On the other side, Kent is the exception which answers to Regan on this.
Cordelia, the brotherless Antigone of our stage, has one passing touch of
intolerance for what her sister was afterwards to brand as indiscretion
and dotage in their father, which redeems her from the charge of
perfection. Like Imogen, she is not too inhumanly divine for the sense
of divine irritation. Godlike though they be, their very godhead is
human and feminine; and only therefore credible, and only therefore
adorable. Cloten and Regan, Goneril and Iachimo, have power to stir and
embitter the sweetness of their blood. But for the contrast and even the
contact of antagonists as abominable as these, the gold of their spirit
would be too refined, the lily of their holiness too radiant, the violet
of their virtue too sweet. As it is, Shakespeare has gone down perforce
among the blackest and the basest things of nature to find anything so
equally exceptional in evil as properly to counterbalance and make
bearable the excellence and extremity of their goodness. No otherwise
could either angel have escaped the blame implied in the very attribute
and epithet of blameless.
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