Page:The Psychology of Shakespeare.pdf/21

6 country are qualities of nerve force which future circumstances will direct to good or evil purposes. Circumstances arise soliciting to evil; "supernatural soliciting," the force of which, in these anti-spiritualist days, it requires an almost unattainable flight of imagination to get a glimpse of. It must be remembered that the drama brings Macbeth face to face with the supernatural, with that devil's brood the weird Sisters, so unlike the inhabitants of earth, who, after a prophecy immediately fulfilled, "made themselves air into which they vanished." What would be the effect upon a man of nervous sensibility, of such appearances? Surely most profound. Well may Hazlitt say, that "he can conceive no common actor to look like a man who had encountered the weird Sisters." When they had "melted as breath into the wind," even the firm tempered and judicious Banquo exclaims:

We may disbelieve in any manifestations of the supernatural; but we cannot but believe that were their occurrence possible, it would profoundly affect the mind. Humboldt says, that the effect of the first earthquake shock is most bewildering, unsettling one of the strongest articles of material faith, namely, the fixedness of the earth. Any supernatural appearance must have this effect of shaking the foundations of the mind in an infinitely greater degree. Indeed, we so fully feel that any glimpse into the spirit-world would effect in ourselves a profound mental revulsion, that we intuitively extend to Macbeth a more indulgent opinion of his great crimes, than we should have been able to do had he been led on to their commission by the temptations of earthly incident alone.

Macbeth is no villain in-grain, like Richard the Third or