And some readers will go further and maintain that this is
also the ultimate and total impression left by the tragedy. _King Lear_
has been held to be profoundly 'pessimistic' in the full meaning of that
word,--the record of a time when contempt and loathing for his kind had
overmastered the poet's soul, and in despair he pronounced man's life to
be simply hateful and hideous. And if we exclude the biographical part
of this view,[153] the rest may claim some support even from the
greatest of Shakespearean critics since the days of Coleridge, Hazlitt
and Lamb. Mr. Swinburne, after observing that _King Lear_ is 'by far the
most Aeschylean' of Shakespeare's works, proceeds thus:
'But in one main point it differs radically from the work and the spirit
of Aeschylus. Its fatalism is of a darker and harder nature. To
Prometheus the fetters of the lord and enemy of mankind were bitter;
upon Orestes the hand of heaven was laid too heavily to bear; yet in the
not utterly infinite or everlasting distance we see beyond them the
promise of the morning on which mystery and justice shall be made one;
when righteousness and omnipotence at last shall kiss each other. But on
the horizon of Shakespeare's tragic fatalism we see no such twilight of
atonement, such pledge of reconciliation as this.
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