mere respect or admiration, become adorable in a nature so loving as Cordelia’s. She is a thing enskyed and sainted, and yet we feel no incongruity in the love of the King of France for her, as we do in the love of the Duke for Isabella.
But with this reverence or worship is combined in the reader’s mind a passion of championship, of pity, even of protecting pity. She is so deeply wronged, and she appears, for all her strength, so defenceless. We think of her as unable to speak for herself. We think of her as quite young, and as slight and small.[1] ‘Her voice was ever soft, gentle, and low’; ever so, whether the tone was that of resolution, or rebuke, or love.[2] Of all Shakespeare’s heroines she knew least of joy. She grew up with Goneril and Regan for sisters. Even her love for her father must have been mingled with pain and anxiety. She must early have learned to school and repress emotion. She never knew the bliss of young love: there is no trace of such love for the King of France. She had knowingly to wound most deeply the being dearest to her. He cast her off; and, after suffering an agony for him, and before she could see him safe in death, she was brutally murdered. We have to thank the poet for passing lightly over the circumstances of her death. We do not think of them. Her image comes before us calm and bright and still.
The memory of Cordelia thus becomes detached in a manner from the action of the drama. The reader refuses to admit into it any idea of imperfection, and is outraged when any share in her father’s
- ↑ ‘Our last and least’ (according to the Folio reading). Lear speaks again of ‘this little seeming substance.’ He can carry her dead body in his arms.
- ↑ Perhaps then the ‘low sound’ is not merely metaphorical in Kent’s speech in I. i. 153 f.:
answer my life my judgment,
Thy youngest daughter does not love thee least;
Nor are those empty-hearted whose low sound
Reverbs no hollowness.
