Part 20 (2/2)
Then everything includes itself in power, Power into will, will into appet.i.te; And appet.i.te, an universal wolf, So doubly seconded with will and power, Must make perforce an universal prey, And last eat up himself.]
[Footnote 148: Nor is it believable that Shakespeare, whose means of imitating a storm were so greatly inferior even to ours, had the stage-performance only or chiefly in view in composing these scenes. He may not have thought of readers (or he may), but he must in any case have written to satisfy his own imagination. I have taken no notice of the part played in these scenes by anyone except Lear. The matter is too huge, and too strictly poetic, for a.n.a.lysis. I may observe that in our present theatres, owing to the use of elaborate scenery, the three Storm-scenes are usually combined, with disastrous effect. Shakespeare, as we saw (p. 49), interposed between them short scenes of much lower tone.]
[Footnote 149: 'justice,' Qq.]
[Footnote 150: =approve.]
[Footnote 151: The direction 'Storm and tempest' at the end of this speech is not modern, it is in the Folio.]
[Footnote 152: The G.o.ds are mentioned many times in _King Lear_, but 'G.o.d' only here (V. ii. 16).]
[Footnote 153: The whole question how far Shakespeare's works represent his personal feelings and att.i.tude, and the changes in them, would carry us so far beyond the bounds of the four tragedies, is so needless for the understanding of them, and is so little capable of decision, that I have excluded it from these lectures; and I will add here a note on it only as it concerns the 'tragic period.'
There are here two distinct sets of facts, equally important, (1) On the one side there is the fact that, so far as we can make out, after _Twelfth Night_ Shakespeare wrote, for seven or eight years, no play which, like many of his earlier works, can be called happy, much less merry or sunny. He wrote tragedies; and if the chronological order _Hamlet_, _Oth.e.l.lo_, _King Lear_, _Timon_, _Macbeth_, is correct, these tragedies show for some time a deepening darkness, and _King Lear_ and _Timon_ lie at the nadir. He wrote also in these years (probably in the earlier of them) certain 'comedies,' _Measure for Measure_ and _Troilus and Cressida_, and perhaps _All's Well_. But about these comedies there is a peculiar air of coldness; there is humour, of course, but little mirth; in _Measure for Measure_ perhaps, certainly in _Troilus and Cressida_, a spirit of bitterness and contempt seems to pervade an intellectual atmosphere of an intense but hard clearness. With _Macbeth_ perhaps, and more decidedly in the two Roman tragedies which followed, the gloom seems to lift; and the final romances show a mellow serenity which sometimes warms into radiant sympathy, and even into a mirth almost as light-hearted as that of younger days. When we consider these facts, not as barely stated thus but as they affect us in reading the plays, it is, to my mind, very hard to believe that their origin was simply and solely a change in dramatic methods or choice of subjects, or even merely such inward changes as may be expected to accompany the arrival and progress of middle age.
(2) On the other side, and over against these facts, we have to set the mult.i.tudinousness of Shakespeare's genius, and his almost unlimited power of conceiving and expressing human experience of all kinds. And we have to set more. Apparently during this period of years he never ceased to write busily, or to exhibit in his writings the greatest mental activity. He wrote also either nothing or very little (_Troilus and Cressida_ and his part of _Timon_ are the possible exceptions) in which there is any appearance of personal feeling overcoming or seriously endangering the self-control or 'objectivity' of the artist. And finally it is not possible to make out any continuously deepening _personal_ note: for although _Oth.e.l.lo_ is darker than _Hamlet_ it surely strikes one as about as impersonal as a play can be; and, on grounds of style and versification, it appears (to me, at least) impossible to bring _Troilus and Cressida_ chronologically close to _King Lear_ and _Timon_; even if parts of it are later than others, the late parts must be decidedly earlier than those plays.
The conclusion we may very tentatively draw from these sets of facts would seem to be as follows. Shakespeare during these years was probably not a happy man, and it is quite likely that he felt at times even an intense melancholy, bitterness, contempt, anger, possibly even loathing and despair. It is quite likely too that he used these experiences of his in writing such plays as _Hamlet_, _Troilus and Cressida_, _King Lear_, _Timon_. But it is evident that he cannot have been for any considerable time, if, ever, overwhelmed by such feelings, and there is no appearance of their having issued in any settled 'pessimistic'
conviction which coloured his whole imagination and expressed itself in his works. The choice of the subject of ingrat.i.tude, for instance, in _King Lear_ and _Timon_, and the method of handling it, may have been due in part to personal feeling; but it does not follow that this feeling was particularly acute at this particular time, and, even if it was, it certainly was not so absorbing as to hinder Shakespeare from representing in the most sympathetic manner aspects of life the very reverse of pessimistic. Whether the total impression of _King Lear_ can be called pessimistic is a further question, which is considered in the text.]
[Footnote 154: _A Study of Shakespeare_, pp. 171, 172.]
[Footnote 155: A flaw, I mean, in a work of art considered not as a moral or theological doc.u.ment but as a work of art,--an aesthetic flaw.
I add the word 'considerable' because we do not regard the effect in question as a flaw in a work like a lyric or a short piece of music, which may naturally be taken as expressions merely of a mood or a subordinate aspect of things.]
[Footnote 156: Caution is very necessary in making comparisons between Shakespeare and the Greek dramatists. A tragedy like the _Antigone_ stands, in spite of differences, on the same ground as a Shakespearean tragedy; it is a self-contained whole with a catastrophe. A drama like the _Philoctetes_ is a self-contained whole, but, ending with a solution, it corresponds not with a Shakespearean tragedy but with a play like _Cymbeline_. A drama like the _Agamemnon_ or the _Prometheus Vinctus_ answers to no Shakespearean form of play. It is not a self-contained whole, but a part of a trilogy. If the trilogy is considered as a unit, it answers not to _Hamlet_ but to _Cymbeline_. If the part is considered as a whole, it answers to _Hamlet_, but may then be open to serious criticism. Shakespeare never made a tragedy end with the complete triumph of the worse side: the _Agamemnon_ and _Prometheus_, if wrongly taken as wholes, would do this, and would so far, I must think, be bad tragedies. [It can scarcely be necessary to remind the reader that, in point of 'self-containedness,' there is a difference of degree between the pure tragedies of Shakespeare and some of the historical.]]
[Footnote 157: I leave it to better authorities to say how far these remarks apply also to Greek Tragedy, however much the language of 'justice' may be used there.]
LECTURE VIII
KING LEAR
We have now to look at the characters in _King Lear_; and I propose to consider them to some extent from the point of view indicated at the close of the last lecture, partly because we have so far been regarding the tragedy mainly from an opposite point of view, and partly because these characters are so numerous that it would not be possible within our limits to examine them fully.
1
The position of the hero in this tragedy is in one important respect peculiar. The reader of _Hamlet_, _Oth.e.l.lo_, or _Macbeth_, is in no danger of forgetting, when the catastrophe is reached, the part played by the hero in bringing it on. His fatal weakness, error, wrong-doing, continues almost to the end. It is otherwise with _King Lear_. When the conclusion arrives, the old King has for a long while been pa.s.sive. We have long regarded him not only as 'a man more sinned against than sinning,' but almost wholly as a sufferer, hardly at all as an agent.
His sufferings too have been so cruel, and our indignation against those who inflicted them has been so intense, that recollection of the wrong he did to Cordelia, to Kent, and to his realm, has been well-nigh effaced. Lastly, for nearly four Acts he has inspired in us, together with this pity, much admiration and affection. The force of his pa.s.sion has made us feel that his nature was great; and his frankness and generosity, his heroic efforts to be patient, the depth of his shame and repentance, and the ecstasy of his re-union with Cordelia, have melted our very hearts. Naturally, therefore, at the close we are in some danger of forgetting that the storm which has overwhelmed him was liberated by his own deed.
Yet it is essential that Lear's contribution to the action of the drama should be remembered; not at all in order that we may feel that he 'deserved' what he suffered, but because otherwise his fate would appear to us at best pathetic, at worst shocking, but certainly not tragic. And when we were reading the earlier scenes of the play we recognised this contribution clearly enough. At the very beginning, it is true, we are inclined to feel merely pity and misgivings. The first lines tell us that Lear's mind is beginning to fail with age.[158] Formerly he had perceived how different were the characters of Albany and Cornwall, but now he seems either to have lost this perception or to be unwisely ignoring it. The rashness of his division of the kingdom troubles us, and we cannot but see with concern that its motive is mainly selfish.
The absurdity of the pretence of making the division depend on protestations of love from his daughters, his complete blindness to the hypocrisy which is patent to us at a glance, his piteous delight in these protestations, the openness of his expressions of preference for his youngest daughter--all make us smile, but all pain us. But pity begins to give way to another feeling when we witness the precipitance, the despotism, the uncontrolled anger of his injustice to Cordelia and Kent, and the 'hideous rashness' of his persistence in dividing the kingdom after the rejection of his one dutiful child. We feel now the presence of force, as well as weakness, but we feel also the presence of the tragic [Greek: hubris]. Lear, we see, is generous and unsuspicious, of an open and free nature, like Hamlet and Oth.e.l.lo and indeed most of Shakespeare's heroes, who in this, according to Ben Jonson, resemble the poet who made them. Lear, we see, is also choleric by temperament--the first of Shakespeare's heroes who is so. And a long life of absolute power, in which he has been flattered to the top of his bent, has produced in him that blindness to human limitations, and that presumptuous self-will, which in Greek tragedy we have so often seen stumbling against the altar of Nemesis. Our consciousness that the decay of old age contributes to this condition deepens our pity and our sense of human infirmity, but certainly does not lead us to regard the old King as irresponsible, and so to sever the tragic _nexus_ which binds together his error and his calamities.
The magnitude of this first error is generally fully recognised by the reader owing to his sympathy with Cordelia, though, as we have seen, he often loses the memory of it as the play advances. But this is not so, I think, with the repet.i.tion of this error, in the quarrel with Goneril.
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