s a drama, I find that my feelings
call for this 'happy ending.' I do not mean the human, the
philanthropic, feelings, but the dramatic sense. The former wish Hamlet
and Othello to escape their doom; the latter does not; but it does wish
Lear and Cordelia to be saved. Surely, it says, the tragic emotions have
been sufficiently stirred already. Surely the tragic outcome of Lear's
error and his daughters' ingratitude has been made clear enough and
moving enough. And, still more surely, such a tragic catastrophe as this
should seem _inevitable_. But this catastrophe, unlike those of all the
other mature tragedies, does not seem at all inevitable. It is not even
satisfactorily motived.[130] In fact it seems expressly designed to fall
suddenly like a bolt from a sky cleared by the vanished storm. And
although from a wider point of view one may fully recognise the value of
this effect, and may even reject with horror the wish for a 'happy
ending,' this wider point of view, I must maintain, is not strictly
dramatic or tragic.

Of course this is a heresy and all the best authority is against it. But
then the best authority, it seems to me, is either influenced
unconsciously by disgust at Tate's sentimentalism or unconsciously takes
that wider point of view. When Lamb--there is no higher
authority--writes, 'A happy ending!--as if the living martyrdom that
Lear had gone through, the flaying of his feelings alive, did not make a
fair dismissal from the stage of life the only decorous thing for him,'
I answer, first, that it is precisely this _fair_ dismissal which we
desire for him instead of renewed anguish; and, secondly, that what we
desire for him during the brief remainder of his days is not 'the
childish pleasure of getting his gilt robes and sceptre again,' not what
Tate gives him, but what Shakespeare himself might have given him--peace
and happiness by Cordelia's fireside. And if I am told that he has
suffered too much for this, how can I possibly believe it with these
words ringing in my ears:

Come, let's away to prison:
We two alone will sing like birds i' the cage.
When thou dost ask me blessing, I'll kneel down,
And ask of thee forgiveness: so we'll live,
And pray, and sing, and tell old tales, and laugh
At gilded butterflies?

And again when Schlegel declares that, if Lear were saved, 'the whole'
would 'lose its significance,' because it would no longer show us that