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First and Last by Hilaire Belloc
page 198 of 229 (86%)

The play is national, again, in that permanent curiosity upon knowable
things--nay, that mysterious half-knowledge of unknowable things--which,
in its last forms, produced the mystic, and which is throughout history
so plainly characteristic of these Northern Atlantic islands. Every play
of Shakespeare builds with that material, and no writer, even of the
English turn, has sent out points further into the region of what is not
known than Shakespeare has in sudden flashes of phrase. But "King Lear,"
though it contains a lesser number of lines of this mystical and
half-religious effect than, say, "Hamlet," yet as a general impression
is the more mystical of the two plays. The element of madness, which in
"Hamlet" hangs in the background like a storm-cloud ready to break, in
"King Lear" rages; and it is the use of this which lends its amazing
psychical power to the play. It has been said (with no great profundity
of criticism) that English fiction is chiefly remarkable for its power
of particularization of character, and that where French work, for
instance, will present ideas, English will present persons. The judgment
is grossly insufficient, and therefore false, but it is based upon a
proof which is very salient in English letters, which is that, say, in
quite short and modern work the sense of complete unity deadens the
English mind. The same nerve which revolts at a straight road and at a
code of law revolts against one tone of thought, and the sharp contrast
of emotional character, not the dual contrast which is common to all
literatures, but the multiple contrast, runs through "King Lear" and
gives the work such a tone that one seems as one reads it to be moving
in a cloud.

The conclusion is perhaps Shakespearean rather than English, and in a
fashion escapes from any national labelling. But the note of silence
which Shakespeare suddenly brings in upon the turmoil, and with which he
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