Meaning
Innate compassion, sympathy or gentleness regarded as part of human nature. Nearly always used with a qualifier or in the negative - someone can have plenty of it, or be accused of having none - to measure how much fellow-feeling a person shows. Literary in register and often ironic. The sense-drift is sharp: Lady Macbeth meant it as a weakness that would stop her husband committing murder, whereas now it names a virtue. Literary register; now usually negative or ironic, measuring how little compassion someone shows. Regional use: General English (Shakespearean origin).
Origin
Macbeth, Act 1 Scene 5. Reading her husband's letter about the witches' prophecy, Lady Macbeth fears he is 'too full o' th' milk of human kindness / To catch the nearest way' - too gentle to seize the crown by murdering Duncan (Folger text). Shakespeare Online glosses the phrase as 'the gentleness of humanity, of human nature'. It is conventionally treated as a Shakespeare coinage and listed among the phrases The Phrase Finder credits to him. In the play it names a weakness Lady Macbeth wants stripped from her husband; in general English, reached through centuries of quotation, it settled into its modern role as a (usually ironic) measure of compassion, most often in the negative.
Research Sources
References used to check this entry’s meaning, history, or documented forms.
Variants
- full of the milk of human kindness
- milk of human kindness
- not a drop of the milk of human kindness
Usage Examples
- The tribunal's ruling was correct in law but showed little of the milk of human kindness.
- Fostering those teenagers took more patience than skill, and more milk of human kindness than either.
- Her neighbours rallied round with casseroles and hospital lifts - the milk of human kindness in plain action.