Study Edition · Essay 42
On the Knocking at the Gate in Macbeth
Source: London Magazine, October 1823. Text from Project Gutenberg #10708. Complete; De Quincey's own footnote on the word “sympathy” is summarized in a reference note. Old spellings (Shakspeare, gulph, synonyme) are modernized. Archaic verb forms modernized; vocabulary kept and glossed.
In Shakespeare's Macbeth, just after Macbeth murders King Duncan in his sleep, someone starts knocking at the castle gate. De Quincey, best known for his Confessions of an English Opium-Eater, asks why that knocking feels so terrifying. His answer is a famous piece of literary criticism: the murder carries us into a frozen, hellish world outside ordinary time, and the knocking is the sound of normal life starting up again, which makes us suddenly feel how far away it had been. Watch how he trusts feeling over cold logic, and how he builds the argument through everyday comparisons: a drawing, a fainting fit, a silent funeral street.
48 sentences: 12 simple, 11 moderate, 25 complex. Hover a number for its paraphrase; click it for the full note.
Key Vocabulary
- perplexityconfusion; puzzlement
- solemnitydeep seriousness
- obstinatelystubbornly
- exhortto urge strongly
- facultya power of the mind, such as reason or memory
- perspectivethe art of drawing depth and distance on a flat surface
- obliterateto wipe out completely
- digressiona wandering away from the main subject
- connoisseuran expert judge of taste in some art
- fastidiousvery hard to please
- dilettantiamateurs who dabble in the arts
- felicitya happy aptness or fitness
- ignoblelow; not noble
- abjectmiserable and degraded
- approbationapproval
- soliloquya speech a character makes alone, thinking aloud
- palpableable to be felt or touched
- sequesteredshut away; isolated
- syncopea faint; loss of consciousness
- parenthesishere, an interval or pause that interrupts the main flow
The Essay
From my boyish days I had always felt a great perplexity on one point in Macbeth.1 It was this: the knocking at the gate, which succeeds to the murder of Duncan, produced to my feelings an effect for which I never could account.2 The effect was, that it reflected back upon the murder a peculiar awfulness and a depth of solemnity; yet, however obstinately I endeavored with my understanding to comprehend this, for many years I never could see why it should produce such an effect.3
Here I pause for one moment, to exhort the reader never to pay any attention to his understanding when it stands in opposition to any other faculty of his mind.4 The mere understanding, however useful and indispensable, is the meanest faculty in the human mind, and the most to be distrusted; and yet the great majority of people trust to nothing else; which may do for ordinary life, but not for philosophical purposes.5 Of this out of ten thousand instances that I might produce, I will cite one.6 Ask of any person whatsoever, who is not previously prepared for the demand by a knowledge of perspective, to draw in the rudest way the commonest appearance which depends upon the laws of that science; as for instance, to represent the effect of two walls standing at right angles to each other, or the appearance of the houses on each side of a street, as seen by a person looking down the street from one extremity.7 Now in all cases, unless the person has happened to observe in pictures how it is that artists produce these effects, he will be utterly unable to make the smallest approximation to it.8 Yet why?9 For he has actually seen the effect every day of his life.10 The reason is, that he allows his understanding to overrule his eyes.11 His understanding, which includes no intuitive knowledge of the laws of vision, can furnish him with no reason why a line which is known and can be proved to be a horizontal line, should not appear a horizontal line; a line that made any angle with the perpendicular less than a right angle, would seem to him to indicate that his houses were all tumbling down together.12 Accordingly he makes the line of his houses a horizontal line, and fails of course to produce the effect demanded.13 Here then is one instance out of many, in which not only the understanding is allowed to overrule the eyes, but where the understanding is positively allowed to obliterate the eyes as it were, for not only does the man believe the evidence of his understanding in opposition to that of his eyes, but, (what is monstrous!) the idiot is not aware that his eyes ever gave such evidence.14 He does not know that he has seen (and therefore quoad his consciousness has not seen) that which he has seen every day of his life.15 But to return from this digression, my understanding could furnish no reason why the knocking at the gate in Macbeth should produce any effect, direct or reflected.16 In fact, my understanding said positively that it could not produce any effect.17 But I knew better; I felt that it did; and I waited and clung to the problem until further knowledge should enable me to solve it.18 At length, in 1812, Mr. Williams made his debut on the stage of Ratcliffe Highway, and executed those unparalleled murders which have procured for him such a brilliant and undying reputation.19 On which murders, by the way, I must observe, that in one respect they have had an ill effect, by making the connoisseur in murder very fastidious in his taste, and dissatisfied by anything that has been since done in that line.20 All other murders look pale by the deep crimson of his; and, as an amateur once said to me in a querulous tone, “There has been absolutely nothing doing since his time, or nothing that's worth speaking of.”21 But this is wrong; for it is unreasonable to expect all men to be great artists, and born with the genius of Mr. Williams.22 Now it will be remembered that in the first of these murders, (that of the Marrs,) the same incident (of a knocking at the door soon after the work of extermination was complete) did actually occur, which the genius of Shakespeare has invented; and all good judges, and the most eminent dilettanti, acknowledged the felicity of Shakespeare's suggestion as soon as it was actually realized.23 Here, then, was a fresh proof that I was right in relying on my own feeling in opposition to my understanding; and I again set myself to study the problem; at length I solved it to my own satisfaction; and my solution is this.24 Murder in ordinary cases, where the sympathy is wholly directed to the case of the murdered person, is an incident of coarse and vulgar horror; and for this reason, that it flings the interest exclusively upon the natural but ignoble instinct by which we cleave to life; an instinct, which, as being indispensable to the primal law of self-preservation, is the same in kind, (though different in degree,) amongst all living creatures; this instinct therefore, because it annihilates all distinctions, and degrades the greatest of men to the level of “the poor beetle that we tread on,” exhibits human nature in its most abject and humiliating attitude.25 Such an attitude would little suit the purposes of the poet.26 What then must he do?27 He must throw the interest on the murderer.28 Our sympathy must be with him; (of course I mean a sympathy of comprehension, a sympathy by which we enter into his feelings, and are made to understand them, not a sympathy of pity or approbation.)29 In the murdered person all strife of thought, all flux and reflux of passion and of purpose, are crushed by one overwhelming panic; the fear of instant death smites him “with its petrific mace.”30 But in the murderer, such a murderer as a poet will condescend to, there must be raging some great storm of passion, jealousy, ambition, vengeance, hatred, which will create a hell within him; and into this hell we are to look.31
In Macbeth, for the sake of gratifying his own enormous and teeming faculty of creation, Shakespeare has introduced two murderers: and, as usual in his hands, they are remarkably discriminated: but, though in Macbeth the strife of mind is greater than in his wife, the tiger spirit not so awake, and his feelings caught chiefly by contagion from her, yet, as both were finally involved in the guilt of murder, the murderous mind of necessity is finally to be presumed in both.32 This was to be expressed; and on its own account, as well as to make it a more proportionable antagonist to the unoffending nature of their victim, “the gracious Duncan,” and adequately to expound “the deep damnation of his taking off,” this was to be expressed with peculiar energy.33 We were to be made to feel that the human nature, i.e., the divine nature of love and mercy, spread through the hearts of all creatures, and seldom utterly withdrawn from man, was gone, vanished, extinct; and that the fiendish nature had taken its place.34 And, as this effect is marvellously accomplished in the dialogues and soliloquies themselves, so it is finally consummated by the expedient under consideration; and it is to this that I now solicit the reader's attention.35 If the reader has ever witnessed a wife, daughter, or sister, in a fainting fit, he may chance to have observed that the most affecting moment in such a spectacle, is that in which a sigh and a stirring announce the recommencement of suspended life.36 Or, if the reader has ever been present in a vast metropolis, on the day when some great national idol was carried in funeral pomp to his grave, and chancing to walk near the course through which it passed, has felt powerfully, in the silence and desertion of the streets and in the stagnation of ordinary business, the deep interest which at that moment was possessing the heart of man, if all at once he should hear the death-like stillness broken up by the sound of wheels rattling away from the scene, and making known that the transitory vision was dissolved, he will be aware that at no moment was his sense of the complete suspension and pause in ordinary human concerns so full and affecting, as at that moment when the suspension ceases, and the goings-on of human life are suddenly resumed.37 All action in any direction is best expounded, measured, and made apprehensible, by reaction.38 Now apply this to the case in Macbeth.39 Here, as I have said, the retiring of the human heart and the entrance of the fiendish heart was to be expressed and made sensible.40 Another world has stepped in; and the murderers are taken out of the region of human things, human purposes, human desires.41 They are transfigured: Lady Macbeth is “unsexed;” Macbeth has forgotten that he was born of woman; both are conformed to the image of devils; and the world of devils is suddenly revealed.42 But how shall this be conveyed and made palpable?43 In order that a new world may step in, this world must for a time disappear.44 The murderers, and the murder, must be insulated, cut off by an immeasurable gulf from the ordinary tide and succession of human affairs, locked up and sequestered in some deep recess; we must be made sensible that the world of ordinary life is suddenly arrested, laid asleep, tranced, racked into a dread armistice: time must be annihilated; relation to things without abolished; and all must pass self-withdrawn into a deep syncope and suspension of earthly passion.45 Hence it is, that when the deed is done, when the work of darkness is perfect, then the world of darkness passes away like a pageantry in the clouds: the knocking at the gate is heard; and it makes known audibly that the reaction has commenced: the human has made its reflux upon the fiendish; the pulses of life are beginning to beat again; and the re-establishment of the goings-on of the world in which we live, first makes us profoundly sensible of the awful parenthesis that had suspended them.46
O, mighty poet!47 Your works are not as those of other men, simply and merely great works of art; but are also like the phenomena of nature, like the sun and the sea, the stars and the flowers, like frost and snow, rain and dew, hail-storm and thunder, which are to be studied with entire submission of our own faculties, and in the perfect faith that in them there can be no too much or too little, nothing useless or inert, but that, the further we press in our discoveries, the more we shall see proofs of design and self-supporting arrangement where the careless eye had seen nothing but accident!48
Sentence Notes
In plain English: Ever since I was a boy, one point in Macbeth had always puzzled me.
In plain English: It was this: the knocking at the gate, which comes right after Duncan's murder, affected my feelings in a way I could never explain.
Reference & context: Macbeth II.ii–iii. Macbeth has just killed the sleeping King Duncan when a loud knocking begins at the south gate; the drunken Porter eventually opens it to Macduff and Lennox.
In plain English: The effect was that it cast back onto the murder a strange sense of dread and deep seriousness. Yet however hard I tried to work it out logically, for many years I could not see why it had that effect.
In plain English: Let me stop for a moment to urge the reader never to listen to his reasoning when it contradicts any other power of his mind.
Reference & context: “Understanding” here means the logical, reasoning part of the mind, as opposed to feeling, intuition or the senses.
In plain English: Mere reasoning, however useful and necessary, is the lowest power of the human mind and the one we should trust least. Yet most people trust nothing else, which may be fine for everyday life but not for deep thinking.
Why this phrase is worth keeping: A bold, surprising claim for a critic to make: that logic is the least reliable faculty.
In plain English: Out of ten thousand examples I could give, I'll mention one.
In plain English: Ask anyone who doesn't already know about perspective to make even a rough drawing of some common sight that depends on its rules: for example, two walls meeting at a right angle, or the houses on both sides of a street as seen by someone looking down it from one end.
In plain English: In every case, unless he has happened to notice in paintings how artists create these effects, he won't come even close.
In plain English: But why not?
In plain English: After all, he has seen it every day of his life.
In plain English: The reason is that he lets his reasoning overrule his eyes.
In plain English: His reasoning, which has no instinctive grasp of how seeing works, can give him no reason why a line he knows to be horizontal should not look horizontal. A line slanting away from the vertical at less than a right angle would seem to him to mean that his houses were all toppling over.
Reference & context: In perspective, the horizontal rooflines of a street seem to slope toward a vanishing point; an untrained drawer “corrects” them to flat lines.
In plain English: So he draws the row of houses with a flat line and, of course, fails to get the effect he wanted.
In plain English: So here is one example among many where reasoning not only overrules the eyes but actually wipes them out, so to speak: the man not only believes his reasoning over his eyes, but (shockingly!) the fool doesn't even realize his eyes ever showed him anything different.
In plain English: He doesn't know that he has seen (and so, as far as his conscious mind goes, he has not seen) what he really has seen every day of his life.
Why this phrase is worth keeping: The paradox of seeing without knowing that you have seen.
Reference & context: Quoad (Latin): “as regards” or “as far as concerns.”
In plain English: But to get back from this side-track: my reasoning could give no explanation of why the knocking in Macbeth should have any effect at all, either directly or by reflection back onto the murder.
In plain English: In fact, my reasoning insisted that it could not have any effect.
In plain English: But I knew better. I felt that it did, so I waited and held on to the problem until I learned enough to solve it.
In plain English: Finally, in 1811, Mr. Williams made his first appearance on the “stage” of Ratcliffe Highway and committed those unmatched murders that have won him such a brilliant and lasting reputation.
Why this phrase is worth keeping: Ironic theatre words (“debut,” “stage,” “reputation”) treat a murderer like a celebrated actor.
Reference & context: The Ratcliff Highway murders (December 1811, not 1812) killed seven people in two London households. John Williams, the suspect, hanged himself in prison. De Quincey's mock-admiring tone, as if murder were a theatrical art, anticipates his satirical essay “On Murder Considered as One of the Fine Arts” (1827).
In plain English: About these murders, by the way, I must point out that in one way they have done harm: they have made the expert in murder very fussy and unhappy with anything done in that field since.
In plain English: All other murders look pale next to the deep red of his. As one enthusiast once complained to me, “There's been absolutely nothing happening since his time, or nothing worth talking about.”
Why this phrase is worth keeping: A darkly comic pun: “pale” versus “crimson” plays on both colour and blood.
In plain English: But that's unfair, since we can't expect everyone to be a great artist born with Mr. Williams's genius.
In plain English: You'll remember that in the first of these murders, of the Marr family, the very thing Shakespeare's genius had invented actually happened: there was a knocking at the door soon after the killing was finished. All good judges and leading connoisseurs recognized how apt Shakespeare's idea was as soon as it came true in real life.
Reference & context: On the night the Marrs were killed, their servant girl, sent out to buy oysters, returned and knocked repeatedly at the locked door while the murderer was still inside.
In plain English: So here was new proof that I was right to trust my feeling over my reasoning. I took up the problem again and at last solved it to my own satisfaction. Here is my answer.
In plain English: Ordinarily, when all our sympathy goes to the victim, murder is a matter of crude, common horror. That is because it focuses our attention only on the natural but unheroic instinct to cling to life. Since this instinct is necessary for the basic law of self-preservation, it is the same in kind (though not in strength) in every living creature. So because it erases all differences and brings the greatest man down to the level of “the poor beetle that we tread upon,” it shows human nature at its most wretched and humiliating.
Reference & context: Measure for Measure III.i.78–80: “the poor beetle that we tread upon / In corporal sufferance finds a pang as great / As when a giant dies.”
In plain English: That sort of picture would hardly suit a poet's purposes.
In plain English: So what must he do?
In plain English: He must turn our attention to the murderer.
In plain English: Our sympathy must be with him. Of course I mean sympathy in the sense of understanding: we enter into his feelings and are made to understand them, not sympathy in the sense of pity or approval.
Reference & context: De Quincey adds a footnote complaining that “sympathy” was coming to mean merely “pity,” and that writers had started saying “sympathy for” instead of the correct “sympathy with.” He uses the word in its older sense: sharing or entering into another person's feelings, whatever they are.
In plain English: In the victim, all conflict of thought, all the ebb and flow of feeling and intention, is crushed by a single overwhelming panic. The fear of instant death strikes him “with its petrifying club.”
Reference & context: Milton, Paradise Lost X.294: Death strikes “with his mace petrific,” that is, with a club that turns things to stone.
In plain English: But in the murderer, at least the kind of murderer a poet would bother to write about, some great storm of passion must be raging (jealousy, ambition, revenge, hatred) that creates a hell inside him. And we are meant to look into that hell.
Why this phrase is worth keeping: The heart of the argument: tragedy shows us the inner hell of the killer, not just the victim's terror.
In plain English: In Macbeth, to satisfy his own huge, overflowing creative power, Shakespeare gives us two murderers, and as usual he makes them very different. Macbeth's mind is more torn than his wife's, the tiger in him is less awake, and he catches his feelings mostly from her like an infection. Still, since both end up guilty of murder, we must assume a murderous mind in both.
In plain English: This had to be shown, and shown with special force, both for its own sake and to set it in proper contrast to the innocent nature of their victim, “the gracious Duncan,” and to bring out fully “the deep damnation of his taking-off.”
Reference & context: Both phrases come from Macbeth: “the gracious Duncan” (III.i.65) and “the deep damnation of his taking-off” (I.vii.20), from Macbeth's soliloquy as he hesitates before the murder.
In plain English: We were meant to feel that human nature (that is, the divine nature of love and mercy that runs through the hearts of all creatures and is rarely entirely missing from people) was gone, vanished, dead, and that a devilish nature had taken its place.
In plain English: This effect is wonderfully achieved in the dialogue and the soliloquies themselves, and it is finally completed by the device we are discussing: the knocking. It is to this that I now ask the reader to turn.
In plain English: If you have ever seen a wife, daughter or sister faint, you may have noticed that the most moving moment is the one when a sigh and a small movement show that her paused life is starting again.
Why this phrase is worth keeping: The first of two everyday comparisons that make the abstract argument easy to feel.
In plain English: Or suppose you have been in a great city on the day a national hero was carried to his grave in a grand funeral. Walking near the route, you felt strongly, in the empty, silent streets and the halted business, how deeply everyone's heart was absorbed at that moment. If suddenly you heard that deathly stillness broken by the sound of wheels rattling away, telling you the brief scene was over, you would realize that you never felt the complete pause in normal life so fully and movingly as at the moment the pause ended and ordinary life suddenly started again.
Reference & context: Readers in 1823 might think of the great public funerals of Nelson (1806) or of Princess Charlotte (1817).
In plain English: Any action, of any kind, is best explained, measured and made understandable by the reaction to it.
Why this phrase is worth keeping: A compact general law that sums up both examples before applying it to Macbeth.
In plain English: Now apply this to Macbeth.
In plain English: Here, as I said, the departure of the human heart and the arrival of the devilish heart had to be shown and made to be felt.
In plain English: Another world has entered, and the murderers are removed from the realm of human things, human aims and human wishes.
In plain English: They are transformed. Lady Macbeth is “unsexed”; Macbeth has forgotten that he was born of a woman; both are reshaped in the image of devils, and the world of devils is suddenly revealed.
Reference & context: Lady Macbeth prays, “Come, you spirits… unsex me here” (I.v.40–41). The witches tell Macbeth that “none of woman born” shall harm him (IV.i.80).
Modernized: has forgot → has forgotten
In plain English: But how can this be conveyed and made something we can feel?
In plain English: For a new world to come in, this world must disappear for a while.
In plain English: The murderers and the murder must be isolated, cut off by an endless gulf from the normal flow of human affairs, locked away in some deep hiding place. We must feel that ordinary life has suddenly been stopped, put to sleep, put into a trance, forced into a terrible truce. Time must be destroyed, all connection with the outside world cut, and everything must sink inward into a deep faint, a suspension of earthly feeling.
Why this phrase is worth keeping: A rising chain of verbs (arrested, laid asleep, tranced, racked) makes the reader feel time stopping.
In plain English: That is why, when the deed is done and the work of darkness is complete, the world of darkness vanishes like a pageant in the clouds. The knocking at the gate is heard, and it announces out loud that the reaction has begun. The human has flowed back over the devilish; the pulse of life is starting to beat again; and the return of everyday life in our world is what first makes us deeply aware of the terrible pause that had interrupted it.
Why this phrase is worth keeping: The solution in one image: the murder was a dreadful “parenthesis,” and the knock closes the bracket.
Reference & context: “Like a pageantry in the clouds” echoes Prospero's “insubstantial pageant faded” in The Tempest IV.i.
In plain English: O mighty poet!
In plain English: Your works are not like other men's, simply great works of art. They are also like things in nature, like the sun and the sea, the stars and the flowers, frost and snow, rain and dew, hailstorms and thunder. They should be studied with complete humility, in full confidence that there is nothing too much or too little in them, nothing useless or lifeless, and that the further we explore, the more we will find signs of purpose and perfect order where a careless eye saw only chance!
Why this phrase is worth keeping: The closing tribute treats Shakespeare as a force of nature in which nothing is accidental.
Reference & context: The idea of studying Shakespeare like nature echoes the Romantic critics Coleridge and Schlegel.
Modernized: Thy → Your
Fun Fact
The Ratcliff Highway murders terrified London so much that they helped bring about the creation of a professional police force. De Quincey stayed fascinated by them all his life and wrote about them again in a long, gruesomely funny postscript to “On Murder Considered as One of the Fine Arts” (1854), which some historians call the first true-crime writing in English.