King Lear.

King Lear may or may not be the greatest of Shakspere's plays, but of his great plays it is undoubtedly the most Shaksperian. For if we separate as much as is possible the qualities of Shakspere, and inquire by which of them he is most to be distinguieshed from other dramatists, I think we shall find it to be that gift of presenting a multitude of scenes and characters, a jumble of styles and incidents, within the limits of one connected drama Other poets have written exquisite and sublime verse, others have known how to depict passion and unfold character: but no one else has given us these transverse sections of the world, where we see the prince and the beggar side by side, each thinking his own thoughts and speaking his own language; where we see the various intrigues and passions jostling one another as they hurry along the highway of life.

This wonderful spectacle is nowhere seen to more advantage than in King Lear. For here we have a central figure too great and awe-inspiring to be lost in the confusion of the scene. Lear's voice, whether in rage, madness or contrition, is so powerful that all the whisperings and wranglings around him seem but its tumultuous echoes. The accompaniment of incidental action does not drown the voice of his supreme passion; and thus is avoided that fault which appears in some of Shakspere's historical plays, where the medley of sentiments and incidents is such that we are bewildered as by a rumbling and unintelligible noise. In the great tragedies, except Lear, this element, although constantly appearing as a living background for the principal figures, is kept distinctly subordinate: Othello is almost classic in its unity and continuity; Macbeth, although less compact, still turns on a single event; while Hamlet draws its variety and intricacy from the character of the hero, and not from any great admixture of foreign matter. But in King Lear we have two distinct plots and a large number of indispensable personages. It is noticeable, however, that there are no purely comic scenes in the play,-as if the poet felt that the subject was too harrowing to admit such episodes.

These peculiarities of King Lear have been thought to make it unfit for the stage. Lamb, in the midst of scathing remarks about one who had mutilated the plot and aspired to improve on Shakspere, asserts that Lear cannot be acted. Such a judgment may be regarded as a bolder impeachment of Shakspere than the mere alteration of a plot, since it condemns, not a part, but the whole, for the purpose for which it was written. For I take it that closet tragedies are not produced until authors get to be more in love with themselves than with nature. Undoubtedly it is hard to put King Lear on the stage; for it requires a great actor of the heroic school such as is seldom found out of Italy, and calls for an elaboration and perfection of detail which cannot be secured so long as the lavishness of the public does not equal its critical sense. But if it be said that the sublimity and complexity of King Lear render any representation of it necessarily inadequate, it follows that there is a fatal flaw and self contradiction at the foundation of Shakspere's art. For if his living pictures cannot be made to move across the stage in all the telling truth of their contrast and variety,- Shakspere missed his vocation. He should have written poems or novels, not plays.

So great a paradox may well induce us to think better on this subject. Indeed, it seems to me that no play can gain more by being seen than such a play as King Lear. Who has ever realized, without the aid of the senses, all the horror and pathos of such a scene as that in which Lear speaks with Edgar and the fool? The majestic madness of the King, the bitter jests and incoherent ditties of the fool, the hideous gibberish of Edgar, each in its peculiar tone telling a story of great and unmerited woe,- what a marvelous harmony of discords! When we have seen this play, we do not, it is true, carry away a single definite impression, or a moral expressed in words; but we do feel in our hearts a dumb sense of the hideousness of wrong and of the sanctity of suffering: we feel the weight of the mysteries of this life, and we are made ready for high thoughts. For the office of the Gothic drama is not to give us merely the chiseled image of some heroic man agitated by one mighty passion, but rather to display the forces that are struggling in all men; to overawe us with the ghost of our own past and our own future, so that we may truly say: The world is passing in review!

GEORGE SANTAYANA,