It is
possible to conjecture as one reads, and especially in the diatribes,
that the pen itself was rapid and the brain too rapid for the pen. One
feels the rush of the air. Now, this quality is to be discovered in the
literature of many nations, but never with the fullness which it has in
the literature of England. And note that in those phases of the national
life when foreign models have constrained this instinct of expansion in
English verse, they never have restrained it for long, and that even
through the bonds established by those models the instinct of expansion
breaks. You see it in the exuberance of Dryden and in the occasional
running rhetoric of Pope, until it utterly loosens itself with the end
of the eighteenth century.
The play is national, again, in that permanent curiosity upon knowable
things--nay, that mysterious half-knowledge of unknowable things--which,
in its last forms, produced the mystic, and which is throughout history
so plainly characteristic of these Northern Atlantic islands. Every play
of Shakespeare builds with that material, and no writer, even of the
English turn, has sent out points further into the region of what is not
known than Shakespeare has in sudden flashes of phrase. But "King Lear,"
though it contains a lesser number of lines of this mystical and
half-religious effect than, say, "Hamlet," yet as a general impression
is the more mystical of the two plays.
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