spirit of loyalty, unstimulated and unsupported by any faith which can be called theological. Kent, who has seen the vicissitude of things, knows of no higher power presiding over the events of the world than fortune. Therefore, all the more, Kent clings to the passionate instinct of right-doing, and to the hardy temper, the fortitude which makes evil, when it happens to come, endurable. It is Kent who utters his thought in the words— "Nothing almost sees miracles But misery." And the miracle he sees, in his distress, is the approaching succor from France, and the loyalty of Cordelia's spirit. It is Kent, again, who, characteristically making the best of an unlucky chance, exclaims, as he settles himself to sleep in the stocks, "Fortune, good night; smile once more, turn thy wheel." And again: "It is the stars, The stars above us, govern our conditions." And again (of Lear): "If Fortune brag of two she loved and hated, Accordingly, there is at once an exquisite tenderness in Kent's nature, and also a certain roughness and hardness, needful to protect, from the shocks of life, the tenderness of one who finds no refuge in communion with the higher powers, or in a creed of religious optimism. But Lear himself—the central figure of the tragedywhat of him? What of suffering humanity that wanders from the darkness into light, and from the light into the darkness? Lear is grandly passive-played upon by all the manifold sources of nature and of society. And though he is in part delivered from his imperious self-will, and learns, at last, what true love is, and that it exists in the world, Lear passes away from our sight, not in any mood of resignation or faith or illuminated peace, but in a piteous agony of yearning for that love which he had found only to lose forever. Does Shakspere mean to contrast the pleasure in a demonstration of spurious affection in the first scene with the agonized cry for real love in the last scene, and does he. wish us to understand that the true gain from the bitter discipline of Lear's old age was precisely this-his acquiring a supreme need of what is best, though a need which finds, as far as we can learn, no satisfaction? We guess at the spiritual significance of the great tragic facts of the world, but, after our guessing, their mysteriousness remains. Our estimate of this drama as a whole, Mr. Hudson has said, depends very much on the view we take of the Fool; and Mr. Hudson has himself understood Lear's " poor boy" with such delicate sympathy that to arrive at precisely the right point of view we need not go beyond his words: "I know not how I can better describe the Fool than as the soul of pathos in a sort of comic masquerade;. one in whom fun and frolic are sublimed and idealized into tragic beauty. . . . His 'laboring to outjest Lear's heart-struck injuries' tells us that his wits are set a-dancing by grief; that his jests bubble up from the depths of a heart struggling with pity and sorrow, as foam enwreathes the face of deeply troubled waters. . . . There is all along a shrinking, velvet-footed delicacy of step in the Fool's antics, as if awed by the holiness of the ground; and he seems bringing diversion to the thoughts, that he may the better steal a sense of woe into the heart. And I am not clear whether the inspired antics that sparkle from the surface of his mind are in more impressive contrast with the dark, tragic scenes into which they are thrown, like rockets into a midnight tempest, or with the undercurrent of deep tragic thoughtfulness out of which they falteringly issue and play."* Of the tragedy of King Lear a critic wishes to say as little as may be; for, in the case of this play, words are more than ordinarily inadequate to express or describe its true impression. A tempest or a dawn will not be analyzed in words; we must feel the shattering fury of the gale, we must watch the calm light broadening.† And the sensation experienced by the reader of King Lear resembles that produced by some grand natural phenomenon. The effect cannot be received at second-hand; it cannot be described; it can hardly be suggested. ‡ *"Shakespeare's Life, Art, and Characters," vol. ii., pp. 351, 352. What follows, too long to quote, is also excellent. † In Victor Hugo's volume of dithyrambic prophesying entitled "William Shakespeare," a passage upon King Lear (ed. 1869, pp. 205–209) is par. ticularly noteworthy His point of view-that the tragedy is "Cordelia," not "King Lear," that the old King is only an occasion for his daughter—is absolutely wrong; but the criticism, notwithstanding, catches largeness and passion from the play. "Et quelle figure que le père! quelle cariatide! C'est l'homme courbé. Il ne fait que changer de fardeaux, toujours plus lourds. Plus le vieillard faiblit, plus le poids augmente. Il vit sous la surcharge. Il porte d'abord l'empire, puis l'ingratitude, puis l'isolement, puis le désespoir, puis la faim et la soif, puis la folie, puis toute la nature. Les nuées viennent sur sa tête, les forêts l'accablent d'ombre, l'ouragan s'abat sur sa nuque, l'orage plombe són manteau, la pluie pèse sur ses épaules, il marche plié et hagard, comme s'il avait les deux genoux de la nuit sur son dos. Eperdu et immense, jette aux bourrasques et aux grêles ce cri épique: Pourquoi me haïssez-vous, tempêtes? pourquoi me persécutez-vous? vous n'êtes pas mes filles. Et alors, c'est fini; la lueur s'éteint, la raison se décourage, et s'en va, Lear est en enfance. Ah! il est enfant, ce vieillard. Eh bien! il lui faut une mère. Sa fille paraît. Son unique fille, Cordelia. Car les deux autres, Regane et Goneril ne sont plus ses filles que de la quantité nécessaire pour avoir droit au nom de parricides." For the description of "l'adorable allaitement," ," "the maternity of the daughter over the father," see what follows, p. 208. In addition to the medical studies of Lear's case by Doctors Bucknill and Kellogg, we may mention the "König Lear" of Dr. Carl Stark (Stutt gart, 1871), favorably noticed in Shakespeare-Jahrbuch, vol. vi. ; and again by Meissner, in his study of the play, Shakespeare-Jahrbuch, vol. vii., pp. 110–118 CHAPTER VI. THE ROMAN PLAYS. I. THE two books which contributed the largest material towards the building-up of Shakspere's art-structure were the chronicles of Holinshed, a quarry worked by the poet previous to 1600, and North's translation of Plutarch's "Lives," a quarry worked after 1600. To this latter source we owe Julius Caesar, Coriolanus, Antony and Cleopatra, and, in part, Timon of Athens. Shakspere treated the material which lay before him in Holinshed and in Plutarch with reverent care. It was not a happy falsifying of the facts of history to which he, as dramatist, aspired, but an imaginative rendering of the very facts themselves. Plutarch he follows even more studiously and closely than he followed Holinshed. Yet it is to be noted that, while Shakspere is profoundly faithful to Roman life and character, it is an ideal truth, truth spiritual rather than truth material, which he seeks to discover. His method, as critics have pointed out, is widely different from that of his contemporary, Ben Jonson. Mr. Knight, treating this subject, has said, "Jonson has left us two Roman plays produced essentially upon a different principle. In his Sejanus there is scarcely a speech or an incident that is not derived from the ancient authorities; and Jonson's own edition of the play is crowded with references as minute as would have been required from any modern annalist. His characters ... are made to speak according to the very words of ... Tacitus and Suetonius; but they are not living men.' Shakspere was aware that his personages must be men before they were Romans. He felt that the truth of poetry must be vital and self-evidencing; that if it has got hold of the fact, no reference to authority will make the validity of the fact more valid. He knew that the buttressing-up of art with erudition will not give stability to that which must stand by no aid of material props and stays, but, if at all, by virtue of the one living soul of which it is the body. The German romanticist critic Franz Horn has said that the hero of Shakspere's King John "stands not in the list of personages, and could not stand with them.... The hero is England." Mr. Knight adds that the hero of Shakspere's great classical trilogy is Rome. Important, however, as the political significance doubtless is, there is something more important. Whether at any time Shakspere was concerned as deeply about corporate life-ecclesiastical, political, or even national-as he was about the life and destiny of the individual man may well be questioned. But at this time the play of social forces certainly did not engage his imagination with exclusive or supreme interest. The struggle of patrician and plebeian is not the subject of Coriolanus, and the tragedy resolves itself by no solution of that political problem. Primarily, the tragedy is that of an individual soul. It is important to note the dates of these plays. Julius Caesar, which Malone assigned to the year 1607, is now, with good reason, carried back as early as 1601; and thus it lies side by side, in point of time, with Hamlet. After an interval of seven years or upwards, the *Charles Knight, "Studies of Shakspere" (1851), p. 405. + Mr. Halliwell pointed out the following lines in Weever's "Mirror of Martyrs" (1601): |