186
THE SWORD OF SONG
of our disasters the sun, the moon, and_ the
stars; as if we were villains by necessity,
fools by heavenly compulsion, knaves, thieves,
and treachers by spherical predominance,
drunkards, liars, and adulterers by an enforced
obedience of planetary influence; and all that
we are evil in, by a divine thrusting on: an
admirable evasion of whoremaster man, to lay
his goatish disposition to the charge of a star!
My father compounded with my mother under
the dragon's tail, and my nativity was under
ursa major; so that it follows I am rough and
lecherous. 'Sfoot! I should have been that |
am had the maidenliest star in the firmament
twinkled on my bastardizing.”’
If there is one sound philosophical dictum in
the play, itis this. (Iam not going to argue
with astrologers in the twentieth century.)
It is one we can test. On questions of
morality and religion opinions veer; but if
Shakespeare was a leader of thought, he saw
through the humbug of the star-gazers; if not,
he was a credulous fool; not the one man of
his time, not a ‘‘debauched genius” (for Sir
R. Burton in this phrase has in a sense antici-
pated my discovery) but a mere Elizabethan.
This the greatest poet of all time? Then
we must believe that Gloucester was right, and
that eclipses caused the fall of Lear ! Observe
that before this Shakespeare has had a sly
dig or two at magic. In King John, " My
lord, they say five moons were seen to-night”
_-but there is no eyewitness. So in Macbeth.
In a host of spiritual suggestion there is always
the rational sober explanation alongside to
discredit the folly of the supernatural.
Shakespeare is like his own Touchstone;
he uses his folly as a stalking-horse, and under
the presentation’of that he shoots his wit.
Here, however, the mask is thrown off for
any but the utterly besotted ; Edmund’s speech
stands up in the face of all time as truth; it
challenges the acclamation of the centuries.
Edmund is then the hero; more, he is
Shakespeare’s own portrait of himself; his
ways are dark
— (and, alas! his tricks are
vain !)—for why? For the fear of the conven-
tional world about him.
He is illegitimate: Shakespeare is no true
child of that age, but born in defiance of it and
its prejudices.
Having taken this important step, let us
slew round the rest of the play to fit it. Ifit
fits, the law of probability comes to our aid ;
every coincidence multiplies the chance of our
correctness in ever increasing proportion. We
shall see—and you may look up your Proctor
—that if the stars are placed just so by chance
not law, then also it may be possible that
Shakespeare was the wool-combing, knock-
kneed, camel-backed, church-going, plaster-
of-Paris, stick-in-the-mud our scholars have
always made him.
Edmund being the hero, Regan and Goneril
must be the heroines. So nearly equal are
their virtues and beauties that our poet cannot
make up his mind which shall possess him—
besides which, he wishes to drive home his
arguments in favour of polygamy.
But the great theme of the play is of course
filial duty ; on this everything will turn. Here
is a test:
Whenever this question is discussed, let us
see who speaks the language of sense,and who
that of draggle-tailed emotionalism and tepid
| melodrama.
In the first scene the heroines, who do not
care for the old fool their father—as how could
any sane women? Remember Shakespeare is
here about to show the folly of filial love as
such—feel compelled, by an act of gracious
generosity to a man they despise, yet pity, to
say what they think will please the dotard’s
vanity. Also no doubt the sound commercial
instinct was touched by Lear’s promise to
make acres vary as words, and they deter-
mined to make a final effort to get some par-
snips buttered after all.
Shakespeare (it is our English boast) was no
long-haired squiggle self-yclept bard; but a
business man—see Bishop Blougram’s appre-
ciation of him ag such.
Shall we suppose him to have deliberately
blackguarded in another his own best qualities ?
Note, too, the simple honesty of the divine
sisters! Others, more subtle, would have
suspected a trap, arguing that such idiocy as
Lear’s could not be genuine—Cordelia, the
Madame Humbert of the play, does so; her
over-cleverness leaves her stranded: yet by a
certain sliminess of dissimulation, the oiliness
of frankness, the pride that apes humility, she
does catch the best king going. Yet it avails
her little. She is hanged like the foul Vivien
she is. *
Cordelia’s farewell to her sisters shows up
the characters of the three in strong relief.
Cordelia—without a scrap of evidence to go on
—accuses her sisters of hypocrisy and cruelty.
(This could not have previously existed, or
Lear would not have been deceived.)
Regan gravely rebukes her; recommends, as
it were, a course of Six Easy Lessons in Mind-
* Tuse the word Vivien provisionally, pending the
appearance of an essay to prove that Lord Tennyson
was in secret an ardent reformer of our lax modern
morals. No doubt, there is room for this. Vivien
was perfectly right about the ‘‘cycle of strumpets
and scoundrels whom Mr. Tennyson has set revolv-
ing round the figure of his central wittol,” and she
was the only one with the courage to say so, and the
brains to strip off the barbarous glitter from an idiotic
and phantom chivalry.