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 indigna-
tion 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