sustain his royal dignity; we feel also that everything external has
become nothingness to him, and that what remains is 'the thing itself,'
the soul in its bare greatness. Hence also it is that two lines in this
last speech show, better perhaps than any other passage of poetry, one
of the qualities we have in mind when we distinguish poetry as
'romantic.' Nothing like Hamlet's mysterious sigh 'The rest is silence,'
nothing like Othello's memories of his life of marvel and achievement,
was possible to Lear. Those last thoughts are romantic in their
strangeness: Lear's five-times repeated 'Never,' in which the simplest
and most unanswerable cry of anguish rises note by note till the heart
breaks, is romantic in its naturalism; and to make a verse out of this
one word required the boldness as well as the inspiration which came
infallibly to Shakespeare at the greatest moments. But the familiarity,
boldness and inspiration are surpassed (if that can be) by the next
line, which shows the bodily oppression asking for bodily relief. The
imagination that produced Lear's curse or his defiance of the storm may
be paralleled in its kind, but where else are we to seek the imagination
that could venture to follow that cry of 'Never' with such a phrase as
'undo this button,' and yet could leave us on the topmost peaks of
poetry?[163]

2

Gloster and Albany are the two neutral characters of the tragedy. The
parallel between Lear and Gloster, already noticed, is, up to a certain
point, so marked that it cannot possibly be accidental. Both are old
white-haired men (III. vii. 37); both, it would seem, widowers, with
children comparatively young. Like Lear, Gloster is tormented, and his
life is sought, by the child whom he favours; he is tended and healed by
the child whom he has wronged. His sufferings, like Lear's, are partly
traceable to his own extreme folly and injustice, and, it may be added,
to a selfish pursuit of his own pleasure.[164] His sufferings, again,
like Lear's, purify and enlighten him: he dies a better and wiser man
than he showed himself at first. They even learn the same lesson, and
Gloster's repetition (noticed and blamed by Johnson) of the thought in a
famous speech of Lear's is surely intentional.[165] And, finally,
Gloster dies almost as Lear dies. Edgar reveals himself to him and asks
his blessing (as Cordelia asks Lear's):

but his flaw'd heart--
Alack, too weak the conflict to