s a daughter played but a
part. She was transformed by a dignity which recast her speech and made
it self-contained. She found herself in the sweep of a feeling so large
that the immediate loss of a kingdom seemed of little consequence to
her. Even an act which might be construed as disrespect to her father
was justified in her eyes, because she was vainly striving to fill out
this larger conception of duty. The test which comes sooner or later to
many parents had come to Lear, to maintain the tenderness of the
relation between father and child, after that relation had become one
between adults, to be content with the responses made by the adult child
to the family claim, while at the same time she responded to the claims
of the rest of life. The mind of Lear was not big enough for this test;
he failed to see anything but the personal slight involved, and the
ingratitude alone reached him. It was impossible for him to calmly watch
his child developing beyond the stretch of his own mind and sympathy.
That a man should be so absorbed in his own indignation as to fail to
apprehend his child's thought, that he should lose his affection in his
anger, simply reveals the fact that his own emotions are dearer to him
than his sense of paternal obligation. Lear apparently also ignored the
common ancestry of Cordelia and himself, and forgot her royal
inheritance of magnanimity. He had thought of himself so long as a noble
and indulgent father that he had lost the faculty by which he might
perceive himself in the wrong. Even in the midst of the storm he
declared himself more sinned against than sinning. He could believe any
amount of kindness and goodness of himself, but could imagine no
fidelity on the part of Cordelia unless she gave him the sign he
demanded.
At length he suffered many hardships; his spirit was buffeted and
broken; he lost his reason as well as his kingdom; but for the first
time his experience was identical with the experience of the men around
him, and he came to a larger conception of life. He put himself in the
place of "the poor naked wretches," and unexpectedly found healing and
comfort. He took poor Tim in his arms from a sheer desire for human
contact and animal warmth, a primitive and genuine need, through which
he suddenly had a view of the world which he had never had from his
throne, and from this moment his heart began to turn toward Cordelia.
In reading the tragedy of King Lear, Cordelia receiv
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