Cordelia's hatred of hypocrisy and of
the faintest appearance of mercenary professions reminds us of
Isabella's hatred of impurity; but Cordelia's position is infinitely
more difficult, and on the other hand there is mingled with her hatred a
touch of personal antagonism and of pride. Lear's words,
Let pride, which she calls plainness, marry her![183]
are monstrously unjust, but they contain one grain of truth; and indeed
it was scarcely possible that a nature so strong as Cordelia's, and with
so keen a sense of dignity, should feel here nothing whatever of pride
and resentment. This side of her character is emphatically shown in her
language to her sisters in the first scene--language perfectly just, but
little adapted to soften their hearts towards their father--and again in
the very last words we hear her speak. She and her father are brought
in, prisoners, to the enemy'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.
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