(c) What then is this feeling, and whence does it come?  I believe we shall find that it is a feeling not confined to King Lear, but present at the close of other tragedies; and that the reason why it has an exceptional tone or force at the close of King Lear, lies in that very peculiarity of the close which also—­at least for the moment—­excites bewilderment, dismay, or protest.  The feeling I mean is the impression that the heroic being, though in one sense and outwardly he has failed, is yet in another sense superior to the world in which he appears; is, in some way which we do not seek to define, untouched by the doom that overtakes him; and is rather set free from life than deprived of it.  Some such feeling as this—­some feeling which, from this description of it, may be recognised as their own even by those who would dissent from the description—­we surely have in various degrees at the deaths of Hamlet and Othello and Lear, and of Antony and Cleopatra and Coriolanus.[185] It accompanies the more prominent tragic impressions, and, regarded alone, could hardly be called tragic.  For it seems to imply (though we are probably quite unconscious of the implication) an idea which, if developed, would transform the tragic view of things.  It implies that the tragic world, if taken as it is presented, with all its error, guilt, failure, woe and waste, is no final reality, but only a part of reality taken for the whole, and, when so taken, illusive; and that if we could see the whole, and the tragic facts in their true place in it, we should find them, not abolished, of course, but so transmuted that they had ceased to be strictly tragic,—­find, perhaps, the suffering and death counting for little or nothing, the greatness of the soul for much or all, and the heroic spirit, in spite of failure, nearer to the heart of things than the smaller, more circumspect, and perhaps even ‘better’ beings who survived the catastrophe.  The feeling which I have tried to describe, as accompanying the more obvious tragic emotions at the deaths of heroes, corresponds with some such idea as this.[186]

Now this feeling is evoked with a quite exceptional strength by the death of Cordelia.[187] It is not due to the perception that she, like Lear, has attained through suffering; we know that she had suffered and attained in his days of prosperity.  It is simply the feeling that what happens to such a being does not matter; all that matters is what she is.  How this can be when, for anything the tragedy tells us, she has ceased to exist, we do not ask; but the tragedy itself makes us feel that somehow it is so.  And the force with which this impression is conveyed depends largely on the very fact which excites our bewilderment and protest, that her death, following on the deaths of all the evil characters, and brought about by an unexplained delay in Edmund’s effort to save her, comes on us, not as an inevitable conclusion to the sequence of events, but as the sudden stroke