Page:The Psychology of Shakespeare.pdf/168

Rh “No, you unnatural hags, I will have such revenges on you both, That all the world shall

, I will do such things

What they are yet I know not ; but they shall be The terrors of the earth. You think I'll weep ; No, I’ll not weep :— I have full cause of weeping ; but this heart

Shall break into a hundred thousand flaws, Or ere I'll weep :—O fool, I shall go mad!” It is the climax of his intercourse with these daughters, who turn their backs on him and bar their doors.

Not

yet do they directly plot against his life. He rushes into the stormy night, such a night that nature seldom sees, such a storm that “man’s nature cannot carry the affliction nor the fear.” He escapes from the cruel presence of his daughters to the bare heath, where “for many miles about, there's scarce a bush.” Here, in com pany with the fool, “who labours to out-jest his heart struck injuries,” in reckless, frantic rage, he “bids what will take all.” On this scene Coleridge finely remarks, “What a world's convention of agonies is here !

All

external nature in a storm, all moral nature convulsed,—the

real madness of Lear, the feigned madness of Edgar, the babbling of the Fool, the desperate fidelity of Kent—surely such a scene was never conceived before or since

Take it

but as a picture for the eye only, it is more terrific than any which a Michael Angelo, inspired by a Dante, could have conceived, and which none but a Michael Angelo could have executed. Or let it have been uttered to the blind, the how

lings of nature would seem converted into the voice of con scious humanity. This scene ends with the first symptoms of positive derangement.” Hardly so ; it is but the climax of the disease, the catas trophy of the mind history. The malady, which has existed from the first, has increased and developed, until it is now

completed.

And yet writers generally agree with Coleridge

in considering that Lear only becomes actually insane