ll
it tells us nothing of the Fool's fate. It seems strange indeed that
Shakespeare should have left us thus in ignorance. But we have seen that
there are many marks of haste and carelessness in _King Lear_; and it
may also be observed that, if the poet imagined the Fool dying on the
way to Dover of the effects of that night upon the heath, he could
perhaps convey this idea to the audience by instructing the actor who
took the part to show, as he left the stage for the last time, the
recognised tokens of approaching death.[179]

Something has now been said of the four characters, Lear, Edgar, Kent
and the Fool, who are together in the storm upon the heath. I have made
no attempt to analyse the whole effect of these scenes, but one remark
may be added. These scenes, as we observed, suggest the idea of a
convulsion in which Nature herself joins with the forces of evil in man
to overpower the weak; and they are thus one of the main sources of the
more terrible impressions produced by _King Lear_. But they have at the
same time an effect of a totally different kind, because in them are
exhibited also the strength and the beauty of Lear's nature, and, in
Kent and the Fool and Edgar, the ideal of faithful devoted love. Hence
from the beginning to the end of these scenes we have, mingled with pain
and awe and a sense of man's infirmity, an equally strong feeling of his
greatness; and this becomes at times even an exulting sense of the
powerlessness of outward calamity or the malice of others against his
soul. And this is one reason why imagination and emotion are never here
pressed painfully inward, as in the scenes between Lear and his
daughters, but are liberated and dilated.

5

The character of Cordelia is not a masterpiece of invention or subtlety
like that of Cleopatra; yet in its own way it is a creation as
wonderful. Cordelia appears in only four of the twenty-six scenes of
_King Lear_; she speaks--it is hard to believe it--scarcely more than a
hundred lines; and yet no character in Shakespeare is more absolutely
individual or more ineffaceably stamped on the memory of his readers.
There is a harmony, strange but perhaps the result of intention, between
the character itself and this reserved or parsimonious method of
depicting it. An expressiveness almost inexhaustible gained through
paucity of expression; the suggestion of infinite wealth and beauty
conveyed by the very refusal to reveal this beauty in expansive