The Division and Love

trial.

Lear of Shakespeare,-that sea where all the winds of tragedy meet in tumult.

This procedure is exhibited with peculiar daring in the much-discussed opening scene. Goethe branded it as 'irrational'; and irrational it is in so far as it throws into glaring prominence the sublime unreason of Lear. Far from rationalising the folktale motif, Shakespeare combines several incongruous versions of it in the chaotic purposes of the king. In some versions, as we have seen, the kingdom is to be equally divided, in others the shares are proportioned to the 'love.' It is reserved for Shakespeare's Lear after contemplating an equal division and assigning two 'ample thirds' to the elder daughters, to invite Cordelia to merit 'a third more opulent than your sisters.' In their subsequent attitude, again, the Leir of the Chronicle, and of the old play, were both consistent; the one had not abdicated, and therefore justly claimed his royal state; the other resigned his state with his crown. It was reserved for Shakespeare's Lear to insist upon keeping the authority of kingship after he had 'given it away.' The Leir of the old play brings no retinue to his daughter's house; the Leir of the Mirror for Magistrates brings sixty knights who are not described as unruly; it was reserved for Shakespeare's Lear to bring a hundred who 'hourly carp and quarrel,' and to meet resentful protests with the fierce intractable irony of his, 'Your name, fair gentlewoman?'-the ominous premonition of the frenzy of implacable rage which burns itself out only after consuming the vast tottering fabric of his mind, that 'tower sublime of yesterday, that royally did wear its crown of weeds.'

In the splendour of that consuming flame the tragedy reaches its climax. Lear's madness is rooted in his unreason, it is the inevitable fate of an

intellect too rigid and untaught to find its bearings in a world where its will is thwarted. But the shock which blurs his senses startles into activity new faculties of apprehension and divination. Insensibly before our eyes the proportions of things change, the irrational and intractable old man grows into the sublime embodiment of 'a grandeur that baffles the malice of daughters and of storms'; 'in the aberrations of his reason we discover a mighty irregular power of reasoning, immethodised from the ordinary purposes of life, but exerting its powers, as the wind bloweth where it listeth, at will upon the corruptions and abuses of mankind.'1

Then the lurid splendour fades, the great rage expires, and all that is left in the ruined mind, his vehement, childlike need of love, flings him, helpless as a child, into Cordelia's healing and upholding The gladness of her presence irradiates his

arms.

mind:

Come, let's away to prison :

We two alone will sing like birds i' the cage:

And take upon's the mystery of things

As if we were God's spies :

She fans the frail spark of his existence, and with the inexorable fate that stops her breath, it expires. Thus Shakespeare brings the old 'tragic tale' of Cordelia's desperate death, like all the other miseries of the story, into relation with the supreme pathos of the fate of Lear.

Story.

It was evidently as a foil to Lear's sublime agony The Gloster that Shakespeare introduced the crasser and more material Nemesis that visits the kindred folly of Gloster. The two stories have the obtrusive parallelism of Shakespeare's early comic plots-one of several

1 Charles Lamb.

points in which the drama on the technical side might be described as an assemblage of Shakespeare's discarded methods, touched to finer issues. In detail, however, they betray at once the different quality of their origin. Gloster's relations to Edmund and Edgar are expanded from the brief episode, in Sidney's Arcadia, of the Paphlagonian 'unkind king,' who is blinded by the son he favours, and the 'kind son' who then saves him by Edgar's dangerously fantastic stratagem. Across the woof of an immemorial Celtic folk-tale Shakespeare thus threw the modern fancy arabesque of an accomplished poet, with its deliberate audacities of horror and romance. The Gloster story echoes the theme of the Lear story in a duller and more conventional key, as the Laertes story echoes the story of Hamlet. The wrongs done and suffered are more grossly and glaringly criminal; but more deserved and less pathetic. Gloster's blinding far exceeds in material savagery any suffering inflicted upon Lear; but his dejected patience as he gropes with eyeless orbs towards Dover recalls only the meek suffering of the Leir of the Chronicle. His pangs stir in him no tempest of the mind. 'Poetic justice' is sublimely defied in the doom of Lear and of Cordelia; but Gloster is blinded by the child of his pleasant vices, and Edmund slain by the brother he has wronged. As Lear's tempest of the mind is opposed to Gloster's torments of the flesh, so the subtle malignity and blind, suicidal passion of Goneril and Regan stand in contrast with the cool, pragmatic villany of Gloster. Goneril and Their common passion for him is the most salient Regan. trait added by Shakespeare to the Goneril and Regan of tradition, and the death of one at the hands of the other strikes a last fierce note from the chord of violated blood-ties that resounds through

the play. But the dagger and the poison-bowl are not the habitual methods of the Shakespearean Regan and Goneril. They affect a subtler and more impalpable cruelty, conveyed through the forms of legal and speciously reasonable acts. Goneril does not, as in the old play, inflame Regan against Lear by slander, nor does Regan hire a murderer to despatch him. The exposure of Lear to the night and storm is, with wonderful art, made to appear the result of his headstrong choice. The two interwoven stories thus carry us through the whole gamut of suffering. No other tragedy is so charged with pain, so crowded with contrivers of harm. But no other is so lighted up with heroic goodness. The querulous laments of old Gloster over the 'machinations, hollowness, treachery, and ruinous disorders' of the time,-'in cities, mutinies; in countries, discord; in palaces, treason,'-express the groundwork of the tragedy, but hardly its groundtone. Anarchy is rampant, but true hearts abound,— lonely beacons of the moral order which is half effaced in the social fabric. Fidelity and frankness were the salient traits of the traditional Cordelia. Shakespeare not only gives these traits a heightened beauty in her, but repeats them, subtly varied and modulated, in a series of other characters;-in the rough-tongued, loyal Kent; in Cornwall's brave 'dunghill slave,' who insolently avenges the blinding of Gloster; and, not least, in that exquisite scherzo to Cordelia's andante the Fool. This characteristic type of the Comedies appears nowhere else in tragedy; but in the close of the comic period we find the Fool shaping towards the functions he performs in Lear. Frankness was his official prerogative; fidelity his added grace. The calamities of As You Like It are as the passing of a summer cloud compared with

The

those of Lear; but such as they are, Touchstone shares in them, throwing in his lot with his banished mistresses, and pricking their romantic extravagances with the rough-hewn bolts of his dry brain. overwhelming pathos of Lear is evolved from a situation in itself quite as capable of yielding farce; and as the tragedy deepens, humour melts into pathos in the chorus-like comments of the more exquisite and finely - tempered Touchstone who follows the king into the night and storm, and vanishes from our ken, like a wild dream-fancy, when the troubled morning breaks.