was to keep it inviolate, but also to preserve a father. And even if truth were the one and only obligation, to tell much less than truth is not to tell it. And Cordelia’s speech not only tells much less than truth about her love, it actually perverts the truth when it implies that to give love to a husband is to take it from a father. There surely never was a more unhappy speech.
When Isabella goes to plead with Angelo for her brother’s life, her horror of her brother’s sin is so intense, and her perception of the justice of Angelo’s reasons for refusing her is so clear and keen, that she is ready to abandon her appeal before it is well begun; she would actually do so but that the warm-hearted profligate Lucio reproaches her for her coldness and urges her on. 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,
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
- ↑ Cf. Cornwall’s satirical remarks on Kent’s ‘plainness’ in II. ii. 101 ff.}},—a plainness which did no service to Kent’s master. (As a matter of fact, Cordelia had said nothing about ‘plainness.’)
