Of course this is a heresy and all the best authority is against it.  But then the best authority, it seems to me, is either influenced unconsciously by disgust at Tate’s sentimentalism or unconsciously takes that wider point of view.  When Lamb—­there is no higher authority—­writes, ’A happy ending!—­as if the living martyrdom that Lear had gone through, the flaying of his feelings alive, did not make a fair dismissal from the stage of life the only decorous thing for him,’ I answer, first, that it is precisely this fair dismissal which we desire for him instead of renewed anguish; and, secondly, that what we desire for him during the brief remainder of his days is not ’the childish pleasure of getting his gilt robes and sceptre again,’ not what Tate gives him, but what Shakespeare himself might have given him—­peace and happiness by Cordelia’s fireside.  And if I am told that he has suffered too much for this, how can I possibly believe it with these words ringing in my ears: 

                      Come, let’s away to prison: 
     We two alone will sing like birds i’ the cage. 
     When thou dost ask me blessing, I’ll kneel down,
     And ask of thee forgiveness:  so we’ll live,
     And pray, and sing, and tell old tales, and laugh
     At gilded butterflies?

And again when Schlegel declares that, if Lear were saved, ‘the whole’ would ‘lose its significance,’ because it would no longer show us that the belief in Providence ’requires a wider range than the dark pilgrimage on earth to be established in its whole extent,’ I answer that, if the drama does show us that, it takes us beyond the strictly tragic point of view.[131]

A dramatic mistake in regard to the catastrophe, however, even supposing it to exist, would not seriously affect the whole play.  The principal structural weakness of King Lear lies elsewhere.  It is felt to some extent in the earlier Acts, but still more (as from our study of Shakespeare’s technique we have learnt to expect) in the Fourth and the first part of the Fifth.  And it arises chiefly from the double action, which is a peculiarity of King Lear among the tragedies.  By the side of Lear, his daughters, Kent, and the Fool, who are the principal figures in the main plot, stand Gloster and his two sons, the chief persons of the secondary plot.  Now by means of this double action Shakespeare secured certain results highly advantageous even from the strictly dramatic point of view, and easy to perceive.  But the disadvantages were dramatically greater.  The number of essential characters is so large, their actions and movements are so complicated, and events towards the close crowd on one another so thickly, that the reader’s attention,[132] rapidly transferred from one centre of interest to another, is overstrained.  He becomes, if not intellectually confused, at least emotionally fatigued.  The battle, on which everything turns, scarcely affects him.  The deaths of Edmund,