s at their
worst, and to return the sternest of replies to that question of the
ultimate power and those appeals for retribution. Is it an accident, for
example, that Lear's first appeal to something beyond the earth,

O heavens,
If you do love old men, if your sweet sway
Allow[150] obedience, if yourselves are old,
Make it your cause:

is immediately answered by the iron voices of his daughters, raising by
turns the conditions on which they will give him a humiliating
harbourage; or that his second appeal, heart-rending in its piteousness,

You see me here, you gods, a poor old man,
As full of grief as age; wretched in both:

is immediately answered from the heavens by the sounds of the breaking
storm?[151] Albany and Edgar may moralise on the divine justice as they
will, but how, in face of all that we see, shall we believe that they
speak Shakespeare's mind? Is not his mind rather expressed in the bitter
contrast between their faith and the events we witness, or in the
scornful rebuke of those who take upon them the mystery of things as if
they were God's spies?[152] Is it not Shakespeare's judgment on his kind
that we hear in Lear's appeal,

And thou, all-shaking thunder,
Smite flat the thick rotundity o' the world!
Crack nature's moulds, all germens spill at once,
That make ingrateful man!

and Shakespeare's judgment on the worth of existence that we hear in
Lear's agonised cry, 'No, no, no life!'?

Beyond doubt, I think, some such feelings as these possess us, and, if
we follow Shakespeare, ought to possess us, from time to time as we read
_King Lear_. And some readers will go further and maintain that this is
also the ultimate and total impression left by the tragedy. _King Lear_
has been held to be profoundly 'pessimistic' in the full meaning of that
word,--the record of a time when contempt and loathing for his kind had
overmastered the poet's soul, and in despair he pronounced man's life to
be simply hateful and hideous. And if we exclude the biographical part
of this view,[153] the rest may claim some support even from the
greatest of Shakespearean critics since the days of Coleridge, Hazlitt
and Lamb. Mr. Swinburne, after observing that _King Lear_ is 'by far the
most Aeschylean' of Shakespeare's works, proceeds thus:

'But in one main point it differs radically from the work and the spirit
of Aeschylus. Its fatalism