the most wretched and the most horrible of the beasts, the impression of Nature’s hostility to him, the irony of the unexpected catastrophe—­these, with much else, seem even to indicate an intention to show things at their worst, and to return the sternest of replies to that question of the ultimate power and those appeals for retribution.  Is it an accident, for example, that Lear’s first appeal to something beyond the earth,

                      O heavens,
     If you do love old men, if your sweet sway
     Allow[150] obedience, if yourselves are old,
     Make it your cause: 

is immediately answered by the iron voices of his daughters, raising by turns the conditions on which they will give him a humiliating harbourage; or that his second appeal, heart-rending in its piteousness,

You see me here, you gods, a poor old man,
As full of grief as age; wretched in both: 

is immediately answered from the heavens by the sounds of the breaking storm?[151] Albany and Edgar may moralise on the divine justice as they will, but how, in face of all that we see, shall we believe that they speak Shakespeare’s mind?  Is not his mind rather expressed in the bitter contrast between their faith and the events we witness, or in the scornful rebuke of those who take upon them the mystery of things as if they were God’s spies?[152] Is it not Shakespeare’s judgment on his kind that we hear in Lear’s appeal,

                   And thou, all-shaking thunder,
     Smite flat the thick rotundity o’ the world! 
     Crack nature’s moulds, all germens spill at once,
     That make ingrateful man!

and Shakespeare’s judgment on the worth of existence that we hear in Lear’s agonised cry, ‘No, no, no life!’?

Beyond doubt, I think, some such feelings as these possess us, and, if we follow Shakespeare, ought to possess us, from time to time as we read King Lear.  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.  Requital, redemption, amends, equity, explanation, pity and mercy, are words without a meaning here.