And that would surely be strange. For _King Lear_ is admittedly
one of the world's greatest poems, and yet there is surely no other of
these poems which produces on the whole this effect, and we regard it as
a very serious flaw in any considerable work of art that this should be
its ultimate effect.[155] So that Mr. Swinburne's description, if taken
as final, and any description of King Lear as 'pessimistic' in the
proper sense of that word, would imply a criticism which is not
intended, and which would make it difficult to leave the work in the
position almost universally assigned to it.
But in fact these descriptions, like most of the remarks made on _King
Lear_ in the present lecture, emphasise only certain aspects of the play
and certain elements in the total impression; and in that impression the
effect of these aspects, though far from being lost, is modified by that
of others. I do not mean that the final effect resembles that of the
_Divine Comedy_ or the _Oresteia_: how should it, when the first of
these can be called by its author a 'Comedy,' and when the second,
ending (as doubtless the _Prometheus_ trilogy also ended) with a
solution, is not in the Shakespearean sense a tragedy at all?[156] Nor
do I mean that _King Lear_ contains a revelation of righteous
omnipotence or heavenly harmony, or even a promise of the reconciliation
of mystery and justice.
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