The Philosophy of the Plays of Shakspere Unfolded Part 22

He is admirably seconded in his views on this subject, by the king himself, who, in that fine philosophic humour which his madness and his misery have served to develop in him, stands ready to lend himself to the boldest and most delicate philosophical inquiries. For the point to be noted here,--and it is one of no ordinary importance,--is, that this mad humour for philosophical investigation, which has seized so strangely the royal mind, does not appear to be at all in the vein of that old-fashioned philosophy, which had been rattling its abstractions in the face of the collective human misery for so many ages. For the helplessness of the human creature in his struggle with the elements, and those conditions of his nature which put him so hopelessly at the mercy of his own kind and kindred, seem to suggest to the royal sufferer, who has the advantage of a fresh experience to stimulate his apprehension, that there ought to be some relief for the human condition from _this source_, that is, from PHILOSOPHY; and his inquiries and discoveries are all stamped with the unmistakeable impress of that fire new philosophy, which was not yet out of the mint elsewhere--which was yet undergoing the formative process in the mind of its great inventor;--that philosophy, which we are told elsewhere 'has for its princ.i.p.al object, to make _nature subservient to the wants and state of Man_';--and which concerns itself for that purpose with ideas as they exist in nature, as _causes_, and not as they exist in the mind of man as _words_ merely.

If there had been, indeed, any intention of paying a marked compliment to the philosophy which still held all the mind of the world in its grasp, at that great moment in history, in which Tom o' Bedlam makes his first appearance on any stage, it is not likely that _that_ sage would have been just the person appointed to hold the office of Philosopher in Chief, and Councillor extraordinary to his Majesty.

The selection is indeed made on the part of the king, in perfect good faith, whatever the Poet's intent may be; for from the moment that this creature makes his appearance, he has no eyes or ears for anything else. And he will not be parted from him. For this startling juxtaposition was not intended by the Poet to fulfil its effect as a mere pa.s.sing _tableau vivant_. The relation must be dramatically developed; that astounding juxtaposition must be prolonged, in spite of the horror of the spectators, and the disgust and rude displeasure of the king's attendants. They seek in vain to _part_ these two men.

The king refuses to stir without him. 'He will _still keep with his philosopher_.' He has a vague idea that his regal administration stands in need of some a.s.sistance, and that philosophy ought to be able to give it, and that the Bedlamite is in some way connected with the subject, but confused as the a.s.sociation is, it is a pertinacious one; and, in spite of their disgust the king's friends are obliged to take this wretch with them. For Gloster does not know, after all, it is 'his own flesh and blood' he sees there. He cannot even recognize the common kindred in that guise, as the king does, when he philosophises on his condition. And the rough aristocratic contempt and indifference which is manifested by the king's party, as a matter of course, for this poor human victim of wrong and misfortune, is made to contrast with their boundless sympathy and tenderness for the _king_, while the poet aiming at broader relationships, finds the mantle of _his_ humanity wide enough for them, _both_.

As for the king,--startled in the midst of those new views of human wretchedness which his own sufferings have occasioned, and while those desires to _remedy it_, with which his penitence is accompanied, are still on his lip, by this wild apparition and embodiment of his thought, in that new accession of his mental disorder, which the presence of this object seems to occasion, that confounding of proximate conceptions, which leads him to regard this man as a source of new light on human affairs, is one of those exquisite physiological exhibitions of which only this scientific artist is capable.

And, in fact, it must be confessed, that this 'learned Theban'

himself, notwithstanding the unexpected dignity of his promotion, does not appear to be altogether wanting in a taste, at least, for that new kind of philosophical investigation, which seems to be looked for at his hands. The king's inquiries appear to fall in remarkably with the previous train of his pursuits. In the course of his experiments, he seems himself to have struck upon that new philosophic proceeding, which has been called 'putting philosophy upon the right road again.'

Only the philosophic domain which that new road in philosophy leads to, appears to be very considerably broader, as 'Tom' takes it, than that very vivid, but narrow limitation of its fields, which Mr.

Macaulay has set down in our time, would make it. Indeed, this 'philosopher,' that _Lear_ so much inclines to, appears to have included in his investigations the two _extremes_ of the new science of practice. He has sounded it apparently 'from its lowest note to the top of its key.'

'What is your study?' says the king to him, eyeing him curiously, and apparently struck with the practical result--anxious to have a word with him in private, but obliged to conduct the examination on the stage.

'How to prevent THE FIEND,' is Tom's reply. 'How to prevent the fiend _and_ to kill vermin.'

This is the Poet who says elsewhere, 'that without _good_ nature, _men_ are themselves but a n.o.bler kind of vermin.'

One cannot but observe, however, that Poor Tom's researches in this quite new field of a practical philosophy, do not appear to have been followed up since his time with any very marked success. _One_ of these departments of 'his _study_' has indeed been seized, and is now occupied by whole troops of modern philosophers; but their inquiries, though very interesting and doubtlessly useful, do not appear to exhibit that direct and palpable bearing on practice, to which Tom's programme so severely inclines. For he is one who would make 'the art and practic part of life, the mistress to his theoric.' And as to that other mysterious object of his inquiries, Mr. Macaulay is not the only person who appears to think, that that does not come within the range of anything human. Many of our scholars are still of the opinion that, 'court holy water' is the best application in the world for _him_; and the fact that he does not appear to get '_prevented_' with it; it is a fact which of course has nothing to do with the logical result. For our philosophers are still determined to reason it 'thus and thus,'

without taking into account the circ.u.mstance, that 'the sequent effect' with which 'nature finds itself scourged,' is not touched by their _reasons_.

King Lear's own inquiries seem also to include with great distinctness, the two great branches of the new philosophical inquiry.

His mind is indeed very eagerly bent on the pursuit of _causes_. And though in the paroxysms of his mental disorder, he is apt to confound them occasionally, this very confusion, as it is managed, only serves to develop the breadth of the philosophic conception beneath it.

'He hath no daughters, Sir.' '_Death, traitor_! Nothing could have subdued nature to such a lowness, but--his UNKIND _daughters_.' It is, of course, his own new and terrible experience which points the inquiry, and though the physical causes are not omitted in it, it is not strange that the moral should predominate, and that his mind should seem to be very curiously occupied in tracking the _ethical_ phenomena to their sources '_in nature_.'

In the midst of the uproar of the Tempest, he does indeed begin with the physical investigation. He puts to his 'learned Theban' the question, which no learned Theban had then ever suspected of lying within the range of the scholar's investigations--that question which has been put to some purpose since--'What is the cause of _thunder_?'

But his philosophic inquiry does not stop there,--where all the new philosophy has stopped ever since, and where some of our scholars declare it was meant to stop, notwithstanding the plainest declarations of its inventor to the contrary--with the investigation of physical causes.

For, after all, it is 'the tempest in his _mind_' that most concerns him. _His_ philosopher, his _practical_ philosopher, must be able to explore the conditions of that, and find the conductors for its lightnings. 'For where the greater malady is fixed, the lesser is scarce felt.' 'Nor rain, wind, thunder, fire, are his daughters.'

After all, it is _Regan's_ heart that appears to him to be the trouble--it is that which must first be laid on the table; and as soon as he decides to have a philosopher among 'his hundred,' he gives orders to that effect.

'Then let them anatomise Regan; see what breeds about her heart: Is there any CAUSE IN NATURE that makes _these hard hearts_?'

A very fair subject for philosophical inquiry, one would say; and, on the whole, as profitable and interesting a one, perhaps, as some of those that engage the attention of our men of learning so profoundly at present. In these days of enlightened scientific procedure, one would hardly undertake the smallest practical affair with the aid of any such vague general notions or traditional accounts of the properties to be dealt with, as those which our learned Thebans appear to find all-sufficient for their practices, in that particular department which Lear seems inclined to open here as a field for scientific exploration.

And it is perfectly clear that the author, whoever he may be, is very much of Lear's mind on this point, for he does not depend upon Lear alone to suggest his views upon it. There is never a person of this drama that does not do it.

CHAPTER IV.

THE USE OF EYES.

'All that follow their noses are led by their eyes, but--_blind men_.'

The Play is all strewn throughout, and tinctured in the grain, with the finest natural philosophy, of that new and very subtle and peculiar kind, which belongs to the earlier stages of the physical inquiry, and while it was still in the hands of its original inventors. Even in physics, there are views here which have not been developed any further since this author's time. It is not merely in the direct discourse on questions of physical science, as in the physician's report of the resources of his art, or in Cordelia's invocation to 'all the _blessed secrets_--the _unpublished_ virtues of the earth,' that the track of the new physiological science, which this work embodies, may be seen. It runs through it all; it betrays itself at every turn. But the subtle and occult relations of the moral and physical are noted here, as we do not find them noted elsewhere, in less practical theories of nature.

That there is something in the design of this play which requires an elaborate and systematic exhibition of the '_special_' human relationships, natural and artificial, political, social, and domestic, almost any reading of it would show. And that this design involves, also, a systematic exhibition of the social _consequences_ arising from the violation of the natural laws or duties of these relationships, and that this violation is everywhere systematically aggravated,--carried to its last conceivable extreme, so that all the play is filled with the uproar of one continued outrage on _humanity_; this is not less evident for the Poet is not content with the material which his chronicle offered him, already invented to his hands for this purpose, but he has deliberately tacked to it, and intricately connected with it throughout, another plot, bearing on the surface of it, and in the most prominent statements, the author's intention in this respect; which tends not only in the most unequivocal manner to repeat and corroborate the impressions which the story of Lear produces, but to widen the dramatic exhibition, so as to make it capable of conveying the whole breadth of the philosophic conception.

For it is the scientific doctrine of MAN that is taught here; and that is, that man must be _human_ in _all_ his relations, or '_cease to be_.' It is the violation of the ESSENTIAL humanity. It is a DEGENERACY which is exhibited here, and the 'SEQUENT EFFECTS' which belong naturally to the violation of a law that has the force of the universe to sustain it. And it is not by accident that the story of the illegitimate Edmund begins the piece; it is not for nothing that we are compelled to stop to hear that, before even Lear and his daughters can make their entrance. The whole story of the _base_ and base-born one, who makes what he calls _nature_--the rude, brutal, spontaneous nature--his G.o.ddess and his law, and ignores the human distinction; this part was needed in order to supply the deficiences in the social diagrams which the original plot presented; and, indeed, the whole story of the Duke of Gloster, which is from first to last a clear Elizabethan invention, and of which this of Edmund is but a part, was not less essential for the same purpose.

Neither does one need to go very far beneath the surface, to perceive a new and extraordinary treatment of the ethical principle in this play throughout; one which the new, artistic, practical 'stand-point'

here taken naturally suggested, but one which could have proceeded only from the inmost heart of the new philosophy. It is just the kind of treatment which the proposal to introduce the Inductive method of inquiry into this department of the human practice inevitably involved. A disposition to go behind the ethical phenomena, to pursue the investigation to its scientific conclusion, a refusal to accept the facts which, to the unscientific observation, appear to be the ultimate ones--a refusal to accept the coa.r.s.e, vague, spontaneous notions of the dark ages, as the solution of these so essential phenomena, is everywhere betraying and declaring itself. Cordelia's agonised invocation and summons to the unpublished forces of nature, to be aidant and remediate to the good man's distress, is continually echoed by the poet, but with a broader application. It is not the bodily malady and infirmity only--it is not that kind of madness, only with which the poor king is afflicted in the later stages of the play, which appears to him to need scientific treatment--it is not for the cure of these alone that he would open his Prospero book, 'nature's infinite book of secresy,' as he calls it in Mark Antony--'the true magic,' as he calls it _elsewhere_--the book of the unpublished laws--the scientific book of 'KINDS'--the book of 'the historic laws'--'the book of G.o.d's power.'

All the _interior_ phenomena which attend the violation of duty are strictly omitted here. That psychological exhibition of it belongs to other plays; and the Poet has left us, as we all know, no room to suspect the tenderness of his moral sensibility, or the depth of his acquaintance with these subjective phenomena. The _social_ consequences of the violation of duty in all the human relationships, the consequence to _others_, and the _social reaction_, limits the exhibition here. The object on which our sympathies are chiefly concentrated is, as he himself is made to inform us--

'One more sinned _against_, than sinning.'

'Oh, these eclipses do portend these divisions,'

says the base-born Edmund, sneeringly. '_Fa sol la mi_,' he continues, producing that particular conjunction of sounds which was forbidden by the ancient musicians, on account of its unnatural discord. The monkish writers on music call it diabolical. It is at the conclusion of a very long and elaborate discussion on this question, that he treats us to this prohibited piece of harmony; and a discussion in which Gloster refers to the influence of the _planets_, this _unnaturalness_ in all the human relations--this universal jangle--'this ruinous disorder, that hunts men disquietly to their graves.' But the 'base' Edmund is disposed to acquit the celestial influences of the evil charged on them. He does not believe in men being--

'Fools, by heavenly compulsion; knaves and thieves, by spherical predominance; drunkards, liars, and adulterers, by an enforced obedience of planetary influence; and all that they are evil in, by a divine thrusting on.'

He has another method of accounting for what _he_ himself is. He does not think it necessary to go quite so far, to find the origin of his own base, lawless, _inhuman, unconscionable_ dispositions. But the inquiries, which are handled so boldly in the soliloquies of Edmund, are started again and again elsewhere; and the recurrence is too emphatic, to leave any room to doubt that the author's intention in the play is concerned in it; and that this question of 'the several dispositions and characters of men,' and the inquiry as to whether there be '_any causes in_ nature' of these _degenerate_ tendencies, which he is at such pains to exhibit, is, for some reason or other, a very important point with him. That which in _contemplative philosophy_ corresponds to the _cause_, in _practical philosophy_ becomes the _rule_, the _founder_ of it tells us. But the play cannot be studied effectually without taking into account the fact, that the author avails himself of the date of his chronicle to represent that stage of human development in which the mysterious forces of nature were still blindly deified; and, therefore, the religious invocations with which the play abounds, are _not_, in the modern sense of the term, _prayers_, but only vague, poetic appeals to the unknown, unexplored powers in nature, which we call _second causes_. And when, as yet, there was no room for science in the narrow premature theories which men found imposed on them--when the new movement of human thought was still hampered by the narrowness of 'preconceived opinions,' the poet was glad to take shelter under the date of his legend now and then, here, as in Macbeth and other poems, for the sake of a little more freedom in this respect. He is very far from condemning '_presuppositions_' and '_antic.i.p.ations_' but only wishes them kept in their proper places, because to bring them into the region of fact and induction, and so to falsify the actual condition of things--to undertake to face down the powers of nature with them, is a merely mistaken mode of proceeding; because these powers are powers which do not yield to the human beliefs, and the _practical_ doctrine must have respect to them. The great battle of that age--the battle of the second causes, which the new philosophers were compelled to fight in behalf of humanity at the peril of their lives--the battle which they fought in the open field with Aristotle and Plato--fills all this magnificent poetry with its reverberations.

It must be confessed, that those terrible appeals to the heavens, into which King Lear launches out in his anguish now and then, are anything but pious; but the boldness which shocks our modern sensibilities becomes less offensive, if we take into account the fact that they are not made to the object of our present religious worship, but are mere vague appeals, and questioning addresses to the unknown, unexplored causes in nature--the powers which lie behind the historical phenomena.

For that divine Ideal of Human Nature to which 'our large temples, crowded with the shows of peace,' are built now, had not yet appeared at the date of this history, in that form in which we now worship it, with its triumphant a.s.surance that it came forth from the heart of G.o.d, and declared Him. Paul had not yet preached his sermon at Athens, in the age of this supposed King of Britain; and though the author was indeed painting his own age, and not that, it so happened that there was such a heathenish and inhuman, and, as he intimates, indeed, quite '_fiendish_' and diabolical state of things to represent here then, that this discrepancy was not so shocking as it might have been if he had found a divine religion in full operation here.

'If it be you,' says Lear, falling back upon the theory, which Edmund has already discarded, of a divine thrusting on--

'If it be _you_ that _stir these daughters' hearts_ Against their father, fool _me_ not so much To bear it tamely; _touch me_ with n.o.ble anger.'

And here is an echo of the 'spherical predominance' which Gloster goes into so elaborately in the outset, confessing, much to the amus.e.m.e.nt of his graceless offspring, that he is disposed to think, after all, there may be something in it. 'For,' he says, 'though the _wisdom_ of _nature_ [the spontaneous wisdom] can REASON IT _thus and thus, yet_ nature _finds itself scourged_ by THE SEQUENT EFFECT;' and he is talking under the dictation of a philosopher who, though he ridicules the pretensions of astrology in the next breath, lays it down as a principle in the scientific Art, as a chief point in the science of Practice and Relief, that the _sequent effects_, with which nature finds itself scourged, are a better guide to the _causes_ which the _practical_ remedy must comprehend, than anything which the wisdom of nature can undertake to reason out _beforehand_, without any respect to the sequent effect--'_thus_, and--_thus_.' But here is the confirmation of Gloster's view of the subject, which the sound-minded Kent, who is not at all metaphysical, finds himself provoked to utter; and though this is in the Fourth Act, and Gloster's opinions are advanced in the First, the pa.s.sages do, notwithstanding, 'look towards each other.'

'It is _the stars_.

The stars above us govern our conditions, Else one self mate and mate could not beget Such different issues.'

Of course, it is not the astrological theory of the const.i.tutional original differences in the human dispositions which the honest Kent is made to advocate here, literally and in earnest. It is rather the absence of any known cause, and the necessity of supposing one in a case where this difference is so obtrusive and violent, which he expresses; the stars being the natural resort of men in such circ.u.mstances, and when other solutions fail; though Poor Tom appears to be in possession of a much more orthodox theory for the peculiar disorders in _his_ moral const.i.tution: but, at the same time, it must be conceded that it is one which does not appear to have led, in his case, to any such felicitous practical results as the supposed origin of it might have seemed to promise.

For, indeed, this point of natural differences in the human dispositions, though, of course, quite overlooked in the moral regimen which is based on _a priori_ knowledge, and is able to dispense with science, and ride over the actual laws; this point of _difference_-- not in the dispositions of individuals only, but the differences which manifest themselves under the varying conditions of age and bodily health, of climate, or other physical differences in the same individual, as well as under the varying moral conditions of differing social and political positions and relations; this so essential point, overlooked as it is in the ordinary practice, has seized the clear eye of this great scientific pract.i.tioner, this Master of Arts, and he is making a radical point of it in his new speculation; he is making collections on it, and he will make a main point of it in 'the part operative' of his New Science, when he comes to make out the outline of it elsewhere, referring us distinctly to this place for his collections in it, for his collections on this point, as well as on others not less radical.

Lear himself, in his madness, appears, as we have seen already, much disposed to speculate upon this same particular question, which Gloster and Edmund and Kent have already indicated as 'a necessary question of the play'; namely, the question as to '_the causes in nature_' of the phenomena which the social condition of man exhibits; that is, the causes of that degeneracy, that violation of the essential human law to which all the evil is tracked here; and it is the scientific doctrine, that the _nature_ of a thing cannot be successfully studied in itself alone. It is not in water or in air only, or in any other single substance, that we find the nature of _oxygen_, or _hydrogen_, or any other of those principles in nature, which the application of this method to another department evolves from things which present themselves to the unscientific experience as most dissimilar. 'It is the greatest proof of want of skill to investigate _the nature_ of any object in itself alone; for _the same nature_ which seems concealed and hidden in some instances, is manifest and almost palpable in others; and, in general, those very things which are considered as secret, are manifest and common in other objects, but will never be clearly seen if the experiments and conclusions of men be directed to themselves alone': for it is a part of this doctrine, that man is not omitted in the order of nature--that the term HUMAN NATURE is _not_ a misnomer. The doctrine of this Play is, that those same powers which are at work in man's life, are at work without it also; that they are powers which belong, in their highest form, to the nature of things in general; and that man himself, with all his special distinctions, is under the law of that universal const.i.tution. The scientific remedy for the state of things which this play exhibits is the knowledge of 'causes in nature,' which must be found here, as in the other case, by scientific investigation--the spontaneous method leading to no better result here than in the other case. Under cover of the excitements of this play, this inquiry is boldly opened, and the track of the new science is clearly marked in it.

Poor Lear is, indeed, compelled to leave the practical improvement of _his_ hints for another; and when it comes to the open question of the remedy for this state of things, which is the term of the inquiry, when he undertakes to put his absolute power in motion for the avowed purpose of effecting an improvement here, he appears indeed disposed to treat the subject in the most savage and despairing manner--that is, on his own account; but the vein of the scientific inquiry still runs unbroken through all this burst of pa.s.sion. For in his scorn for that failure in human nature and human life of which society, as he finds it, stands convicted--that failure to establish the distinctive law of the human kind--that failure from which he is suffering so deeply--and in his struggle to express that disgust, he proposes, as an improvement on the state of things he finds, a law which shall obliterate that human distinction; though certainly _that_ is anything but the Poet's remedy; and the poor king himself does not appear to be in earnest, for the moral disgust in which the distinctive sentiment of the n.o.bler nature, and the knowledge of _human_ good and evil betrays itself, breaks forth in floods of pa.s.sion that overflow all the bounds of articulation before he can make an end of it.

But the radical nature of this question of _natural causes_, which the practical theory of the social arts must comprehend, is already indicated in this play, in the very beginning of the action.

This author is everywhere bent on graving the scientific distinction between those instinctive affections in which men degenerate, and tend to the rank of lower natures, and the n.o.ble natural, distinctively human affections; and when, in the first scene, the king betrays the selfishness of that fond preference for his younger daughter,--tender, and paternal, and deep as it was,--and the depth of those hopes he was resting on her kind care and nursery, by the very height of that frenzied paroxysm of rage and disappointment, which her unflattering and, as it seems to him, her unloving reply, creates;--when that 'small fault, which showed,' he tells us, 'so ugly' in _her_ whom 'he loved _most_'--which turned, in a moment, all the sweetness of his love for her '_to gall_, and like an engine, wrenched his _nature from its firm place_';--these are the terms in which he undertakes to annul the natural tie, and _disown_ her--

_Lear_. So young, and so untender?

_Cordelia_. So young, my lord, and true.

_Lear_. Let it be so.--Thy truth then be thy dower: For, by the _sacred radiance of the sun_; _The mysteries_ of _Hecate_, and _the night_; _By all the operations_ of _the orbs, From whom we do exist, and cease to be, Here I disclaim all my paternal care_, Propinquity and property of blood, And as a stranger to my heart and me Hold thee, from this, for ever. The barbarous Scythian, Or he that makes his generation messes To gorge his appet.i.te, shall to my bosom Be _as well neighboured, pitied, and relieved_, As thou, _my sometime daughter_.