Like the deformity of Richard, Edmund’s illegitimacy furnishes, of course, no excuse for his villainy, but it somewhat influences our feelings.  It is no fault of his, and yet it separates him from other men.  He is the product of Nature—­of a natural appetite asserting itself against the social order; and he has no recognised place within this order.  So he devotes himself to Nature, whose law is that of the stronger, and who does not recognise those moral obligations which exist only by convention,—­by ‘custom’ or ’the curiosity of nations.’[170] Practically, his attitude is that of a professional criminal.  ’You tell me I do not belong to you,’ he seems to say to society:  ’very well:  I will make my way into your treasure-house if I can.  And if I have to take life in doing so, that is your affair.’  How far he is serious in this attitude, and really indignant at the brand of bastardy, how far his indignation is a half-conscious self-excuse for his meditated villainy, it is hard to say; but the end shows that he is not entirely in earnest.

As he is an adventurer, with no more ill-will to anyone than good-will, it is natural that, when he has lost the game, he should accept his failure without showing personal animosity.  But he does more.  He admits the truth of Edgar’s words about the justice of the gods, and applies them to his own case (though the fact that he himself refers to fortune’s wheel rather than to the gods may be significant).  He shows too that he is not destitute of feeling; for he is touched by the story of his father’s death, and at last ‘pants for life’ in the effort to do ‘some good’ by saving Lear and Cordelia.  There is something pathetic here which tempts one to dream that, if Edmund had been whole brother to Edgar, and had been at home during those ‘nine years’ when he was ‘out,’ he might have been a very different man.  But perhaps his words,

                   Some good I mean to do,
     Despite of mine own nature,

suggest rather that Shakespeare is emphasising the mysterious fact, commented on by Kent in the case of the three daughters of Lear, of an immense original difference between children of one father.  Stranger than this emergence of better feelings, and curiously pathetic, is the pleasure of the dying man in the thought that he was loved by both the women whose corpses are almost the last sight he is to see.  Perhaps, as we conjectured, the cause of his delay in saving Lear and Cordelia even after he hears of the deaths of the sisters is that he is sunk in dreamy reflections on his past.  When he murmurs, ‘Yet Edmund was beloved,’ one is almost in danger of forgetting that he had done much more than reject the love of his father and half-brother.  The passage is one of several in Shakespeare’s plays where it strikes us that he is recording some fact about human nature with which he had actually met, and which had seemed to him peculiarly strange.