The Philosophy of the Plays of Shakspere Unfolded Part 23

And when

'This even-handed justice Commends the ingredients of his poisoned chalice To his own lips'--

when his 'dog-hearted daughters' have returned to his own bosom the cruel edge of that _unnatural_ wrong which he has impiously dared to summon nature herself--violated nature--to witness, this is the greeting which the _unnatural_ Goneril receives, on her return to her husband, when she complains to him of her welcome--

_Goneril_. I have been worth the whistle.

_Albany_. O Goneril!

You are not worth _the dust which the rude wind Blows in your face_.--I fear your _disposition: That nature, which contemns_ ITS ORIGIN, CANNOT BE BORDERED CERTAIN IN ITSELF; She that herself will _sliver and disbranch_ From her MATERIAL SAP, PERFORCE MUST WITHER, _And come to deadly use_.

[_Prima Philosophia_. Axioms which are not limited to the particular parts of sciences, but 'such as are more common, and of a higher stage.']

_Goneril_. No more; _the text_ is foolish.

_Albany_. Tigers, not daughters,--

[You have practised on yourself--you have destroyed in yourself the n.o.bler, fairer nature which the law of _human_ kind--the law of human duty and affection--would have given you. Not DAUGHTERS,--_Tigers_.]

'A _father, and a gracious aged man_, Whose reverence the head-lugged bear would lick, Most barbarous, most DEGENERATE!'--

[_degenerate_--that is the point--most degenerate]--

'have you _madded_.

If that the _heavens_ do not _their_ visible spirits Send quickly down, to _tame these vile offences_ 'Twill come, HUMANITY _must perforce prey on itself_, Like monsters of the deep.'

[the land refuses a parallel.]

And it is the scientific distinction between man and the brute creation--it is the law of nature in the human kind, which the Poet is getting out scientifically here, in the face of that terrific failure and degeneration in the kind--which he paints so vividly, for the purpose of inquiring whether there is not, perhaps, after all, some more potent provisioning and arming of man for his place in nature, than this state of things would lead one to suppose--whether there are not, perhaps, some more efficacious 'humanities' than those mild ones which appear to operate so lamely on this barbaric, _degenerate_ thing. 'Milk-liver'd man!' replies Goneril, speaking not on her own behalf only, for the words have a double significance; and the Poet glances through them at that sufferance with which the state of things he has just noted was endured--

'_Milk-livered man_, That bear'st a _cheek for blows_, a HEAD _for_ WRONGS; Who hast not _in thy brows an eye_ discerning Thine honour from thy sufferance; that not know'st, FOOLS do those villains pity, _who are punished Before they have done their mischief_. Where's thy _drum_?

France spreads his banners in _our noiseless land; With plumed helm_ thy _slayer_ begins threats; _Whilst thou_, a _Moral Fool_, sit'st still, and _cry'st, Alack_! why does he so?'

This is found to be an appeal of the Poet's own when all is done, and one that goes far into the necessary questions of the play.

But Albany, in his rejoinder, returns to the idea of the lost, _degenerate_, dissolute _Humanity_ again. He has talked of tigers, and _head-lugged_ bears (and it was necessary to combine the proverbial sensitiveness of that animal to that particular mode of treatment, with the natural amiability of his disposition in general, in order to do justice to the Poet's conception here);--he has called upon 'the monsters of the deep,' and quoted the laws of their societies, in ill.u.s.tration of the state of things to which the unscientific human combination appears to him to be visibly tending. But this human _degeneracy_ and deformity, which the action of the play exhibits in diagrams--the _descent_ to the _lower_ nature from the higher; the _voluntary_ descent; the voluntary blindness and narrowness; the rejection of the distinctive human law--of VIRTUE and DUTY, as reason and conscience interpret it--appears to the scientific mind to require yet _other_ terms and comparisons. These conceits and comparisons, drawn from the habits of innocent, though not to man agreeable, animals, who have no law but blind instinct, do not suffice to convey the Poet's idea of this human failing; and, accordingly, he instructs this gentle and n.o.ble man, whom this criticism best becomes, to complete this view of the subject, in his attempt to express the disgust with which this _inhuman_, this _more_ than brutal conduct, in his high-born, and gorgeously-robed, and delicately-featured spouse, inspires him--

'See thyself, devil!'--

nay, he corrects himself--

_Proper deformity_ [DE-FORMITY] seems _not_ in the _fiend_ _So_ horrid, as in woman.

_Goneril_. O vain fool!

_Albany_. Thou _changed_ and _self-covered thing_. For shame, Be-monster not thy _feature_. Were it my FITNESS'--

for here it is the _human_, and not the instinctive element--not '_the blood_' element that rules--

'Were it my FITNESS To _let_ these hands _obey_ my blood, _They_ are _apt_ enough to _dislocate_ and _tear_ Thy _flesh_ and _bones_,'

Rather tiger-like impulses for so mild a gentleman to own to; but the process which he confesses his hands are already inclined to undertake, is not half so cruel as the one which this woman has practised on herself while she was meditating only wrong to another, and pursuing her 'horrible pleasure' at the expense of madness and death to another; not half so cruel and injurious, for in that act she has trampled down, and torn, and dislocated, she has slaughtered in cold blood, the divine, angelic form of womanhood--that form of worth and celestial aspiration which great nature stamped upon her, and gave to her for her law in nature, her type, her essence, her ORIGINAL. She has desecrated, not that common form of humanity only which the common human sentiment of reason, which the human sentiment of duty is everywhere struggling to fulfil, but that lovelier soul of humanity--that softer, subtler, more gracious, more celestial, more commanding spirit of it, which the form of womanhood in its integrity must carry with it--which the form of womanhood will carry with it, if it be not counterfeit or degenerate, gone down into a lower range, 'be-monstered'--'a changed and _self-covered_ thing.' That is the Poet's reading.

'Howe'er,' the Duke of Albany concludes, after that struggle with his hands he speaks of--chivalrously refusing to let them obey that impulse of 'blood,' as a gentleman in such circ.u.mstances, under any amount of provocation, should--true to himself, true to his manliness and to his gentle breeding, though his wife is false to hers, and 'false to her nature'--

'Howe'er thou _art_ a, _fiend, A woman's shape doth shield thee.

Goneril_. Marry! YOUR MANHOOD NOW.'

This is indeed a discourse in which the reader must have '_the text_,'

or ever he can begin to catch the meaning of those philosophic points with which this orator, who _talks_ so 'pressly,' studs his lines.

For the pa.s.sage which Goneril dismisses with such scorn is indeed the text, or it will be, when the word which her commentary on it contains has been added to it: for it is '_the foolishness_' of struggling with great Nature, and her LAW of KINDS--it is the folly of ignorance, the stupidity of living without respect to nature and its sequent effects, as well as its preformed decree--

(_'Perforce must_ wither, And come to deadly use'--)

which this discourse is intended to ill.u.s.trate. And one who has once tracked the dramatic development of this text, through all this moving exhibition of human society, and its violated rule in nature, will be at no loss to conjecture out of what 'New' book it comes, if indeed that book has ever been opened to him.

The whole subject is treated here scientifically--that is, from without. The generalizations of the higher stages of philosophy--the axioms of a universal philosophy--with all the force of their universality, must be brought to bear upon it, through all its developments. The universal historical laws, in that modification of them which the speciality of the human kind creates, must be impartially set forth here. The law of DUTY, as the NATURAL LAW of human society; the law of humanity, as the law, nay, THE FORM, of the HUMAN kind, stamped on it with the Creator's stamp, that _order_ from the universal law of kinds that gives to all life its SPECIAL bounds, its '_border_ in _itself_'--that form so _essential_, that there is no _humanity_ or _kind-ness_ where that is not--that law which we hear so much of, in its narrower aspects, under various names, in all men's speech, is produced here, in its broader relations, as the necessary basis of a scientific social art. And it is this author's deliberate opinion as a Naturalist, it is the opinion of this School in Natural Science, from which this work proceeds, that those who undertake to compose human societies, large or small, whether in families, or states, or empires, without recognising this principle--those who undertake to compose UNIONS, human unions and societies, on any other principle--will have a diabolical jangle of it when all is done. For this law of _unity_, which is written on the soul of man, this law of CONSCIENCE _within, is written without also_; and to erase it _within_ is to get the lesson from _without_ in that universal and downright speech and language which the axioms of nature are taught in--it is to get it in that fearful school in which nature _repeats_ the doctrine of her violated law, for those who are not able to solve and comprehend the science of it as it is _written_--written beforehand--in the natural law and const.i.tutions of the human soul.

'That nature which, contemns its ORIGIN Cannot be _bordered_ certain _in itself_.'

[These are the mysteries of day and night, that Lear, in his ignorance, vainly invokes, the operations of the orbs from _whom we do exist and cease to be_.]

'She that herself will _sliver_ and _disbranch_ From her _material_ sap, _perforce must_ wither, And come to _deadly_ use.'

'The text is--FOOLISH.'

The teacher who takes it upon himself to get out this text from the text-book of Universal Laws, for the purpose of conducting it to its practical application in human affairs, for the purpose of suggesting the true remedy for those great human wants which he exhibits here, is _not_ one of those 'Milk-livered men,' those _Moral Fools_, that _Goneril_ delicately alludes to, who bear a cheek for blows, a _head_ for wrongs; who have not in their brows an _eye_ discerning their _honour_ from their sufferance; who think it enough to sit still under the murderous blows of what they call misfortune, fate, _Providence_, when it is their own im-_providence_; who think it is enough to sit still, and cry, _Alack_! without inquiring what it is that makes that _lack_; without ever putting the question in earnest, '_Why does he so_?' His Play is all full of the _practical application_ of the text, the application of it which Gloster sums up in a word--

''T is the Time's plague when MADMEN _lead_ THE BLIND.'

'I will preach to thee. Mark me: [says Lear]

When we are born, we cry that we are come To this great stage of FOOLS. [Mark me!']

The whole Play is one magnificent intimation, on the part of the Poet, that eyes are made to see with; and that there is no so natural and legitimate use of them as that which human affairs were crying for, through all their lengths and breadths, in his time. It is that _eye_ which is one of the distinctive features of the human kind; that eye which looks before and after, which extends human vision so far beyond individual sensuous experience, which is able to converge the light of universal truth upon particular experience, which is able to bring the infallible guidance of universal axioms into all the particulars of human conduct--that is the eye which he finds wanting in human affairs. The play is pointing everywhere with the Poet's scorn of '_Blind Men_,' 'who will not see because they do not feel,'--who wait for the blows of 'fortune,' to teach them the lesson of Nature's laws--who wait to be scourged, or dashed to pieces with 'the sequent effect,' instead of making use of their faculty of reason to ascend to causes, and _so_ 'to trammel up the consequence.'

It is that same combination of human faculties, that same combination of sense and reason, which the Novum Organum provides for; it is that same scorn of abstract wordy speculation, on the one hand, and blind experimental groping, on the other, that is everywhere _suggested_ here. But with the aid of the persons of the Drama, and their suggestions, the new philosophy is carried into departments which it would have cost the Author of the Novum Organum and the Advancement of Learning his head to look into. He might as well have proposed to impeach the Government in Parliament outright, as to offer to advance his Novum Organum into these fields; fields which it enters safely enough under the cover of a spontaneous, inspired, dramatic philosophy, though it is a philosophy which overflows continually with those practical axioms, those aphorisms, which the Author of the Advancement of Learning a.s.sures us 'are made of the pith and heart of sciences'; and that 'no man can write who is not sound and grounded.'

But then, if they are only written in 'with a goose-pen,' they pa.s.s well enough for unconscious, unmeaning, spontaneous felicities.

'Canst thou tell why one's nose stands in the middle of his face?'

says the Fool, in the First Act, by way of entertaining his master, when the poor king's want of foresight and 'prudence' begins to tell on his affairs a little. 'Canst thou tell why one's nose stands in the middle of his face?' 'No.' 'Why, to keep his eyes on either side of it, that what a man _cannot smell out_ he may _spy into_.'

_Fool_. Canst tell how _an oyster_ makes _his_ sh.e.l.l?'

_Lear_. No.

_Fool_. Nor I neither; but I can tell why a snail has a house.