e's mind was also occupied with the
knowledge that self-confident intellect is terrible and tragical. One of
the truths of the play is the very sad one that being certain is in
itself a kind of sin, sure to be avenged by life. The obsession of
self-confidence betrays person after person, to misery or death. All
the heads that lift themselves proudly go bloody to the dust or bow in
anguish. Only one man moves by other light than his own. He is the only
one who achieves quiet triumph. Nothing in the play is more impressive
than the speech in which the intellect that has ended the bloodshed
prays humbly that God may bless and help England with peace.

It was said of Napoleon that he was as great as a man can be without
virtue. The intellect of Richard III is like that of Napoleon. It is
restless, swift, and sure of its power. It is sure, too, that the world
stays as it is from something stupid in the milky human feelings.
Richard is a "bloody dog" let loose in a sheep-fold. It is a part of the
tragedy that he is nobler than the sheep that he destroys. His is the
one great intellect in the play. Intellect is always rare. In kings it
is very rare. When a great intellect is made bitter by being cased in
deformity one has the tragedy of intellect turned upon itself. Had
Richard been born without his deformed shoulder he could have known
human sympathy, and human intercourse. Without human intercourse he goes
gloating, clutching himself, biting his lip, muttering at the twist in
his shadow. This warped, starved mind knows himself stronger than the
minds near him. It is tragical to be deformed, it is tragical to have an
intellect too great for people to understand. But the deformed and
bitter intellect would suffer tragedy indeed if he, the one constant
Yorkist, were to be ruled by a gentle, half-witted Lancastrian saint
like Henry VI, or by Clarence the perjurer, or by the upstart Woodville,
a commoner made noble because his sister took the King's fancy, or by
the Queen herself, the housewife who caused great Warwick's death, or by
one of her sons, who are pert to the man who had spilt his blood to make
their father king. The snarling intellect bites rather than suffer that.
It is very terrible, but how if he had not bitten? The vision of all
this bloodiness is less terrible than that vision of the sheep
triumphing, so dear to us moderns--

"Strength by limping sway disabled,
And art made tongue-tied by authority,