's camp; but she sees only Edmund, not those
'greater' ones on whose pleasure hangs her father's fate and her own.
For her own she is little concerned; she knows how to meet adversity:

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 b