but his flaw’d heart—­
     Alack, too weak the conflict to support—­
     ’Twixt two extremes of passion, joy and grief,
     Burst smilingly.

So far, the resemblance of the two stories, and also of the ways in which their painful effect is modified, is curiously close.  And in character too Gloster is, like his master, affectionate,[166] credulous and hasty.  But otherwise he is sharply contrasted with the tragic Lear, who is a towering figure, every inch a king,[167] while Gloster is built on a much smaller scale, and has infinitely less force and fire.  He is, indeed, a decidedly weak though good-hearted man; and, failing wholly to support Kent in resisting Lear’s original folly and injustice,[168] he only gradually takes the better part.  Nor is his character either very interesting or very distinct.  He often gives one the impression of being wanted mainly to fill a place in the scheme of the play; and, though it would be easy to give a long list of his characteristics, they scarcely, it seems to me, compose an individual, a person whom we are sure we should recognise at once.  If this is so, the fact is curious, considering how much we see and hear of him.

I will add a single note.  Gloster is the superstitious character of the drama,—­the only one.  He thinks much of ’these late eclipses in the sun and moon.’  His two sons, from opposite points of view, make nothing of them.  His easy acceptance of the calumny against Edgar is partly due to this weakness, and Edmund builds upon it, for an evil purpose, when he describes Edgar thus: 

     Here stood he in the dark, his sharp sword out,
     Mumbling of wicked charms, conjuring the moon,
     To prove’s auspicious mistress.

Edgar in turn builds upon it, for a good purpose, when he persuades his blind father that he was led to jump down Dover cliff by the temptation of a fiend in the form of a beggar, and was saved by a miracle: 

     As I stood here below, methought his eyes
     Were two full moons; he had a thousand noses,
     Horns whelk’d and waved like the enridged sea: 
     It was some fiend; therefore, thou happy father,
     Think that the clearest gods, who make them honours
     Of men’s impossibilities, have preserved thee.

This passage is odd in its collocation of the thousand noses and the clearest gods, of grotesque absurdity and extreme seriousness.  Edgar knew that the ‘fiend’ was really Gloster’s ‘worser spirit,’ and that ‘the gods’ were himself.  Doubtless, however—­for he is the most religious person in the play—­he thought that it was the gods who, through him, had preserved his father; but he knew that the truth could only enter this superstitious mind in a superstitious form.

The combination of parallelism and contrast that we observe in Lear and Gloster, and again in the attitude of the two brothers to their father’s superstition, is one of many indications that in King Lear Shakespeare was working more than usual on a basis of conscious and reflective ideas.  Perhaps it is not by accident, then, that he makes Edgar and Lear preach to Gloster in precisely the same strain.  Lear says to him: