bany are set apart,
the rest fall into two distinct groups, which are strongly, even
violently, contrasted: Cordelia, Kent, Edgar, the Fool on one side,
Goneril, Regan, Edmund, Cornwall, Oswald on the other. These characters
are in various degrees individualised, most of them completely so; but
still in each group there is a quality common to all the members, or one
spirit breathing through them all. Here we have unselfish and devoted
love, there hard self-seeking. On both sides, further, the common
quality takes an extreme form; the love is incapable of being chilled by
injury, the selfishness of being softened by pity; and, it may be added,
this tendency to extremes is found again in the characters of Lear and
Gloster, and is the main source of the accusations of improbability
directed against their conduct at certain points. Hence the members of
each group tend to appear, at least in part, as varieties of one
species; the radical differences of the two species are emphasized in
broad hard strokes; and the two are set in conflict, almost as if
Shakespeare, like Empedocles, were regarding Love and Hate as the two
ultimate forces of the universe.

The presence in _King Lear_ of so large a number of characters in whom
love or self-seeking is so extreme, has another effect. They do not
merely inspire in us emotions of unusual strength, but they also stir
the intellect to wonder and speculation. How can there be such men and
women? we ask ourselves. How comes it that humanity can take such
absolutely opposite forms? And, in particular, to what omission of
elements which should be present in human nature, or, if there is no
omission, to what distortion of these elements is it due that such
beings as some of these come to exist? This is a question which Iago
(and perhaps no previous creation of Shakespeare's) forces us to ask,
but in _King Lear_ it is provoked again and again. And more, it seems to
us that the author himself is asking this question. 'Then let them
anatomise Regan, see what breeds about her heart. Is there any cause in
nature that makes these hard hearts?'--the strain of thought which
appears here seems to be present in some degree throughout the play. We
seem to trace the tendency which, a few years later, produced Ariel and
Caliban, the tendency of imagination to analyse and abstract, to
decompose human nature into its constituent factors, and then to
construct beings in whom one or more of these factors is