ng of his end. _King
Lear_ is undoubtedly the tragedy which comes nearest to _Othello_ in the
impression of darkness and fatefulness, and in the absence of direct
indications of any guiding power.[88] But in _King Lear_, apart from
other differences to be considered later, the conflict assumes
proportions so vast that the imagination seems, as in _Paradise Lost_,
to traverse spaces wider than the earth. In reading _Othello_ the mind
is not thus distended. It is more bound down to the spectacle of noble
beings caught in toils from which there is no escape; while the
prominence of the intrigue diminishes the sense of the dependence of the
catastrophe on character, and the part played by accident[89] in this
catastrophe accentuates the feeling of fate. This influence of accident
is keenly felt in _King Lear_ only once, and at the very end of the
play. In _Othello_, after the temptation has begun, it is incessant and
terrible. The skill of Iago was extraordinary, but so was his good
fortune. Again and again a chance word from Desdemona, a chance meeting
of Othello and Cassio, a question which starts to our lips and which
anyone but Othello would have asked, would have destroyed Iago's plot
and ended his life. In their stead, Desdemona drops her handkerchief at
the moment most favourable to him,[90] Cassio blunders into the presence
of Othello only to find him in a swoon, Bianca arrives precisely when
she is wanted to complete Othello's deception and incense his anger into
fury. All this and much more seems to us quite natural, so potent is the
art of the dramatist; but it confounds us with a feeling, such as we
experience in the _Oedipus Tyrannus_, that for these star-crossed
mortals--both [Greek: dysdaimones]--there is no escape from fate, and
even with a feeling, absent from that play, that fate has taken sides
with villainy.[91] It is not surprising, therefore, that _Othello_
should affect us as _Hamlet_ and _Macbeth_ never do, and as _King Lear_
does only in slighter measure. On the contrary, it is marvellous that,
before the tragedy is over, Shakespeare should have succeeded in toning
down this impression into harmony with others more solemn and serene.

But has he wholly succeeded? Or is there a justification for the fact--a
fact it certainly is--that some readers, while acknowledging, of course,
the immense power of _Othello_, and even admitting that it is
dramatically perhaps Shakespeare's greatest triumph, still reg