of mere fate or chance.  The force of the impression, that is to say, depends on the very violence of the contrast between the outward and the inward, Cordelia’s death and Cordelia’s soul.  The more unmotived, unmerited, senseless, monstrous, her fate, the more do we feel that it does not concern her.  The extremity of the disproportion between prosperity and goodness first shocks us, and then flashes on us the conviction that our whole attitude in asking or expecting that goodness should be prosperous is wrong; that, if only we could see things as they are, we should see that the outward is nothing and the inward is all.

And some such thought as this (which, to bring it clearly out, I have stated, and still state, in a form both exaggerated and much too explicit) is really present through the whole play.  Whether Shakespeare knew it or not, it is present.  I might almost say that the ‘moral’ of King Lear is presented in the irony of this collocation: 

           Albany. The gods defend her!
     Enter Lear with Cordelia dead in his arms.

The ‘gods,’ it seems, do not show their approval by ‘defending’ their own from adversity or death, or by giving them power and prosperity.  These, on the contrary, are worthless, or worse; it is not on them, but on the renunciation of them, that the gods throw incense.  They breed lust, pride, hardness of heart, the insolence of office, cruelty, scorn, hypocrisy, contention, war, murder, self-destruction.  The whole story beats this indictment of prosperity into the brain.  Lear’s great speeches in his madness proclaim it like the curses of Timon on life and man.  But here, as in Timon, the poor and humble are, almost without exception, sound and sweet at heart, faithful and pitiful.[188] And here adversity, to the blessed in spirit, is blessed.  It wins fragrance from the crushed flower.  It melts in aged hearts sympathies which prosperity had frozen.  It purges the soul’s sight by blinding that of the eyes.[189] Throughout that stupendous Third Act the good are seen growing better through suffering, and the bad worse through success.  The warm castle is a room in hell, the storm-swept heath a sanctuary.  The judgment of this world is a lie; its goods, which we covet, corrupt us; its ills, which break our bodies, set our souls free;

     Our means secure us,[190] and our mere defects
     Prove our commodities.

Let us renounce the world, hate it, and lose it gladly.  The only real thing in it is the soul, with its courage, patience, devotion.  And nothing outward can touch that.