The position of the hero in this tragedy is in one important respect peculiar.  The reader of Hamlet, Othello, or Macbeth, is in no danger of forgetting, when the catastrophe is reached, the part played by the hero in bringing it on.  His fatal weakness, error, wrong-doing, continues almost to the end.  It is otherwise with King Lear.  When the conclusion arrives, the old King has for a long while been passive.  We have long regarded him not only as ’a man more sinned against than sinning,’ but almost wholly as a sufferer, hardly at all as an agent.  His sufferings too have been so cruel, and our indignation against those who inflicted them has been so intense, that recollection of the wrong he did to Cordelia, to Kent, and to his realm, has been well-nigh effaced.  Lastly, for nearly four Acts he has inspired in us, together with this pity, much admiration and affection.  The force of his passion has made us feel that his nature was great; and his frankness and generosity, his heroic efforts to be patient, the depth of his shame and repentance, and the ecstasy of his re-union with Cordelia, have melted our very hearts.  Naturally, therefore, at the close we are in some danger of forgetting that the storm which has overwhelmed him was liberated by his own deed.

Yet it is essential that Lear’s contribution to the action of the drama should be remembered; not at all in order that we may feel that he ‘deserved’ what he suffered, but because otherwise his fate would appear to us at best pathetic, at worst shocking, but certainly not tragic.  And when we were reading the earlier scenes of the play we recognised this contribution clearly enough.  At the very beginning, it is true, we are inclined to feel merely pity and misgivings.  The first lines tell us that Lear’s mind is beginning to fail with age.[158] Formerly he had perceived how different were the characters of Albany and Cornwall, but now he seems either to have lost this perception or to be unwisely ignoring it.  The rashness of his division of the kingdom troubles us, and we cannot but see with concern that its motive is mainly selfish.  The absurdity of the pretence of making the division depend on protestations of love from his daughters, his complete blindness to the hypocrisy which is patent to us at a glance, his piteous delight in these protestations, the openness of his expressions of preference for his youngest daughter—­all make us smile, but all pain us.  But pity begins to give way to another feeling when we witness the precipitance, the despotism, the uncontrolled anger of his injustice to Cordelia and Kent, and the ‘hideous rashness’ of his persistence in dividing the kingdom after the rejection of his one dutiful child.  We feel now the presence of force, as well as weakness, but we feel also the presence of the tragic [Greek:  hubris].  Lear, we see, is generous and unsuspicious, of an open and free nature, like Hamlet and Othello and indeed