Page:The Psychology of Shakespeare.pdf/173

158 and incoherence of mania. There is one more speech before delusion appears. Lear will not enter the hovel because the tempest will not give him leave to ponder on things which would hurt him more; and yet he yields with meekness unnatural to him : he will go in, and then “I’ll pray and then I'll sleep; ” and then comes that calm and pitiful exordium to houseless poverty, that royal appeal for “poor naked wretches,” whose cause has been pleaded in these recent days with so much success by the great power which now acts in the place of des potic authority—the power of the press. What Lear thought, under the tyranny of the wild storm, the great and wealthy have recently felt under the newspaper appeals, which have so forcibly and successfully brought the cause of the houseless poor to their knowledge. ( And now intellectual takes the place of moral distur bance. It is remarkable how comparatively passionless the

old king is, after intellectual aberration has displayed itself.) It is true, that even in his delusions he never loses the

sense and memory of the filial ingratitude which has been the moral excitant of his madness; but henceforth he ceases

to call down imprecations upon his daughters; or with con fused sense of personal identity, he curses them, as the daughters of Edgar. It is as if in madness he has found a refuge from grief, a refuge which Gloster even envies when he finds his own wretchedness “deprived that benefit to end itself by death :” “Gloster. The king is mad: How stiff is my vile sense, That I stand up, and have ingenious feeling

Of my huge sorrows

Better I were distract :

So should my thoughts be severed from my griefs; And woes, by strong imaginations lose

The knowledge of themselves.” To lose the sovereignty of reason is, indeed, to be de graded below humanity :