sed it in Mr. K.'s performance of that
part, the painful anxiety about the act, the natural longing to
prevent it while it yet seems unperpetrated, the too close pressing
semblance of reality, give a pain and an uneasiness which totally
destroy all the delight which the words in the book convey, where the
deed doing never presses upon us with the painful sense of presence:
it rather seems to belong to history,--to something past and
inevitable, if it has anything to do with time at all. The sublime
images, the poetry alone, is that which is present to our minds in the
reading.

So to see Lear acted--to see an old man tottering about the stage with
a walking-stick, turned out of doors by his daughters in a rainy
night, has nothing in it but what is painful and disgusting. We want
to take him into shelter and relieve him. That is all the feeling
which the acting of Lear ever produced in me. But the Lear of
Shakespeare cannot be acted. The contemptible machinery by which they
mimic the storm which he goes out in, is not more inadequate to
represent the horrors of the real elements, than any actor can be to
represent Lear: they might more easily propose to personate the Satan
of Milton upon a stage, or one of Michael Angelo's terrible figures.
The greatness of Lear is not in corporal dimension, but in
intellectual: the explosions of his passion are terrible as a volcano:
they are storms turning up and disclosing to the bottom that sea, his
mind, with all its vast riches. It is his mind which is laid bare.
This case of flesh and blood seems too insignificant to be thought on;
even as he himself neglects it. On the stage we see nothing but
corporal infirmities and weakness, the impotence of rage; 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, immethodized from the ordinary purposes
of life, but exerting its powers, as the wind blows where it listeth,
at will upon the corruptions and abuses of mankind. What have looks,
or tones, to do with that sublime identification of his age with that
of the _heavens themselves_, when in his reproaches to them for
conniving at the injustice of his children, he reminds them that 'they
themselves are old'. What gesture shall we appropriate to this? What
has the voice or the eye to do with such things? B