it is present. I might almost say that the 'moral' of
_King Lear_ is presented in the irony of this collocation:

_Albany._ The gods defend her!
_Enter Lear with Cordelia dead in his arms._

The 'gods,' it seems, do _not_ show their approval by 'defending' their
own from adversity or death, or by giving them power and prosperity.
These, on the contrary, are worthless, or worse; it is not on them, but
on the renunciation of them, that the gods throw incense. They breed
lust, pride, hardness of heart, the insolence of office, cruelty, scorn,
hypocrisy, contention, war, murder, self-destruction. The whole story
beats this indictment of prosperity into the brain. Lear's great
speeches in his madness proclaim it like the curses of Timon on life and
man. But here, as in _Timon_, the poor and humble are, almost without
exception, sound and sweet at heart, faithful and pitiful.[188] And here
adversity, to the blessed in spirit, is blessed. It wins fragrance from
the crushed flower. It melts in aged hearts sympathies which prosperity
had frozen. It purges the soul's sight by blinding that of the
eyes.[189] Throughout that stupendous Third Act the good are seen
growing better through suffering, and the bad worse through success. The
warm castle is a room in hell, the storm-swept heath a sanctuary. The
judgment of this world is a lie; its goods, which we covet, corrupt us;
its ills, which break our bodies, set our souls free;

Our means secure us,[190] and our mere defects
Prove our commodities.

Let us renounce the world, hate it, and lose it gladly. The only real
thing in it is the soul, with its courage, patience, devotion. And
nothing outward can touch that.

This, if we like to use the word, is Shakespeare's 'pessimism' in _King
Lear_. As we have seen, it is not by any means the whole spirit of the
tragedy, which presents the world as a place where heavenly good grows
side by side with evil, where extreme evil cannot long endure, and where
all that survives the storm is good, if not great. But still this strain
of thought, to which the world appears as the kingdom of evil and
therefore worthless, is in the tragedy, and may well be the record of
many hours of exasperated feeling and troubled brooding. Pursued further
and allowed to dominate, it would destroy the tragedy; for it is
necessary to tragedy that we should feel that suffering and death do
matter greatly, and that happiness and life are