“I am a man
More sinned against than sinning,”—
he pronounced in a way that emphasized the vast ethical meaning involved in it, and illustrated the strong humanity of Lear. He seemed to be saying, “These woes are just; I have been proud, rash, and cruel; but others have treated me worse than I have treated them.” This unconscious effort at a halting justification, this disguised appeal for kindly judgment, was profoundly natural and affecting. Then his brain reeled under its load of woe, and he sighed, with a piteous bewilderment, “My wits begin to turn,” bringing back with awful fulfilment his prophetic prayer long before, “O, let me not be mad, sweet heaven! keep me in temper: I would not be mad!”
There was something in the immense outspread of the sorrows of Lear and the enlacement of their gigantic portrayal with the elemental scenery of nature, the desolate heath, the blackness of night, the howling gale, the stabbing flashes of lightning, overwhelmingly pathetic and sublime. The passion of Othello pours along like a vast river turbulent and raging, yet with placid eddies. The passion of Lear is like the continual swell and moan of the ocean, whose limitless expanse, with no beacon of hope to meet the eye, baffles our comprehension and bewilders us with its awful mystery. This part of the play, as Forrest represented it in person and voice, gave one a new measure of the greatness of man in his glory and in his ruin. And in the subsequent scenes, where the disease of Lear had progressed and his faculties become more wrecked, he was so interpreted from the splendid might over which he had exulted to the mournful decay into which he had sunk, that when he said, in reply to a request to be allowed to kiss his hand, “Let me wipe it first; it smells of mortality,” the whole audience felt like exclaiming, with Gloster,—
“O ruined piece of nature! This great world
Shall so wear out to naught.”
The acting of all the closing scenes with Cordelia was something to be treasured apart in the memories of all who saw it and who were capable of appreciating its exquisite beauty and its unfathomable pathos. When he was awakened out of the merciful sleep which had fallen on the soreness of his soul, and heard her whose voice was ever soft, gentle, and low, addressing him as she had been wont in happier days, his look of wondering weariness, his mistaking her for a spirit in bliss, his kneeling to her, his gradual recognition of her,—all these were executed with a unity of purpose, a simplicity of means, and an ineffable tenderness of affection, to which it is impossible for any verbal description to do justice. Who, that did not carry a stone in his breast in place of a heart, could refrain from tears when he heard the exhausted sufferer—his gaze fixed on hers, his hands moving in unpurposed benediction, a solemn calm wrapping him after the long tempest, passing from the old arrogance of self-assertion into a supreme sympathy—murmur,—
“Where have I been? Where am I?—Fair daylight?
I am mightily abused.—I should even die with pity
To see another thus.”