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 receives a full share of our censure.  Her first words are cold, and we are shocked by her lack of tenderness.  Why should she ignore her father’s need for indulgence, and be unwilling to give him what he so obviously craved?  We see in the old king “the over-mastering desire of being beloved, selfish, and yet characteristic of the selfishness of a loving and kindly nature alone.”  His eagerness produces in us a strange pity for him, and we are impatient that his youngest and best-beloved child cannot feel this, even in the midst of her search for truth and her newly acquired sense of a higher duty.  It seems to us a narrow conception that