is remarkable, and somewhat sad, that he seems to find none of man’s better qualities in the world of the brutes (though he might well have found the prototype of the self-less love of Kent and Cordelia in the dog whom he so habitually maligns);[1] but he seems to have been asking himself whether that which he loathes in man may not be due to some strange wrenching of this frame of things, through which the lower animal souls have found a lodgment in human forms, and there found—to the horror and confusion of the thinking mind—brains to forge, tongues to speak, and hands to act, enormities which no mere brute can conceive or execute. He shows us in King Lear these terrible forces bursting into monstrous life and flinging themselves upon those human beings who are weak and defenceless, partly from old age, but partly because they are human and lack the dreadful undivided energy of the beast. And the only comfort he might seem to hold out to us is the prospect that at least this bestial race, strong only where it is vile, cannot endure: though stars and gods are powerless, or careless, or empty dreams, yet there must be an end of this horrible world:
- ↑ I fear it is not possible, however, to refute, on the whole, one charge,—that the dog is a snob, in the sense that he respects power and prosperity, and objects to the poor and despised. It is curious that Shakespeare refers to this trait three times in King Lear, as if he were feeling a peculiar disgust at it. See III. vi. 65, ‘The little dogs and all,’ etc.: IV. vi. 159, ‘Thou hast seen a farmer’s dog bark at a beggar . . . and the creature run from the cur? There thou mightst behold the great image of authority’: V. iii. 186, ‘taught me to shift Into a madman’s rags; to assume a semblance That very dogs disdain’d.’ Cf. Oxford Lectures, p. 341.
- ↑ With this compare the following lines in the great speech on ‘degree’ in Troilus and Cressida, I. iii.:
Take but degree away, untune that string,
And, hark, what discord follows! Each thing meets
In mere oppugnancy: the bounded waters
Should lift their bosoms higher than the shores
And make a sop of all this solid globe:
