of divine indifference to
suffering, of godlike satisfaction and a less than compassionate content,
it is not yet perhaps utterly superfluous to insist on the utter fallacy
and falsity of their creed who whether in praise or in blame would rank
him to his credit or discredit among such poets as on this side at least
may be classed rather with Goethe than with Shelley and with Gautier than
with Hugo. A poet of revolution he is not, as none of his country in
that generation could have been: but as surely as the author of _Julius
Caesar_ has approved himself in the best and highest sense of the word at
least potentially a republican, so surely has the author of _King Lear_
avowed himself in the only good and rational sense of the words a
spiritual if not a political democrat and socialist.

It is only, I think, in this most tragic of tragedies that the sovereign
lord and incarnate god of pity and terror can be said to have struck with
all his strength a chord of which the resonance could excite such angry
agony and heartbreak of wrath as that of the brother kings when they
smote their staffs against the ground in fierce imperious anguish of
agonised and rebellious compassion, at the oracular cry of Calchas for
the innocent blood of Iphigenia. The doom even of Desdemona seems as
much less morally intolerable as it is more logically inevitable than the
doom of Cordelia. But doubtless the fatalism of _Othello_ is as much
darker and harder than that of any third among the plays of Shakespeare,
as it is less dark and hard than the fatalism of _King Lear_. For upon
the head of the very noblest man whom even omnipotence or Shakespeare
could ever call to life he has laid a burden in one sense yet heavier
than the burden of Lear, insomuch as the sufferer can with somewhat less
confidence of universal appeal proclaim himself a man more sinned against
than sinning.

And yet, if ever man after Lear might lift up his voice in that protest,
it would assuredly be none other than Othello. He is in all the
prosperous days of his labour and his triumph so utterly and wholly
nobler than the self-centred and wayward king, that the capture of his
soul and body in the unimaginable snare of Iago seems a yet blinder and
more unrighteous blow

Struck by the envious wrath of man or God

than ever fell on the old white head of that child-changed father. But
at least he is destroyed by the stroke of a mightier hand than theirs who
struc