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 not to be renounced as
worthless. Pursued further, again, it leads to the idea that the world,
in that obvious appearance of it which tragedy cannot dissolve without
dissolving itself, is illusive.
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