The Sword of Song

THE SWORD OF SONG 44 of our disasters the sun, the moon, and the stars; as if we w ere villains b y 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 w horemaster 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 I am had the maidenliest star in the firmament twinkled on my bastardizing.” If there is one sound philosophical dictum in the play, it is this. (I am 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 ? T hen 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, “M y 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 throw n 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. If it fits, the law of probability comes to our aid ; every coincidence multiplies the chance of our correctness in 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 w ill turn. Here is a test : Whenever the 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 w hat they think w ill 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 as 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 farew ell to her sistes show s up the characters of the three in strong relif. 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- * I use the word Vivien provisionally, pending the appearance of a n essay to prove that Lord Tennyson was in se cret a re former of our la x m odern morals. N o doubt, the re is room for this. Vivien was perfectly right about the “cycle of strumpets and scoundels w hom M r. T ennyson ha s se t re volv- 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 of the barbarous glitter from an idiotic and phantom chivaly.