The entrance to the third period of Shakespeare is like the entrance to
that lost and lesser Paradise of old,
With dreadful faces thronged, and fiery arms.
Lear, Othello, Macbeth, Coriolanus, Antony, Timon, these are names indeed
of something more than tragic purport. Only in the sunnier distance
beyond, where the sunset of Shakespeare's imagination seems to melt or
flow back into the sunrise, do we discern Prospero beside Miranda,
Florizel by Perdita, Palamon with Arcite, the same knightly and kindly
Duke Theseus as of old; and above them all, and all others of his divine
and human children, the crowning and final and ineffable figure of
Imogen.
Of all Shakespeare's plays, _King Lear_ is unquestionably that in which
he has come nearest to the height and to the likeness of the one tragic
poet on any side greater than himself whom the world in all its ages has
ever seen born of time. It is by far the most AEschylean of his works;
the most elemental and primaeval, the most oceanic and Titanic in
conception. He deals here with no subtleties as in _Hamlet_, with no
conventions as in _Othello_: there is no question of "a divided duty" or
a problem half insoluble, a matter of country and connection, of family
or of race; we look upward and downward, and in vain, into the deepest
things of nature, into the highest things of providence; to the roots of
life, and to the stars; from the roots that no God waters to the stars
which give no man light; over a world full of death and life without
resting-place or guidance.
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.
For in this the most terrible work of human genius it is with the very
springs and sources of nature that her student has set himself to deal.
The veil of the temple of our humanity is rent in twain. Nature herself,
we might say, is revealed--and revealed as unnatural. In face of such a
world as this a man might be forgiven who should pray that chaos might
come again. Nowhere else in Shakespeare's work or in the universe of
jarring lives are the lines of character and event so broadly drawn or so
sharply cut. Only the supreme self-command of this one poet could so
mould and handle such types as to restrain and prevent their passing from
the abnormal into the monstrous: yet even as much as this, at least in
all cases but one, it surely has accomplished. In Regan alone would it
be, I think, impossible to find a touch or trace of anything less vile
than it was devilish. Even Goneril has her one splendid hour, her fire-
flaught of hellish glory; when she treads under foot the half-hearted
goodness, the wordy and windy though sincere abhorrence, which is all
that the mild and impotent revolt of Albany can bring to bear against her
imperious and dauntless devilhood; when she flaunts before the eyes of
her "milk-livered" and "moral fool" the coming banners of France about
the "plumed helm" of his slayer.
On the other side, Kent is the exception which answers to Regan on this.
Cordelia, the brotherless Antigone of our stage, has one passing touch of
intolerance for what her sister was afterwards to brand as indiscretion
and dotage in their father, which redeems her from the charge of
perfection. Like Imogen, she is not too inhumanly divine for the sense
of divine irritation. Godlike though they be, their very godhead is
human and feminine; and only therefore credible, and only therefore
adorable. Cloten and Regan, Goneril and Iachimo, have power to stir and
embitter the sweetness of their blood. But for the contrast and even the
contact of antagonists as abominable as these, the gold of their spirit
would be too refined, the lily of their holiness too radiant, the violet
of their virtue too sweet. As it is, Shakespeare has gone down perforce
among the blackest and the basest things of nature to find anything so
equally exceptional in evil as properly to counterbalance and make
bearable the excellence and extremity of their goodness. No otherwise
could either angel have escaped the blame implied in the very attribute
and epithet of blameless. But where the possible depth of human hell is
so foul and unfathomable as it appears in the spirits which serve as
foils to these, we may endure that in them the inner height of heaven
should be no less immaculate and immeasurable.
It should be a truism wellnigh as musty as Hamlet's half cited proverb,
to enlarge upon the evidence given in _King Lear_ of a sympathy with the
mass of social misery more wide and deep and direct and bitter and tender
than Shakespeare has shown elsewhere. But as even to this day and even
in respectable quarters the murmur is not quite duly extinct which would
charge on Shakespeare a certain share of divine indifference to
suffering, of godlike satisfaction and a less than compassionate content,
it is not yet perhaps utterly superfluous to insist on the utter fallacy
and falsity of their creed who whether in praise or in blame would rank
him to his credit or discredit among such poets as on this side at least
may be classed rather with Goethe than with Shelley and with Gautier than
with Hugo. A poet of revolution he is not, as none of his country in
that generation could have been: but as surely as the author of _Julius
Caesar_ has approved himself in the best and highest sense of the word at
least potentially a republican, so surely has the author of _King Lear_
avowed himself in the only good and rational sense of the words a
spiritual if not a political democrat and socialist.
It is only, I think, in this most tragic of tragedies that the sovereign
lord and incarnate god of pity and terror can be said to have struck with
all his strength a chord of which the resonance could excite such angry
agony and heartbreak of wrath as that of the brother kings when they
smote their staffs against the ground in fierce imperious anguish of
agonised and rebellious compassion, at the oracular cry of Calchas for
the innocent blood of Iphigenia. The doom even of Desdemona seems as
much less morally intolerable as it is more logically inevitable than the
doom of Cordelia. But doubtless the fatalism of _Othello_ is as much
darker and harder than that of any third among the plays of Shakespeare,
as it is less dark and hard than the fatalism of _King Lear_. For upon
the head of the very noblest man whom even omnipotence or Shakespeare
could ever call to life he has laid a burden in one sense yet heavier
than the burden of Lear, insomuch as the sufferer can with somewhat less
confidence of universal appeal proclaim himself a man more sinned against
than sinning.
And yet, if ever man after Lear might lift up his voice in that protest,
it would assuredly be none other than Othello. He is in all the
prosperous days of his labour and his triumph so utterly and wholly
nobler than the self-centred and wayward king, that the capture of his
soul and body in the unimaginable snare of Iago seems a yet blinder and
more unrighteous blow