Hence too, as well as from other sources, comes that feeling which haunts us in King Lear, as though we were witnessing something universal,—­a conflict not so much of particular persons as of the powers of good and evil in the world.  And the treatment of many of the characters confirms this feeling.  Considered simply as psychological studies few of them, surely, are of the highest interest.  Fine and subtle touches could not be absent from a work of Shakespeare’s maturity; but, with the possible exception of Lear himself, no one of the characters strikes us as psychologically a wonderful creation, like Hamlet or Iago or even Macbeth; one or two seem even to be somewhat faint and thin.  And, what is more significant, it is not quite natural to us to regard them from this point of view at all.  Rather we observe a most unusual circumstance.  If Lear, Gloster and Albany are set apart, the rest fall into two distinct groups, which are strongly, even violently, contrasted:  Cordelia, Kent, Edgar, the Fool on one side, Goneril, Regan, Edmund, Cornwall, Oswald on the other.  These characters are in various degrees individualised, most of them completely so; but still in each group there is a quality common to all the members, or one spirit breathing through them all.  Here we have unselfish and devoted love, there hard self-seeking.  On both sides, further, the common quality takes an extreme form; the love is incapable of being chilled by injury, the selfishness of being softened by pity; and, it may be added, this tendency to extremes is found again in the characters of Lear and Gloster, and is the main source of the accusations of improbability directed against their conduct at certain points.  Hence the members of each group tend to appear, at least in part, as varieties of one species; the radical differences of the two species are emphasized in broad hard strokes; and the two are set in conflict, almost as if Shakespeare, like Empedocles, were regarding Love and Hate as the two ultimate forces of the universe.

The presence in King Lear of so large a number of characters in whom love or self-seeking is so extreme, has another effect.  They do not merely inspire in us emotions of unusual strength, but they also stir the intellect to wonder and speculation.  How can there be such men and women? we ask ourselves.  How comes it that humanity can take such absolutely opposite forms?  And, in particular, to what omission of elements which should be present in human nature, or, if there is no omission, to what distortion of these elements is it due that such beings as some of these come to exist?  This is a question which Iago (and perhaps no previous creation of Shakespeare’s) forces us to ask, but in King Lear it is provoked again and again.  And more, it seems to us that the author himself is asking this question.  ’Then let them anatomise Regan, see what breeds about her heart.  Is there any cause in nature that makes