Of these four characters Edgar excites the least enthusiasm, but he is the one whose development is the most marked. His behaviour in the early part of the play, granted that it is not too improbable, is so foolish as to provoke one. But he learns by experience, and becomes the most capable person in the story, without losing any of his purity and nobility of mind. There remain in him, however, touches which a little chill one’s feeling for him.
The gods are just, and
of our pleasant vices
Make instruments to
plague us:
The dark and vicious
place where thee he got
Cost him his eyes:
—one wishes he had not said to his dying brother those words about their dead father. ‘The gods are just’ would have been enough.[171] It may be suggested that Shakespeare merely wished to introduce this moral somehow, and did not mean the speech to be characteristic of the speaker. But I doubt this: he might well have delivered it through Albany, if he was determined to deliver it. This trait in Edgar is characteristic. It seems to be connected with his pronounced and conscious religiousness. He interprets everything religiously, and is speaking here from an intense conviction which overrides personal feelings. With this religiousness, on the other side, is connected his cheerful and confident endurance, and his practical helpfulness and resource. He never thinks of despairing; in the worst circumstances he is sure there is something to be done to make things better. And he is sure of this, not only from temperament, but from faith in ’the clearest gods.’ He is the man on whom we are to rely at the end for the recovery and welfare of the state: and we do rely on him.
I spoke of his temperament. There is in Edgar, with much else that is fine, something of that buoyancy of spirit which charms us in Imogen. Nothing can subdue in him the feeling that life is sweet and must be cherished. At his worst, misconstrued, contemned, exiled, under sentence of death, ‘the lowest and most dejected thing of fortune,’ he keeps his head erect. The inextinguishable spirit of youth and delight is in him; he embraces the unsubstantial air which has blown him to the worst; for him ’the worst returns to laughter.’[172] ’Bear free and patient thoughts,’ he says to his father. His own thoughts are more than