CRITICISM, as far as regards the very highest works of art, must always be a failure. What criti Dism (and in that term we include description and analysis) ever helped us to an adequate notion of the Belvedere Apollo or the Cartoons of Raffaelle? We may try to apply general principles to the particular instances, as far as regards the ideal of such productions; or, what is more common, we may seize upon the salient points of their material and mechanical excellences. If we adopt this comparatively easy and therefore common course, criticism puts on that technical and pedantic form which is the besetting sin of all who attempt to make the great works of painting or sculpture comprehensible by the medium of words. If we take the more difficult path, we are quickly involved in the vague and obscure, and end in explanations without explanation. "The Correggiescity of Correggio," after all, and in sober truth, tells as much as the critics have told us. And is it different with poetry of the very highest order? What criticism, for example, can make the harmony of a very great poom comprehensible to those who have not studied such a poem again and again, till all its scattered lights, and all its broad masses of shadow, are blended into one pervading tint upon which the mind reposes, through the influence of that mighty power by which the force of contrast is subjected to the higher force of unity? Criticism may, to a certain extent, stimulate us to the appreciation of the great parts of the highest creations of poetical genius; but in the exact degree in which it is successful in leading to a comprehension of details is it injurious to the higher purpose of its vocation-that of illuminating a whole. It is precisely the same with regard to the modes in which even the most tasteful minds attempt to convey impressions to others of the effects of real scenery. There are probably recollections lingering around most of us of some combination of natural grandeur or beauty which can never be forgotten-which has moved us even to tears. What can we describe of such scenes? Take a common instance-a calm river sleeping in the moonlight-familiar hills, in their massy outlines looking mountain-like-the wellknown village on the river's bank, giving forth its cottage lights, each shining as a star in the depth of the transparent stream. The description of such a scene becomes merely picturesque. It is the harmony which cannot be described—the harmony which results from some happy combinations not always, and indeed rarely, present-which has thus invested the commonest things

with life-lasting impressions. The "prevailing poet," in his great productions, converts what is accidental in nature into a principle in art. But the workings of the principle must, to a great extent, be felt and understood rather than analysed and described.

"

Hazlitt, applying himself to write a set criticism upon Lear, says-" We wish that we could pass this play over, and say nothing about it. All that we can say must fall far short of the subject, or even of what we ourselves conceive of it. To attempt to give a description of the play itself, or of its effect upon the mind, is mere impertinence." This is not affectation. The "effect upon the mind" which Lear produces is the result of combinations too subtle to be described-almost so to be defined to ourselves; and yet, to continue the sentence of Hazlitt, we must say something." There is an English word-joiner-author we will not call him-who has had the temerity to accomplish two things, either of which would have been enough to have conferred upon him a bad immortality. Nahum Tate has succeeded, to an extent which defies all competition, in degrading the Psalms of David and the Lear of Shakspere to the condition of being tolerated, and perhaps even admired, by the most dull, gross, and anti-poetical capacity. These were not easy tasks; but Nahum Tate has enjoyed more than a century of honour for hia labours; and his new versions of the Psalms are still sung on (like the Shepherd in Arcadia piped) as if they would never be old, and his Lear was the Lear of the playhouse at the time of the publication of our first edition, with one solitary excep. tion of a modern heresy in favour of Shakspere. To have enjoyed so extensive and lasting a popularity, Nahum Tate must have possessed more than ordinary power in the reduction of the highest things to he vulgar standard. He set about the metamorphosis of Lear with a bold hand, nothing doubting hat he had an especial vocation to the office of tumbling that barbaric pile into ruins, for the purpose f building up something compact, and pretty, and modern, after the fashion of the architecture of his wn age. He talks, indeed, of his feat in the way in which the court jeweller talks at the beginning of a new reign, when he pulls the crown to pieces, and re-arranges the emeralds and rubies of our Edwards and Henries according to the newest taste. "It is a heap of jewels, unstrung and unpolished, yet so dazzling in their disorder that I soon perceived I had seized a treasure." We are grateful, however, to Tate for what he has done; for he has enabled us to say something about Shakspere's Lear, when, without him, we might have shrunk into " expressive silence." We proposo to show what the Lear is, in some of its highest attributes, by an investigation of the process by which one of the feeblest and most prosaic of verse-makers has turned it into something essentially different. Tate thus becomes a standard by which to measure Shakspere; and we are relieved from the oppressive. sense of the vast by the juxtaposition of the minute. We judge of the height of the pyramids by the scale of the human atoms at their base.

Shelley, in his eloquent Defence of Poetry,' published in his 'Posthumous Essays,' &c., has stated the grounds for his belief that the Lear of Shakspere may sustain a comparison with the master-pieces of the Greek tragedy. The modern practice of blending comedy with tragedy, though liable to great abuse in point of practice, is undoubtedly an extension of the dramatic circle; but the comedy should be as in King Lear, universal, ideal, and sublime. It is, perhaps, the intervention of this principle which determines the balance in favour of King Lear against the Edipus Tyrannus or the Agamemnon, or, if you will, the trilogies with which they are connected; unless the intense power of the choral poetry, especially that of the latter, should be considered as restoring the equilibrium. King Lear, if it can sustain that comparison, may be judged to be the most perfect specimen of the dramatic art existing in the world." We can understand this now. But if any writer before the commencement of the present century, and indeed long after, had talked of the comedy of Lear as being "universal, ideal, and sublime," and had chosen that as the excellence to balance against "the intense power of the choral poetry" of Eschylus and Sophocles, he would have been referred to the authority of Voltaire, who, in his letter to the Academy, describes such works of Shakspere as forming "an obscure chaos, composed of murders and buffooneries, of heroism and meanness, of the language of the Halles and of the highest interests."

In certain schools of criticism, even yet, the notion that Lear "may be judged to be the most perfect specimen of the dramatic art existing in the world" would be treated as a mere visionary conceit; and we should still be reminded that Shakspere was a "wild and irregular genius," producing these results because he could not help it. In France are now scarcely heard the feeble echoes of the contest between the disciples of the romantic and the classic schools. M. Guizot stated, some forty years go, with his usual acuteness and good sense, some of the mistakes into which the opponents of the TRAGEDIES.-VOL. L 2 465

romantic school had fallen, from not perceiving that the productions of that school contained within themselves a principle of art. "This intellectual ferment can never cease, as long as the question shall be mooted as a contest between science and barbarism-the beauties of order and the irregular influences of disorder; as long as we shall obstinately refuse to see, in the system of which Shakspere bas traced the first outlines, nothing more than a liberty without restraint-an indefinite latitude, which lies open as much to the freaks of the imagination as to the course of genius. If the romantic system has its beauties, it has necessarily its art and its rules. Nothing is beautiful for man which does not owe its effect to certain combinations, of which our judgment may always disclose to us the secret when our emotions have borne witness to their power. The employment of these combinations constitutes art. Shakspere had his own art. To discover it in his works we must examine the means which he used, and the results to which he aspired." These combinations, of which Guizot speaks, were as unknown to what has been called the Augustan age of English literature as the properties of electro-magnetism; and poor Nahum Tate did not unfitly represent his age when he said of Lear, "It is a heap of jewels, unstrung and unpolished, yet so dazzling in their disorder that I soon perceived I had seized a treasure.” The principle of appropriation here is exquisite. But, after all, we fancy that Tate was someting like the cock in the fable, who, having found the jewel, in his secret heart wished it had been a grain of barley. Be this as it may, he set to work in good earnest in the stringing and polishing process. Let us proceed to examine the character of his workmanship.

Coleridge has remarked emphatically, what every diligent student of Shakspere must have been impressed with, the striking judgment which he displays in the management of his first scenes. The first scene of Lear is very short, perfectly simple, has no elaborate descriptions of character, and contains only a slight and incidental notice of the events upon which the drama is to turn. Of course Tate rejected this scene; and, without the necessary preparation of the dialogue between Kent and Gloster, he brings at once Edmund before us in the soliloquy, "Thou, nature, art my goddess." Shakspere, in his soliloquies, makes his characters pursue a certain train of ideas to a conclusion; and by causing them to think aloud, he is enabled, without the slightest violation of propriety, to give the audience a due impression of their latent motives. He very rarely employs this expedient, but he never employs it in vain, or goes beyond its legitimate use. We have an example in the soliloquy of Iago at the end of the first act of Othello; and the soliloquy of Edmund in the second scene of Lear has precisely the same object in view. Tate, not understanding the art of Shakspere, and having no dramatic art in himself, makes the soliloquy an instrument for telling the audience what has happened; and instead of exhibiting the management by which Gloster is made to distrust and hate Elgar, he gives us a narrative of the affair, which Edmund tells to the audience under the pretence of talking to himself:

"With success

I've practis'd yet on both their easy natures.

Here comes the old man, chaf'd with the information
Which last I forg'd against my brother Edgar;

A tale so plausible, so boldly utter'd,

And heighten'd by such lucky accidents,

That now the slightest circunstance confirms him,

And base-born Edmund, spite of law, inherits."

It is no part of the plan of this notice to point out the differences between the language of Tate and the language of Shakspere. It is with the conduct of the drama only that we wish to deal. Gloster, of course, after this preparation, enters in a furious passion.

The main business of the tragedy, by Tate's arrangement, has been thus made subordinate to the secondary plot. But Lear is not quite forgotten: Gloster says to Kent,

To which Kent replies,-

"My lord, you wait the king, who comes resolv'd

To quit the toils of empire, and divide

His realms amongst his daughters. Heav'n succeed B,
But much I fear the change."

Vic de Shakspeare.

"I grieve to see him,

With such wild starts of passion hourly seiz'd

As render majesty beneath itself."

-Edgar and

We may be sure that if a dramatic purpose would have been served by a description of the temper of Lear, instead of an exhibition of it, Shakspere would have introduced such a description. But that was not his art; it was for the jewel-stringer to convey impressions by such clumsy and common-place means. We have one more new combination to notice in Tate's introductory sceneCordelia in love. Of the results of this combination we shall have presently to speak. In the mean time, let the lovers explain themselves through the nine lines in the preparation of which Tate has put out his poetical strength :-

"Edgar. Cordelia, royal fair, turn yet once more,

And ere successful Burgundy receive

The treasure of thy beauties from the king,

Ere happy Burgundy for ever fold thee,

Cast back one pitying look on wretched Edgar.

"Cord. Alas! what would the wretched Edgar with

The more unfortunate Cordelia?

Who, in obedience to a father's will,

Flies from her Edgar's arms to Burgundy's."

The second scene of Tate, like the second scene of Shakspere, exhibits the trial by Lear of his daughters' affections, and the subsequent division of the kingdom. It was perfectly clear that in changing the dramatic situation of Cordelia, Tate would destroy her character. But it is not within the range of human ingenuity to conjecture how effectually he has contrived to render one of the loveliest of Shakspere's creations not only uninteresting, but positively repulsive-he has produced a selfish and dissimulating Cordelia. These are the first words which she utters :

"Now comes my trial. How am I distress'd

That must with cold speech tempt the choleric king
Rather to leave me dowerless, than condemin me
To Burgundy's embraces!"

"Of the heavenly beauty of soul of Cordelia, pronounced in so few words, I will not venture to speak." This was the impression which Shakspere's Cordelia produced upon Schlegel. In the whole range of the Shaksperian drama there is nothing more extraordinary than the effect upon the mind of the character of Cordelia. Mrs. Jameson has truly said, "Everything in her seems to lie beyond our view, and affects us in a manner which we feel rather than perceive." In the first act she has only forty-three lines assigned to her: she does not appear again till the fourth act, in the fourth scene of which she has twenty-four lines, and, in the seventh, thirty-seven. In the fifth act she has five lines. Yet during the whole progress of the play we can never forget her; and, after its melancholy close, she lingers about our recollections as if we had seen some being more beautiful and purer than a thing of earth, who had communicated with us by a higher medium than that of words. And yet she is no mere abstraction;-she is nothing more nor less than a personification of the holiness of womanhood. She is a creature formed for all sympathies, moved by all tenderness, prompt for all duty, prepared for all suffering; but she cannot talk of what she is, and what she purposes. The King of France describes the apparent reserve of her character as

She herself says,

"A tardiness in nature, Which often leaves the history unspoke That it intends to do."

If for I want that glib and oily art,

To speak, and purpose not; since what I well intend,
I'll do 't before I speak."

But the conception of a character that should fill our minds without much talk, and withal magniloquent talk, was something too ethereal for Tate, the jewel-polisher: so Cordelia is turned into a French intrigante. She does not profess as her sisters professed, not because she wanted the "glib and oily art," but because she desired to accomplish a secret purpose, that was to be carried by silence better than by words-she would lose her dower that she might marry Edgar. One more specimen of the Tatification of Cordelia, and we have done. The love-scenes, be it understood, go forward; and in the third act Cordelia, herself wandering about, encounters Edgar in his mad

disguise. The "tardiness in nature" of Shakspere is thus interpreted in the production which "Garrick and his followers, the showmen of the scene," have inflicted upon us almost up to the present hour, under the sanction of Dr. Johnson :

"Cord. Come to my arms, thou dearest, best of men,
And take the kindest vows that e'er were spoke

By a protesting maid.

"Edg. Is't possible?

"Cord. By the dear vital stream that bathes my heart,

These hallow'd rags of thine, and naked virtue,

These abject tassels, these fantastic shreds

To me are dearer than the richest pomp

Of purpled monarchs."

Need we exhibit more of the Cordelia which is not Shakspere's!

The mixed character of Shakspere's Lear has been admirably dissected by Coleridge :—“ The strange, yet by no means unnatural, mixture of selfishness, sensibility, and habit of feeling, derived from, and fostered by, the particular rank and usages of the individual; the intense desire of being intensely beloved,-selfish, and yet characteristic of the selfishness of a loving and kindly nature alone;—the self-supportless leaning for all pleasure on another's breast;—the craving after sympathy with a prodigal disinterestedness, frustrated by its own ostentation, and the mode and nature of its claims;--the anxiety, the distrust, the jealousy, which more or less accompany all selfish affections, and are amongst the surest contradistinctions of mere fondness from true love, and which originate Lear's eager wish to enjoy his daughters' violent professions, whilst the inveterate habits of sovereignty convert the wish into claim and positive right, and an incompliance with it into crime and treason; these facts, these passions, these moral verities, on which, the whole tragedy is founded, are all prepared for, and will to the retrospect be found implied, in the first four or five lines of the play." They are implied, certainly, but the character which they make up is not described by Shakspere. When Regan and Goneril speak slightingly of their father, immediately after he has been lavishing his kingdom upon them, it is not the object of the poet to make us understand Lear, but to make us understand Regan and Goneril. This, again, was Shakspere's art:-Tate, the representative of the vulgar notion of art, must have a defined character-something positive, something generic-a bad man, a good man-a mild man, a passionate man-a good son, a cruel son. Upon this principle the Lear of Tate is the choleric king. Because Goneril characteristically speaks of "the unruly waywardness that infirm and choleric years bring with them," Gloster, in Tate, is made to say of Lear,

"Yet has his temper ever been unfix'd
Chol'ric and sudden;"

and, as if this were not enough to disturb an audience in the proper comprehension of the real Lear, we must have Cordelia call him "the choleric king," and, last of all, Lear himself must exclaim, in the trial-scene, "'tis said that I am choleric." And now, then, that we have got a choleric kinga simple, unmixed, ranting, roaring, choleric king, he is in a fit condition to be stirred up by “the showmen of the scene." Charles Lamb would be immortal as a critic if he had only written these words:—“Tate has put his hook in the nostrils of this leviathan, for Garrick and his followers, the showmen of the scene, to draw the mighty beast about more easily." All the wonderful gradations of his character are utterly destroyed;-all the thin partitions which separate passion from wildness, and wildness from insanity, and insanity from a partial restoration to the most intense of human feelings,—a father's concentrated love;—all these traces of what Shakspere only could effect, are utterly destroyed by the stage conception of Lear, such as has been endured amongst us for more than a century. When the "showmen" banished the Fool, they rendered it impossible that the original nature of Lear should be understood. It is the Fool who interprets to us the old man's sensitive tenderness lying at the bottom of his impatience. He cannot bear to hear that “the Fool hath much pined away."-"No more of that, I have noted it well." From the Fool, Lear can bear to hear truth; his jealous pride is not alarmed: he indeed calls him “a pestilent gall," "bitter fool;" but the

"Poor, infirm, weak, and despis'd old man,"

in the depths of his misery, having scarcely anything in the world to love but the Fool, thus clings to him :

My wits begin to turn.

Come on, my boy. How dost, my boy? Art cold?