Essays,' &c., has stated the grounds for his belief that the "Lear' of Shakspere may sustain a comparison with the master-pieces of the Greek tragedy. "The modern practice of blending comedy with tragedy, though liable to great abuse in point of practice, is undoubtedly an extension of the dramatic circle; but the comedy should be as in 'King Lear,' universal, ideal, and sublime. It is, perhaps, the intervention of this principle which determines the balance in favour of 'King Lear' against the 'Edipus Tyrannus,' or the 'Agamemnon,' or, if you will, the trilogies with which they are connected; unless the intense power of the choral poetry, especially that of the latter, should be considered as restoring the equilibrium. 'King Lear,' if it can sustain that comparison, may be judged to be the most perfect specimen of the dramatic art existing in the world." We can understand this now. But, if any writer before the commencement of the present century, and indeed long after, had talked of the comedy of Lear' as being “universal, ideal, and sublime," and had chosen that as the excellence to balance against "the intense power of the choral poetry" of Eschylus and Sophocles, he would have been referred to the authority of Voltaire, who, in his letter to the Academy, describes such works of Shakspere as forming "an obscure chaos, composed of murders and buffooneries, of heroism and meanness, of the language of the Halles, and of the highest interests." In certain schools of criticism, even yet, the notion that Lear' "may be judged to be the most perfect specimen of the dramatic art existing in the world," would be treated as a mere visionary conceit; and we should still be reminded that Shakзpere was a "wild and irregular genius," producing these results because he could not help it. In France are still heard the feeble echoes of the contest between the disciples of the romantic and the classic schools. M. Guizot stated, some twenty-five years ago, with his usual acuteness and good sense, some of the mistakes into which the opponents of the romantic school had fallen, from not perceiving that the productions of that school contained within themselves a principle of art. "This intellectual ferment can never cease, as long as the question shall be mooted as a contest between science and barbarism-the beauties of order, and the irregular influences of disorder; as long as we shall obstinately refuse to see, in the system of which Shakspere has traced the first outlines, nothing more than a liberty without restraint-an indefinite latitude, which lies open as much to the freaks of the imagination as to the course of genius. If the romantic system has its beauties, it has necessarily its art and its rules. Nothing is beautiful for man that does not owe its effect to certain combinations, of which our judgment may always disclose to us the secret when our emotions have borne witness to their power. The employment of these combinations constitutes art. Shakspere had his own art. To discover it in his works we must examine the means which he used, and the results to which he aspired."* These combinations, of which Guizot speaks, were as unknown to what has been called the Augustan age of English literature as the properties of electro-magnetism; and poor Nahum Tate did not unfitly represent his age when he said of Lear,' " It is a heap of jewels, unstrung and unpolished, yet so dazzling in their disorder that I soon perceived I had seized a treasure." The principle of appropriation here is exquisite. But, after all, we fancy that Tate was something like the cock in the fable, who, having found the jewel, in his secret heart wished it had been a grain of barley. Be this as it may, he set to work in good earnest in the stringing and polishing process. Let us proceed to examine the character of his workmanship. 66 Coleridge has remarked emphatically, what every diligent student of Shakspere must have been impressed with, the striking judgment which he displays in the management of his first scenes. The first scene of Lear' is very short, perfectly simple, has no elaborate descriptions of character, and contains only a slight and incidental notice of the events upon which the drama is to turn. Of course Tate rejected this scene; and, *Vie de Shakspeare.' without the necessary preparation of the dialogue between Kent and Gloster, he brings at once Edmund before us in the soliloquy, "Thou, nature, art my goddess." Shakspere, in his soliloquies, makes his characters pursue a certain train of ideas to a conclusion; and, by causing them to think aloud, he is enabled, without the slightest violation of propriety, to give the audience a due impression of their latent motives. He very rarely employs this expedient, but he never employs it in vain, or goes beyond its legitimate use. We have an example in the soliloquy of Iago at the end of the first act of Othello;' and the soliloquy of Edmund in the second scene of 'Lear' has precisely the same object in view. Tate, not understanding the art of Shakspere, and having no dramatic art in himself, makes the soliloquy an instrument for telling the audience what has happened; and instead of exhibiting the management by which Gloster is made to distrust and hate Edgar, he gives us a narrative of the affair, which Edmund tells to the audience under the pretence of talking to himself: "With success I've practised yet on both their easy natures. Here comes the old man, chafed with the information Which last I forged against my brother Edgar; And base-born Edmund, spite of law, inherits." It is no part of the plan of this notice to point out the differences between the language of Tate and the language of Shakspere. It is with the conduct of the drama only that we wish to deal. Gloster, of course, after this preparation, enters in a furious passion. The main business of the tragedy, by Tate's arrangement, has been thus inade subordinate to the secondary plot. But Lear is not quite forgotten: Gloster says to Kent, To quit the toils of empire, and divide His realms amongst his daughters. Heav'n succeed it, But much I fear the change." To which Kent replies,— "I grieve to see him With such wild starts of passion hourly seized As render majesty beneath itself." We may be sure that, if a dramatic purpose would have been served by a description of the temper of Lear, instead of an exhibition of it, Shakspere would have introduced such a description. But that was not his art; it sions by such clumsy and commonplace was for the jewel-stringer to convey impres means. We have one more new combination to notice in Tate's introductory scene-Edgar and Cordelia in love. Of the results of this combination we shall have presently to speak. In the mean time, let the lovers in the preparation of which Tate has put explain themselves through the nine lines out his poetical strength :: "Edg. Cordelia, royal fair, turn yet once more, And ere successful Burgundy receive "Cord. Alas! what would the wretched The more unfortunate Cordelia, The second scene of Tate, like the second scene of Shakspere, exhibits the trial by Lear of his daughters' affections, and the subsequent division of the kingdom. It was perfectly clear that, in changing the dramatic situation of Cordelia, Tate would destroy her character. But it is not within the range of human ingenuity to conjecture how effectually he has contrived to render one of the loveliest of Shakspere's creations not only uninteresting, but positively repulsive he has produced a selfish and dissimu "My lord, you wait the king, who comes relating Cordelia. These are the first words solved which she utters : "Now comes my trial. How am I distress'd That must with cold speech tempt the choleric king into a French intrigante. She does not profess as her sisters professed, not because she wanted the "glib and oily art," but because Rather to leave me dowerless, than condemn she desired to accomplish a secret purpose, me To Burgundy's embraces!" "Of the heavenly beauty of soul of Cordelia, pronounced in so few words, I will not venture to speak." This was the impression which Shakspere's Cordelia produced upon Schlegel. In the whole range of the Shaksperean drama there is nothing more extraordinary than the effect upon the mind of the character of Cordelia. Mrs. Jameson has truly said, "Everything in her seems to lie beyond our view, and affects us in a manner which we feel rather than perceive." In the first act she has only forty-three lines assigned to her: she does not appear again till the fourth act, in the fourth scene of which she has twenty-four lines, and, in the seventh, thirty-seven. In the fifth act she has five lines. Yet during the whole progress of the play we can never forget her; and, after its melancholy close, she lingers about our recollections as if we had seen some being more beautiful and purer than a thing of earth, who had communicated with us by a higher medium than that of words. And yet she is no mere abstraction ;—she is nothing more nor less than a personification of the holiness of womanhood. She is a creature formed for all sympathies, moved by all tenderness, prompt for all duty, prepared for all suffering; but she cannot talk of what she is, and what she purposes. The King of France describes the apparent reserve of her character as "A tardiness in nature, Which often leaves the history unspoke That it intends to do." She herself says, "If for I want that glib and oily art, that was to be carried by silence better than by words she would lose her dower that she might marry Edgar. One more specimen of the Tatification of Cordelia, and we have done. The love-scenes, be it understood, go forward; and in the third act Cordelia, herself wandering about, encounters Edgar in his mad disguise. "The tardiness in nature" of Shakspere is thus interpreted in the production which "Garrick and his followers, the showmen of the scene," have inflicted upon us almost up to the present day, under the sanction of Dr. John "Cord. By the dear vital stream that bathes my heart, These hallow'd rags of thine, and naked These abject tassels, these fantastic shreds, Need we exhibit more of the Cordelia which The mixed character of Shakspere's 'Lear' has been admirably dissected by Coleridge:"The strange, yet by no means unnatural mixture of selfishness, sensibility, and habit of feeling, derived from, and fostered by, the particular rank and usages of the individual; the intense desire of being intensely beloved, -selfish, and yet characteristic of the selfishness of a loving and kindly nature alone;— the self-supportless leaning for all pleasure on another's breast; - the craving after To speak, and purpose not; since what I well sympathy with a prodigal disinterestedness, intend, I'll do 't before I speak." But the conception of a character that should fill our minds without much talk, and withal magniloquent talk, was something too ethereal for Tate: so Cordelia is turned frustrated by its own ostentation, and the mode and nature of its claims;-the anxiety, the distrust, the jealousy, which more or less accompany all selfish affections, and are amongst the surest contradistinctions of mere fondness from true love, and which originate love;-all these traces of what Shakspere only could effect, are utterly destroyed by the stage conception of Lear, such as has been endured amongst us for more than a century. When the "showmen" banished the Fool, they rendered it impossible that the original nature of Lear should be understood. It is the Fool who interprets to us the old man's sensitive tenderness lying at the bottom of his impatience. He cannot bear to hear that "the Fool hath much pined away.”—“ No more of that, I have noted it well." From the Fool, Lear can bear to hear truth; his jealous pride is not alarmed: he indeed calls him "a pestilent gall," "a bitter fool;" but the Lear's eager wish to enjoy his daughter's human feelings,-a father's concentrated violent professions, whilst the inveterate habits of sovereignty convert the wish into claim and positive right, and an incompliance with it into crime and treason;-these facts, these passions, these moral verities, on which the whole tragedy is founded, are all prepared for, and will to the retrospect be found implied, in the first four or five lines of the play." They are implied, certainly, but the character which they make up is not described by Shakspere. When Regan and Goneril speak slightingly of their father, immediately after he has been lavishing his kingdom upon them, it is not the object of the poet to make us understand Lear, but to make us understand Regan and Goneril. This, again, was Shakspere's art :-Tate, the representative of the vulgar notion of art, must have a defined character-something positive, something generic-a bad man, a good man— a mild man, a passionate man-a good son, a cruel son. Upon this principle the Lear of Tate is the choleric king. Because Goneril characteristically speaks of "the unruly waywardness that infirm and choleric years bring with them," Gloster, in Tate, is made to say of Lear, "Yet has his temper ever been unfix'd, Chol'ric and sudden;" and, as if this were not enough to disturb an audience in the proper comprehension of the real Lear, we must have Cordelia call him "the choleric king," and, last of all, Lear himself must exclaim, in the trial-scene, "'t is said that I am choleric." And now, then, that we have got a choleric king—a simple, | unmixed, ranting, roaring, choleric king, he is in a fit condition to be stirred up by "the showmen of the scene." Charles Lamb would be immortal as a critic if he had only written these words:"Tate has put his hook in the nostrils of this leviathan, for Garrick and his followers, the showmen of the scene, to draw the mighty beast about more easily." All the wonderful gradations of his character are utterly destroyed;—all the thin partitions which separate passion from wildness, and wildness from insanity, and insanity from a partial restoration to the most intense of 66 'Poor, infirm, weak, and despis'd old man," in the depths of his misery, having scarcely anything in the world to love but the Fool, thus clings to him : "My wits begin to turnCome on, my boy: How dost, my boy? Art cold? I am cold myself. Where is this straw, my fellow? The art of our necessities is strange, That can make vile things precious. Come, your hovel: Poor fool and knave, I have one part in my heart That's sorry yet for thee." And all this is gone in the stage Lear. The "universal, ideal, and sublime" comedy, of which the Fool is the principal exponent, would have been incomprehensible to the Augustan age. We are quite sure that Tate would have got rid of the assumed madness of Edgar, if he had not found it convenient for the purpose of tacking a love-scene to it. As it is, he has brought the mad Tom and the mad king into juxtaposition. We do not suspect Tate of comprehending the metaphysical principle upon which Shakspere worked, and which Coleridge has so well expounded: -“ Edgar's assumed madness serves the great purpose of taking off part of the shock which would otherwise be caused by the true madness of Lear, and further displays the profound difference between the with all that is brought together;-the night the storms-the houselessness-Gloster with his eyes put out-the Fool-the semblance of a madman, and Lear in his madness, are all bound together by a strange kind of sympathy, confusion in the elements of nature, of human society and the human soul! Throughout all the play is there not sublimity felt amidst the continual presence of all kinds of disorder and confusion in the natural and moral world; -a continual consciousness of eternal order, law, and good? This it is that so exalts it in our eycs."* The love-scene between Edgar and Cordelia, in the first scene of the first act of Tate's two. In every attempt at representing | consecration of Lear's madness. It agrees madness throughout the whole range of dramatic literature, with the single exception of Lear, it is mere light-headedness, as especially in Otway. In Edgar's ravings, Shakspere all the while lets you see a fixed purpose, a practical end in view; in Lear's there is only the brooding of the one anguish, an eddy without progression." Tate has left us this contrast; but he has taken away the Fool, which completes the wonderful power of the third act of Shakspere's 'Lear.' The Fool, as well as Edgar, takes off part of the shock which would otherwise be caused by the madness of Lear, whilst he yet contributes to the completeness of that moral chaos which Shakspere has represented-" all external nature in a storm, all moral natureLear,' was an assurance, under the hand convulsed." A writer of very rare depth and discrimination has thus described these scenes of which Edgar and the Fool make up such important accessories:-"The two characters, father and king, so high to our imagination and love, blended in the reverend image of Lear—both in their destitution, yet both in their height of greatness-the spirit blighted, and yet undepressed-the wits gone, and yet the moral wisdom of a good heart left unstained, almost unobscured-the wild raging of the elements, joined with human outrage and violence to persecute the helpless, unresisting, almost unoffending suffererand he himself, in the midst of all imaginable misery and desolation, descanting upon himself, on the whirlwinds that drive around him, and then turning in tenderness to some of the wild motley associations of sufferers among whom he stands-all this is not like what has been seen on any stage, perhaps in any reality; but it has made a world to our imagination about one single imaginary individual, such as draws the reverence and sympathy which would seem to belong properly only to living men. It is like the remembrance of some wild perturbed scene of real life. Everything is perfectly woful in this world of woe. The very assumed madness of Edgar, which, if the story of Edgar stood alone, would be insufferable, and would utterly degrade him to us, seems, associated as he is with Lear, to come within the and seal of Tate, that the play would end happily. He might be constrained, in the impossibility of wholly destroying Shakspere, to exhibit to us some of the most terrific conflicts of human passion, and the most striking displays of human suffering. He could not utterly conceal the terrible workings of the mind of Lear, which had been laid bare by the "explosions of his passion." But he takes care to let it be understood that there is nothing real in this; that all will be right in the end; that, though the flames rage, the house is insured; that a wedding and a dance will terminate the play much better than the "dead march" of Shakspere. "Cordelia," says Dr. Johnson, "from the time of Tate, has always retired with victory and felicity. And, if my sensations could add anything to the general suffrage, I might relate, I was many years ago so shocked by Cordelia's death, that I know not whether I ever endured to read again the last scenes of the play till I undertook to revise them as an editor." This was a bold or a lazy avowal in Johnson; for Aristotle describes the popular admiration of the tragedy which ends happily for the good characters, and fatally for the bad, as a result of the "weakness of the spectators;"† and though Johnson vigorously attacked Aristotle's Unities-or rather the *Blackwood s Mag.,' vol. v. t Treatise on Poetry'-Twining's Translation. |