tion. It has certain strictly dramatic
advantages, and may well have had its origin in purely dramatic
considerations. To go no further, the secondary plot fills out a story
which would by itself have been somewhat thin, and it provides a most
effective contrast between its personages and those of the main plot,
the tragic strength and stature of the latter being heightened by
comparison with the slighter build of the former. But its chief value
lies elsewhere, and is not merely dramatic. It lies in the fact--in
Shakespeare without a parallel--that the sub-plot simply repeats the
theme of the main story. Here, as there, we see an old man 'with a white
beard.' He, like Lear, is affectionate, unsuspicious, foolish, and
self-willed. He, too, wrongs deeply a child who loves him not less for
the wrong. He, too, meets with monstrous ingratitude from the child whom
he favours, and is tortured and driven to death. This repetition does
not simply double the pain with which the tragedy is witnessed: it
startles and terrifies by suggesting that the folly of Lear and the
ingratitude of his daughters are no accidents or merely individual
aberrations, but that in that dark cold world some fateful malignant
influence is abroad, turning the hearts of the fathers against their
children and of the children against their fathers, smiting the earth
with a curse, so that the brother gives the brother to death and the
father the son, blinding the eyes, maddening the brain, freezing the
springs of pity, numbing all powers except the nerves of anguish and the
dull lust of life.[141]

Hence too, as well as from other sources, comes that feeling which
haunts us in _King Lear_, as though we were witnessing something
universal,--a conflict not so much of particular persons as of the
powers of good and evil in the world. And the treatment of many of the
characters confirms this feeling. Considered simply as psychological
studies few of them, surely, are of the highest interest. Fine and
subtle touches could not be absent from a work of Shakespeare's
maturity; but, with the possible exception of Lear himself, no one of
the characters strikes us as psychologically a _wonderful_ creation,
like Hamlet or Iago or even Macbeth; one or two seem even to be somewhat
faint and thin. And, what is more significant, it is not quite natural
to us to regard them from this point of view at all. Rather we observe a
most unusual circumstance. If Lear, Gloster and Al