But where the possible depth of human hell is
so foul and unfathomable as it appears in the spirits which serve as
foils to these, we may endure that in them the inner height of heaven
should be no less immaculate and immeasurable.
It should be a truism wellnigh as musty as Hamlet's half cited proverb,
to enlarge upon the evidence given in _King Lear_ of a sympathy with the
mass of social misery more wide and deep and direct and bitter and tender
than Shakespeare has shown elsewhere. But as even to this day and even
in respectable quarters the murmur is not quite duly extinct which would
charge on Shakespeare a certain share of divine indifference to
suffering, of godlike satisfaction and a less than compassionate content,
it is not yet perhaps utterly superfluous to insist on the utter fallacy
and falsity of their creed who whether in praise or in blame would rank
him to his credit or discredit among such poets as on this side at least
may be classed rather with Goethe than with Shelley and with Gautier than
with Hugo. A poet of revolution he is not, as none of his country in
that generation could have been: but as surely as the author of _Julius
Caesar_ has approved himself in the best and highest sense of the word at
least potentially a republican, so surely has the author of _King Lear_
avowed himself in the only good and rational sense of the words a
spiritual if not a political democrat and socialist.
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