forms, and there found—­to the horror and confusion of the thinking mind—­brains to forge, tongues to speak, and hands to act, enormities which no mere brute can conceive or execute.  He shows us in King Lear these terrible forces bursting into monstrous life and flinging themselves upon those human beings who are weak and defenceless, partly from old age, but partly because they are human and lack the dreadful undivided energy of the beast.  And the only comfort he might seem to hold out to us is the prospect that at least this bestial race, strong only where it is vile, cannot endure:  though stars and gods are powerless, or careless, or empty dreams, yet there must be an end of this horrible world: 

     It will come;
     Humanity must perforce prey on itself
     Like monsters of the deep.[147]

The influence of all this on imagination as we read King Lear is very great; and it combines with other influences to convey to us, not in the form of distinct ideas but in the manner proper to poetry, the wider or universal significance of the spectacle presented to the inward eye.  But the effect of theatrical exhibition is precisely the reverse.  There the poetic atmosphere is dissipated; the meaning of the very words which create it passes half-realised; in obedience to the tyranny of the eye we conceive the characters as mere particular men and women; and all that mass of vague suggestion, if it enters the mind at all, appears in the shape of an allegory which we immediately reject.  A similar conflict between imagination and sense will be found if we consider the dramatic centre of the whole tragedy, the Storm-scenes.  The temptation of Othello and the scene of Duncan’s murder may lose upon the stage, but they do not lose their essence, and they gain as well as lose.  The Storm-scenes in King Lear gain nothing and their very essence is destroyed.  It is comparatively a small thing that the theatrical storm, not to drown the dialogue, must be silent whenever a human being wishes to speak, and is wretchedly inferior to many a storm we have witnessed.  Nor is it simply that, as Lamb observed, the corporal presence of Lear, ’an old man tottering about the stage with a walking-stick,’ disturbs and depresses that sense of the greatness of his mind which fills the imagination.  There is a further reason, which is not expressed, but still emerges, in these words of Lamb’s:  ’the explosions of his passion are terrible as a volcano:  they are storms turning up and disclosing to the bottom that sea, his mind, with all its vast riches.’  Yes, ‘they are storms.’  For imagination, that is to say, the explosions of Lear’s passion, and the bursts of rain and thunder, are not, what for the senses they must be, two things, but manifestations of one thing.  It is the powers of the tormented soul that we hear and see in the ’groans of roaring wind and rain’ and the ‘sheets of fire’; and they that, at intervals almost more overwhelming, sink back into darkness and silence.  Nor yet is even this all; but, as those incessant references to wolf and tiger made us see humanity ‘reeling back into the beast’ and ravening against itself, so in the storm we seem to see Nature herself convulsed by the same horrible passions; the ‘common mother,’