Something has now been said of the four characters, Lear, Edgar, Kent and the Fool, who are together in the storm upon the heath.  I have made no attempt to analyse the whole effect of these scenes, but one remark may be added.  These scenes, as we observed, suggest the idea of a convulsion in which Nature herself joins with the forces of evil in man to overpower the weak; and they are thus one of the main sources of the more terrible impressions produced by King Lear.  But they have at the same time an effect of a totally different kind, because in them are exhibited also the strength and the beauty of Lear’s nature, and, in Kent and the Fool and Edgar, the ideal of faithful devoted love.  Hence from the beginning to the end of these scenes we have, mingled with pain and awe and a sense of man’s infirmity, an equally strong feeling of his greatness; and this becomes at times even an exulting sense of the powerlessness of outward calamity or the malice of others against his soul.  And this is one reason why imagination and emotion are never here pressed painfully inward, as in the scenes between Lear and his daughters, but are liberated and dilated.

5

The character of Cordelia is not a masterpiece of invention or subtlety like that of Cleopatra; yet in its own way it is a creation as wonderful.  Cordelia appears in only four of the twenty-six scenes of King Lear; she speaks—­it is hard to believe it—­scarcely more than a hundred lines; and yet no character in Shakespeare is more absolutely individual or more ineffaceably stamped on the memory of his readers.  There is a harmony, strange but perhaps the result of intention, between the character itself and this reserved or parsimonious method of depicting it.  An expressiveness almost inexhaustible gained through paucity of expression; the suggestion of infinite wealth and beauty conveyed by the very refusal to reveal this beauty in expansive speech—­this is at once the nature of Cordelia herself and the chief characteristic of Shakespeare’s art in representing it.  Perhaps it is not fanciful to find a parallel in his drawing of a person very different, Hamlet.  It was natural to Hamlet to examine himself minutely, to discuss himself at large, and yet to remain a mystery to himself; and Shakespeare’s method of drawing the character answers to it; it is extremely detailed and searching, and yet its effect is to enhance the sense of mystery.  The results in the two cases differ correspondingly.  No one hesitates to enlarge upon Hamlet, who speaks of himself so much; but to use many words about Cordelia seems to be a kind of impiety.