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KING LEAR 10
The character of Cordelia is not a masterpiece of invention or subtlety
like that of Cleopatra; yet in its own way it is a creation as
wonderful. Cordelia appears in only four of the twenty-six scenes of
King Lear; she speaks--it is hard to believe it--scarcely more than a
hundred lines; and yet no character in Shakespeare is more absolutely
individual or more ineffaceably stamped on the memory of his readers.
There is a harmony, strange but perhaps the result of intention, between
the character itself and this reserved or parsimonious method of
depicting it. An expressiveness almost inexhaustible gained through
paucity of expression; the suggestion of infinite wealth and beauty
conveyed by the very refusal to reveal this beauty in expansive
speech--this is at once the nature of Cordelia herself and the chief
characteristic of Shakespeare's art in representing it. Perhaps it is
not fanciful to find a parallel in his drawing of a person very
different, Hamlet. It was natural to Hamlet to examine himself minutely,
to discuss himself at large, and yet to remain a mystery to himself; and
Shakespeare's method of drawing the character answers to it; it is
extremely detailed and searching, and yet its effect is to enhance the
sense of mystery. The results in the two cases differ correspondingly.
No one hesitates to enlarge upon Hamlet, who speaks of himself so much;
but to use many words about Cordelia seems to be a kind of impiety.
I am obliged to speak of her chiefly because the devotion she inspires
almost inevitably obscures her part in the tragedy. This devotion is
composed, so to speak, of two contrary elements, reverence and pity. The
first, because Cordelia's is a higher nature than that of most even of
Shakespeare's heroines. With the tenderness of Viola or Desdemona she
unites something of the resolution, power, and dignity of Hermione, and
reminds us sometimes of Helena, sometimes of Isabella, though she has
none of the traits which prevent Isabella from winning our hearts. Her
assertion of truth and right, her allegiance to them, even the touch of
severity that accompanies it, instead of compelling mere respect or
admiration, become adorable in a nature so loving as Cordelia's. She is
a thing enskyed and sainted, and yet we feel no incongruity in the love
of the King of France for her, as we do in the love of the Duke for
Isabella.
But with this reverence or worship is combined in the reader's mind a
passion of championship, of pity, even of protecting pity. She is so
deeply wronged, and she appears, for all her strength, so defenceless.
We think of her as unable to speak for herself. We think of her as quite
young, and as slight and small.[180] 'Her voice was ever soft, gentle,
and low'; ever so, whether the tone was that of resolution, or rebuke,
or love.[181] Of all Shakespeare's heroines she knew least of joy. She
grew up with Goneril and Regan for sisters. Even her love for her father
must have been mingled with pain and anxiety. She must early have
learned to school and repress emotion. She never knew the bliss of young
love: there is no trace of such love for the King of France. She had
knowingly to wound most deeply the being dearest to her. He cast her
off; and, after suffering an agony for him, and before she could see him
safe in death, she was brutally murdered. We have to thank the poet for
passing lightly over the circumstances of her death. We do not think of
them. Her image comes before us calm and bright and still.
The memory of Cordelia thus becomes detached in a manner from the action
of the drama. The reader refuses to admit into it any idea of
imperfection, and is outraged when any share in her father's sufferings
is attributed to the part she plays in the opening scene. Because she
was deeply wronged he is ready to insist that she was wholly right. He
refuses, that is, to take the tragic point of view, and, when it is
taken, he imagines that Cordelia is being attacked, or is being declared
to have 'deserved' all that befell her. But Shakespeare's was the tragic
point of view. He exhibits in the opening scene a situation tragic for
Cordelia as well as for Lear. At a moment where terrible issues join,
Fate makes on her the one demand which she is unable to meet. As I have
already remarked in speaking of Desdemona, it was a demand which other
heroines of Shakespeare could have met. Without loss of self-respect,
and refusing even to appear to compete for a reward, they could have
made the unreasonable old King feel that he was fondly loved. Cordelia
cannot, because she is Cordelia. And so she is not merely rejected and
banished, but her father is left to the mercies of her sisters. And the
cause of her failure--a failure a thousand-fold redeemed--is a compound
in which imperfection appears so intimately mingled with the noblest
qualities that--if we are true to Shakespeare--we do not think either of
justifying her or of blaming her: we feel simply the tragic emotions of
fear and pity.
In this failure a large part is played by that obvious characteristic to
which I have already referred. Cordelia is not, indeed, always
tongue-tied, as several passages in the drama, and even in this scene,
clearly show. But tender emotion, and especially a tender love for the
person to whom she has to speak, makes her dumb. Her love, as she says,
is more ponderous than her tongue:[182]
Unhappy that I am, I cannot heave
My heart into my mouth.
This expressive word 'heave' is repeated in the passage which describes
her reception of Kent's letter:
Faith, once or twice she heaved the name of 'Father'
Pantingly forth, as if it press'd her heart:
two or three broken ejaculations escape her lips, and she 'starts' away
'to deal with grief alone.' The same trait reappears with an ineffable
beauty in the stifled repetitions with which she attempts to answer her
father in the moment of his restoration:
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.
Cor. No cause, no cause.
We see this trait for the last time, marked by Shakespeare with a
decision clearly intentional, in her inability to answer one syllable to
the last words we hear her father speak to her:
No, no, no, no! Come, let's away to prison:
We two alone will sing like birds i' the cage:
When thou dost 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....
She stands and weeps, and goes out with him silent. And we see her alive
no more.
But (I am forced to dwell on the point, because I am sure to slur it
over is to be false to Shakespeare) this dumbness of love was not the
sole source of misunderstanding. If this had been all, even Lear could
have seen the love in Cordelia's eyes when, to his question 'What can
you say to draw a third more opulent than your sisters?' she answered
'Nothing.' But it did not shine there. She is not merely silent, nor
does she merely answer 'Nothing.' She tells him that she loves him
'according to her bond, nor more nor less'; and his answer,
How now, Cordelia! mend your speech a little,
Lest it may mar your fortunes,
so intensifies her horror at the hypocrisy of her sisters that she
replies,
You have begot me, bred me, loved me: I
Return those duties back as are right fit,
Obey you, love you, and most honour you.
Why have my sisters husbands, if they say
They love you all? Haply, when I shall wed,
That lord whose hand must take my plight shall carry
Half my love with him, half my care and duty:
Sure, I shall never marry like my sisters,
To love my father all.
What words for the ear of an old father, unreasonable, despotic, but
fondly loving, indecent in his own expressions of preference, and blind
to the indecency of his appeal for protestations of fondness! Blank
astonishment, anger, wounded love, contend within him; but for the
moment he restrains himself and asks,
But goes thy heart with this?
Imagine Imogen's reply! But Cordelia answers,
Lear. So young, and so untender?
Cor. So young, my lord, and true.
Yes, 'heavenly true.' But truth is not the only good in the world, nor
is the obligation to tell truth the only obligation. The matter here was
to keep it inviolate, but also to preserve a father. And even if truth
were the one and only obligation, to tell much less than truth is not
to tell it. And Cordelia's speech not only tells much less than truth
about her love, it actually perverts the truth when it implies that to
give love to a husband is to take it from a father. There surely never
was a more unhappy speech.
When Isabella goes to plead with Angelo for her brother's life, her
horror of her brother's sin is so intense, and her perception of the
justice of Angelo's reasons for refusing her is so clear and keen, that
she is ready to abandon her appeal before it is well begun; she would
actually do so but that the warm-hearted profligate Lucio reproaches her
for her coldness and urges her on. Cordelia's hatred of hypocrisy and of
the faintest appearance of mercenary professions reminds us of
Isabella's hatred of impurity; but Cordelia's position is infinitely
more difficult, and on the other hand there is mingled with her hatred a
touch of personal antagonism and of pride. Lear's words,
Let pride, which she calls plainness, marry her![183]
are monstrously unjust, but they contain one grain of truth; and indeed
it was scarcely possible that a nature so strong as Cordelia's, and with
so keen a sense of dignity, should feel here nothing whatever of pride
and resentment. This side of her character is emphatically shown in her
language to her sisters in the first scene--language perfectly just, but
little adapted to soften their hearts towards their father--and again in
the very last words we hear her speak. She and her father are brought
in, prisoners, to the enemy's camp; but she sees only Edmund, not those
'greater' ones on whose pleasure hangs her father's fate and her own.
For her own she is little concerned; she knows how to meet adversity:
For thee, oppressed king, am I cast down;
Myself could else out-frown false fortune's frown.
Yes, that is how she would meet fortune, frowning it down, even as
Goneril would have met it; nor, if her father had been already dead,
would there have been any great improbability in the false story that
was to be told of her death, that, like Goneril, she 'fordid herself.'
Then, after those austere words about fortune, she suddenly asks,
Shall we not see these daughters and these sisters?
Strange last words for us to hear from a being so worshipped and
beloved; but how characteristic! Their tone is unmistakable. I doubt if
she could have brought herself to plead with her sisters for her
father's life; and if she had attempted the task, she would have
performed it but ill. Nor is our feeling towards her altered one whit by
that. But what is true of Kent and the Fool[184] is, in its measure,
true of her. Any one of them would gladly have died a hundred deaths to
help King Lear; and they do help his soul; but they harm his cause. They
are all involved in tragedy.
* * * * *
Why does Cordelia die? I suppose no reader ever failed to ask that
question, and to ask it with something more than pain,--to ask it, if
only for a moment, in bewilderment or dismay, and even perhaps in tones
of protest. These feelings are probably evoked more strongly here than
at the death of any other notable character in Shakespeare; and it may
sound a wilful paradox to assert that the slightest element of
reconciliation is mingled with them or succeeds them. Yet it seems to me
indubitable that such an element is present, though difficult to make
out with certainty what it is or whence it proceeds. And I will try to
make this out, and to state it methodically.
(a) It is not due in any perceptible degree to the fact, which we have
just been examining, that Cordelia through her tragic imperfection
contributes something to the conflict and catastrophe; and I drew
attention to that imperfection without any view to our present problem.
The critics who emphasise it at this point in the drama are surely
untrue to Shakespeare's mind; and still more completely astray are those
who lay stress on the idea that Cordelia, in bringing a foreign army to
help her father, was guilty of treason to her country. When she dies we
regard her, practically speaking, simply as we regard Ophelia or
Desdemona, as an innocent victim swept away in the convulsion caused by
the error or guilt of others.
(b) Now this destruction of the good through the evil of others is one
of the tragic facts of life, and no one can object to the use of it,
within certain limits, in tragic art. And, further, those who because of
it declaim against the nature of things, declaim without thinking. It is
obviously the other side of the fact that the effects of good spread far
and wide beyond the doer of good; and we should ask ourselves whether we
really could wish (supposing it conceivable) to see this double-sided
fact abolished. Nevertheless the touch of reconciliation that we feel in
contemplating the death of Cordelia is not due, or is due only in some
slight degree, to a perception that the event is true to life,
admissible in tragedy, and a case of a law which we cannot seriously
desire to see abrogated.
(c) What then is this feeling, and whence does it come? I believe we
shall find that it is a feeling not confined to King Lear, but present
at the close of other tragedies; and that the reason why it has an
exceptional tone or force at the close of King Lear, lies in that very
peculiarity of the close which also--at least for the moment--excites
bewilderment, dismay, or protest. The feeling I mean is the impression
that the heroic being, though in one sense and outwardly he has failed,
is yet in another sense superior to the world in which he appears; is,
in some way which we do not seek to define, untouched by the doom that
overtakes him; and is rather set free from life than deprived of it.
Some such feeling as this--some feeling which, from this description of
it, may be recognised as their own even by those who would dissent from
the description--we surely have in various degrees at the deaths of
Hamlet and Othello and Lear, and of Antony and Cleopatra and
Coriolanus.[185] It accompanies the more prominent tragic impressions,
and, regarded alone, could hardly be called tragic. For it seems to
imply (though we are probably quite unconscious of the implication) an
idea which, if developed, would transform the tragic view of things. It
implies that the tragic world, if taken as it is presented, with all its
error, guilt, failure, woe and waste, is no final reality, but only a
part of reality taken for the whole, and, when so taken, illusive; and
that if we could see the whole, and the tragic facts in their true place
in it, we should find them, not abolished, of course, but so transmuted
that they had ceased to be strictly tragic,--find, perhaps, the
suffering and death counting for little or nothing, the greatness of the
soul for much or all, and the heroic spirit, in spite of failure, nearer
to the heart of things than the smaller, more circumspect, and perhaps
even 'better' beings who survived the catastrophe. The feeling which I
have tried to describe, as accompanying the more obvious tragic emotions
at the deaths of heroes, corresponds with some such idea as this.[186]
Now this feeling is evoked with a quite exceptional strength by the
death of Cordelia.[187] It is not due to the perception that she, like
Lear, has attained through suffering; we know that she had suffered and
attained in his days of prosperity. It is simply the feeling that what
happens to such a being does not matter; all that matters is what she
is. How this can be when, for anything the tragedy tells us, she has
ceased to exist, we do not ask; but the tragedy itself makes us feel
that somehow it is so. And the force with which this impression is
conveyed depends largely on the very fact which excites our bewilderment
and protest, that her death, following on the deaths of all the evil
characters, and brought about by an unexplained delay in Edmund's effort
to save her, comes on us, not as an inevitable conclusion to the
sequence of events, but as the sudden stroke of mere fate or chance. The
force of the impression, that is to say, depends on the very violence of
the contrast between the outward and the inward, Cordelia's death and
Cordelia's soul. The more unmotived, unmerited, senseless, monstrous,
her fate, the more do we feel that it does not concern her. The
extremity of the disproportion between prosperity and goodness first
shocks us, and then flashes on us the conviction that our whole attitude
in asking or expecting that goodness should be prosperous is wrong;
that, if only we could see things as they are, we should see that the
outward is nothing and the inward is all.
And some such thought as this (which, to bring it clearly out, I have
stated, and still state, in a form both exaggerated and much too
explicit) is really present through the whole play. Whether Shakespeare
knew it or not, it is present. I might almost say that the 'moral' of
King Lear is presented in the irony of this collocation:
Albany. The gods defend her!
Enter Lear with Cordelia dead in his arms.
The 'gods,' it seems, do not show their approval by 'defending' their
own from adversity or death, or by giving them power and prosperity.
These, on the contrary, are worthless, or worse; it is not on them, but
on the renunciation of them, that the gods throw incense. They breed
lust, pride, hardness of heart, the insolence of office, cruelty, scorn,
hypocrisy, contention, war, murder, self-destruction. The whole story
beats this indictment of prosperity into the brain. Lear's great
speeches in his madness proclaim it like the curses of Timon on life and
man. But here, as in Timon, the poor and humble are, almost without
exception, sound and sweet at heart, faithful and pitiful.[188] And here
adversity, to the blessed in spirit, is blessed. It wins fragrance from
the crushed flower. It melts in aged hearts sympathies which prosperity
had frozen. It purges the soul's sight by blinding that of the
eyes.[189] Throughout that stupendous Third Act the good are seen
growing better through suffering, and the bad worse through success. The
warm castle is a room in hell, the storm-swept heath a sanctuary. The
judgment of this world is a lie; its goods, which we covet, corrupt us;
its ills, which break our bodies, set our souls free;
Our means secure us,[190] and our mere defects
Prove our commodities.
Let us renounce the world, hate it, and lose it gladly. The only real
thing in it is the soul, with its courage, patience, devotion. And
nothing outward can touch that.
This, if we like to use the word, is Shakespeare's 'pessimism' in King
Lear. As we have seen, it is not by any means the whole spirit of the
tragedy, which presents the world as a place where heavenly good grows
side by side with evil, where extreme evil cannot long endure, and where
all that survives the storm is good, if not great. But still this strain
of thought, to which the world appears as the kingdom of evil and
therefore worthless, is in the tragedy, and may well be the record of
many hours of exasperated feeling and troubled brooding. Pursued further
and allowed to dominate, it would destroy the tragedy; for it is
necessary to tragedy that we should feel that suffering and death do
matter greatly, and that happiness and life are not to be renounced as
worthless. Pursued further, again, it leads to the idea that the world,
in that obvious appearance of it which tragedy cannot dissolve without
dissolving itself, is illusive. And its tendency towards this idea is
traceable in King Lear, in the shape of the notion that this 'great
world' is transitory, or 'will wear out to nought' like the little world
called 'man' (IV. vi. 137), or that humanity will destroy itself.[191]
In later days, in the drama that was probably Shakespeare's last
complete work, the Tempest, this notion of the transitoriness of
things appears, side by side with the simpler feeling that man's life is
an illusion or dream, in some of the most famous lines he ever wrote:
Our revels now are ended. These our actors,
As I foretold you, were all spirits and
Are melted into air, into thin air:
And, like the baseless fabric of this vision,
The cloud-capp'd towers, the gorgeous palaces,
The solemn temples, the great globe itself,
Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve
And, like this insubstantial pageant faded,
Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff
As dreams are made on, and our little life
Is rounded with a sleep.
These lines, detached from their context, are familiar to everyone; but,
in the Tempest, they are dramatic as well as poetical. The sudden
emergence of the thought expressed in them has a specific and most
significant cause; and as I have not seen it remarked I will point it
out.
Prospero, by means of his spirits, has been exhibiting to Ferdinand and
Miranda a masque in which goddesses appear, and which is so majestic and
harmonious that to the young man, standing beside such a father and such
a wife, the place seems Paradise,--as perhaps the world once seemed to
Shakespeare. Then, at the bidding of Iris, there begins a dance of
Nymphs with Reapers, sunburnt, weary of their August labour, but now in
their holiday garb. But, as this is nearing its end, Prospero 'starts
suddenly, and speaks'; and the visions vanish. And what he 'speaks' is
shown in these lines, which introduce the famous passage just quoted:
Pros. [Aside] I had forgot that foul conspiracy
Of the beast Caliban and his confederates
Against my life: the minute of their plot
Is almost come. [To the Spirits.] Well done! avoid; no more.
Fer. This is strange; your father's in some passion
That works him strongly.
Mir. Never till this day
Saw I him touch'd with anger so distemper'd.
Pros. You do look, my son, in a moved sort,
As if you were dismay'd: be cheerful, sir.
Our revels....
And then, after the famous lines, follow these:
Bear with my weakness; my old brain is troubled;
Be not disturb'd with my infirmity;
If you be pleased, retire into my cell
And there repose: a turn or two I'll walk,
To still my beating mind.
We seem to see here the whole mind of Shakespeare in his last years.
That which provokes in Prospero first a 'passion' of anger, and, a
moment later, that melancholy and mystical thought that the great world
must perish utterly and that man is but a dream, is the sudden
recollection of gross and apparently incurable evil in the 'monster'
whom he had tried in vain to raise and soften, and in the monster's
human confederates. It is this, which is but the repetition of his
earlier experience of treachery and ingratitude, that troubles his old
brain, makes his mind 'beat,'[192] and forces on him the sense of
unreality and evanescence in the world and the life that are haunted by
such evil. Nor, though Prospero can spare and forgive, is there any sign
to the end that he believes the evil curable either in the monster, the
'born devil,' or in the more monstrous villains, the 'worse than
devils,' whom he so sternly dismisses. But he has learned patience, has
come to regard his anger and loathing as a weakness or infirmity, and
would not have it disturb the young and innocent. And so, in the days of
King Lear, it was chiefly the power of 'monstrous' and apparently
cureless evil in the 'great world' that filled Shakespeare's soul with
horror, and perhaps forced him sometimes to yield to the infirmity of
misanthropy and despair, to cry 'No, no, no life,' and to take refuge in
the thought that this fitful fever is a dream that must soon fade into a
dreamless sleep; until, to free himself from the perilous stuff that
weighed upon his heart, he summoned to his aid his 'so potent art,' and
wrought this stuff into the stormy music of his greatest poem, which
seems to cry,
You heavens, give me that patience, patience I need,
and, like the Tempest, seems to preach to us from end to end, 'Thou
must be patient,' 'Bear free and patient thoughts.'[193]
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