e, must be silent whenever a human being wishes to speak, and is
wretchedly inferior to many a storm we have witnessed. Nor is it simply
that, as Lamb observed, the corporal presence of Lear, 'an old man
tottering about the stage with a walking-stick,' disturbs and depresses
that sense of the greatness of his mind which fills the imagination.
There is a further reason, which is not expressed, but still emerges, in
these words of Lamb's: 'the explosions of his passion are terrible as a
volcano: they are storms turning up and disclosing to the bottom that
sea, his mind, with all its vast riches.' Yes, 'they are _storms_.' For
imagination, that is to say, the explosions of Lear's passion, and the
bursts of rain and thunder, are not, what for the senses they must be,
two things, but manifestations of one thing. It is the powers of the
tormented soul that we hear and see in the 'groans of roaring wind and
rain' and the 'sheets of fire'; and they that, at intervals almost more
overwhelming, sink back into darkness and silence. Nor yet is even this
all; but, as those incessant references to wolf and tiger made us see
humanity 'reeling back into the beast' and ravening against itself, so
in the storm we seem to see Nature herself convulsed by the same
horrible passions; the 'common mother,'

Whose womb immeasurable and infinite breast
Teems and feeds all,

turning on her children, to complete the ruin they have wrought upon
themselves. Surely something not less, but much more, than these
helpless words convey, is what comes to us in these astounding scenes;
and if, translated thus into the language of prose, it becomes confused
and inconsistent, the reason is simply that it itself is poetry, and
such poetry as cannot be transferred to the space behind the
foot-lights, but has its being only in imagination. Here then is
Shakespeare at his very greatest, but not the mere dramatist
Shakespeare.[148]

And now we may say this also of the catastrophe, which we found
questionable from the strictly dramatic point of view. Its purpose is
not merely dramatic. This sudden blow out of the darkness, which seems
so far from inevitable, and which strikes down our reviving hopes for
the victims of so much cruelty, seems now only what we might have
expected in a world so wild and monstrous. It is as if Shakespeare said
to us: 'Did you think weakness and innocence have any chance here? Were
you beginning to dream that? I will show y