ringing 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.

(_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 real