As flies to wanton boys are we to the gods;
     They kill us for their sport.

Here is no need of the Eumenides, children of Night everlasting; for here is very Night herself.

’The words just cited are not casual or episodical; they strike the keynote of the whole poem, lay the keystone of the whole arch of thought.  There is no contest of conflicting forces, no judgment so much as by casting of lots:  far less is there any light of heavenly harmony or of heavenly wisdom, of Apollo or Athene from above.  We have heard much and often from theologians of the light of revelation:  and some such thing indeed we find in Aeschylus; but the darkness of revelation is here.’[154]

It is hard to refuse assent to these eloquent words, for they express in the language of a poet what we feel at times in reading King Lear but cannot express.  But do they represent the total and final impression produced by the play?  If they do, this impression, so far as the substance of the drama is concerned (and nothing else is in question here), must, it would seem, be one composed almost wholly of painful feelings,—­utter depression, or indignant rebellion, or appalled despair.  And that would surely be strange.  For King Lear is admittedly one of the world’s greatest poems, and yet there is surely no other of these poems which produces on the whole this effect, and we regard it as a very serious flaw in any considerable work of art that this should be its ultimate effect.[155] So that Mr. Swinburne’s description, if taken as final, and any description of King Lear as ‘pessimistic’ in the proper sense of that word, would imply a criticism which is not intended, and which would make it difficult to leave the work in the position almost universally assigned to it.

But in fact these descriptions, like most of the remarks made on King Lear in the present lecture, emphasise only certain aspects of the play and certain elements in the total impression; and in that impression the effect of these aspects, though far from being lost, is modified by that of others.  I do not mean that the final effect resembles that of the Divine Comedy or the Oresteia:  how should it, when the first of these can be called by its author a ‘Comedy,’ and when the second, ending (as doubtless the Prometheus trilogy also ended) with a solution, is not in the Shakespearean sense a tragedy at all?[156] Nor do I mean that King Lear contains a revelation of righteous omnipotence or heavenly harmony, or even a promise of the reconciliation of mystery and justice.  But then, as we saw, neither do Shakespeare’s other tragedies contain these things.  Any theological interpretation of the world on the author’s part is excluded from them, and their effect would be disordered or destroyed equally by the ideas of righteous or of unrighteous omnipotence.  Nor, in reading them, do we think of ‘justice’ or ‘equity’ in