between the representation and the imagination, because these tragedies are, in essentials, perfectly dramatic.  But King Lear, as a whole, is imperfectly dramatic, and there is something in its very essence which is at war with the senses, and demands a purely imaginative realisation.  It is therefore Shakespeare’s greatest work, but it is not what Hazlitt called it, the best of his plays; and its comparative unpopularity is due, not merely to the extreme painfulness of the catastrophe, but in part to its dramatic defects, and in part to a failure in many readers to catch the peculiar effects to which I have referred,—­a failure which is natural because the appeal is made not so much to dramatic perception as to a rarer and more strictly poetic kind of imagination.  For this reason, too, even the best attempts at exposition of King Lear are disappointing; they remind us of attempts to reduce to prose the impalpable spirit of the Tempest.

I propose to develop some of these ideas by considering, first, the dramatic defects of the play, and then some of the causes of its extraordinary imaginative effect.

1

We may begin, however, by referring to two passages which have often been criticised with injustice.  The first is that where the blinded Gloster, believing that he is going to leap down Dover cliff, does in fact fall flat on the ground at his feet, and then is persuaded that he has leaped down Dover cliff but has been miraculously preserved.  Imagine this incident transferred to Othello, and you realise how completely the two tragedies differ in dramatic atmosphere.  In Othello it would be a shocking or a ludicrous dissonance, but it is in harmony with the spirit of King Lear.  And not only is this so, but, contrary to expectation, it is not, if properly acted, in the least absurd on the stage.  The imagination and the feelings have been worked upon with such effect by the description of the cliff, and by the portrayal of the old man’s despair and his son’s courageous and loving wisdom, that we are unconscious of the grotesqueness of the incident for common sense.

The second passage is more important, for it deals with the origin of the whole conflict.  The oft-repeated judgment that the first scene of King Lear is absurdly improbable, and that no sane man would think of dividing his kingdom among his daughters in proportion to the strength of their several protestations of love, is much too harsh and is based upon a strange misunderstanding.  This scene acts effectively, and to imagination the story is not at all incredible.  It is merely strange, like so many of the stories on which our romantic dramas are based.  Shakespeare, besides, has done a good deal to soften the improbability of the legend, and he has done much more than the casual reader perceives.  The very first words of the drama, as Coleridge pointed out, tell us that the division of the kingdom is already settled in all its