either unconscious of its blemishes or regard them as almost irrelevant?
As soon as we turn to this question we recognise, not merely that _King
Lear_ possesses purely dramatic qualities which far outweigh its
defects, but that its greatness consists partly in imaginative effects
of a wider kind. And, looking for the sources of these effects, we find
among them some of those very things which appeared to us dramatically
faulty or injurious. Thus, to take at once two of the simplest examples
of this, that very vagueness in the sense of locality which we have just
considered, and again that excess in the bulk of the material and the
number of figures, events and movements, while they interfere with the
clearness of vision, have at the same time a positive value for
imagination. They give the feeling of vastness, the feeling not of a
scene or particular place, but of a world; or, to speak more accurately,
of a particular place which is also a world. This world is dim to us,
partly from its immensity, and partly because it is filled with gloom;
and in the gloom shapes approach and recede, whose half-seen faces and
motions touch us with dread, horror, or the most painful
pity,--sympathies and antipathies which we seem to be feeling not only
for them but for the whole race. This world, we are told, is called
Britain; but we should no more look for it in an atlas than for the
place, called Caucasus, where Prometheus was chained by Strength and
Force and comforted by the daughters of Ocean, or the place where
Farinata stands erect in his glowing tomb, 'Come avesse lo Inferno in
gran dispitto.'
Consider next the double action. It has certain strictly dramatic
advantages, and may well have had its origin in purely dramatic
considerations. To go no further, the secondary plot fills out a story
which would by itself have been somewhat thin, and it provides a most
effective contrast between its personages and those of the main plot,
the tragic strength and stature of the latter being heightened by
comparison with the slighter build of the former. But its chief value
lies elsewhere, and is not merely dramatic. It lies in the fact--in
Shakespeare without a parallel--that the sub-plot simply repeats the
theme of the main story. Here, as there, we see an old man 'with a white
beard.' He, like Lear, is affectionate, unsuspicious, foolish, and
self-willed. He, too, wrongs deeply a child who loves him not less for
the wrong. He, too, meets with monstrous ingratitude from the child whom
he favours, and is tortured and driven to death. This repetition does
not simply double the pain with which the tragedy is witnessed: it
startles and terrifies by suggesting that the folly of Lear and the
ingratitude of his daughters are no accidents or merely individual
aberrations, but that in that dark cold world some fateful malignant
influence is abroad, turning the hearts of the fathers against their
children and of the children against their fathers, smiting the earth
with a curse, so that the brother gives the brother to death and the
father the son, blinding the eyes, maddening the brain, freezing the
springs of pity, numbing all powers except the nerves of anguish and the
dull lust of life.[141]
Hence too, as well as from other sources, comes that feeling which
haunts us in _King Lear_, as though we were witnessing something
universal,--a conflict not so much of particular persons as of the
powers of good and evil in the world. And the treatment of many of the
characters confirms this feeling. Considered simply as psychological
studies few of them, surely, are of the highest interest. Fine and
subtle touches could not be absent from a work of Shakespeare's
maturity; but, with the possible exception of Lear himself, no one of
the characters strikes us as psychologically a _wonderful_ creation,
like Hamlet or Iago or even Macbeth; one or two seem even to be somewhat
faint and thin. And, what is more significant, it is not quite natural
to us to regard them from this point of view at all. Rather we observe a
most unusual circumstance. If Lear, Gloster and Albany are set apart,
the rest fall into two distinct groups, which are strongly, even
violently, contrasted: Cordelia, Kent, Edgar, the Fool on one side,
Goneril, Regan, Edmund, Cornwall, Oswald on the other. These characters
are in various degrees individualised, most of them completely so; but
still in each group there is a quality common to all the members, or one
spirit breathing through them all. Here we have unselfish and devoted
love, there hard self-seeking. On both sides, further, the common
quality takes an extreme form; the love is incapable of being chilled by
injury, the selfishness of being softened by pity; and, it may be added,
this tendency to extremes is found again in the characters of Lear and
Gloster, and is the main source of the accusations of improbability
directed against their conduct at certain points. Hence the members of
each group tend to appear, at least in part, as varieties of one
species; the radical differences of the two species are emphasized in
broad hard strokes; and the two are set in conflict, almost as if
Shakespeare, like Empedocles, were regarding Love and Hate as the two
ultimate forces of the universe.
The presence in _King Lear_ of so large a number of characters in whom
love or self-seeking is so extreme, has another effect. They do not
merely inspire in us emotions of unusual strength, but they also stir
the intellect to wonder and speculation. How can there be such men and
women? we ask ourselves. How comes it that humanity can take such
absolutely opposite forms? And, in particular, to what omission of
elements which should be present in human nature, or, if there is no
omission, to what distortion of these elements is it due that such
beings as some of these come to exist? This is a question which Iago
(and perhaps no previous creation of Shakespeare's) forces us to ask,
but in _King Lear_ it is provoked again and again. And more, it seems to
us that the author himself is asking this question. 'Then let them
anatomise Regan, see what breeds about her heart. Is there any cause in
nature that makes these hard hearts?'--the strain of thought which
appears here seems to be present in some degree throughout the play. We
seem to trace the tendency which, a few years later, produced Ariel and
Caliban, the tendency of imagination to analyse and abstract, to
decompose human nature into its constituent factors, and then to
construct beings in whom one or more of these factors is absent or
atrophied or only incipient. This, of course, is a tendency which
produces symbols, allegories, personifications of qualities and abstract
ideas; and we are accustomed to think it quite foreign to Shakespeare's
genius, which was in the highest degree concrete. No doubt in the main
we are right here; but it is hazardous to set limits to that genius. The
Sonnets, if nothing else, may show us how easy it was to Shakespeare's
mind to move in a world of 'Platonic' ideas;[142] and, while it would be
going too far to suggest that he was employing conscious symbolism or
allegory in _King Lear_, it does appear to disclose a mode of
imagination not so very far removed from the mode with which, we must
remember, Shakespeare was perfectly familiar in Morality plays and in
the _Fairy Queen_.
This same tendency shows itself in _King Lear_ in other forms. To it is
due the idea of monstrosity--of beings, actions, states of mind, which
appear not only abnormal but absolutely contrary to nature; an idea,
which, of course, is common enough in Shakespeare, but appears with
unusual frequency in _King Lear_, for instance in the lines:
Ingratitude, thou marble-hearted fiend,
More hideous when thou show'st thee in a child
Than the sea-monster!
or in the exclamation,
Filial ingratitude!
Is it not as this mouth should tear this hand
For lifting food to't?
It appears in another shape in that most vivid passage where Albany, as
he looks at the face which had bewitched him, now distorted with
dreadful passions, suddenly sees it in a new light and exclaims in
horror:
Thou changed and self-cover'd thing, for shame.
Be-monster not thy feature. Were't my fitness
To let these hands obey my blood,
They are apt enough to dislocate and tear
Thy flesh and bones: howe'er thou art a fiend,
A woman's shape doth shield thee.[143]
It appears once more in that exclamation of Kent's, as he listens to
the description of Cordelia's grief:
It is the stars,
The stars above us, govern our conditions;
Else one self mate and mate could not beget
Such different issues.
(This is not the only sign that Shakespeare had been musing over
heredity, and wondering how it comes about that the composition of two
strains of blood or two parent souls can produce such astonishingly
different products.)
This mode of thought is responsible, lastly, for a very striking
characteristic of _King Lear_--one in which it has no parallel except
_Timon_--the incessant references to the lower animals[144] and man's
likeness to them. These references are scattered broadcast through the
whole play, as though Shakespeare's mind were so busy with the subject
that he could hardly write a page without some allusion to it. The dog,
the horse, the cow, the sheep, the hog, the lion, the bear, the wolf,
the fox, the monkey, the pole-cat, the civet-cat, the pelican, the owl,
the crow, the chough, the wren, the fly, the butterfly, the rat, the
mouse, the frog, the tadpole, the wall-newt, the water-newt, the worm--I
am sure I cannot have completed the list, and some of them are mentioned
again and again. Often, of course, and especially in the talk of Edgar
as the Bedlam, they have no symbolical meaning; but not seldom, even in
his talk, they are expressly referred to for their typical
qualities--'hog in sloth, fox in stealth, wolf in greediness, dog in
madness, lion in prey,' 'The fitchew nor the soiled horse goes to't With
a more riotous appetite.' Sometimes a person in the drama is compared,
openly or implicitly, with one of them. Goneril is a kite: her
ingratitude has a serpent's tooth: she has struck her father most
serpent-like upon the very heart: her visage is wolvish: she has tied
sharp-toothed unkindness like a vulture on her father's breast: for her
husband she is a gilded serpent: to Gloster her cruelty seems to have
the fangs of a boar. She and Regan are dog-hearted: they are tigers, not
daughters: each is an adder to the other: the flesh of each is covered
with the fell of a beast. Oswald is a mongrel, and the son and heir of a
mongrel: ducking to everyone in power, he is a wag-tail: white with
fear, he is a goose. Gloster, for Regan, is an ingrateful fox: Albany,
for his wife, has a cowish spirit and is milk-liver'd: when Edgar as the
Bedlam first appeared to Lear he made him think a man a worm. As we
read, the souls of all the beasts in turn seem to us to have entered the
bodies of these mortals; horrible in their venom, savagery, lust,
deceitfulness, sloth, cruelty, filthiness; miserable in their
feebleness, nakedness, defencelessness, blindness; and man, 'consider
him well,' is even what they are. Shakespeare, to whom the idea of the
transmigration of souls was familiar and had once been material for
jest,[145] seems to have been brooding on humanity in the light of it.
It is remarkable, and somewhat sad, that he seems to find none of man's
better qualities in the world of the brutes (though he might well have
found the prototype of the self-less love of Kent and Cordelia in the
dog whom he so habitually maligns);[146] but he seems to have been
asking himself whether that which he loathes in man may not be due to
some strange wrenching of this frame of things, through which the lower
animal souls have found a lodgment in human forms, and there found--to
the horror and confusion of the thinking mind--brains to forge, tongues
to speak, and hands to act, enormities which no mere brute can conceive
or execute. He shows us in _King Lear_ these terrible forces bursting
into monstrous life and flinging themselves upon those human beings who
are weak and defenceless, partly from old age, but partly because they
_are_ human and lack the dreadful undivided energy of the beast. And the
only comfort he might seem to hold out to us is the prospect that at
least this bestial race, strong only where it is vile, cannot endure:
though stars and gods are powerless, or careless, or empty dreams, yet
there must be an end of this horrible world:
It will come;
Humanity must perforce prey on itself
Like monsters of the deep.[147]
The influence of all this on imagination as we read _King Lear_ is very
great; and it combines with other influences to convey to us, not in the
form of distinct ideas but in the manner proper to poetry, the wider or
universal significance of the spectacle presented to the inward eye. But
the effect of theatrical exhibition is precisely the reverse. There the
poetic atmosphere is dissipated; the meaning of the very words which
create it passes half-realised; in obedience to the tyranny of the eye
we conceive the characters as mere particular men and women; and all
that mass of vague suggestion, if it enters the mind at all, appears in
the shape of an allegory which we immediately reject. A similar conflict
between imagination and sense will be found if we consider the dramatic
centre of the whole tragedy, the Storm-scenes. The temptation of Othello
and the scene of Duncan's murder may lose upon the stage, but they do
not lose their essence, and they gain as well as lose. The Storm-scenes
in _King Lear_ gain nothing and their very essence is destroyed. It is
comparatively a small thing that the theatrical storm, not to drown the
dialogue, must be silent whenever a human being wishes to speak, and is
wretchedly inferior to many a storm we have witnessed. Nor is it simply
that, as Lamb observed, the corporal presence of Lear, 'an old man
tottering about the stage with a walking-stick,' disturbs and depresses
that sense of the greatness of his mind which fills the imagination.
There is a further reason, which is not expressed, but still emerges, in
these words of Lamb's: 'the explosions of his passion are terrible as a
volcano: they are storms turning up and disclosing to the bottom that
sea, his mind, with all its vast riches.' Yes, 'they are _storms_.' For
imagination, that is to say, the explosions of Lear's passion, and the
bursts of rain and thunder, are not, what for the senses they must be,
two things, but manifestations of one thing. It is the powers of the
tormented soul that we hear and see in the 'groans of roaring wind and
rain' and the 'sheets of fire'; and they that, at intervals almost more
overwhelming, sink back into darkness and silence. Nor yet is even this
all; but, as those incessant references to wolf and tiger made us see
humanity 'reeling back into the beast' and ravening against itself, so
in the storm we seem to see Nature herself convulsed by the same
horrible passions; the 'common mother,'
Whose womb immeasurable and infinite breast
Teems and feeds all,
turning on her children, to complete the ruin they have wrought upon
themselves. Surely something not less, but much more, than these
helpless words convey, is what comes to us in these astounding scenes;
and if, translated thus into the language of prose, it becomes confused
and inconsistent, the reason is simply that it itself is poetry, and
such poetry as cannot be transferred to the space behind the
foot-lights, but has its being only in imagination. Here then is
Shakespeare at his very greatest, but not the mere dramatist
Shakespeare.[148]
And now we may say this also of the catastrophe, which we found
questionable from the strictly dramatic point of view. Its purpose is
not merely dramatic. This sudden blow out of the darkness, which seems
so far from inevitable, and which strikes down our reviving hopes for
the victims of so much cruelty, seems now only what we might have
expected in a world so wild and monstrous. It is as if Shakespeare said
to us: 'Did you think weakness and innocence have any chance here? Were
you beginning to dream that? I will show you it is not so.'
I come to a last point. As we contemplate this world, the question
presses on us, What can be the ultimate power that moves it, that
excites this gigantic war and waste, or, perhaps, that suffers them and
overrules them? And in _King Lear_ this question is not left to us to
ask, it is raised by the characters themselves. References to religious
or irreligious beliefs and feelings are more frequent than is usual in
Shakespeare's tragedies, as frequent perhaps as in his final plays. He
introduces characteristic differences in the language of the different
persons about fortune or the stars or the gods, and shows how the
question What rules the world? is forced upon their minds. They answer
it in their turn: Kent, for instance:
It is the stars,
The stars above us, govern our condition:
Edmund:
Thou, nature, art my goddess; to thy law
My services are bound:
and again,
This is the excellent foppery of the world, that, when we are
sick in fortune--often the surfeit of our own behaviour--we
make guilty of our disasters the sun, the moon and the stars;
as if we were villains by necessity, fools by heavenly
compulsion, ... and all that we are evil in by a divine
thrusting on:
Gloster:
As flies to wanton boys are we to the gods;
They kill us for their sport;
Edgar:
Think that the clearest gods, who make them honours
Of men's impossibilities, have preserved thee.
Here we have four distinct theories of the nature of the ruling power.
And besides this, in such of the characters as have any belief in gods
who love good and hate evil, the spectacle of triumphant injustice or
cruelty provokes questionings like those of Job, or else the thought,
often repeated, of divine retribution. To Lear at one moment the storm
seems the messenger of heaven:
Let the great gods,
That keep this dreadful pother o'er our heads,
Find out their enemies now. Tremble, thou wretch,
That hast within thee undivulged crimes....
At another moment those habitual miseries of the poor, of which he has
taken too little account, seem to him to accuse the gods of injustice:
Take physic, pomp;
Expose thyself to feel what wretches feel,
That thou mayst shake the superflux to them
And show the heavens more just;
and Gloster has almost the same thought (IV. i. 67 ff.). Gloster again,
thinking of the cruelty of Lear's daughters, breaks out,
but I shall see
The winged vengeance overtake such children.
The servants who have witnessed the blinding of Gloster by Cornwall and
Regan, cannot believe that cruelty so atrocious will pass unpunished.
One cries,
I'll never care what wickedness I do,
If this man come to good;
and another,
if she live long,
And in the end meet the old course of death,
Women will all turn monsters.
Albany greets the news of Cornwall's death with the exclamation,
This shows you are above,
You justicers, that these our nether crimes
So speedily can venge;
and the news of the deaths of the sisters with the words,
This judgment[149] of the heavens, that makes us tremble,
Touches us not with pity.
Edgar, speaking to Edmund of their father, declares
The gods are just, and of our pleasant vices
Make instruments to plague us,
and Edmund himself assents. Almost throughout the latter half of the
drama we note in most of the better characters a pre-occupation with the
question of the ultimate power, and a passionate need to explain by
reference to it what otherwise would drive them to despair. And the
influence of this pre-occupation and need joins with other influences in
affecting the imagination, and in causing it to receive from _King Lear_
an impression which is at least as near of kin to the _Divine Comedy_ as
to _Othello_.
3
For Dante that which is recorded in the _Divine Comedy_ was the justice
and love of God. What did _King Lear_ record for Shakespeare? Something,
it would seem, very different. This is certainly the most terrible
picture that Shakespeare painted of the world. In no other of his
tragedies does humanity appear more pitiably infirm or more hopelessly
bad. What is Iago's malignity against an envied stranger compared with
the cruelty of the son of Gloster and the daughters of Lear? What are
the sufferings of a strong man like Othello to those of helpless age?
Much too that we have already observed--the repetition of the main theme
in that of the under-plot, the comparisons of man with the most wretched
and the most horrible of the beasts, the impression of Nature's
hostility to him, the irony of the unexpected catastrophe--these, with
much else, seem even to indicate an intention to show things at their
worst, and to return the sternest of replies to that question of the
ultimate power and those appeals for retribution. Is it an accident, for
example, that Lear's first appeal to something beyond the earth,
O heavens,
If you do love old men, if your sweet sway
Allow[150] obedience, if yourselves are old,
Make it your cause:
is immediately answered by the iron voices of his daughters, raising by
turns the conditions on which they will give him a humiliating
harbourage; or that his second appeal, heart-rending in its piteousness,
You see me here, you gods, a poor old man,
As full of grief as age; wretched in both:
is immediately answered from the heavens by the sounds of the breaking
storm?[151] Albany and Edgar may moralise on the divine justice as they
will, but how, in face of all that we see, shall we believe that they
speak Shakespeare's mind? Is not his mind rather expressed in the bitter
contrast between their faith and the events we witness, or in the
scornful rebuke of those who take upon them the mystery of things as if
they were God's spies?[152] Is it not Shakespeare's judgment on his kind
that we hear in Lear's appeal,
And thou, all-shaking thunder,
Smite flat the thick rotundity o' the world!
Crack nature's moulds, all germens spill at once,
That make ingrateful man!
and Shakespeare's judgment on the worth of existence that we hear in
Lear's agonised cry, 'No, no, no life!'?
Beyond doubt, I think, some such feelings as these possess us, and, if
we follow Shakespeare, ought to possess us, from time to time as we read
_King Lear_. And some readers will go further and maintain that this is
also the ultimate and total impression left by the tragedy. _King Lear_
has been held to be profoundly 'pessimistic' in the full meaning of that
word,--the record of a time when contempt and loathing for his kind had
overmastered the poet's soul, and in despair he pronounced man's life to
be simply hateful and hideous. And if we exclude the biographical part
of this view,[153] the rest may claim some support even from the
greatest of Shakespearean critics since the days of Coleridge, Hazlitt
and Lamb. Mr. Swinburne, after observing that _King Lear_ is 'by far the
most Aeschylean' of Shakespeare's works, proceeds thus:
'But in one main point it differs radically from the work and the spirit
of Aeschylus. Its fatalism is of a darker and harder nature. To
Prometheus the fetters of the lord and enemy of mankind were bitter;
upon Orestes the hand of heaven was laid too heavily to bear; yet in the
not utterly infinite or everlasting distance we see beyond them the
promise of the morning on which mystery and justice shall be made one;
when righteousness and omnipotence at last shall kiss each other. But on
the horizon of Shakespeare's tragic fatalism we see no such twilight of
atonement, such pledge of reconciliation as this. Requital, redemption,
amends, equity, explanation, pity and mercy, are words without a meaning
here.
As flies to wanton boys are we to the gods;
They kill us for their sport.
Here is no need of the Eumenides, children of Night everlasting; for
here is very Night herself.
'The words just cited are not casual or episodical; they strike the
keynote of the whole poem, lay the keystone of the whole arch of
thought. There is no contest of conflicting forces, no judgment so much
as by casting of lots: far less is there any light of heavenly harmony
or of heavenly wisdom, of Apollo or Athene from above. We have heard
much and often from theologians of the light of revelation: and some
such thing indeed we find in Aeschylus; but the darkness of revelation
is here.'[154]
It is hard to refuse assent to these eloquent words, for they express in
the language of a poet what we feel at times in reading _King Lear_ but
cannot express. But do they represent the total and final impression
produced by the play? If they do, this impression, so far as the
substance of the drama is concerned (and nothing else is in question
here), must, it would seem, be one composed almost wholly of painful
feelings,--utter depression, or indignant rebellion, or appalled
despair. And that would surely be strange. For _King Lear_ is admittedly
one of the world's greatest poems, and yet there is surely no other of
these poems which produces on the whole this effect, and we regard it as
a very serious flaw in any considerable work of art that this should be
its ultimate effect.[155] So that Mr. Swinburne's description, if taken
as final, and any description of King Lear as 'pessimistic' in the
proper sense of that word, would imply a criticism which is not
intended, and which would make it difficult to leave the work in the
position almost universally assigned to it.