ity, 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 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,