CHAP. X. prepared for him of meeting with obstacles which will not give way, but from which his passion rebounds upon himself with a physical shock. As thus opposition follows opposition, we see waves of physical, that is of hysterical, passion, sweeping over Lear, until, as it were, a tenth wave lands him in the full disease of madness.

i. iv.

i. iv. 292.

i. v.

The first case occurs in his interview with Goneril after that which is the first check he has received in his new life, the insolence shown to his retinue. Goneril enters his presence with a frown. The wont had been that Lear frowned and all cowered before him: and now he waits for his daughter to remember herself with a rising passion ill concealed under the forced calmness with which he enquires, 'Are you our daughter?' 'Doth any here know me?' But Goneril, on the contrary, calmly assumes the position of reprover, and details her unfounded charges of insolence against her father's sober followers, until at last he hears himself desired

By her, that else will take the thing she begs,

to disquantity his train.

Then Lear breaks out:

Darkness and devils!

Saddle my horses; call my train together.
Degenerate bastard! I'll not trouble thee:
Yet have I left a daughter.

In a moment the thought of Cordelia's 'most small fault' and
how it had been visited upon her occurs to condense into a
single pang the whole sense of his folly; and here it is that
the first of these waves of physical passion comes over Lear,
its physical character marked by the physical action which
accompanies it:

O Lear, Lear, Lear!

Beat at this gate, that let thy folly in, [Striking his head.
And thy dear judgement out.

It lasts but for a moment: but it is a wave, and it will
return. Accordingly in the next scene we see Lear on his
journey from one daughter to the other. He is brooding

over the scene he is leaving behind, and he cannot disguise a CHAP. X.
shade of anxiety, in his awakened judgment, that some such
scene may be reserved for him in the goal to which he is
journeying. He is half listening, moreover, to the Fool, who
harps on the same thought, that the King is suffering what he
might have expected, that the other daughter will be like the
first until there comes another of these sudden outbursts of
passion, in which Lear for a moment half foresees the end to
which he is being carried.

O, let me not be mad, not mad, sweet heaven!
Keep me in temper: I would not be mad!

i. v. 49.

Imperiousness is especially attached to outward signs of reverence it is reserved for Lear when he arrives at Regan's ii. iv. 4. palace to find the messenger he has sent on to announce him suffering the indignity of the stocks. At first he will not believe that this has been done by order of his daughter and son.

They could not, would not do't; 'tis worse than murder,

To do upon respect such violent outrage.

But he has to listen to a circumstantial account of the insult,

and, further, reminded by the Fool that

Fathers that wear rags

Do make their children blind,

he comes at last to realise it all,—and then there sweeps over him a third and more violent wave of hysterical agitation.

O, how this mother swells up toward my heart!

Hysterica passio, down, thou climbing sorrow,
Thy element's below!

56.

15

CHAP. X.

ii. iv. 89.

I22.

204.

253.

173.

He has mastered the passion by a strong effort: but it is a
wave, and it will return. He has mastered himself in order
to confront the culprits face to face: his altered position is
brought home to him when they refuse to receive him. And
the refusal is made the worse by the well-meant attempt of
Gloucester to palliate it, in which he unfortunately speaks of
the fiery quality' of the duke.

Lear. Vengeance! plague! death! confusion!
Fiery? what quality?

Nothing is harder than to endure what one is in the habit of
inflicting on others; it was Lear's own 'fiery quality' by
which he had been accustomed to scorch all opposition out
of his way; now he has to hear another man's fiery quality'
quoted to him. But this outburst is only momentary; the
very extremity of the case seems to calm Lear, and he begins
himself to frame excuses for the duke, how sickness and
infirmity neglect the 'office' to which health is bound—until
his eye lights again upon his messenger sitting in the stocks,
and the recollection of this deliberate affront brings back
again the wave of passion.

O me, my heart, my rising heart! but, down!

Lear had a strange confidence in his daughter Regan. As we see the two women in the play, Regan appears the more cold-blooded; nothing in Goneril is more cruel than Regan's

I pray you, father, being weak, seem so;

or her meeting Lear's 'I gave you all' with the rejoinder,
And in good time you gave it.

But there was something in Regan's personal appearance
that belied her real character; her father says to her in this

Scene:

Her eyes are fierce, but thine

Do comfort and not burn.

Judas betrayed with a kiss, and Regan persecutes her father CHAP. X. in tears. But Regan has scarcely entered her father's presence when the trumpet announces the arrival of Goneril, and Lear 185. has to see the Regan in whom he is trusting take Goneril's 197. hand before his eyes in token that she is making common

cause with her. When following this the words 'indiscretion,' 'dotage,' reach his ear there is a momentary swelling of the physical passion within:

O sides, you are too tough;

Will you yet hold?

200.

He has mastered it for the last time: for now his whole world seems to be closing in around him; he has committed his all to the two daughters standing before him, and they from 233. unite to beat him down, from fifty knights to twenty-five, from twenty-five to ten, to five, until the soft-eyed Regan asks, 'What need one?' A sense of crushing oppression stifles his anger, and Lear begins to answer with the same calmness with which the question had been asked:

O, reason not the need: our basest beggars

Are in the poorest thing superfluous:

Allow not nature more than nature needs,

Man's life's as cheap as beast's: thou art a lady;

If only to go warm were gorgeous,

Why, nature needs not what thou gorgeous wear'st,

Which scarcely keeps thee warm. But, for true need,

He breaks off at finding himself actually pleading: and the
blinding tears come as he recognises that the kingly passion
in which he had found support at every cross has now
deserted him in his extremity. He appeals to heaven against
the injustice.

You heavens, give me that patience, patience I need!
You see me here, you gods, a poor old man,
As full of grief as age; wretched in both!
If it be you that stir these daughters' hearts
Against their father, fool me not so much

CHAP. X.

To bear it tamely; touch me with noble anger,
And let not women's weapons, water-drops,
Stain my man's cheeks!

The prayer is answered; the passion returns in full flood,
and at last brings Lear face to face with the madness which
has threatened from a distance.

No, you unnatural hags,

I will have such revenges on you both,

That all the world shall-I will do such things,

What they are, yet I know not; but they shall be
The terrors of the earth. You think I'll weep;

No, I'll not weep:

I have full cause of weeping; but this heart

Shall break into a hundred thousand flaws,

Or ere I'll weep. O fool, I SHALL go mad!

ii. iv. 290. As Lear with these words rushes out into the night, we The storm marks off hear the first sound of the storm-the storm which here, as the Centre- in Julius Cæsar, will be recognised as the dramatic backpiece of the ground to the tempest of human emotions; it is the signal

play.

iii. i. 12, &c.

that we have now entered upon the mysterious Centrepiece of the play, in which the gathering passions of the whole drama are to be allowed to vent themselves without check or bound. And it is no ordinary storm: it is a night of bleak winds sorely ruffling, of cataracts and hurricanoes, of curled waters swelling above the main, of thought-executing fires and oak-cleaving thunderbolts; a night

wherein the cub-drawn bear would couch, The lion and the belly-pinched wolf

Keep their fur dry.

And all of it is needed to harmonise with the whirlwind of human passions which finds relief only in outscorning its fury. The purpose of the storm is not confined to this of marking the emotional climax: it is one of the agencies which assist in carrying it to its height. Experts in mental disease have noted amongst the causes which convert mere mental excitement into actual madness two leading ones, external physical shocks and imitation. Shakespeare has made use of both in