Is it an accident, for
example, that Lear's first appeal to something beyond the earth,
O heavens,
If you do love old men, if your sweet sway
Allow[150] obedience, if yourselves are old,
Make it your cause:
is immediately answered by the iron voices of his daughters, raising by
turns the conditions on which they will give him a humiliating
harbourage; or that his second appeal, heart-rending in its piteousness,
You see me here, you gods, a poor old man,
As full of grief as age; wretched in both:
is immediately answered from the heavens by the sounds of the breaking
storm?[151] Albany and Edgar may moralise on the divine justice as they
will, but how, in face of all that we see, shall we believe that they
speak Shakespeare's mind? Is not his mind rather expressed in the bitter
contrast between their faith and the events we witness, or in the
scornful rebuke of those who take upon them the mystery of things as if
they were God's spies?[152] Is it not Shakespeare's judgment on his kind
that we hear in Lear's appeal,
And thou, all-shaking thunder,
Smite flat the thick rotundity o' the world!
Crack nature's moulds, all germens spill at once,
That make ingrateful man!
and Shakespeare's judgment on the worth of existence that we hear in
Lear's agonised cry, 'No, no, no life!'?
Beyond doubt, I think, some such feelings as these possess us, and, if
we follow Shakespeare, ought to possess us, from time to time as we read
_King Lear_.
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