(the cat who wanted fish but did not like to wet her feet); or,
or,
Wherein you dress’d yourself? hath it slept since?
And wakes it now, to look so green and pale
At what it did so freely?
The Witches are practically nothing to her. She feels no sympathy in Nature with her guilty purpose, and would never bid the earth not hear her steps, which way they walk. The noises before the murder, and during it, are heard by her as simple facts, and are referred to their true sources. The knocking has no mystery for her: it comes from ‘the south entry’. She calculates on the drunkenness of the grooms, compares the different effects of wine on herself and on them, and listens to their snoring. To her the blood upon her husband’s hands suggests only the taunt,
To wear a heart so white;
and the blood to her is merely ‘this filthy witness,’—words impossible to her husband, to whom it suggested something quite other than sensuous disgust or practical danger. The literalism of her mind appears fully in two contemptuous speeches where she dismisses his imaginings; in the murder scene:
Give me the daggers! The sleeping and the dead
Are but as pictures: ’tis the eye of childhood
That fears a painted devil;
- ↑ Surely the usual interpretation of ‘We fail?’ as a question of contemptuous astonishment, is right. ‘We fail!’ gives practically the same sense, but alters the punctuation of the first two Folios. In either case, ‘But,’ I think, means ‘Only.’ On the other hand the proposal to read ‘We fail.’ with a full stop, as expressive of sublime acceptance of the possibility, seems to me, however attractive at first sight, quite out of harmony with Lady Macbeth’s mood throughout these scenes.
