n _King Lear_ is not due, however, to anything
intrinsically undramatic in the story, but to characteristics which were
necessary to an effect not wholly dramatic. The stage is the test of
strictly dramatic quality, and _King Lear_ is too huge for the stage. Of
course, I am not denying that it is a great stage-play. It has scenes
immensely effective in the theatre; three of them--the two between Lear
and Goneril and between Lear, Goneril and Regan, and the ineffably
beautiful scene in the Fourth Act between Lear and Cordelia--lose in the
theatre very little of the spell they have for imagination; and the
gradual interweaving of the two plots is almost as masterly as in _Much
Ado_. But (not to speak of defects due to mere carelessness) that which
makes the _peculiar_ greatness of King Lear,--the immense scope of the
work; the mass and variety of intense experience which it contains; the
interpenetration of sublime imagination, piercing pathos, and humour
almost as moving as the pathos; the vastness of the convulsion both of
nature and of human passion; the vagueness of the scene where the action
takes place, and of the movements of the figures which cross this scene;
the strange atmosphere, cold and dark, which strikes on us as we enter
this scene, enfolding these figures and magnifying their dim outlines
like a winter mist; the half-realised suggestions of vast universal
powers working in the world of individual fates and passions,--all this
interferes with dramatic clearness even when the play is read, and in
the theatre not only refuses to reveal itself fully through the senses
but seems to be almost in contradiction with their reports. This is not
so with the other great tragedies. No doubt, as Lamb declared,
theatrical representation gives only a part of what we imagine when we
read them; but there is no _conflict_ between the representation and the
imagination, because these tragedies are, in essentials, perfectly
dramatic. But _King Lear_, as a whole, is imperfectly dramatic, and
there is something in its very essence which is at war with the senses,
and demands a purely imaginative realisation. It is therefore
Shakespeare's greatest work, but it is not what Hazlitt called it, the
best of his plays; and its comparative unpopularity is due, not merely
to the extreme painfulness of the catastrophe, but in part to its
dramatic defects, and in part to a failure in many readers to catch the
peculiar effects to which I ha