castle her real deliverer and lover in order to save his life, and in protecting him amidst strange circumstances of suspicion to bid defiance to all comers. Finally the castle is besieged by the royal armies, and the heroine has to hear herself proclaimed a traitor by the herald of England; from this perplexity a deliverance is found only when her best friend saves her by betraying the castle to the king. So every detail in the unnatural doom has been in the most natural manner fulfilled: and the woman by whose action it has been fulfilled has been all the while maintaining the freedom of her will and persistently ignoring the oracle.

But the supreme interest of the Oracular Action is reached (3) by the when the oracle is fulfilled by an agency that has all the agency of opposing while set itself to oppose and frustrate it. A simple illustra- will. tion of this is seen in the Eastern potentate who, in opposition to a prophecy that his son should be killed by a lion, forbad the son to hunt, but heaped upon him every other indulgence. In particular he built him a pleasure-house, hung with pictures of hunting and of wild beasts, on which all that art could do was lavished to compensate for the loss of the forbidden sport. One day the son, chafing at his absence from the manly exercise in which his comrades were at that moment engaged, wandered through his pleasure-house, until, stopping at a magnificient picture of a lion at bay, he began to apostrophise it as the source of his disgrace, and waxing still more angry, drove his fist through the picture. A nail, hidden behind the canvas, entered his hand; the wound festered, and he died. So the measures taken to frustrate the

CHAP. VI. story of Edipus: told fully, it presents three examples woven together. Laius of Thebes learns from an oracle that the son about to be born to him is destined to be his murderer; accordingly he refuses to rear the child, and it is cast out to perish. A herdsman rescues the infant, and afterwards disposes of it surreptitiously to the childless wife of Polybus, king of Corinth, keeping the secret of its birth. In due time this Edipus seeks advice of the oracle as to his future career, and receives the startling response that he is destined to slay his own father. Resolved to frustrate so terrible a fatė, he will not return to Corinth, but, as it happens, takes the road to Thebes, where he falls in accidentally with Laius, and, in ignorance of his person, quarrels with him and slays him. Now if Laius had not resisted the oracle by casting out the infant, it would have grown up like other sons, and every probability would have been against his committing so terrible a crime as parricide. Again, if the herdsman had not, by sending the child out of the country, sought to bar him against a chance of the dreadful fate prophesied for him, he would have known the person of Laius and spared him. Once more, if Edipus had not, in opposition to the oracle, avoided his supposed home, Corinth, he would never have gone to Thebes and fallen in with his real father. Three different persons acting separately seek to frustrate a declared destiny, and their action unites in fulfilling it.

The plot of Macbeth, both as a whole and in its separate parts, is constructed upon this form of the Oracular Action, in combination with the form of Nemesis. The play deals with the rise and fall of Macbeth: the rise, and the fall, and again the two taken together, present each of them an The rise of example of an Oracular Action. Firstly, the former half of Macbeth an the play, the rise of Macbeth, taken by itself, consists in an oracle and its fulfilment-the Witches' promise of the crown 1 the gradual steps by which the crown is attained.

Oracular

Action,