Page:The Psychology of Shakespeare.pdf/174

Rh “A sight most pitiful in the meanest wretch ; Past speaking of in a king !” and yet, like the grave itself, it may be a refuge from intense agony. (As the hand of mercy has placed a limit even to physical suffering in senseless exhaustion or for getful delirium, so in madness it has raised a barrier against the continuance of the extreme agony of the soul. Madness may, as in acute melancholia, be the very climax of moral suffering; but in other forms it may be, and often is, the suspension of misery—the refuge of incurable sorrow. This is finely shewn in Lear, who, from the time that his wits, that is, his intellects, unsettle, is not so much the subject

as the object of moral pain. His condition is past speaking of, to those who look upon it, but to himself it is one of comparative happiness, like the delirium which shortens the agony of a bed of pain. The second crisis, indeed, arrives—the crisis of recovery ; and then he experiences a second agony like that of a person reviving from the suspended animation of drowning. The king recognizes, in Edgar's miserable state, a re flection of his own; and the intellect, now in every way prepared by the accumulation of moral suffering and phy sical shock, falls into delusion and confusion of personal identity: “Lear. Didst thou give all to thy daughters ? And art thou come to this?”

“Lear. Now, all the plagues that in the pendulous air Hang fated o'er men's faults, light on thy daughters! Kent. He hath no daughters, sir.

Lear. Death, traitor nothing could have subdued nature To such a lowness, but his unkind daughters. Is it the fashion, that discarded fathers

Should have thus little mercy on their flesh? Judicious punishment ’t was this flesh begot

Those pelican daughters.” The next speech is a wonderful example of reason and