" Lamb and Coleridge, on the other hand, have praised "Lear" as
a world's masterpiece. Lamb says of it:
"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, immethodised from the ordinary
purposes of life, but exerting its powers, as the wind bloweth where it
listeth, at will upon the corruptions and abuses of mankind."
Coleridge calls "Lear," "the open and ample playground of Nature's
passions."
These dithyrambs show rather the lyrical power of the writers than the
thing described.
Tolstoi, on the other hand, keeps his eyes on the object, and sets
himself to describe the story of "Lear" "as impartially as possible." He
says of the first scene:
"Not to mention the pompous, characterless language
of King Lear, the same in which all Shakespeare's kings
speak, the reader or spectator cannot conceive that a
king, however old and stupid he may be, could believe
the words of the vicious daughters with whom he had
passed his whole life, and not believe his favourite
daughter, but curse and banish her; and therefore, the
spectator or reader cannot share the feelings of the
persons participating in this unnatural scene.
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