imprecations, but what they tell us about Lear. They show that, although
he has already recognised his injustice towards Cordelia, is secretly
blaming himself, and is endeavouring to do better, the disposition from
which his first error sprang is still unchanged. And it is precisely the
disposition to give rise, in evil surroundings, to calamities dreadful
but at the same time tragic, because due in some measure to the person
who endures them.
The perception of this connection, if it is not lost as the play
advances, does not at all diminish our pity for Lear, but it makes it
impossible for us permanently to regard the world displayed in this
tragedy as subject to a mere arbitrary or malicious power. It makes us
feel that this world is so far at least a rational and a moral order,
that there holds in it the law, not of proportionate requital, but of
strict connection between act and consequence. It is, so far, the world
of all Shakespeare's tragedies.
But there is another aspect of Lear's story, the influence of which
modifies, in a way quite different and more peculiar to this tragedy,
the impressions called pessimistic and even this impression of law.
There is nothing more noble and beautiful in literature than
Shakespeare's exposition of the effect of suffering in reviving the
greatness and eliciting the sweetness of Lear's nature. The occasional
recurrence, during his madness, of autocratic impatience or of desire
for revenge serves only to heighten this effect, and the moments when
his insanity becomes merely infinitely piteous do not weaken it. The old
King who in pleading with his daughters feels so intensely his own
humiliation and their horrible ingratitude, and who yet, at fourscore
and upward, constrains himself to practise a self-control and patience
so many years disused; who out of old affection for his Fool, and in
repentance for his injustice to the Fool's beloved mistress, tolerates
incessant and cutting reminders of his own folly and wrong; in whom the
rage of the storm awakes a power and a poetic grandeur surpassing even
that of Othello's anguish; who comes in his affliction to think of
others first, and to seek, in tender solicitude for his poor boy, the
shelter he scorns for his own bare head; who learns to feel and to pray
for the miserable and houseless poor, to discern the falseness of
flattery and the brutality of authority, and to pierce below the
differences of rank and raiment to the common humanity beneath; whose
sight is so purged by scalding tears that it sees at last how power and
place and all things in the world are vanity except love; who tastes in
his last hours the extremes both of love's rapture and of its agony, but
could never, if he lived on or lived again, care a jot for aught
beside--there is no figure, surely, in the world of poetry at once so
grand, so pathetic, and so beautiful as his. Well, but Lear owes the
whole of this to those sufferings which made us doubt whether life were
not simply evil, and men like the flies which wanton boys torture for
their sport. Should we not be at least as near the truth if we called
this poem _The Redemption of King Lear_, and declared that the business
of 'the gods' with him was neither to torment him, nor to teach him a
'noble anger,' but to lead him to attain through apparently hopeless
failure the very end and aim of life? One can believe that Shakespeare
had been tempted at times to feel misanthropy and despair, but it is
quite impossible that he can have been mastered by such feelings at the
time when he produced this conception.
To dwell on the stages of this process of purification (the word is
Professor Dowden's) is impossible here; and there are scenes, such as
that of the meeting of Lear and Cordelia, which it seems almost a
profanity to touch.[159] But I will refer to two scenes which may remind
us more in detail of some of the points just mentioned. The third and
fourth scenes of Act III. present one of those contrasts which speak as
eloquently even as Shakespeare's words, and which were made possible in
his theatre by the absence of scenery and the consequent absence of
intervals between the scenes. First, in a scene of twenty-three lines,
mostly in prose, Gloster is shown, telling his son Edmund how Goneril
and Regan have forbidden him on pain of death to succour the houseless
King; how a secret letter has reached him, announcing the arrival of a
French force; and how, whatever the consequences may be, he is
determined to relieve his old master. Edmund, left alone, soliloquises
in words which seem to freeze one's blood:
This courtesy, forbid thee, shall the duke
Instantly know; and of that letter too:
This seems a fair deserving, and must draw me
That which my father loses; no less than all:
The younger rises when the old doth fall.
He goes out; and the next moment, as the fourth scene opens, we find
ourselves in the icy storm with Lear, Kent and the Fool, and yet in the
inmost shrine of love. I am not speaking of the devotion of the others
to Lear, but of Lear himself. He had consented, merely for the Fool's
sake, to seek shelter in the hovel:
Come, your hovel.
Poor fool and knave, I have one part in my heart
That's sorry yet for thee.
But on the way he has broken down and has been weeping (III. iv. 17),
and now he resists Kent's efforts to persuade him to enter. He does not
feel the storm:
when the mind's free
The body's delicate: the tempest in my mind
Doth from my senses take all feeling else
Save what beats there:
and the thoughts that will drive him mad are burning in his brain:
Filial ingratitude!
Is it not as this mouth should tear this hand
For lifting food to't? But I will punish home.
No, I will weep no more. In such a night
To shut me out! Pour on; I will endure.
In such a night as this! O Regan, Goneril!
Your old kind father, whose frank heart gave all,--
O, that way madness lies; let me shun that;
No more of that.
And then suddenly, as he controls himself, the blessed spirit of
kindness breathes on him 'like a meadow gale of spring,' and he turns
gently to Kent:
Prithee, go in thyself; seek thine own ease:
This tempest will not give me leave to ponder
On things would hurt me more. But I'll go in.
In, boy; go first. You houseless poverty--
Nay, get thee in. I'll pray, and then I'll sleep.
But his prayer is not for himself.
Poor naked wretches, wheresoe'er you are,
it begins, and I need not quote more. This is one of those passages
which make one worship Shakespeare.[160]
Much has been written on the representation of insanity in _King Lear_,
and I will confine myself to one or two points which may have escaped
notice. The most obvious symptom of Lear's insanity, especially in its
first stages, is of course the domination of a fixed idea. Whatever
presents itself to his senses, is seized on by this idea and compelled
to express it; as for example in those words, already quoted, which
first show that his mind has actually given way:
Hast thou given all
To thy two daughters? And art thou come to this?[161]
But it is remarkable that what we have here is only, in an exaggerated
and perverted form, the very same action of imagination that, just
before the breakdown of reason, produced those sublime appeals:
O heavens,
If you do love old men, if your sweet sway
Allow obedience, if yourselves are old,
Make it your cause;
and:
Rumble thy bellyful! Spit, fire! spout, rain!
Nor rain, wind, thunder, fire, are my daughters:
I tax not you, you elements, with unkindness;
I never gave you kingdom, call'd you children,
You owe me no subscription: then let fall
Your horrible pleasure; here I stand, your slave,
A poor, infirm, weak, and despised old man:
But yet I call you servile ministers,
That have with two pernicious daughters join'd
Your high engender'd battles 'gainst a head
So old and white as this. O! O! 'tis foul!
Shakespeare, long before this, in the _Midsummer Night's Dream_, had
noticed the resemblance between the lunatic, the lover, and the poet;
and the partial truth that genius is allied to insanity was quite
familiar to him. But he presents here the supplementary half-truth that
insanity is allied to genius.
He does not, however, put into the mouth of the insane Lear any such
sublime passages as those just quoted. Lear's insanity, which destroys
the coherence, also reduces the poetry of his imagination. What it
stimulates is that power of moral perception and reflection which had
already been quickened by his sufferings. This, however partial and
however disconnectedly used, first appears, quite soon after the
insanity has declared itself, in the idea that the naked beggar
represents truth and reality, in contrast with those conventions,
flatteries, and corruptions of the great world, by which Lear has so
long been deceived and will never be deceived again:
Is man no more than this? Consider him well. Thou owest the
worm no silk, the beast no hide, the sheep no wool, the cat no
perfume. Ha! here's three on's are sophisticated: thou art the
thing itself.
Lear regards the beggar therefore with reverence and delight, as a
person who is in the secret of things, and he longs to question him
about their causes. It is this same strain of thought which much later
(IV. vi.), gaining far greater force, though the insanity has otherwise
advanced, issues in those famous Timon-like speeches which make us
realise the original strength of the old King's mind. And when this
strain, on his recovery, unites with the streams of repentance and love,
it produces that serene renunciation of the world, with its power and
glory and resentments and revenges, which is expressed in the speech (V.
iii.):
No, no, no, no! Come, let's away to prison:
We two alone will sing like birds i' the cage:
When thou dost ask me blessing, I'll kneel down,
And ask of thee forgiveness: so we'll live,
And pray, and sing, and tell old tales, and laugh
At gilded butterflies, and hear poor rogues
Talk of court news; and we'll talk with them too,
Who loses, and who wins; who's in, who's out;
And take upon's the mystery of things,
As if we were God's spies: and we'll wear out,
In a wall'd prison, packs and sets of great ones,
That ebb and flow by the moon.
This is that renunciation which is at the same time a sacrifice offered
to the gods, and on which the gods themselves throw incense; and, it may
be, it would never have been offered but for the knowledge that came to
Lear in his madness.
I spoke of Lear's 'recovery,' but the word is too strong. The Lear of
the Fifth Act is not indeed insane, but his mind is greatly enfeebled.
The speech just quoted is followed by a sudden flash of the old
passionate nature, reminding us most pathetically of Lear's efforts,
just before his madness, to restrain his tears:
Wipe thine eyes:
The good-years shall devour them, flesh and fell,
Ere they shall make us weep: we'll see 'em starve first.
And this weakness is still more pathetically shown in the blindness of
the old King to his position now that he and Cordelia are made
prisoners. It is evident that Cordelia knows well what mercy her father
is likely to receive from her sisters; that is the reason of her
weeping. But he does not understand her tears; it never crosses his mind
that they have anything more than imprisonment to fear. And what is that
to them? They have made that sacrifice, and all is well:
Have I caught thee?
He that parts us shall bring a brand from heaven,
And fire us hence like foxes.
This blindness is most affecting to us, who know in what manner they
will be parted; but it is also comforting. And we find the same mingling
of effects in the overwhelming conclusion of the story. If to the
reader, as to the bystanders, that scene brings one unbroken pain, it is
not so with Lear himself. His shattered mind passes from the first
transports of hope and despair, as he bends over Cordelia's body and
holds the feather to her lips, into an absolute forgetfulness of the
cause of these transports. This continues so long as he can converse
with Kent; becomes an almost complete vacancy; and is disturbed only to
yield, as his eyes suddenly fall again on his child's corpse, to an
agony which at once breaks his heart. And, finally, though he is killed
by an agony of pain, the agony in which he actually dies is one not of
pain but of ecstasy. Suddenly, with a cry represented in the oldest text
by a four-times repeated 'O,' he exclaims:
Do you see this? Look on her, look, her lips,
Look there, look there!
These are the last words of Lear. He is sure, at last, that she _lives_:
and what had he said when he was still in doubt?
She lives! if it be so,
It is a chance which does redeem all sorrows
That ever I have felt!
To us, perhaps, the knowledge that he is deceived may bring a
culmination of pain: but, if it brings _only_ that, I believe we are
false to Shakespeare, and it seems almost beyond question that any actor
is false to the text who does not attempt to express, in Lear's last
accents and gestures and look, an unbearable _joy_.[162]
To dwell on the pathos of Lear's last speech would be an impertinence,
but I may add a remark on the speech from the literary point of view. In
the simplicity of its language, which consists almost wholly of
monosyllables of native origin, composed in very brief sentences of the
plainest structure, it presents an extraordinary contrast to the dying
speech of Hamlet and the last words of Othello to the by-standers. The
fact that Lear speaks in passion is one cause of the difference, but not
the sole cause. The language is more than simple, it is familiar. And
this familiarity is characteristic of Lear (except at certain moments,
already referred to) from the time of his madness onwards, and is the
source of the peculiarly poignant effect of some of his sentences (such
as 'The little dogs and all....'). We feel in them the loss of power to
sustain his royal dignity; we feel also that everything external has
become nothingness to him, and that what remains is 'the thing itself,'
the soul in its bare greatness. Hence also it is that two lines in this
last speech show, better perhaps than any other passage of poetry, one
of the qualities we have in mind when we distinguish poetry as
'romantic.' Nothing like Hamlet's mysterious sigh 'The rest is silence,'
nothing like Othello's memories of his life of marvel and achievement,
was possible to Lear. Those last thoughts are romantic in their
strangeness: Lear's five-times repeated 'Never,' in which the simplest
and most unanswerable cry of anguish rises note by note till the heart
breaks, is romantic in its naturalism; and to make a verse out of this
one word required the boldness as well as the inspiration which came
infallibly to Shakespeare at the greatest moments. But the familiarity,
boldness and inspiration are surpassed (if that can be) by the next
line, which shows the bodily oppression asking for bodily relief. The
imagination that produced Lear's curse or his defiance of the storm may
be paralleled in its kind, but where else are we to seek the imagination
that could venture to follow that cry of 'Never' with such a phrase as
'undo this button,' and yet could leave us on the topmost peaks of
poetry?[163]
2
Gloster and Albany are the two neutral characters of the tragedy. The
parallel between Lear and Gloster, already noticed, is, up to a certain
point, so marked that it cannot possibly be accidental. Both are old
white-haired men (III. vii. 37); both, it would seem, widowers, with
children comparatively young. Like Lear, Gloster is tormented, and his
life is sought, by the child whom he favours; he is tended and healed by
the child whom he has wronged. His sufferings, like Lear's, are partly
traceable to his own extreme folly and injustice, and, it may be added,
to a selfish pursuit of his own pleasure.[164] His sufferings, again,
like Lear's, purify and enlighten him: he dies a better and wiser man
than he showed himself at first. They even learn the same lesson, and
Gloster's repetition (noticed and blamed by Johnson) of the thought in a
famous speech of Lear's is surely intentional.[165] And, finally,
Gloster dies almost as Lear dies. Edgar reveals himself to him and asks
his blessing (as Cordelia asks Lear's):
but his flaw'd heart--
Alack, too weak the conflict to support--
'Twixt two extremes of passion, joy and grief,
Burst smilingly.
So far, the resemblance of the two stories, and also of the ways in
which their painful effect is modified, is curiously close. And in
character too Gloster is, like his master, affectionate,[166] credulous
and hasty. But otherwise he is sharply contrasted with the tragic Lear,
who is a towering figure, every inch a king,[167] while Gloster is built
on a much smaller scale, and has infinitely less force and fire. He is,
indeed, a decidedly weak though good-hearted man; and, failing wholly to
support Kent in resisting Lear's original folly and injustice,[168] he
only gradually takes the better part. Nor is his character either very
interesting or very distinct. He often gives one the impression of being
wanted mainly to fill a place in the scheme of the play; and, though it
would be easy to give a long list of his characteristics, they scarcely,
it seems to me, compose an individual, a person whom we are sure we
should recognise at once. If this is so, the fact is curious,
considering how much we see and hear of him.
I will add a single note. Gloster is the superstitious character of the
drama,--the only one. He thinks much of 'these late eclipses in the sun
and moon.' His two sons, from opposite points of view, make nothing of
them. His easy acceptance of the calumny against Edgar is partly due to
this weakness, and Edmund builds upon it, for an evil purpose, when he
describes Edgar thus:
Here stood he in the dark, his sharp sword out,
Mumbling of wicked charms, conjuring the moon,
To prove's auspicious mistress.
Edgar in turn builds upon it, for a good purpose, when he persuades his
blind father that he was led to jump down Dover cliff by the temptation
of a fiend in the form of a beggar, and was saved by a miracle:
As I stood here below, methought his eyes
Were two full moons; he had a thousand noses,
Horns whelk'd and waved like the enridged sea:
It was some fiend; therefore, thou happy father,
Think that the clearest gods, who make them honours
Of men's impossibilities, have preserved thee.
This passage is odd in its collocation of the thousand noses and the
clearest gods, of grotesque absurdity and extreme seriousness. Edgar
knew that the 'fiend' was really Gloster's 'worser spirit,' and that
'the gods' were himself. Doubtless, however--for he is the most
religious person in the play--he thought that it _was_ the gods who,
through him, had preserved his father; but he knew that the truth could
only enter this superstitious mind in a superstitious form.
The combination of parallelism and contrast that we observe in Lear and
Gloster, and again in the attitude of the two brothers to their father's
superstition, is one of many indications that in _King Lear_ Shakespeare
was working more than usual on a basis of conscious and reflective
ideas. Perhaps it is not by accident, then, that he makes Edgar and Lear
preach to Gloster in precisely the same strain. Lear says to him:
If thou wilt weep my fortunes, take my eyes.
I know thee well enough; thy name is Gloster:
Thou must be patient; we came crying hither:
Thou know'st, the first time that we smell the air,
We wawl and cry. I will preach to thee: mark.
Edgar's last words to him are:
What, in ill thoughts again? Men must endure
Their going hence, even as their coming hither:
Ripeness is all.
Albany is merely sketched, and he is so generally neglected that a few
words about him may be in place. He too ends a better and wiser man than
he began. When the play opens he is, of course, only just married to
Goneril; and the idea is, I think, that he has been bewitched by her
fiery beauty not less than by her dowry. He is an inoffensive
peace-loving man, and is overborne at first by his 'great love' for his
wife and by her imperious will. He is not free from responsibility for
the treatment which the King receives in his house; the Knight says to
Lear, 'there's a great abatement of kindness appears as well in the
general dependants as in _the duke himself also_ and your daughter.' But
he takes no part in the quarrel, and doubtless speaks truly when he
protests that he is as guiltless as ignorant of the cause of Lear's
violent passion. When the King departs, he begins to remonstrate with
Goneril, but shrinks in a cowardly manner, which is a trifle comical,
from contest with her. She leaves him behind when she goes to join
Regan, and he is not further responsible for what follows. When he hears
of it, he is struck with horror: the scales drop from his eyes, Goneril
becomes hateful to him, he determines to revenge Gloster's eyes. His
position is however very difficult, as he is willing to fight against
Cordelia in so far as her army is French, and unwilling in so far as she
represents her father. This difficulty, and his natural inferiority to
Edmund in force and ability, pushes him into the background; the battle
is not won by him but by Edmund; and but for Edgar he would certainly
have fallen a victim to the murderous plot against him. When it is
discovered, however, he is fearless and resolute enough, beside being
full of kind feeling towards Kent and Edgar, and of sympathetic distress
at Gloster's death. And one would be sure that he is meant to retain
this strength till the end, but for his last words. He has announced his
intention of resigning, during Lear's life, the 'absolute power' which
has come to him; and that may be right. But after Lear's death he says
to Kent and Edgar:
Friends of my soul, you twain
Rule in this realm, and the gored state sustain.
If this means that he wishes to hand over his absolute power to them,
Shakespeare's intention is certainly to mark the feebleness of a
well-meaning but weak man. But possibly he means by 'this realm' only
that half of Britain which had belonged to Cornwall and Regan.
3
I turn now to those two strongly contrasted groups of good and evil
beings; and to the evil first. The members of this group are by no means
on a level. Far the most contemptible of them is Oswald, and Kent has
fortunately expressed our feelings towards him. Yet twice we are able to
feel sympathy with him. Regan cannot tempt him to let her open Goneril's
letter to Edmund; and his last thought as he dies is given to the
fulfilment of his trust. It is to a monster that he is faithful, and he
is faithful to her in a monstrous design. Still faithfulness is
faithfulness, and he is not wholly worthless. Dr. Johnson says: 'I know
not well why Shakespeare gives to Oswald, who is a mere factor of
wickedness, so much fidelity'; but in any other tragedy this touch, so
true to human nature, is only what we should expect. If it surprises us
in _King Lear_, the reason is that Shakespeare, in dealing with the
other members of the group, seems to have been less concerned than usual
with such mingling of light with darkness, and intent rather on making
the shadows as utterly black as a regard for truth would permit.
Cornwall seems to have been a fit mate for Regan; and what worse can be
said of him? It is a great satisfaction to think that he endured what to
him must have seemed the dreadful disgrace of being killed by a servant.
He shows, I believe, no redeeming trait, and he is a coward, as may be
seen from the sudden rise in his courage when Goneril arrives at the
castle and supports him and Regan against Lear (II. iv. 202). But as his
cruelties are not aimed at a blood-relation, he is not, in this sense, a
'monster,' like the remaining three.