But before coming to that, we must say a word about Cordelia. The extraordinary vividness of her portrayal, considering the brevity of her role, has often been commented on. The beauty of her nature-its sincerity and its combined strength and tenderness-goes far toward explaining the clarity of impression. But it is the fact that never for an instant do we for- get her that compensates for the infrequency of her physical presence. Shakespeare sees to this in several \ways. The antithesis with her sisters, to begin with, brings her to mind \whenever they are on the stage. His sense of guilt with regard to her keeps her perpetually in Lear's memory-and so in ours. And the Fool's love for her, both on its own account and because he is forever insinuating thoughts of her into the King's mind, works the same way. Kent, too, makes his contribution. ~the best verbal embodiment I can think of for what Shakespeare's magic gradually turns Cordelia into in our imaginations is that starry phrase of Emily Dickinson's: Bright Absentee. Bright Absentee: that is exactly what Cordelia is during most of the play, and the phrase is doubly appropriate when we remember that the Cordelia-like New England poetess employed it to express a not less spiritual love than Cordelia's of a younger woman for an older man.
Now the fact and the success of this method of characterizing Cordelia are generally felt, I believe, but what is not recognized is that Shakespeare used it not just because it fitted the plot and was effective, but for a minutely specific reason. The last scene of this fourth act, the most tenderly pathetic in the play, begins to apprise us of what that reason is.
The place is a tent in the French camp. Lear is brought in asleep, and we hear and see administered the two of all the medicines in the world that in addition to sleep itself can bring back his sanity, if any can: music and Cordelia's kiss. The King gives signs of returning consciousness. "He wakes," says Cordelia to the Doctor, "speak to him." But like most of Shakespeare's physicians, this one has psychological insight as well as physiological skill, as his use of music as a healer has already hinted. "Madam, do you; 'tis fittest," he replies to Cordelia. Whereupon, with a wisdom equal to his, she addresses her father by his former title, seeking thereby to preserve his mental continuity:
How does my royal lord? How fares your majesty?
But Lear believes he has awakened in hell and is gazing across a great gulf toward one in heaven:
LEAR: You do me wrong to take me out 0' the grave: Thou art a soul in bliss; but I am bound
Upon a wheel of fire, that mine own tears Do scald like molten lead.
COR.: Sir, do you know me?
LEAR: You are a spirit, I know. When did you die?
Lear is "still, still, far wide!" as Cordelia expresses it under her breath. Yet in another sense, as it befits Cordelia alone not to know, Lear was never before so near the mark. Cordelia, we know, is a spirit, and, in that shining line, Shakespeare harvests the promise of four full acts which have been subtly contrived to convince us of the same truth. That which without being apprehensible to the senses is nevertheless undeniably present is a spirit-and that Cordelia has been through most of the play. Now she becomes visibly that to Lear, and \ve, as readers or spectators, Blust be able to enter into the old man's vision, or the effect is lost. Shakespeare has abundantly seen to it that we shall be able. Here is that unkno\vn S0111e- thing that is indeed "dearer than eyesight"-something that is related to eyesight as eyesight is to blindness.
It is a pity to skip even one line of this transcendent scene. But we must. What a descent from king and warrior to this very foolish fond old man, fourscore and up\\rard, who senses that he is not in his perfect mind! But what an ascent-what a perfect mind in comparison! He begins to realize vaguely that he is still on earth:
LEAR: Do not laugh at me; For, as I am a man, I think this lady To be my child Cordelia.
COR.: And so I am, I am,
LEAR: Be your tears wet? Yes, faith. I pray, weep not. If you have poison for me, I will drink it.
I know you do not love me; for your sisters Have, as I do remember, done me wrong:
You have some cause, they have not.
"No cause, no cause," replies Cordelia: a divine lie that will shine forever beside the one Desdemona uttered with her last breath. "Am I in France?" Lear asks at last, coming back to earth. "In your own kingdom, sir," Kent replies, meaning England, of course; but we know that Shakespeare means also that Lear is now in a kingdom not of this earth. And in a moment more the scene closes-and the act. It would seem as if poetry could go no further, and yet it is scarcely an exaggeration to say that this scene is nothing in comparison with what Shakespeare still has in store for us in the scene to which this one specifically leads up.
X
The event which determines everything else in the last act is the battle
between the British and the French. But what a battle! Except for the quick passage of the French forces over the stage, with an alarum and a retreat, it all takes place behind the scenes and exactly one line of the text is de- voted to the account of it:
King Lear hath lost, he and his daughter ta'en.
The brevity of it is a measure of how insignificant the mere clash of arms becomes in comparison with the moral convulsion that is its cause, and the strife between and within the human beings who are its agents. Shakespeare is here tracking Force into its inmost lair. To have stressed the merely military would have thro\vn his whole drama out of focus. Cordelia, for all her heroic strength, is no Joan of Arc, and it would have blotted our image of her to have spotted it \with blood. Instead, we remember the final lines of King John, and, forgetting entirely that France is invading England, think only of the battle between love and treason. Even Albany, in effect, fights on the other side. His hand is compelled to defend his land against the invader, but his heart is with the King:
where I could not be honest I never yet was valiant.
Ubi !Jonestas, ibi patriae
Lear and Cordelia are led in captive. But for hilTI, she would be ready to "out-frown false Fortune's frown," and, as it is, she is willing to confront her captors. But all that he begs is to spend the rest of his life with her in prison. That will be paradise enough, and the words in which he tastes that joy in imagination are one of the crests of all poetry. Shakespeare in the course of his life had many times paid his ironic respects to worldly great- ness and temporal power, but it may be doubted whether he ever did it more crushingly than in the last lines of this daydream of a broken old king who had himself so recently been one of "the great." Lear's words are elicited by Cordelia's glorious challenge to Fortune, which exhibits her at the opposite pole fronl HalTIlet with his weak attempt to rationalize Fate into the "divinity that shapes our ends." Cordelia will be fooled by no such verbal self-deception. "For if the trumpet give an uncertain sound, ,vho shall prepare himself to the battle?" Cordelia's ringing sentences are the very stuff into which the pugnacity of the race ought to be sublimated:
COR.: "We are not the first Who with best Meaning have incurr'd the worst. For thee, oppressed king, anl I cast clown; Myself could else out-frown false Fortune's frown. Shall we not see these daughters and these sisters?
LEAR: No, no, no, no! Come, let's away to prison; We two alone will sing like birds i' the cage. When thou clost ask me blessing, I'll kneel down, And ask of thee forgiveness. So we'll live,And pray, and sing, and tell old tales, and laugh At gilded butterflies, and hear poor rogues Talk of court news; and we'll talk with theIn too, Who loses and who wins; who's in, '\who's Ollt; And take upon's the Mystery of things, As if we were God's spies: and we'll wear out,
In a wall'd prison, packs and sects of great one' That ebb and flow by the moon..
Even Shakespeare seldom concentrated thought as he did in those last lines. "That ebb and flow by the moon": what indeed is the rise and fall of the mighty but just that, the meaningless coming in and going out of a tide, never registering any gain, forever canceling itself out to all eternity? And who are these mighty? "Packs and sects of great ones." Into those half-dozen words the poet condenses his condemnation of three of the forces he most detests: (I) the mob, "which is nothing but the human counterpart of the pack; (2) that spirit which, in opposition to the one that makes the whole world kin, puts its own sect or party above humanity; and (3)
"greatness," or worldly place and power. Under each or any of these dis- pensations the harlTIony man dreams of is denied. The mob is its destroyer. The sect or party is its defier. Power is its counterfeiter. And the extremes meet, for power rests on the conquest and subservience of the mob. In the face of such might, what can the imprisoned spirits of tenderness and beauty do? "We'll wear out..." And it does indeed sometimes seem as if all they can do is to wear it out with patience, even as the weak ancestors of man outwore, by outlasting, the dynasties of now extinct "great ones," the mastodons and saber-toothed tigers that dominated the earth in an earlier geologic age.
But Shakespeare, however profound his reverence for patience, does not leave it at that. His phrase, in this scene, for the opposite of packs and sects and great ones is "the common bosom," and Edmund does not intend-any more than Claudius did in Hamlet's case-that: pity for the old King shall be able
To pluck the common bosom on his side,
or that the general love for Cordelia shall have a like effect.
Her very silence and her patience Speak to the people, and they pity her.
It might still be Edn1und speaking of Cordelia. Actually the words are uttered of Rosalind by her envious uncle. As they show, a turn of For- tune's wheel could easily have converted the play of which she is the heroine into tragedy, and Rosalind herself into a Cordelia. She would have met the test, too! Meanwhile, Edmund is as rek~ntless as the usurping Duke in As You Like It. His retort to Lear's mental picture of his final days with Cordelia is an abrupt
Take them away,
and a moment later we are given a typical glimpse of one of Lear's "great ones" in action, as Edmund promises advancement to a captain if he will carry out his bloody purpose.
EDM.:
CAPT.:
Know thou this, that men Are as the time is; to be tender-minded
Does not become a sword. Thy great employment Will not bear question; either say thou'lt do 't,
Or thrive by other means.
I'll do 't, my lord . . . I cannot draw a cart, nor eat dried oats;
If it be man's work, I'll do 'to
XI
The dying Edmund, mortally wounded by Edgar in their duel, changes his mind too late. Edgar's account of their father's death of mingled grief and joy obviously touches him. It is as if the incipient prompting to good- ness that may for just a moment be detected in Iago in the presence of Desdemona had survived into another life and come to bud in Edmund. When the deaths of Goneril and Regan are announced, deeply moved again, he exclaims:
I was contracted to them both. All three Now marry in an instant,
and when the bodies of the two sisters-one poisoned by the other, the other self-slain-are brought in, the balance is finally tipped:
I pant for life. Some good I mean to do, Despite of mine own nature.
He attempts to rescind his fatal order.'*' But in vain, as we see a moment later when Lear enters with the dead Cordelia in his arms. "Dead as earth," he pronounces her. And yet the next second he is willing to believe that she may still be revived. He calls for a looking glass to see if her breath will mist it, and Kent, gazing at the pathetic picture, cries: "Is this the promis'd end?" "Or inlage of that horror?" echoes Edgar, while Albany begs the heavens to "fall, and cease!" All three utterances converge to prove that this is indeed Shakespeare's version of the Last Judgment.
Failing a mirror, Lear holds a feather to Cordelia's lips:
This feather stirs; she lives! If it be so,
It is a chance which does redeem all sorrows That ever I have felt
(words that must on no account be forgotten). Kent, and then Edgar, bend above the old man, but Lear, intent on his work of resuscitation, waves them away. They have jostled him at the critical moment, he thinks:
A plague upon you, murderers, traitors all!
I might have sav'd her; now she's gone for ever!
The test of breath, of touch, has failed. But there still remains the test of hearing:
Cordelia, Cordelia! stay a little. Ha!
What is't thou say'st? Her voice was ever soft,
Gentle, and low; an excellent thing in \"Onlan. I kill'd the slave that was a-hanging thee.
And an officer standing by confirms him: 'Tis true, my lords, he did.
The officer's word causes Lear to look up, and he gazes with groping vision at Kent. "See better, Lear," Kent had bade his master, we recall, when he rejected Cordelia. Lear has followed that injunction: he recognizes his friend and servant. (But of that we have already spoken.) "Your eldest daughters," Kent goes on,
have fordone themselves, And desperately are dead.
And Lear, as though he had kno\vn it for a thousand years, replies \\lith an indifference as sublime as if a granite cliff \vere told that an insect had dashed itself to death against its base:
Ay, so I think.
"He knows not what he says," Albany observes, and while Edmund's death is announced, Shakespeare, as if perceiving that the scene should inspire anyone who participates in it in the theater, lea ves to the actor the immense freedom of devising business for Lear that shall bridge the dozen lines that the others speak. Albany, by right of succession, is now entitled to the throne. Seeking to make what amends he can, he steps aside:
For us, we will resign, During the life of this old majesty,
To him our absolute power.
Lear is again to be king! His reign, however, as Albany does not know, is to be a matter of seconds. But what is time except for what it contains? and into those seconds is to be crowded such a wonder as never occurred in the longest reign ever chronicled of the most venerable of earth's kings.
What Lear has been doing while Albany is speaking is left, as I said, to the imagination, but that it is something profoundly moving is indicated by the sudden, "0, see, see!" with which Albany interrupts the train of his thought. And thereupon Lear begins what is possibly the most poeti- cally pathetic speech existing in the English, if not in any, language:
And my poor fool is hang'd!
are his first words... Hundreds of other words have been written about those six. Do they refer to the Fool, or to Cordelia?
Why did Shakespeare create one of the most beautiful and appealing of his characters-perhaps his masterpiece in the amalgamation of the tragic and the comic-only to drop him completely out a little past the middle of the play? To those who think Lear remembers his faithful jester at the end, those six words are the answer: he dropped him out precisely in order to stress this parting allusion to him. But why was the Fool hanged? And why, at this supreme moment, should Lear have a thought for anything but what is in his arms? No-another school of interpreters, a vast majority, tells us- "poor fool" is a colloquial term of endearment, and it is Cordelia to whom it is applied. Yet I challenge anyone in his heart of heart to deny that, so taken, at such a moment the phrase jars. Furthermore, Shakespeare is not in the habit of sending us to our glossaries at such enl0tional pinnacles: he has too sure a sense of \what is permanent in language.
The solution of the enigma is simple. Remember the Third Murderer in Macbeth. Surely the whole point of the phrase is that I..ear is referring to both Cordelia and the Fool. His wandering nlind has confused theIll, if you will. But what a divine confusion! Has wedded them would be the better word. Think how the Fool loved his master! Think how he adored Cordelia and pined away after she went to France! Surely this is the main reason for Shakespeare's banishing the Fool froIn his play-that he tl1ight reappear united to Cordelia on his dear master's lips:
Where dead men meet, on lips of living men.
In what other Heaven would the Fool have preferred to t11eet those other t\vo? "Let Me not to the marriage of true Minds admit impediments."
All three
Now marry in an instant.
Goneril, Regan, Edmund. Cordelia, I..ear, the Fool. (And the supererogatory Nahum Tate thought this drama lacked a love story, and proceeded to concoct one between Edgar and Cordelia!)
But the union of Cordelia and the Fool is but the first act of King Lear's reign. The restored King goes on speaking, holding his child's body closer as it grows colder. The tests of touch and hearing have failed.
No, no, no life!
Why should a dog, a horse, a rat, have life,
And thou no breath at all? Thou'lt come no more, Never, never, never, never, never!
-a last line that fathoms the nadir of annihilation as utterly as that earlier kill, kill, kill, kill, kill, kill,
had touched the nadir of revenge... But the uprush of emotion has been too much for the old man:
Pray you, undo this button. Thank You, sir.
Lear has lifted his head while the service ,vas perfornled. Now he looks down again at what is in his arms. And on the instant, like a bolt of divine lightning-that "lightning before death" of 'which Romeo told-the Truth descends:
Do you see this? Look on her, look, her lips, Look there, look there!
Cordelia lives! The Third Test-of vision-has not failed, and those earlier words echo through our minds:
She lives! If it be so,
It is a chance which does redeem all sorrows That ever I have felt.
And Lear, clasping his restored child to his heart, falls "dead" of joy.· For all its sound and fury, this story at least is not a tale told by an idiot, signi- fying nothing. And here the rest is not silence.
XII
On the contrary, it will be said, Lear's delusion only makes the blackness
blacker, another night fallen on mid-night. For we kno\v that Cordelia is dead.
We do? How do we? And if we do, we know more than Shakespeare. For like a shower of golden arrows flying from every angle and every dis- tance to a single target, every line of the play-almost-has been cunningly devised to answer our skepticism, to demonstrate that Lear is right and we are wrong. Why but to make the old King's dying assertion incontroverti- ble does Shakespeare so permeate his play with the theme of vision?
Only consider for a moment the grounds the poet has given-pre-emi- nently in this play, but also in all he had written from the beginning-for having faith in the testimony of Lear's imagination.
First-though least important and not indispensable to the point-Lear is an old old man, and Shakespeare has over and over indicated his adher- ence to the world-old view that age, which is a synonym for experience, coupled with a good life, brings insight and truth. Adam, in As You Like It
(a part that Shakespeare himself may have played), Priam in Troilus and Cressida, Belarius in Cymbeline, or the Old Tenant who aids Gloucester in this very play are good examples. Lear has had long experience; and if he was tardy in attaining the good life, he has at least packed enough virtue into its last days to compensate for its previous failure. Here we have at least a foundation for a faith in Lear's power to see the truth. The wisdom of experience. The wisdom of old age.
But there is something more cogent than that.
Second, Shakespeare believes that suffering and affliction, to those at least who will give ear, bring po\ver to see things as they are. To prove that in detail would be to pass his Tragedies in review. With what clairvoyance Othello, for example, sees the truth at the moment when he begs to be washed in steep-down gulfs of liquid fire. With what prophetic power Queen Margaret foresees the doom of the House of York. "Nothing almost sees miracles but misery," says Kent, at night, in the stocks, confident of sunrise. By which rule, laid down in this very play, Lear at the moment of supreme misery might be expected to see the supreme miracle. He does. To the vision and wisdom of old age are added the vision and wisdom of misery.
But Lear, if he is an old and a miserable, is also a dying, man; and if there is any ancient belief that Shakespeare credits, it is that "truth sits upon the lips of dying men." Over and over he has said it: "Holy men at their death have good inspirations";
The tongues of dying men Enforce attention like deep harmony;
and over and over he has illustrated it in the death scenes, whether in bed or on the battlefield, of his plays:
The setting sun, and music at the close, As the last taste of sweets, is sweetest last.
There is a human counterpart of the legend of the dying s\van, or that legend, rather, is a symbol of this human truth. Even worldly men and women, like Warwick or Henry IV, if they regret or repent, may see their lives at last in something like true perspective, and evil ones, like Cardinal Beaufort, Lady Macbeth, or Edmund in this play, may confess, or may face the truth in nightmare or terror. The vision of death is a third fonn of inspired seeing.
And a fourth is the vision of insanity. Primitives, instead of degrading them as we do, worship the insane, holding that madness is in touch with the gods.
says Emily Dickinson. S07ne l11adness. The fact that there is plenty of in- sanity of the infernal brand has not blinded poets to the same truth that primitives accept too indiscriminately. As with crime, so with mental ab- normality, it is certain species of it only that are of tragic interest: the mad- ness of Orestes, of Cassandra, of Don Qui~ote, of Kirillov ~nd Ivan Ka- ramazov. Lear, sane, is exiled from the truth His egotism is intolerable. He is devoid of sympathy. It is Lear of so-called sound mind who disin- herits Cordelia, banishes Kent, and curses Goneril. But as his mind begins to break, truth begins to break in on it. Indeed, Shakespeare chooses Lear's shattered brain as the vehicle of not a few of his own profoundest convic- tions, mixed, it is true, with wild ravings, as lightning is with wind and night. After the restoration to him of Cordelia, he is never again incoherent, and he never utters a word that does not enforce attention either by its truth or its pathos. But his mind is not in normal condition, and, just before his dying speech, Shakespeare is careful, for our guidance, to have Albany remark,
He knows not what he says.
His last flash of insight is the perception of a supernormal mind.
Or better, it may be, of a childlike mind. For Lear, after the return of sanity, is in his second childhood, not in the ordinary sense of being afflicted with stupidity and dullness, but in the rarer sense of being gifted with a second innocence and ingenuousness, as if he had indeed been born again.· And so at the end it is more strictly the \wisdom of simplicity than the wisdom of insanity with which he is crowned. The artlessness-not to say monosyllabic bareness, considering the tragic intensity effected-of his last speeches, especially the last of all, has often 1been the subject of comment. Shakespeare has already familiarized us with the insight of simplicity in scores of humorous and humble characters from Launch to Desdemona, always differentiating it sharply from commonness or uncouthness. In the present play, Edgar and the Fool are strikingly simple but penetratingly
wise.
And so on that last line and a half of Lear's role are concentrated, like
sunbeams by a burning glass, the inspired visions of old age, of misery, of death, of insanity and simplicity, to put beyond the possibility of challenge the truth of what Lear at this extremest moment sees.
Death but our rapt attention To immortality.
It Might have been this last scene of King Lear, ,vith the father intent on nothing but what he saw on his daughter's lips, that elicited those astound- ing seven words of Emily Dickinson's.
Prove true, imagination, O, prove true!
prayed Viola. So prayed Shakespeare, and, by writing King Lear, helped answer his own prayer. This is Keats's "truth of Imagination." Like Cor- delia's, its voice is ever soft, gentle, and 10''', and the din of the world easily 11lakes it inaudible. But in the end, Shakespeare seems to say, it is the only voice worth listening to. How many other ,vise n1en have said the saMe thing! "Power to appreciate faint, fainter, and infinitely faintest voices and visions," says Enlerson, "is ,what distinguishes man from man." And thoreau, improving even upon Emerson, exclaims: "I will attend the faint- est sound, and then declare to man, what God hath meant." This is the "genuine" ,vay of kno,ving ,which De1110critus differentiates from the "ob- scure" way. "Whenever the obscure way has reached the minimum sensible of hearing, s111elI, taste, and touch," Democritus asserts, "and when the in- vestigation 1nust he carried farther into that which is still finer, then arises the genuine way of knowing, which has a finer organ of thought." King tear nlight have been written to make that distinction clear.
Such a piling-up of persuasions as we have been reviewing might seem sufficient. But it is not for Shakespeare. For him, there is still the obverse side of the coin. The objective must supplement the subjective. Not con- tent with showing that Lear is capable at death of spiritual vision, Shakedpeare must also show that there is spirit there to be seen.
Hut here \ve have forestalled the demonstration-for precisely this is "'hat \ve have already abundantly seen. Why, all through the play, has Shakespeare exercised the last resources of his art to make us conscious of Cordelia's presence even when she is invisible, except in preparation for the end?
You arc a spirit, I kno\v.
So \\'c too say, and if we did not at that 1l10lllent add to 's ~l~sertion his question, "When did you die?" it is only because the restoration scene is but a rehearsal of the death scene. In it all the poetical forces that verify Lear's first vision of Cordelia as a spirit come back with cOmpound interest to verify his last one. Cordelia lived in the Fool's inlagination, and in her father's before death; the Fool is united with Cordelia in his master's im- agination at death; Cordelia still lives in Lear's imagination after death. And she lives in ours. In all these \vays, Shakespeare confers upon her existence in the Imagination itself, which, as William Blake saw, is only our human
word for Eternity. "Love without Imagination is eternal death." From Julius Caesar on, Shakespeare's faith in the existence of spiritual entities beyond the range of ordinary consciousness;, and hence objective to it, in- creases in steady crescendo. Of his belief in the reality of infernal spirits, he has long left us in no doubt. In the starIn scene of Othello, and in the "divine" Desdemona, we can sense the conling of the last scene of King Lear. But in ]{illg Lear more unequivocally leven than in Othello-however embryonically from the merely human point of view-he asserts the reality of a celestial spirit. The debased current use of the word "imagination" must not be permitted to confuse us. The imagination is not a faculty for the creation of illusion; it is the faculty by which alone man apprehends reality. The "illusion" turns out to be the truth. "Let faith oust fact," as Starbuck says in Moby-Dick. It is only our absurd "scientific" prejudice
that reality must be physical and rational that blinds us to the truth.
And right here lies the reason for the numerous references to the lower animals in King Lear. They are so used as to suggest that the evil characters of the play have slipped back from the hUInan kingdom to the kingdom of beasts and brutes. Goneril, for instance, shows wither Henry V's injunction to imitate the action of the tiger ultimately leads. She has become a tiger. Hyenas, wolves, serpents-men under slavery to passion pass back into them by atavism; yet it is an insult to these subrational creatures to compare human abortions like Regan and :ornwall to them, and Shake-
speare seems to be asking himself, as Bradley so admirably expresses it,
whether that which he loathes in man may not be due to some strange wrench- ing of this frame of things, through which the lower animal souls have found a lodgment in human forms, and there found-to the horror and confusion of the thinking mind-brains to forge, tongues to speak, and hands to act, enormi- ties which no mere brute can conceive or execUte.
Er nennt's Vernunft und br(lUcht's allein, Nur tierischer als jedes Tier' zu sein,
says Goethe of man. For this monstrous state of affairs words stronger than brutal or bestial, infernal words, are demanded. Albany feels this \when he calls his own wife a devil:
ALB.: See thyself, devil! Proper deformity seems not in the fiend So horrid as in woman.
GON.: O vain fool!
ALB.: Thou changed and self-cover'd thing, for shame!
Be-monster not thy feature. Were't my fitness To let these hands obey my blood,
They are apt enough to dislocate and tear Thy flesh and bones. Howe'er thou art a fiend, A woman's shape doth shield thee.
If this is not the doctrine of "possession," what is it? To Albany, Goneril is not a woman in the shape of a fiend, but a fiend in the shape of a woman. The distinction may seem slight or merely verbal: actually it involves t\VO opposite views of the universe.
And so the play takes on what may be called an evolutionary or hier- archical character-but more in a transmigratory than in a Darwinian sense -with the dramatic persons on an ascending and descending scale, from the evil sisters and their accomplices at the bottom up through Albany and Edgar and Kent to the Fool, the transformed Lear, and Cordelia at the top. "O! the difference of man and man!" The effect is indeed Cosmic, as if the real battle were being fought over men's heads by devils and angels, and as if man's freedom (yet how could he crave more?) consisted, as in Mac- beth, not in any power to affect the issue by his "own" strength, but rather in the right to stand, as he wills, in the light or in the shadow, to be pos- sessed, as he chooses, by spirits dark or bright.
XIII
Spirits! The word sends us back to the Ghost in Hamlet. What a con-
trast! The son kneeling to the spirit of his father; the father kneeling to the spirit of his child. The warrior demanding vengeance in stentorian tones that every man and woman in the theater can hear and understand; the daughter breathing reconciliation in a voice so low that no one in the theater can hear-the only evidence to auditor or reader of its existence being its reflection in the voice and face and gestures of him who bends over her, when, though he cannot hear, he sees the movement of Life on her lips.
In this scene is finally registered the immense advance that Shakespeare's own vision had taken since Hamlet. From Romeo and Juliet, or earlier, to Hamlet, and perhaps beyond, Shakespeare held, so far as we can tell, that the human ideal, as Hamlet said, lay in a proper commingling of blood and judgment. But he grew wiser as he grew older. Blood is life itself. It is heat, intensity, passion, driving force: it is our inheritance from an indefinitely long animal and hUman past with all its vast capacity-for good, yes, but especially for rapacity and destruction. And that enormous energy is to be ruled by judgment! Judgment: what a colorless abstraction beside red blood!-as if a charging stallion were to be turned aside not by a bit but by politely calling his attention to the danger of his speed and fury. It just will not do. Hamlet himself discovered too late the terrible inadequacy of
"reason" in this sense. And so did Shakespeare-but not too late. The infi- nite can be controlled only by the infinite-by something of its own order. In Othello, Macbeth, and [(king Lear invisible and superhuman spiritual agencies have taken the place of judgment as the hoped-for curb of blood. Love, tenderness, patience, forgiveness are our too too human names for the manifestations within human life of something which comes as incon- trovertibly from what is beyond and above it as the appetites do from what is beyond and below. Because these rare ,;words are tarnished with hy- pocrisy and soiled by daily misuse, they lose their power-until a Shake- speare comes along to bring them to life in a Desdemona or a Cordelia.
But it would be wrong to the point of grotesqueness to suggest that he implies that reason has no place. It has, he seems to be saying, but it is a secondary one. Reason is what we have to fall back on when imagination fails-as we have to fall back on touch when eyesight fails. Or, in another figure, reason is the bush that saves us from plunging do\vn the declivity, not the wings that enable us to soar in safety above it. Such wings only some brighter spirit, like Dante's Beatrice, can bestow. Cordelia is one- of the first magnitude. King Lear is Hell, Earth, and Heaven in one. It is Shakespeare's reconciliation of blood and spirit, his union of the Red Rose and the White.
XIV
From Henry VI onward, Shakespeare nev{:r ceased to be concerned with
the problem of chaos, or, as we would be more likely to say today, of disintegration. Sometimes it may be no more than a hint of chaos in an outburst of individual passion or social disorder. Often it is chaos under its extreme aspects of insanity or war. Always the easy and obvious remedy for chaos is force. But the best force can do is to impose order, not to elicit harmony, and Shakespeare spurns such a superficial and temporizing solu- tion. "How with this rage," he perpetually asks,
Ho\v with this rage shall beauty hold a plea, Whose action is no stronger than a flower?
In play after play he pits some seemingly fragile representative of beauty against the forces of inertia and destruction:: a dream, the spirit of inno- cence or play, love, art-whether as poetry, drama, or music especially. Force and Imagination: they are the ultimat'e foes. Force or Imagination: that is the ultimate choice. But al\vays up to J{ing Lear the conflict seemed to fall short of finality. It remained for Shakespeare's supreme play to op- pose physical force with imagination in its quintessential form of meta-
physical Vision. Not only does the poet incarnate that struggle in the action of the drama; he has the Duke of Albany state it in so many words.
Anyone who reads those words, if he notices them at all, thinks he under- stands then1. But it n1ay be questioned whether he can understand them unless he reads them in the light of those other words, the last utterance of King Lear, to which, as I have tried to show, the entire tragedy in a sense leads up.
In this, his version of The Last JudgITIent, Shakespeare has demonstrated that hatred and revenge are a plucking-out of the hUMan imagination as fatal to lnan's power to find his way in the universe as Corn\\'all's plucking out of Gloucester's eyes was to the guidance of his body on earth. The exhibition, in fearful detail, of this self-devouring process is what makes King Lear to many readers the Most hopeless of Shakespeare's plays. But King Lear also exhibits and deIl10nstrates something else. It shows that there is a mode of seeing as much higher than physical eyesight as physical eye- sight is than touch, an insight that besto\vs power to see "things invisible to mortal sight" as certainly ~s Lear sa\v that Cordelia lives after her death.
What is the relation bet\yeen these two aspects of Shakespeare's I-Jast Judgment?
He states it with the utmost exactitude in the words of Albany to \which I have referred. The last three of the five lines that 11lake up this passage I have already quoted. The first two, as those familiar with the text may have noted, I oIllitted at that tinle. I suppressed theln intentionally. Albany says:
If that the heavens do not their visible spirits Send quickly down to tank these vile offences, It \will come,
Humanity must perforce prey on itself,
Like monsters of the deep.
Such is the predestined end of humanity, if the heavens do not send down their spirits and if those to whom they are sent down do not achieve the power to sec thenl. If the heavens do not... But the heavens did-and King Lear did not fail thenl.
'You are a spirit, I know. 'When did you die? ... Do you see this? Look on her, look, her lips, Look there, look there!
And so, in King Lear at least, humanity did not devour itself, and King Lear and his child were lifted up into the realm of the gods.
King Lear takes us captive. That is what it ought to do and what we ought to let it do, for only as \\'e give ourselves up to it will it give itself
Up to US. "Enthusiastic admiration," says Blake, "is the first principle of knowledge, and its last." And it is right too that we should wish to share our wonder. "O! see, see!" cries Albany over the dying Lear. "Look there, look there!" cries the dying Lear over the de:ad Cordelia. This play draws those same exclamations about itself from everyone who feels its power. But that does not mean that anyone has the right to insist that his way of taking it is the only possible one. I hope that I have myself given no im- pression of speaking "the truth" about King Lear in this sense. All I have wanted to do is to point out the figures I see moving in this fiery furnace of Shakespeare's imagination, in the hope, naturally, that others may see them too. But if others do not see them, for them they are not there. Far be it from me in that case to assert that I am right and they are wrong. If, as the old King bends over his child and sees that she still lives, he is de- luded and those who know that she is dead are right, then indeed is King Lear, as many believe, the darkest document in the supreme poetry of the world. And perhaps it is. There come moods: in which anyone is inclined to take it in that sense. But they are not our best moods. And the chief reason, next to the compulsion of my own imagination, why I believe I have at least done no violence to Shakespeare's text is that I have so often witnessed the effect on youth of this reading of the final scene of his tragic masterpiece. I have already quoted the words of one such young person
on first coming under its spell. They are worth repeating:
"King Lear is a miracle. There is nothing in the whole world that is not in this play. It says everything, and if this is the last and final judgment on this world we live in, then it is a miraculous world. This is a miracle play."