With cadent tears fret channels in her cheeks;
Turn all her mother’s pains and benefits
To laughter and contempt; that she may feel,
How sharper than a serpent’s tooth it is
To have a thankless child.’
Now this should not certainly be spoken in a fit of drunken choler, without any ‘compunctious visitings of nature,’ without any relentings of tenderness, as if it was a mere speech of hate, directed against a person to whom he had the most rooted and unalterable aversion. The very bitterness of the imprecations is prompted by, and turns upon, an allusion to the fondest recollections: it is an excess of indignation, but that indignation, from the depth of its source, conjures up the dearest images of love: it is from these that the brimming cup of anguish overflows; and the voice, in going over them, should falter, and be choked with other feelings besides anger. The curse in Lear should not be scolded, but recited as a Hymn to the Penates! Lear is not a Timon. From the action and attitude into which Mr. Kean put himself to repeat this passage, we had augured a different result. He threw himself on his knees; lifted up his arms like withered stumps; threw his head quite back, and in that position, as if severed from all that held him to society, breathed a heart-struck prayer, like the figure of a man obtruncated!—It was the only moment worthy of himself, and of the character.
In the former part of the scene, where Lear, in answer to the cool didactic reasoning of Gonerill, asks, ‘Are you our daughter?’ &c., Mr. Kean, we thought, failed from a contrary defect. The suppression of passion should not amount to immobility: that intensity of feeling of which the slightest intimation is supposed to convey everything, should not seem to convey nothing. There is a difference between ordinary familiarity and the sublime of familiarity. The mind may be staggered by a blow too great for it to bear, and may not recover itself for a moment or two; but this state of suspense of its faculties, ‘like a phantasma, or a hideous dream,’ should not assume the appearance of indifference, or still-life. We do not think Mr. Kean kept this distinction (though it is one in which he is often very happy) sufficiently marked in the foregoing question to his daughter, nor in the speech which follows immediately after, as a confirmation of the same sentiment of incredulity and surprise.
‘Does any here know me? This is not Lear:
Does Lear walk thus? speak thus? where are his eyes?
Either his notion weakens, his discernings