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How is it, now, that this defective drama so overpowers us that we are either unconscious of its blemishes or regard them as almost irrelevant?  As soon as we turn to this question we recognise, not merely that King Lear possesses purely dramatic qualities which far outweigh its defects, but that its greatness consists partly in imaginative effects of a wider kind.  And, looking for the sources of these effects, we find among them some of those very things which appeared to us dramatically faulty or injurious.  Thus, to take at once two of the simplest examples of this, that very vagueness in the sense of locality which we have just considered, and again that excess in the bulk of the material and the number of figures, events and movements, while they interfere with the clearness of vision, have at the same time a positive value for imagination.  They give the feeling of vastness, the feeling not of a scene or particular place, but of a world; or, to speak more accurately, of a particular place which is also a world.  This world is dim to us, partly from its immensity, and partly because it is filled with gloom; and in the gloom shapes approach and recede, whose half-seen faces and motions touch us with dread, horror, or the most painful pity,—­sympathies and antipathies which we seem to be feeling not only for them but for the whole race.  This world, we are told, is called Britain; but we should no more look for it in an atlas than for the place, called Caucasus, where Prometheus was chained by Strength and Force and comforted by the daughters of Ocean, or the place where Farinata stands erect in his glowing tomb, ’Come avesse lo Inferno in gran dispitto.’

Consider next the double action.  It has certain strictly dramatic advantages, and may well have had its origin in purely dramatic considerations.  To go no further, the secondary plot fills out a story which would by itself have been somewhat thin, and it provides a most effective contrast between its personages and those of the main plot, the tragic strength and stature of the latter being heightened by comparison with the slighter build of the former.  But its chief value lies elsewhere, and is not merely dramatic.  It lies in the fact—­in Shakespeare without a parallel—­that the sub-plot simply repeats the theme of the main story.  Here, as there, we see an old man ’with a white beard.’  He, like Lear, is affectionate, unsuspicious, foolish, and self-willed.  He, too, wrongs deeply a child who loves him not less for the wrong.  He, too, meets with monstrous ingratitude from the child whom he favours, and is tortured and driven to death.  This repetition does not simply double the pain with which the tragedy is witnessed:  it startles and terrifies by suggesting that the folly of Lear and the ingratitude of his daughters are no accidents or merely individual aberrations, but that in that dark cold world some fateful malignant influence is abroad, turning the hearts of the fathers against their children and of the children against their fathers, smiting the earth with a curse, so that the brother gives the brother to death and the father the son, blinding the eyes, maddening the brain, freezing the springs of pity, numbing all powers except the nerves of anguish and the dull lust of life.[141]