The Philosophy of the Plays of Shakspere Unfolded Part 20

But Regan's views on this point are seconded and sustained, and there seems to be but one opinion on the subject among those who happen to have that castle in possession; at least the timid owner of it does not feel himself in a position to make any forcible resistance to the orders which his ill.u.s.trious guests, who have 'taken from him the use of his own house,' have seen fit to issue in it. 'Shut up your doors, (says Cornwall),

'Shut up your doors, my lord: 'tis a wild night.

_My_ REGAN COUNSELS _well_; COME OUT O' THE STORM.'

And it is because this representation is artistic and dramatic, and not simply historical, and the Poet must seek to condense, and sum and exhibit in dramatic appreciable figures, the unreckonable, undefinable historical suffering of years, aad lifetimes of this vain human struggle,--because, too, the wildest threats which nature in her terrors makes to man, had to be incorporated in this great philosophic piece; and because, lastly, the Poet would have the madness of the human will and pa.s.sion, presented in its true scientific relations, that this storm collects into itself such ideal sublimities, and borrows from the human pa.s.sion so many images of cruelty.

In all the mad anguish of that ruined greatness, and wronged natural affection, the Poet, relentless as fortune herself in her sternest moods, intent on his experiment only, will bring out his great victim, and consign him to the wind and the rain, and the lightning, and the thunder, and bid his _senses_ undergo _their_ 'horrible pleasure.'

For the senses, scorned as they had been in philosophy hitherto, the senses in this philosophy, have _their_ report also,--their full, honest report, to make to us. And the design of this piece, as already stated in the general, required in its execution, not only that these two kinds of suffering, these two grand departments of human need, should be included and distinguished in it, but that they should be brought together in this one man's experience, so that a deliberate comparison can be inst.i.tuted between them; and the Poet will bid the philosophic king, the living 'subject' himself, report the experiment, and tell us plainly, once for all, whether the science of the physical Arts only, is the science which is wanting to man; or whether arts--scientific arts--that take hold of the moral nature, also, and deal with that not less effectively, can be dispensed with; whether, indeed, man is in any condition to dispense with _the_ Science and _the_ Art which puts him into intelligent and harmonious relations with nature in general.

It was necessary to the purpose of the play to exhibit man's dependence on art, by means of his senses _and_ his sensibilities, and his intellectual conditions, and all his frailties and liabilities,-- his dependence on art, based on the knowledge of natural laws, universal laws,--const.i.tutions, which _include_ the human. It was necessary to exhibit the whole misery, the last extreme of that social evil, to which a creature so naturally frail and ignorant is liable, under those coa.r.s.e, fortuitous, inartistic, unscientific social conglomerations, which ignorant and barbarous ages build, and under the tyranny of those wild, barbaric social evils, which our fine social inst.i.tutions, notwithstanding the universality of their terms, and the transcendant nature of the forces which they are understood to have at their disposal, for some fatal reason or other, do not yet succeed in reducing.

It is, indeed, the whole ground of the Scientific Human Art, which is revealed here by the light of this great pa.s.sion, and that, in this Poet's opinion, is none other than the ground of the human want, and is as large and various as that. And the careful reader of this play,--the patient searcher of its subtle lore,--the diligent collector of its thick-crowding philosophic points and flashing condensations of discovery, will find that the _need of arts_, is that which is set forth in it, with all the power of its magnificent poetic embodiment, and in the abstract as well,--the need of arts infinitely more n.o.ble and effective, more nearly matched with the subtlety of nature, and better able to entangle and subdue its oppositions, than any of which mankind have yet been able to possess themselves, or ever the true intention of nature in the human form can be realized, or anything like a truly Human Const.i.tution, or Common-Weal, is possible.

But let us return to the comparison, and collect the results of this experiment.--For a time, indeed, raised by that storm of grief and indignation into a companionship with the wind and the rain, and the lightning, and the thunder, the king 'strives in his little world of man,'--for that is the phrasing of the poetic report, to _out-scorn_ these elements. Nay, we ourselves hear, as the curtain rises on that ideal representative form of human suffering, the wild intonation of that human defiance--mounting and singing above the thunder, and drowning all the elemental crash with its articulation; for this is an experiment which the philosopher will try in the presence of his audience, and not report it merely. With that anguish in his heart, the crushed majesty, the stricken old man, the child-wounded father, laughs at the pains of _the senses_; the physical distress is welcome to him, he is glad of it. He does not care for anything that the _unconscious_, soulless elements can do to him, he calls to them from their heights, and bids them do their worst. Or it is only as they conspire with that _wilful human_ wrong, and serve to bring home to him anew the depth of it, by these tangible, sensuous effects,--it is only by that means that they are able to wound him.

'Nor rain, wind, thunder, fire, are my daughters,'

_that_ is the argument.

'I tax you _not_, you elements, with _unkindness_.'

Surely that is logical; that is a distinction not without a difference, and appreciable to the human mind, as it is const.i.tuted,--surely that is a point worth putting in the arts and sciences.

'I never gave you kingdoms, called you _children_; You _owe_ me no subscription; why, _then_, let fall Your horrible pleasure? Here I stand _your_ slave, A poor, infirm, weak, and despised old man; But _yet_, I call you _servile ministers_, That have with two pernicious daughters _joined_ Your high, engendered battles 'gainst a head _So old and white_ as this. O, O, '_tis foul_.'

And in his calmer mood, when the storm has done its work upon him, and all the strength of his great pa.s.sion is exhausted,--when his bodily powers are fast sinking under it, and like the subtle Hamlet's 'potent poison,' it begins at last to 'o'er-crow his spirit'--when he is faint with struggling with its fury, wet to the skin with it, and comfortless and shivering, he still maintains through his chattering teeth the argument; he will still defend his first position--

'Thou thinkst 'tis much that this _contentious_ storm Invades _us_ to the skin; so 'tis to thee, But where the greater _malady_ is fixed, The _lesser_ is scarce felt.'

'The tempest in my mind Doth from my senses take all feeling else, Save what beats there.'

'In _such_ a night _To shut me out! Pour on_, I will endure.

_In such a night as this_.'

And when the shelter he is at last forced to seek is found, at the door his courage fails him; and he shrinks back into the storm again, because 'it will not give him leave to think on that _which hurts him more_.'

So nicely does the Poet balance these ills, and report the swaying movement. But it is a poet who does not take common-place opinions on this, or on any other such subject. He is one whose poetic work does not consist in ill.u.s.trating these received opinions, or in finding some novel and fine expression for them. He is observing nature, and undertaking to report it, as it is, not as it should be according to these preconceptions, or according to the established poetic notions of the heroic requisitions.

But there is no stage that can exhibit his experiment here in its real significance, excepting that one which he himself builds for us; for it is the vast lonely heath, and the _Man_, the pigmy man, on it--and the KING, the pigmy king, on it;--it is all the wild roar of elemental nature, and the tempest in that '_little world_ of man,' that have to measure their forces, that have to be brought into continuous and persevering contest. It is not Gloster only, who sees in that storm what 'makes him think that _a man_ is but _a worm_.'

Doubtless, it would have been more in accordance with the old poetic notions, if this poor king had maintained his ground without any misgiving at all; but it is a poet of a new order, and not the old heroic one, who has the conducting of this experiment; and though his verse is not without certain sublimities of its own, they have to consist with the report of the fact as it is, to its most honest and unpoetic, unheroic detail.

And notwithstanding all the poetry of that pa.s.sionate defiance, it is the physical storm that triumphs in the end. The contest between that little world of man and the great outdoor world of nature was too unequal. Compelled at last to succ.u.mb, yielding to 'the tyranny of the open night, that is _too rough_ for _nature to endure_--the night that frightens the very wanderers of the dark, and makes _them_ keep their caves, while it reaches, with its poetic combination of horrors, that border line of the human conception which great Nature's pencil, in this Poet's hand, is always reaching and completing,--

'_Man's_ nature cannot carry The affliction nor _the fear_.'

--Unable to contend any longer with 'the _fretful_ element'--unable to '_outscorn_' any longer 'the to and fro conflicting wind and rain'--weary of struggling with 'the _impetuous_ blasts,' that in their 'eyeless _rage_' and '_fury_' care no more for age and reverence than his _daughters_ do--that seize his white hairs, and make nothing of them--'exposed to _feel_ what _wretches_ feel'--he finds at last, with surprise, that art--the wretch's art--that can make vile things _precious_. No longer clamoring for 'the additions of a king,' but thankful for the basest means of shelter from the elements, glad to avail himself of the rudest structure with which art '_accommodates_'

man to nature, (for that is the word of this philosophy, where it is first proposed)--glad to divide with his meanest subject that shelter which the outcast seeks on such a night--ready to creep with him, under it, side by side--'fain to hovel with _swine_ and rogues forlorn, in short and musty straw'--surely we have reached a point at last where the _action_ of the piece itself--the mere 'dumb show' of it--becomes luminous, and hardly needs the player's eloquence to tell us what it means.

Surely this is a little like 'the language' of _Periander's_ message, when he bid the messenger observe and _report what he saw him do_. It is very important to note that ideas may be conveyed in this way as well as by words, the author of the Advancement of Learning remarks, in speaking of the tradition of the princ.i.p.al and supreme sciences. He takes pains to notice, also, that a representation, by means of these 'transient hieroglyphics,' is much more moving to the sensibilities, and leaves a more vivid and durable impression on the memory, than the most eloquent statement in mere words. 'What is _sensible_ always strikes the memory more strongly, and sooner impresses itself, than what is _intellectual_. Thus the memory of _brutes_ is excited by sensible, but not by intellectual things;' and thus, also, he proposes to impress that _cla.s.s_ which Coriola.n.u.s speaks of, 'whose eyes are more learned than their ears,' to whom 'action is eloquence.' Here we have the advantage of the combination, for there is no part of the dumb show, but has its word of scientific comment and interpretation.

'Art cold [to the Fool]?

I am cold myself. _Where is this_ STRAW, _my fellow_?

The art of our necessities is strange, That can make vile things _precious_. Come, _your hovel_.

Come, bring us to this _hovel_.'

For this is what that wild tragic poetic resistance and defiance comes to--this is what the 'unaccommodated man' comes to, though it is the highest person in the state, stripped of his ceremonies and artificial appliances, on whom the experiment is tried.

'Where is this straw, my fellow? Art _cold_? I am cold _myself_.

Come, your hovel. Come, bring us to this _hovel_.'

When that royal edict is obeyed,--when the wonders of the magician's art are put in requisition to fulfil it,--when the road from the palace to the hovel is laid open,--when the hovel, where Tom o' Bedlam is nestling in the straw, is produced on the stage, and THE KING--THE KING--stoops, before all men's eyes, to creep into its mouth,--surely we do not need 'a _chorus_ to interpret for us'--we do not need to wait for the Poet's own deferred exposition to seize the more obvious meanings. Surely, one catches enough in pa.s.sing, in the dialogues and tableaux here, to perceive that there is something going on in this play which is not all play,--something that will be earnest, perhaps, ere all is done,--something which 'the groundlings' were not expected to get, perhaps, in 'their sixe-penn'orth' of it at the first performance,--something which that witty and splendid company, who made up the Christmas party at Whitehall, on the occasion of its first exhibition there, who sat there 'rustling in silk,' breathing perfumes, glittering in wealth that the alchemy of the storm had not tried, were not, perhaps, all informed of; though there might have been one among them, 'a gentleman of blood and breeding,' who could have told them what it meant.

'We construct,' says the person who describes this method of philosophic instruction, speaking of the subtle prepared history which forces the inductions--'we construct tables and combinations of instances, upon such a plan, and in such order, that the understanding may be enabled to act upon them.'

'They told me I was everything.'

_They told me I was everything_,' says the poor king himself, long afterwards, when the storm has had its ultimate effect upon him.

'To say ay and no to everything that I said!--[To say] ay and no _too_ WAS NO GOOD DIVINITY. They told me, I had _white_ hairs in my beard, ere the _black_ ones were there. When the rain came to wet me once, and the wind to make me chatter; when the thunder would not peace at _my bidding_; there I found them, _there_ I smelt them out. Go to, they are not men of their words: they told me I was everything; _'tis a lie; I am not ague-proof_.'

'_I_ think the king is but a man, as I am' [says King Hal], 'All his _senses_ have the like conditions; and his _affections_, though higher mounted, when they stoop, stoop with _the like wing_.'

But at the door of that rude hut the ruined majesty pauses. In vain his loving attendants, whom, for love's sake, this Poet will still have with him, entreat him to enter. Storm-battered, and wet, and shivering as he is, he shrinks back from the shelter he has bid them bring him to. He will not '_in_.' Why? Is it because 'the tempest will not give him leave to ponder on things would hurt him more.' That is his excuse at first; but another blast strikes him, and he yields to 'the to and fro conflicting wind and rain,' and says--

'_But_ I'll go in.'

Yet still he pauses. Why? Because he has not told us why he is there;--because he is in the hands of the Poet of the Human Kind, the poet of 'those common things that our ordinary life consisteth of,'

who will have of them an argument that shall shame that 'resplendent and l.u.s.trous ma.s.s of matter' that old philosophers and poets have chosen for theirs;--because the rare accident--the wild, poetic, unheard-of accident--which has brought a man, old in luxuries, clothed in soft raiment, nurtured in king's houses, into this rude, unaided collision with nature;--the poetic impossibility, which has brought the one man from the apex of the social structure down this giddy depth, to this lowest social level;--the accident which has given the 'one man,' who has the divine disposal of the common weal, this little casual experimental taste of the weal which his wisdom has been able to provide for the many--of the weal which a government so divinely ordered, from its pinnacle of _personal_ ease and luxury, thinks sufficient and divine enough for _the many_,--this accident--this grand poetic accident--with all its exquisite poetic effects, is, in this poet's hands, the means, not the end. This poor king's great tragedy, the loss of his social position, his broken-heartedness, his outcast suffering, with all the aggravations of this poetic descent, and the force of its vivid contrasts--with all the luxurious impressions on the sensibilities which the ideal wonders of the rude old fable yield so easily in this Poet's hands,--this rare accident, and moving marvel of poetic calamity,--this 'one man's' tragedy is not the tragedy that this Poet's soul is big with. It is the tragedy of the Many, and not the One,--it is the tragedy that is the rule, and not the exception,--it is the tragedy that is common, and not that which is singular, whose argument this Poet has undertaken to manage.

'Come, bring us to your hovel.'

The royal command is obeyed; and the house of that estate, which has no need to borrow its t.i.tle of plurality to establish the grandeur of its claim, springs up at the New Magician's word, and stands before us on the scientific stage in its colossal, portentous, scientific grandeur; and the king--the king--is at the door of it: the _Monarch_ is at the door of the _Many_. For the scientific Poet has had his eye on that structure, and he will make of it a thing of wonder, that shall rival old poets' fancy pieces, and drive our entomologists and conchologists to despair, and drive them off the stage with their curiosities and marvels. There is no need of a Poet's going to the supernatural for 'machinery,' this Poet thinks, while there's such machinery as this ready to his hands unemployed. 'There's something in this more than natural, if philosophy could find it out.' There's no need of going to the antique for his models; for he is inventing the arts that will make of this an _antiquity_.

The Monarch has found his meanest subject's shelter, but at the door of it he is arrested--nailed with a nail fastened by the Master of a.s.semblies. He has come down from that dizzy height, on the Poet's errand. He is there to speak the Poet's word,--to ill.u.s.trate that grave abstract learning which the Poet has put on another page, with a note that, as it stands there, notwithstanding the learned airs it has, it is _not_ learning, but 'the husk and sh.e.l.l' of it. For this is the philosopher who puts it down as a primary Article of Science, that governments should be based on a scientific acquaintance with 'the _natures, dispositions, necessities_ and _discontents_ of _the people_'; and though in his book of the Advancement of Learning, he suggests that these points '_ought to be_,' considering the means of ascertaining them at the disposal of the government, 'considering the variety of its intelligences, the wisdom of its observations, and the height of the station where it keeps sentinel, _transparent as crystal,'--here_ he puts the case of a government that had not availed itself of those extraordinary means of ascertaining the truth at a distance, and was therefore in the way of discovering much that was new, in the course of an accidental personal descent into the lower and more inaccessible regions of the _Common_ Weal it had ordered.

This is the _crystal_ which proves after all the most transparent for him. This is the help for weak eyes which becomes necessary sometimes, in the absence of the scientific crystal, which is its equivalent.

The Monarch is at the hovel's door, but he cannot enter. Why? Because he is in that school into which his own wise REGAN, that '_counsels_'

so 'well'--that _Regan_ who sat at his own council-table so long, has turned him; and it is a school in which the lessons must be learned '_by heart_,' and there is no shelter for him from its pitiless beating in this Poet's economy, till that lesson he was sent there to learn has been learned; and it was a Monarch's lesson, and at the Hovel's door he must recite it. He _will_ not enter. Why? Because the great lesson of state has entered his soul: with the sharpness of its ill.u.s.tration it has _pierced_ him: his spirit is dilated, and moved and kindling with its grandeur: he is thinking of 'the Many,' he has forgotten 'the One,'--the many, all whose senses have like conditions, whose affections stoop with the like wing. He will not enter, because he thinks it unregal, inhuman, mean, selfish to engross the luxury of the hovel's shelter, and the warmth of the 'precious' straw, while he knows that he has subjects still abroad with senses like his own, capable of the like misery, still exposed to its merciless cruelties.

It was the tenant of the castle, it was the man in the house who said, 'Come, let's be snug and cheery here. _Shut up the door_. Let's have a fire, and a feast, and a song,--or a psalm, or a prayer, as the case may be; only let it be _within_--no matter which it is':

'Shut up your doors, my lord; 'tis a wild night,-- _My Regan counsels_ well; come out o' the storm.'

But here it is the houseless man, who is thinking of his kindred,--his royal family, for whom G.o.d has made him responsible, out in this same storm unbonneted; and in the tenderness of that sympathy, in the searching delicacy of that feeling with which he scrutinizes now their case, they seem to him less able than himself to resist its elemental '_tyranny_.' For in that ideal revolution--in that exact turn of the wheel of fortune--in that experimental 'change of places,' which the Poet recommends to those who occupy the upper ones in, the social structure, as a means of a more particular and practical acquaintance with the conditions of those for whom they legislate, new views of the common natural human relations; new views of the ends of social combinations are perpetually flashing on him; for it is the fallen monarch himself, the late owner and disposer of the Common Weal, it is this strangely _philosophic_, mysteriously philosophic, king--philosophic as that Alfred who was going to succeed him--it is the king who is chosen by the Poet as the chief commentator and expounder of that new political and social doctrine which the action of this play is itself suggesting.

In that school of the tempest; in that one night's personal experience of the misery that underlies the pompous social structure, with all its stately splendours and divine pretensions; in that New School of the Experimental Science, the king has been taking lessons in the art of majesty. The alchemy of it has robbed him of the external adjuncts and 'additions of a king,' but the sovereignty of MERCY, the divine right of PITY, the majesty of the HUMAN KINDNESS, the grandeur of the COMMON WEAL, 'breathes through his lips' from the Poet's heart 'like man new made.'

_Kent_. Good, my lord, enter here.