Shakespeare's passion for Mary Fitton led him to shame and madness and despair; his strength broke down under the strain and he never won back again to health. He paid the price of passion with his very blood. It is Shakespeare and not Antony who groans:
“O this false soul of Egypt! this grave charm,—
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Like a right gipsy, hath, at fast and loose,
Beguil'd me to the very heart of loss.”
Shakespeare's love for Mary Fitton is to me one of the typical tragedies of life—a symbol for ever. In its progress through the world genius is inevitably scourged and crowned with thorns and done to death; inevitably, I say, for the vast majority of men hate and despise what is superior to them: Don Quixote, too, was trodden into the mire by the swine. But the worst of it is that genius suffers also through its own excess; is bound, so to speak, to the stake of its own passionate sensibilities, and consumed, as with fire.
CHAPTER XI. THE DRAMA OF MADNESS: “LEAR”
Ever since Lessing and Goethe it has been the fashion to praise Shakespeare as a demi-god; whatever he wrote is taken to be the rose of perfection. This senseless hero-worship, which reached idolatry in the superlatives of the “Encyclopaedia Britannica” and elsewhere in England, was certain to provoke reaction, and the reaction has come to vigorous expression in Tolstoi, who finds nothing to praise in any of Shakespeare's works, and everything to blame in most of them, especially in “Lear.” Lamb and Coleridge, on the other hand, have praised “Lear” as a world's masterpiece. Lamb says of it:
“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, immethodised from the ordinary purposes of life, but exerting its powers, as the wind bloweth where it listeth, at will upon the corruptions and abuses of mankind.”
Coleridge calls “Lear,” “the open and ample playground of Nature's passions.”
These dithyrambs show rather the lyrical power of the writers than the thing described.
Tolstoi, on the other hand, keeps his eyes on the object, and sets himself to describe the story of “Lear” “as impartially as possible.” He says of the first scene: