His Life and Genius 131 



strange and ominous phenomena to mark the foul 

 night of the treacherous murder of Duncan. In- 

 tellectual disbelief of a superstition is not incon- 

 sistent with an emotional half-belief of it, which 

 half-belief shall in moments of great mental pertur- 

 bation become a positive conviction, as perhaps it 

 was with Gloucester in King Lear when he says : — 



These late eclipses in the sun and moon portend no good to 

 us : though the wisdom of Nature can reason it thus and thus, 

 yet Nature finds itself scourged by the sequent effects : love 

 cools, friendships fall off, brothers divide ; in cities, mutinies ; 

 in countries, discords ; in palaces, treason ; and the bond 

 cracked 'twixt son and father. 



Instead of unwise haste to blink or minimize 

 the disreputable events of his career, it might be 

 wiser to look upon them as having been the 

 necessary outcome of his character ; just as 

 essential a part of his life as his patient industry 

 and imaginative fertility, and nowise therefore 

 deplorable. Anyhow they were a part of it, 

 even if nature had done amiss in his composition, 

 and they ought properly not to have been. More 

 likely there was no such cosmic blunder, and it 

 was only from the deep basic materiality of his 

 nature that the sane and rich splendour of its 

 robust spirituality was or could have been 

 sublimed. Is not this inference perchance a 

 simple law of organic growth which, when he 

 clearly apprehends it, will dissolve the amazement 

 of the psychologist who, feeling his foundations 

 sink under him, staggers blindly at the seeming 

 inconsistency of vice and virtue in the same 



