that Shakespeare was giving vent to some personal feeling, whether present or past; for the signs of his hand appear most unmistakably when the hero begins to pour the vials of his wrath upon mankind. Timon, lastly, in some of the unquestionably Shakespearean parts, bears (as it appears to me) so strong a resemblance to King Lear in style and in versification that it is hard to understand how competent judges can suppose that it belongs to a time at all near that of the final romances, or even that it was written so late as the last Roman plays.  It is more likely to have been composed immediately after King Lear and before Macbeth.[125]

Drawing these comparisons together, we may say that, while as a work of art and in tragic power King Lear is infinitely nearer to Othello than to Timon, in its spirit and substance its affinity with Timon is a good deal the stronger.  And, returning to the point from which these comparisons began, I would now add that there is in King Lear a reflection or anticipation, however faint, of the structural weakness of Timon.  This weakness in King Lear is not due, however, to anything intrinsically undramatic in the story, but to characteristics which were necessary to an effect not wholly dramatic.  The stage is the test of strictly dramatic quality, and King Lear is too huge for the stage.  Of course, I am not denying that it is a great stage-play.  It has scenes immensely effective in the theatre; three of them—­the two between Lear and Goneril and between Lear, Goneril and Regan, and the ineffably beautiful scene in the Fourth Act between Lear and Cordelia—­lose in the theatre very little of the spell they have for imagination; and the gradual interweaving of the two plots is almost as masterly as in Much Ado.  But (not to speak of defects due to mere carelessness) that which makes the peculiar greatness of King Lear,—­the immense scope of the work; the mass and variety of intense experience which it contains; the interpenetration of sublime imagination, piercing pathos, and humour almost as moving as the pathos; the vastness of the convulsion both of nature and of human passion; the vagueness of the scene where the action takes place, and of the movements of the figures which cross this scene; the strange atmosphere, cold and dark, which strikes on us as we enter this scene, enfolding these figures and magnifying their dim outlines like a winter mist; the half-realised suggestions of vast universal powers working in the world of individual fates and passions,—­all this interferes with dramatic clearness even when the play is read, and in the theatre not only refuses to reveal itself fully through the senses but seems to be almost in contradiction with their reports.  This is not so with the other great tragedies.  No doubt, as Lamb declared, theatrical representation gives only a part of what we imagine when we read them; but there is no conflict