s out in, is not more inadequate to
represent the horrors of the real elements, than any actor can be to
represent Lear; they might more easily propose to personate the Satan
of Milton upon a stage, or one of Michael Angelo's terrible figures.
The greatness of Lear is not in corporal dimension, but in
intellectual: the explosions of his passion are terrible as a
volcano; they are storms turning up and disclosing to the bottom that
sea, his mind, with all its vast riches. It is his mind which is laid
bare. This case of flesh and blood seems too insignificant to be
thought on; even as he himself neglects it. On the stage we see
nothing but corporal infirmities and weakness, the impotence of rage;
while we read it, we see not Lear, but we are Lear,--we are in his
mind, we are sustained by a grandeur which baffles the malice of
daughters and storms; in the aberrations of his reason, we discover a
mighty irregular power of reasoning, immethodized from the ordinary
purposes of life, but exerting its powers, as the wind blows where it
listeth, at will upon the corruptions and abuses of mankind. What
have looks, or tones, to do with that sublime identification of his
age with that of the _heavens themselves_, when, in his reproaches to
them for conniving at the injustice of his children, he reminds them
that "they themselves are old?" What gesture shall we appropriate to
this? What has the voice or the eye to do with such things? But the
play is beyond all art, as the tamperings with it show; it is too
hard and stony; it must have love-scenes, and a happy ending. It is
not enough that Cordelia is a daughter, she must shine as a lover
too. 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. A happy ending!--as if the living
martyrdom that Lear had gone through,--the flaying of his feelings
alive, did not make a fair dismissal from the stage of life the only
decorous thing for him. If he is to live and be happy after, if he
could sustain this world's burden after, why all this pudder and
preparation,--why torment us with all this unnecessary sympathy? As
if the childish pleasure of getting his gilt robes and sceptre again
could tempt him to act over again his misused station,--as if, at his
years and with his experience, anything was left but to die.

Lear is essentially impossible to be represented on a stage. But how
many