Beauty, Pain and Violence: Through Lessing and Nietzsche to King Lear

Abstract

This is the issue: the relation of beauty in tragedy to what Keats calls ‘disagreeables’. The unsatisfactory nature of Keats’s word for the tearing out of Gloucester’s eyes, the killing of Cordelia, the psychological assault that drives Lear to madness, and all the other horrors of violence and suffering in the play indicate the problem. A word hopelessly pal-lid for its referents, ‘disagreeables’ indicates the difficulty of connecting suffering and violence with beauty. One thing Keats requires is that art excite ‘momentous depth of speculation’. And Keats himself suggests vividly the real nature of the experience of reading or seeing King Lear in his sonnet about the play:

once again, the fierce dispute

Betwixt damnation and impassion’d clay

Must I burn through; …

… when I am consumed in the fire,

Give me new Phoenix wings to fly at my desire.²

The excellence of every Art is its intensity, capable of making all disagreeables evaporate, from their being in close relationship with Beauty and Truth. Examine King Lear and you will find this exemplified throughout; but in this picture [Benjamin West’s Death on a Pale Horse] we have unpleasantness without any momentous depth of speculation excited, in which to bury its repulsiveness. (Keats, letter to his brothers George and Tom, 1817)¹