The storm is raging on the heath, and faithful Kent implores his aged master to take shelter, such as it is, within a hovel hard by; some friendship will it lend him against the tempest; the tyranny of the open night’s too rough for nature to endure. But Lear would be let alone. “Wilt break my heart?” he exclaims, in answer to Kent’s fresh entreaty: Kent had rather break his own. Again the drenched, discrowned old man is urged to enter the hovel on the heath. But he stays outside, to reason on his past and present, till reason gives way. Kent may think it a matter of moment that this contentious storm invades them to the skin; and so it is to him. But Lear has deeper griefs to shatter him; and “where the greater malady is fixed, the lesser is scarce felt.” Let Kent go in, by all means: the king enjoins it—at least the ex-king desires it: let Kent seek his own ease—and perhaps Lear will follow him in. Meanwhile, in draggling robes, drenched to the skin, chilled to the heart, Lear’s thoughts perforce are turned to “houseless poverty,” to the indigent and vagrant creatures once, and so lately, his subjects, equally exposed to the downpour of the wrathful skies, of whom he had seldom, if ever, thought till now. Poor naked wretches, he apostrophises them, wheresoever they are, that bide the pelting of this pitiless storm,—how shall their houseless heads, and unfed sides, their looped and windowed raggedness, defend them from seasons such as these? And then, in an outburst of repentant self-reproach, he that had been King of Britain breaks forth into the avowal,
“O, I have ta’en
Too little care of this! Take physic, pomp;
Expose thyself to feel what wretches feel;
That thou mayst shake the superflux to them,
And show the heavens more just.”
Between the history of Lear and that of Gloster, in the same play, there is a curious and significant parallel maintained throughout. And it is observable that when Gloster too, another duped and outcast father, is wandering in his turn on the same heath, and is accosted by “poor mad Tom,”—the sightless, miserable father thus addresses the “naked fellow” whose identity he so little suspects:
“Here, take this purse, thou whom the heaven’s plagues
Have humbled to all strokes: that I am wretched,
Makes thee the happier:—Heavens, deal so still!