For thee, oppressed king, am I cast down;
     Myself could else out-frown false fortune’s frown.

Yes, that is how she would meet fortune, frowning it down, even as Goneril would have met it; nor, if her father had been already dead, would there have been any great improbability in the false story that was to be told of her death, that, like Goneril, she ‘fordid herself.’  Then, after those austere words about fortune, she suddenly asks,

     Shall we not see these daughters and these sisters?

Strange last words for us to hear from a being so worshipped and beloved; but how characteristic!  Their tone is unmistakable.  I doubt if she could have brought herself to plead with her sisters for her father’s life; and if she had attempted the task, she would have performed it but ill.  Nor is our feeling towards her altered one whit by that.  But what is true of Kent and the Fool[184] is, in its measure, true of her.  Any one of them would gladly have died a hundred deaths to help King Lear; and they do help his soul; but they harm his cause.  They are all involved in tragedy.

* * * * *

Why does Cordelia die?  I suppose no reader ever failed to ask that question, and to ask it with something more than pain,—­to ask it, if only for a moment, in bewilderment or dismay, and even perhaps in tones of protest.  These feelings are probably evoked more strongly here than at the death of any other notable character in Shakespeare; and it may sound a wilful paradox to assert that the slightest element of reconciliation is mingled with them or succeeds them.  Yet it seems to me indubitable that such an element is present, though difficult to make out with certainty what it is or whence it proceeds.  And I will try to make this out, and to state it methodically.

(a) It is not due in any perceptible degree to the fact, which we have just been examining, that Cordelia through her tragic imperfection contributes something to the conflict and catastrophe; and I drew attention to that imperfection without any view to our present problem.  The critics who emphasise it at this point in the drama are surely untrue to Shakespeare’s mind; and still more completely astray are those who lay stress on the idea that Cordelia, in bringing a foreign army to help her father, was guilty of treason to her country.  When she dies we regard her, practically speaking, simply as we regard Ophelia or Desdemona, as an innocent victim swept away in the convulsion caused by the error or guilt of others.

(b) Now this destruction of the good through the evil of others is one of the tragic facts of life, and no one can object to the use of it, within certain limits, in tragic art.  And, further, those who because of it declaim against the nature of things, declaim without thinking.  It is obviously the other side of the fact that the effects of good spread far and wide beyond the doer of good; and we should ask ourselves whether we really could wish (supposing it conceivable) to see this double-sided fact abolished.  Nevertheless the touch of reconciliation that we feel in contemplating the death of Cordelia is not due, or is due only in some slight degree, to a perception that the event is true to life, admissible in tragedy, and a case of a law which we cannot seriously desire to see abrogated.