I render thanks to these hands, which in my despair, Towards Thebes, your camp is rushing on your footsteps: I attach to your colors, terror and flight. May all these seven chiefs, who have pledged to you their faith, May all nature, at your perfidious looks Be lit up by the fire of the Furies! May this bloody sceptre, which your hand hopes to seize, At the moment of reaching it, escape your desire! May Eteocles and you, deprived of funeral rites, Both rip open each other's bowels! On all the Theban fields, may you be able To acquire only space enough to cover your body! The reception and the vows which I keep for my sons. These beautiful verses, full of anger and revenge, are worthy of the antique Edipus. But very soon the modern Edipus arrives. Polynice, although cursed, persists in supplicating his father; he threatens to kill him, which has scarcely moved the antique Edipus; but the modern ŒŒdipus has a heart less firm: What do I hear? Where am I?.... O heaven! If it were virtue! Act iii. scene 5. At last he embraces Polynice, and his son exclaims, These are beautiful and almost sublime verses, but of a sublimity altogether modern, if we may so speak; for the sublime is possible only in changing not only the character of Edipus such as antiquity conceived it, but especially the moral idea which the history of Edipus inculcates. Edipus, according to the ancient morality, could not forgive his sons for the injury done to himself, because this injury affected the majesty of all fathers, and destroyed the sanctity of paternal reverence. In order to remit crime an atonement, and not pardon, was necessary. According to Christian morality, pardon sufficed, because the evil that was not repaired here below would be repaired in another life, by chastisements for crime, and rewards for virtue. Divine justice is not pledged to fulfil itself entirely in this world. If a crime is not noticed by the law, or remitted by the pardon of the victim, that does not destroy the established order, since the immortality of the soul reserves its mysterious guaranties beyond this world. In paganism, on the contrary, all was to be accomplished. Hence the irresistible power of the ancient Nemesis, who reigned so much the more imperiously upon earth, since she reigned only here, and her power to punish expired with the life of the victims. We have exhibited the character, such as Sophocles has conceived it; but there were in ancient times, different traditions with regard to this character, and all did not give him this austere grandeur which the grave and solemn genius of Sophocles has attributed to it. In the Little Thebai, of which the scholiast of Sophocles has preserved some verses which would incline us to believe that this was a heroi-comic poem, Edipus is no longer the minister of the ancient fatality; he is a whimsical and suspicious old man, whose anger and sadness have neither grandeur nor gravity. If he curses his children, it is not because they have cast him off and proscribed him; it is because on a day for offering sacrifices, instead of sending him the shoulder of the victim, as was the custom, they sent him the thigh, which was a less honorable portion. Thereupon Edipus thought himself outraged, and prayed to "the sovereign Jupiter and the other immortals, that his sons, slain by each other, would immediately go down to hell." This gloomy and restless Edipus, whom misfortune has soured and made miserable, naturally leads us to King Lear as Shakspeare has represented him. Like Edipus, King Lear is rejected by his ungrateful children, and, like Edipus, he curses them; a fatal malediction which is fulfilled by the death of Regan and Goneril. But apart from this resemblance, there is between Edipus and Lear a great difference of character. Obedient to the influence of a mysterious power, the actions of Edipus do not seem to be his own: whether he strikes his father unconsciously, or curses his ungrateful sons, he is the instru ment of the gods. King Lear, on the contrary, seems to be the representative of human liberty in its weakness and caprices. If he is rejected by his two daughters, Regan and Goneril, it is his own fault; for he has scorned the counsel of Kent, his oldest and most faithful servant, who advised him not to abdicate his authority, and not to confide in the gratitude of his two daughters. Not only has King Lear despised and exiled the faithful Kent, he has also rejected the young Cordelia, his beloved daughter, the only one who loved him with a sincere and disinterested love; but the filial love of Cordelia does not permit her to use the flattering words of her two sisters. When her father asks her to say how much she loves him, offering her an empire in return for the protestations of tenderness which he expected from her, she was silent; for the sincere and genuine sentiments are reserved, and Lear does not comprehend how full of affection is this silence. He prefers to this mute devotion the emphatic and false professions of Regan and Goneril. We are not astonished that, with this violence of the passions which Shakspeare has given him, Lear should lose his reason as soon as the ingratitude of his children enabled him to see his folly. Passionate and weak natures who do not wish to anticipate evil, although warned of it beforehand, cannot support it when it befalls them. Such is King Lear. His grief and his anger do not possess the calmness and gravity of the old Edipus. Edipus is tranquil and firm, because he is always obedient to the mysterious will of the gods, and not his own. In Lear, grief borders on despair, and anger is converted into madness, because all his misfortunes having been brought upon him by his own imprudence, the thought that he could have avoided them comes incessantly to exasperate and madden him. Hence his madness. We are aware that madness is one of the common subjects of the English drama; and as this common dramatic subject has been often employed in our days, we will examine, in another chapter, how and on what conditions it has figured upon the stage from the time of the Greeks to our own days. But it suffices for us to remark at present that the madness of King Lear springs naturally from the very character which Shakspeare wished to give him. We have just pointed out a difference between dipus and King Lear, which extends to the foundation of the two characters, and perhaps also to the genius of the two theatres. We will point out another, which relates to the dif ferent progress of the drama in Sophocles and in Shakspeare. Among the Greeks, the plot is always simple. The drama only represents one period of the life of the hero; but this period is that which exhibits his character or his destiny in bold relief. Thus in King Edipus, the leading incident of the drama is the fatal moment when dipus learns his crimes and his misfortunes; and in Edipus Colonaus it is the moment when Edipus dies in refusing to pardon his sons. The modern dramatists, and especially Shakspeare, permit in the action of the drama too much continuance and variety. Shakspeare represents the whole life of man; not that he does not select the most dramatic moments; but he collects many, and loves to place them in opposition to each other; whence arise their chief interest. Thus we see first the moment of imprudence and blindness when Lear, upon the faith of the fine words of his two daughters, divides his kingdom between them, and disinherits his daughter Cordelia, the only one who loves him without ambition. Then comes the moment of his grief and anger,— when, rejected by his two daughters, he curses them; and finally, the drama also has its moment of tenderness and pity, when Lear recognizes Cordelia, and bewails her death. The liberty which Shakspeare takes of introducing on the stage the whole history of Lear, enables us to witness the different passions which agitate the soul of his hero, and to anticipate their first explosion. When Edipus flies to Colonna, it is already a long time since he has been banished by his sons. We do not witness this scene of ingratitude; we only perceive it by the feelings of anger and grief which it has lef in the soul of Edipus. This grief and this anger have more the violence of their first outbreak; they are inflexible. If we compare the imprecations of King Lear against Goneril with those of Edipus against Polynice, the difference is striking: Hear, nature, hear; Dear goddess, hear! Suspend thy purpose, If thou didst intend to make this creature fruitful; Into her womb convey sterility! Dry up in her the organs of increase; And from her derogate body never spring To laughter and contempt; that she may feel Edipus is certainly as angry as Lear, but he is less agitated. He curses Polynice with the voice and language of a judge and an avenger, rather than that of an offended and enraged father. Edipus thinks of paternal majesty outraged in his person, and he renews his imprecations against his sons, "in order that they may learn to respect the author of their days, and not insult the misfortunes of a father." Lear thinks only of the indignity offered to himself, and to gratify his revenge he seeks for the most cruel chastisement possible; not such as Edipus invoked upon the heads of his sons, "the loss of power, and a violent death by each other's hands;" but he desires that his daughter may have an ungrateful son, who would "turn all his mother's pains and benefits to laughter and contempt." We remark a difference of the same kind in the manner in which Edipus and Lear express their sufferings. The suffering of Edipus is grave and majestic. If he speaks of his misery and his exile, it is particularly with a view of commending the tenderness of his daughters, Antigone and Ismene, who accompany him and administer to his comforts. He seeks an asylum, since he has no country; but it is to find the place where his ashes are predestined to repose. In these strokes of misfortune, which have nothing human, we forget the beggar, the blind man, and the vagabond, and see in dipus nothing but the mysterious guest of the furies, the victim and minister of the justice of the gods; and we then understand why his complaint is dignified and reserved, and why in his suffering there is nothing which is addressed to vulgar pity. Such is not King Lear. There is, if we may so speak, the same agitation in his misfortune, and the same excess, as in his sentiments. Shakspeare does not spare him any of the ordinary sufferings of misery: night without a place of re |