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.  Requital, redemption, amends, equity, explanation, pity and mercy, are words without a meaning here.

   As flies to wanton boys are we to the gods;
   They kill us for their sport.

Here is no need of the Eumenides, children of Night everlasting; for here is very Night herself.

The words just cited are not casual or episodical; they strike the keynote of the whole poem, lay the keystone of the whole arch of thought.  There is no contest of conflicting forces, no judgment so much as by casting of lots:  far less is there any light of heavenly harmony or of heavenly wisdom, of Apollo or Athene from above.  We have heard much and often from theologians of the light of revelation:  and some such thing indeed we find in AEschylus:  but the darkness of revelation is here.

For in this the most terrible work of human genius it is with the very springs and sources of nature that her student has set himself to deal.  The veil of the temple of our humanity is rent in twain.  Nature herself, we might say, is revealed—­and revealed as unnatural.  In face of such a world as this a man might be forgiven who should pray that chaos might come again.  Nowhere else in Shakespeare’s work or in the universe of jarring lives are the lines of character and event so broadly drawn or so sharply cut.  Only the supreme self-command of this one poet could so mould and handle such types as to restrain and prevent their passing from the abnormal into the monstrous:  yet even as much as this, at least in all cases but one, it surely has accomplished.  In Regan alone would it be, I think, impossible to find a touch or trace of anything less vile than it was devilish.  Even Goneril has her one splendid hour, her fire-flaught of hellish glory; when she treads under foot the half-hearted goodness, the wordy and windy though sincere abhorrence, which is all that the mild and impotent revolt of Albany can bring to bear against her imperious and dauntless devilhood; when she flaunts before the eyes of her “milk-livered” and “moral fool” the coming banners of France about the “plumed helm” of his slayer.