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RV 293 (Rh) ‘romantic.’ Nothing like Hamlet’s mysterious sigh ‘The rest is silence,’ nothing like Othello’s memories of his life of marvel and achievement, was possible to Lear. Those last thoughts are romantic in their strangeness: Lear’s five-times repeated ‘Never,’ in which the simplest and most unanswerable cry of anguish rises note by note till the heart breaks, is romantic in its naturalism; and to make a verse out of this one word required the boldness as well as the inspiration which came infallibly to Shakespeare at the greatest moments. But the familiarity, boldness and inspiration are surpassed (if that can be) by the next line, which shows the bodily oppression asking for bodily relief. The imagination that produced Lear’s curse or his defiance of the storm may be paralleled in its kind, but where else are we to seek the imagination that could venture to follow that cry of ‘Never’ with such a phrase as ‘undo this button,’ and yet could leave us on the topmost peaks of poetry?

Gloster and Albany are the two neutral characters of the tragedy. The parallel between Lear and Gloster, already noticed, is, up to a certain point, so marked that it cannot possibly be accidental. Both are old white-haired men ( vii. 37); both, it would seem, widowers, with children comparatively young. Like Lear, Gloster is tormented, and his life is sought, by the child whom he favours; he is tended and healed by the child whom he has wronged. His sufferings, like Lear’s, are partly traceable to his own extreme folly and injustice, and, it may be