unless he possesses a greatly
affectionate heart, a fiery spirit, and,--albeit the intellect must be
shown in ruins,--a regal mind. Within that grand and lamentable image of
shattered royalty the man must be noble and lovable. Nothing that is
puny or artificial can ever wear the investiture of that colossal
sorrow. McCullough embodied Lear as, from the first, stricken in
mind--already the unconscious victim of incipient decay and dissolution;
not mad but ready to become so. There is a subtle apprehensiveness all
about the presence of the king, in all the earlier scenes. He diffuses
disquietude and vaguely presages disaster, and the observer looks on him
with solicitude and pain. He is not yet decrepit but he will soon break;
and the spectator loves him and is sorry for him and would avert the
destiny of woe that is darkly foreshadowed in his condition. McCullough
gave the invectives--as they ought to be given--with the impetuous rush
and wild fury of the avalanche; and yet they were felt to come out of
agony as well as out of passion. The pathos of those tremendous passages
is in their chaotic disproportion; in their lawlessness and lack of
government; in the evident helplessness of the poor old man who hurls
them forth from a breaking heart and a distracted mind. He loves, and he
loathes himself for loving: every fibre of his nature is in horrified
revolt against such lack of reverence, gratitude, and affection toward
such a monarch and such a father as he knows himself to have been. The
feeling that McCullough poured through those moments of splendid yet
pitiable frenzy was overwhelming in its intense glow and in its towering
and incessant volume. There was remarkable subtlety, also, in the manner
in which that feeling was tempered. In Lear's meeting with Goneril after
the curse you saw at once the broken condition of an aged, infirm, and
mentally disordered man, who had already forgotten his own terrible
words. "We'll no more meet, no more see one another" is a line to which
McCullough gave its full eloquence of abject mournfulness and forlorn
desolation. Other denotements of subtlety were seen in his sad
preoccupation with memories of the lost Cordelia, while talking with the
Fool. "I did her wrong" was never more tenderly spoken than by him. They
are only four little words; but they carry the crushing weight of
eternal and hopeless remorse. It was in this region of delicate,
imaginative touch that McCullough's drama