indness is most affecting to us, who know in what manner they
will be parted; but it is also comforting. And we find the same mingling
of effects in the overwhelming conclusion of the story. If to the
reader, as to the bystanders, that scene brings one unbroken pain, it is
not so with Lear himself. His shattered mind passes from the first
transports of hope and despair, as he bends over Cordelia's body and
holds the feather to her lips, into an absolute forgetfulness of the
cause of these transports. This continues so long as he can converse
with Kent; becomes an almost complete vacancy; and is disturbed only to
yield, as his eyes suddenly fall again on his child's corpse, to an
agony which at once breaks his heart. And, finally, though he is killed
by an agony of pain, the agony in which he actually dies is one not of
pain but of ecstasy. Suddenly, with a cry represented in the oldest text
by a four-times repeated 'O,' he exclaims:

Do you see this? Look on her, look, her lips,
Look there, look there!

These are the last words of Lear. He is sure, at last, that she _lives_:
and what had he said when he was still in doubt?

She lives! if it be so,
It is a chance which does redeem all sorrows
That ever I have felt!

To us, perhaps, the knowledge that he is deceived may bring a
culmination of pain: but, if it brings _only_ that, I believe we are
false to Shakespeare, and it seems almost beyond question that any actor
is false to the text who does not attempt to express, in Lear's last
accents and gestures and look, an unbearable _joy_.[162]

To dwell on the pathos of Lear's last speech would be an impertinence,
but I may add a remark on the speech from the literary point of view. In
the simplicity of its language, which consists almost wholly of
monosyllables of native origin, composed in very brief sentences of the
plainest structure, it presents an extraordinary contrast to the dying
speech of Hamlet and the last words of Othello to the by-standers. The
fact that Lear speaks in passion is one cause of the difference, but not
the sole cause. The language is more than simple, it is familiar. And
this familiarity is characteristic of Lear (except at certain moments,
already referred to) from the time of his madness onwards, and is the
source of the peculiarly poignant effect of some of his sentences (such
as 'The little dogs and all....'). We feel in them the loss of power to