King Leur: A Psychological Study

Aye, every inch a King, in all his pompous vanity, his reckless passion, his unstable judgment, a thorough king, whom even madness could not dethrone from the royal habits of authority, of strenuous will, and of proud predominance. As the highest mountain summit becomes the fearful beacon of volcanic flame, testifying in lurid characters to the world's deep heart-throes, so this kingliest of minds—he who in his little world has been the summit and the cope of things—becomes, in the creative hand of the poet, the visible outlet of those forces which devastate the soul. We stand by in reverential awe, despairing, with our small gauge of criticism, to estimate the forces of this human Etna. Oppressed by the power and magnitude of the passions, as depicted in this most sublime and awful of poetic creations, it is only after the senses have become accustomed to the roar and turmoil that we throw off the stupor, and dare to look down upon the throes of the Titan, and begin to recognize the distinctive features of the fierce commotion. Even then we must stand afar off; for not in Lear, as in others of the poet's great characters, can one for a single moment perform the act of mental transmutation. In Hamlet, for instance, the most complex of all, many a man may see reflected the depths of his own soul. But Lear is more and less than human in its isolated grandeur, in the force and depths of its passions, in its abstraction from accidental qualities. In the breadth of his strength and weakness he is painted like one of those old gods, older and greater than the heathen representatives of small virtues and vices—the usurping vulgarities of polytheism. The true divinities of Lear were old, like himself very old and kingly—Saturn and Rhea, the autochthones of the heavens; even as his qualities are laid upon the dark and far off, yet solid and deep foundations of moral personality. Well might this King of sorrows exclaim, in the words of the World-spirit, to those who attempt to tear his passions to tatters before the footlights; yea, even to the more reverent efforts of critics— “Du gleichst dem Geist den du begreifst, Nicht mir!”