Where have I been?-Where am I?-Fair daylight !— I will not swear these are my hands:-let's see; CORDELIA. O! look upon me, sir, And hold your hands in benediction o'er me:- LEAR, Pray do not mock me: I am a very foolish, fond old man, Fourscore and upward; Not an hour more, nor less; and, to deal plainly, I fear, I am not in my perfect mind. Methinks I should know you, and know this man; Remembers not these garments; nor I know not To be my child Cordelia. Be your tears wet? Yes, 'faith. I pray weep not: CORDELIA. No cause, no cause ! As we do not estimate Cordelia's affection for her father by the coldness of her language, so neither should we measure her indignation against her sisters by the mildness of her expressions] What, in fact, can be more eloquently significant, and at the same time more characteristic of Cordelia, than the single line when she and her father are conveyed to their prison : Shall we not see these daughters and these sisters? The irony here is so bitter and intense, and at the same time so quiet, so feminine, so dignified in the expression, that who but Cordelia would have uttered it in the same manner, or would have condensed such ample meaning into so few and simple words? We lose sight of Cordelia during the whole of the second and third and a great part of the fourth act, but towards the conclusion she reappears. Just as our sense of human misery and wickedness, being carried to its extreme height, becomes nearly intolerable, “like an engine wrenching our frame of nature from its fixed place," then, like a redeeming angel, she descends to mingle in the scene, "loosening the springs of pity in our eyes," and relieving the impressions of pain and terror by those of admiration and a tender pleasure. For the catastrophe, it is indeed terrible! wondrous terrible! When Lear enters with Cordelia dead in his arms, compassion and awe so seize on all our faculties, that we are left only to silence and to tears. But if I might judge from my own sensations, the catastrophe of Lear is not so overwhelming as the catastrophe of Othello. We do not turn away with the same feeling of absolute unmitigated despair. Cordelia is a saint ready prepared for heaven-our earth is not good enough for her; and Lear! O who, after sufferings and tortures such as his, would wish to see his life prolonged? What! replace a sceptre in that shaking hand? -a crown upon that old grey head, on which the tempest had poured in its wrath, on which the deep dreadbolted thunders and the winged lightnings had spent their fury? O never, never! Let him pass! he hates him That would, upon the rack of this rough world, In the story of King Lear and his three daughters, as it is related in the " delectable and mellifluous romance of Perceforest, and in the Chronicle of Geoffrey of Monmouth, the conclusion is fortunate. Cordelia defeats her sisters, and replaces her father on his throne. Spenser, in his version of the story, has followed these authorities. Shakspeare has preferred the catastrophe of the old ballad, founded apparently on some lost tradition. I suppose it is by way of amending his errors, and bringing back this daring innovator to sober history, that it has been thought fit to alter the play of "Lear" for the stage, as they have altered Romeo and Juliet; they have converted the seraph-like Cordelia into a puling love heroine, and sent her off 66 victorious at the end of the play-exit with drums and colours flying-to be married to Edgar. Now anything more absurd, more discordant with all our previous impressions, and with the characters as unfolded to us, can hardly be imagined. 'I cannot conceive," says Schlegel, "what ideas of art and dramatic connexion those persons have who suppose we can at pleasure tack a double conclusion to a tragedy—a melancholy one for hard-hearted spectators, and a merry one for those of softer mould." The fierce manners depicted in this play, the extremes of virtue and vice in the persons, belong to the remote period of the story.* There is no attempt at character in the old narratives; Regan and Goneril are monsters of ingratitude, and Cordelia merely distinguished by her filial piety: whereas, in Shakspeare, this filial piety is an affection quite distinct from the qualities which serve to individualize the human being; we have a perception of innate character apart from all accidental circumstance; we see that if Cordelia had never known her father, had never been rejected from his love, had never been a born princess or a crowned queen, she would not have been less Cordelia, less distinctly herself-that is, a woman of a steady mind, of calm but deep affections, of inflexible truth, of few words, and of reserved deportment. As to Regan and Goneril-" tigers, not daughters " -we might wish to regard them as mere hateful chimeras, impossible as they are detestable; but unfortunately there was once a Tullia. I know not where * King Lear may be supposed to have lived about one thousand years before the Christian era, being the fourth or fifth in descent from King Brut, the great-grandson of Eneas, and the fabulous founder of the kingdom of Britain. to look for the prototype of Cordelia : there was a Julia Alpinula, the young priestess of Aventicum,* who, unable to save her father's life by the sacrifice of her own, died with him-"infelix patris infelix proles;" but this is all we know of her. There was the Roman daughter, too. I remember seeing, at Genoa, Guido's "Pietà Romana," in which the expression of the female bending over the aged parent, who feeds from her bosom, is perfect, but it is not a Cordelia: only Raffaelle could have painted Cordelia. But the character which at once suggests itself in comparison with Cordelia, as the heroine of filial tenderness and piety, is certainly the Antigone of Sophocles. As poetical conceptions, they rest on the same basis: they are both (pure abstractions (of truth, piety, and natural affection; and in both love, as a passion, is kept entirely out of sight: for though the womanly character is sustained by making them the objects of devoted attachment, yet to have portrayed them as influenced by passion would have destroyed that unity of purpose and feeling which is one source of power, and, besides, have disturbed that serene purity and grandeur of soul which equally distinguishes both heroines. The spirit, however, in which the two characters is conceived is as different as possible; and we must not fail to remark that Antigone, who plays a principal part in two fine tragedies, and is distinctly and completely made out, is considered as a masterpiece, the very triumph of the ancient classical drama; whereas there are many among Shakspeare's characters which are equal to Cordelia as dramatic * She is commemorated by Lord Byron. Vide "Childe Harold," Canto iii. |