His Life and Genius 179 



common mistress when she had borne a child 

 to him, burdening himself thenceforth with a 

 drunken wife ; that Byron was a saint who 

 masked a pious life beneath the impious show 

 of a dissolute Don Juanism ; that the gentle and 

 genial Lamb was not set in the stocks once for 

 brawling on the Sabbath day. 



Such phrases as inconsistent, inconceivable, in- 

 congruous, contradictory, and their like, when 

 used in the examination and interpretation of the 

 qualities of a character, only betray imbecilities 

 of analysis.* At bottom the man is always an 

 organic unity, and the bad as essential and logical 

 a constituent of his nature as the good ; for what 

 strange compounds soever nature makes, and 



Nature has framed strange fellows in her time, 

 it does not make organic disunities, contrives 

 somehow to hold opposite polarities in unity of 

 being. To my mind it would be the most won- 

 derful thing in the psychological wonder which 

 Shakspeare is, if one who had never felt it could 

 have known " the expense of spirit in a waste of 

 shame," and expressed with tersest force and 

 consummate art of diction the fierce quest, the 



* If it be "a great philosophical truth " that " contradictions 

 cannot coexist," that is only to call contradictories things which 

 we cannot conceive to coexist, because they affect us so 

 oppositely; whereas the truth may be that they are funda- 

 mental continuities. It might perhaps be a deeper truth to 

 say that because they coexist in the whote they are necessarily 

 contradictory in the individual part of it. 



