humanity in the light of it.
It is remarkable, and somewhat sad, that he seems to find none of man's
better qualities in the world of the brutes (though he might well have
found the prototype of the self-less love of Kent and Cordelia in the
dog whom he so habitually maligns);[146] but he seems to have been
asking himself whether that which he loathes in man may not be due to
some strange wrenching of this frame of things, through which the lower
animal souls have found a lodgment in human forms, and there found--to
the horror and confusion of the thinking mind--brains to forge, tongues
to speak, and hands to act, enormities which no mere brute can conceive
or execute. He shows us in _King Lear_ these terrible forces bursting
into monstrous life and flinging themselves upon those human beings who
are weak and defenceless, partly from old age, but partly because they
_are_ human and lack the dreadful undivided energy of the beast. And the
only comfort he might seem to hold out to us is the prospect that at
least this bestial race, strong only where it is vile, cannot endure:
though stars and gods are powerless, or careless, or empty dreams, yet
there must be an end of this horrible world:

It will come;
Humanity must perforce prey on itself
Like monsters of the deep.[147]

The influence of all this on imagination as we read _King Lear_ is very
great; and it combines with other influences to convey to us, not in the
form of distinct ideas but in the manner proper to poetry, the wider or
universal significance of the spectacle presented to the inward eye. But
the effect of theatrical exhibition is precisely the reverse. There the
poetic atmosphere is dissipated; the meaning of the very words which
create it passes half-realised; in obedience to the tyranny of the eye
we conceive the characters as mere particular men and women; and all
that mass of vague suggestion, if it enters the mind at all, appears in
the shape of an allegory which we immediately reject. A similar conflict
between imagination and sense will be found if we consider the dramatic
centre of the whole tragedy, the Storm-scenes. The temptation of Othello
and the scene of Duncan's murder may lose upon the stage, but they do
not lose their essence, and they gain as well as lose. The Storm-scenes
in _King Lear_ gain nothing and their very essence is destroyed. It is
comparatively a small thing that the theatrical storm, not to drown the
dialogu