The Philosophy of the Plays of Shakspere Unfolded Part 27

It is all one picture of social ignorance, and misery, and _frantic_ misrule. It is a faithful exhibition of the degree of personal security which a man of honourable sentiments, and humane and n.o.ble intentions, could promise himself in such a time. It shows what chance there was of any man being permitted to sustain an honourable and intelligent part in the world, in an age in which all the radical social arts were yet wanting, in which the rude inst.i.tutions of an ignorant past spontaneously built up, without any science of the natural laws, were vainly seeking to curb and quench the Incarnate soul of new ages,--the spirit of a scientific human advancement; and, when all the common welfare was still openly intrusted to the unchecked caprice and pa.s.sion of one selfish, pitiful, narrow, low-minded man.

To appreciate fully the incidental and immediate political application of the piece, however, it is necessary to observe that notwithstanding that studious exhibition of lawless and outrageous power, which it involves, it is, after all, we are given to understand, by a quiet intimation here and there, _a limited monarchy_ which is put upon the stage here. It is a const.i.tutional government, very much in the Elizabethan stage of development, as it would seem, which these arbitrary rulers affect to be administering. It is a government which professes to be one of law, under which the atrocities of this piece are sheltered.

And one may even note, in pa.s.sing, that that high Judicial Court, in which poor Lear undertakes to get his cause tried, appears to have, somehow, an extremely modern air, considering what age of the British history it was, in which it was supposed to be const.i.tuted, and considering that one of the wigs appointed to that Bench had to leave his speech behind him for Merlin to make, in consequence of living before his time: at all events it is already tinctured with some of the more notorious Elizabethan vices--vices which our Poet, not content with this exposition, contrived to get exposed in another manner, and to some purpose, ere all was done.

_Lear_. It shall be done, I will arraign them straight!

Come, sit thou here, _most learned Justice_.

[_To the_ BEDLAMITE_.]

Thou, _sapient_ Sir, sit here. [_To the_ FOOL.]

And again,--

I'll see _their trial_ first. _Bring in the evidence_.

Thou _robed_ MAN of JUSTICE take _thy_ place.

[_To_ TOM O'BEDLAM.]

And _thou_, his _yoke fellow_ of EQUITY _bench by his side_.

[_To the_ FOOL.]

You are of '_the Commission_'--sit _you too_.

[_To_ KENT.]

Truly it was a bold wit that could undertake to const.i.tute that bench on the stage, and fill it with those speaking forms,--speaking to the eye the unmistakeable significance, for these judges, two of them, happened to be on the spot in full costume,--and as to the third, he was of '_the commission_.' 'Sit you, too.' Truly it was a bold instructor that could undertake 'to facilitate' the demonstration of 'the more chosen subjects,' with the aid of diagrams of this kind.

Arms! Arms! Sword, fire! CORRUPTION IN THE PLACE! _False justicer, why hast thou let her scape_?

The tongues of these ancient sovereigns of Britain, 'tang' throughout with Elizabethan 'arguments of state,' and even Goneril, in her somewhat severe proceedings against her _father_, justifies her course in a very grave and excellent speech, enriched with the choicest phrases of that particular order of state eloquence, in which majesty stoops graciously to a recognition of the subject nation;--a speech from which we gather that the '_tender of a wholesome weal_' is, on the whole, the thing which she has at heart most deeply, and though the proceeding in question is a painful one to her feelings, a state necessity appears to prescribe it, or at least, render it '_discreet_.'

Even in Gloster's case, though the process to which he is subjected, is, confessedly, an extemporaneous one, it appears from the Duke of Cornwall's statement, that it was only the _form_ which was wanting to make it legal. Thus he apologizes for it.--

Though well we may not pa.s.s upon his life Without the form of justice, yet our _power_ Shall do a _courtesy_ to _our wrath_, which men May blame, _but not control_.

Goneril, however, grows bolder at the last, and says outright, 'Say if I do, the _laws_ are _mine_ NOT THINE.' But it is the law which is _thine_ and _mine_, it is the law which is for Tom o' Bedlam and for thee, that great nature speaking at last through her interpreter, and explaining all this wild scene, will have vindicated.

_Most_ MONSTROUS, exclaims her ill.u.s.trious consort; but at the close of the play, where so much of the meaning sometimes comes out in a word, he himself concedes that the government which has just devolved upon him is an _absolute_ monarchy.

'For us,' he says, 'WE WILL RESIGN, during the life of this old Majesty, OUR ABSOLUTE POWER.'

So that there seems to have been, in fact,--in the minds, too, of persons who ought, one would say, to have been best informed on this subject,--just that vague, uncertain, contradictory view of this important question, which appears to have obtained in the English state, during the period in which the material of this poetic criticism was getting slowly acc.u.mulated. But of course this play, so full of the consequences of arbitrary power, so full of Elizabethan politics, with its 'ear-kissing arguments,' could not well end, till that word, too, had been spoken outright; and, in the Duke of Albany's resignation, it slips in at last so quietly, so properly, that no one perceives that it is not there by accident.

This, then, is what the play contains; but those that follow the _story_ and the superficial plot only, must, of course, lose track of the interior ident.i.ties. It does not occur to these that the Poet is occupied with principles, and that the change of _persons_ does not, in the least, confound his pursuit of them.

The fact that tyranny is in one act, or in one scene, represented by Lear, and in the next by his daughters;--the fact that the king and the father is in one act the tyrant, and in another, the victim of tyranny, is quite enough to confound the criticism to which a work of mere amus.e.m.e.nt is subjected; for it serves to disguise the philosophic purport, by dividing it on the surface: and the dangerous pa.s.sages are all opposed and neutralised, for those who look at it only as a piece of dramatized, poetic history.

For this is a philosopher who prefers to handle his principles in their natural, historical combinations, in those modified unions of opposites, those complex wholes, which nature so stedfastly inclines to, instead of exhibiting them scientifically bottled up and labelled, in a state of fierce chemical abstraction.

His characters are not like the characters in the old 'Moralities,'

which he found on the stage when he first began to turn his attention to it, mere impersonations of certain vague, loose, popular notions.

Those sickly, meagre forms would not answer his purpose. It was necessary that the actors in the New Moralities he was getting up so quietly, should have some speculation in their eyes, some blood in their veins, a kind of blood that had never got manufactured in the Poet's laboratory till then. His characters, no matter how strong the predominating trait, though '_the conspicuous instance_' of it be selected, have all the rich quality, the tempered and subtle power of nature's own compositions. The expectation, the interest, the surprise of life and history, waits, with its charm on all their speech and doing.

The whole play tells, indeed, its own story, and scarcely needs interpreting, when once the spectator has gained the true dramatic stand-point; when once he understands that there is a teacher here,--a new one,--one who will not undertake to work with the instrumentalities that his time offered to him, who begins by rejecting the abstractions which lie at the foundation of all the learning of his time, which are not scientific, but vague, loose, popular notions, that have been collected without art, or scientific rule of rejection, and are, therefore, inefficacious in nature, and unavailable for 'the art and practic part of life;' a teacher who will build up his philosophy anew, from the beginning, a teacher who will begin with history and particulars, who will abstract his definitions from nature, and have _powers_ of them, and not _words_ only, and make _them_ the basis of his science and the material and instrument of his reform. 'I will teach you _differences_,' says Kent to the steward, alluding on the part of his author, for he does not profess to be metaphysical himself to another kind of distinction, than that which obtained in the schools; and accompanying the remark, on his own part, with some practical demonstrations, which did not appear to be taken in good part at all by the person he was at such pains to instruct in his doctrine of distinctions.

The reader who has once gained this clue, the clue which the question of design and authorship involves, will find this play, as he will find, indeed, all this author's plays, overflowing every where with the scientific statement,--the finest abstract statement of that which the action, with its moving, storming, laughing, weeping, praying diagrams, sets forth in the concrete.

But he who has not yet gained this point,--the critic who looks at it from the point of observation which the traditionary theory of its origin and intent creates, is not in a position to notice the philosophic expositions of its purport, with which the action is all inwoven. No,--though the whole structure of the piece should manifestly hang on them, though the whole flow of the dialogue should make one tissue of them, though every interstice of the play should be filled with them, though the fool's jest, and the Bedlamite's gibberish, should point and flash with them at every turn;--though the wildest incoherence of madness, real or a.s.sumed, to its most dubious hummings,--its s.n.a.t.c.hes of old ballads, and inarticulate mockings of the blast, should be strung and woven with them; though the storm itself, with its wild accompaniment, and demoniacal frenzies, should articulate its response to them;--keeping open tune without, to that human uproar; and howling symphonies, to the unconquered demoniacal forces of human life,--for it is the Poet who writes in 'the storm continues,'--'the storm continues,'--'the storm continues;'--though even Edmund's diabolical '_fa, sol, lah, mi_,' should dissolve into harmony with them, while Tom's five fiends echo it from afar, and 'mop and mow' their responses, down to the one that '_since possesses chambermaids_;' n.o.body that takes the play theory, and makes a matter of faith of it merely; n.o.body that is willing to shut his eyes and open his mouth, and swallow the whole upon trust, as a miracle simply, is going to see anything in all this, or take any exceptions at it.

Certainly, at the time when it was written, it was not the kind of learning and the kind of philosophy that the world was used to. n.o.body had ever heard of such a thing. The memory of man could not go far enough to produce any parallel to it in letters. It was manifest that this was _nature_, the living nature, the thing itself. None could perceive the tint of the school on its robust creations; no eye could detect in its st.u.r.dy compositions the stuff that books were made of; and it required no effort of faith, therefore, to believe that it was not that. It was easy enough to believe, and men were glad, on the whole, to believe that it was not that--that it was not learning or philosophy--but something just as far from that, as completely its opposite, as could well be conceived of.

How could men suspect, as yet, that this was the new scholasticism, the New Philosophy? Was it strange that they should mistake it for rude nature herself, in her unschooled, spontaneous strength, when it had not yet publicly transpired that something had come at last upon the stage of human development, which was stooping to nature and learning of her, and stealing her secret, and unwinding the clue to the heart of her mystery? How could men know that this was the subtlest philosophy, the ripest scholasticism, the last proof of all human learning, when it was still a secret that the school of nature and her laws, that the school of natural history and natural philosophy, too, through all its lengths and breadths and depths, was open; and that '_the schools_'--the schools of old chimeras and notions--the schools where the jangle of the monkish abstractions and the 'fifes and the trumpets of the Greeks' were sounding--were going to get shut up with it.

How should they know that the teacher of the New Philosophy was Poet also--must be, by that same anointing, a singer, mighty as the sons of song who brought their harmonies of old into the savage earth--a singer able to sing down antiquities with his new gift, able to sing in new eras?

But these have no clue as yet to track him with: they cannot collect or thread his thick-showered meanings. He does not care through how many mouths he draws the lines of his philosophic purpose. He does not care from what long distances his meanings look towards each other.

But these interpreters are not aware of that. They have not been informed of that particular. On the contrary, they have been put wholly off their guard. Their heads have been turned, deliberately, in just the opposite direction. They have no faintest hint beforehand of the depths in which the philosophic unities of the piece are hidden: it is not strange, therefore, that these unities should escape their notice, and that they should take it for granted that there are none in it. It is not the mere play-reader who is ever going to see them.

It will take the philosophic student, with all his clues, to master them. It will take the student of the New School and the New Ages, with the torch of Natural Science in his hand, to track them to their centre.

Here, too, as elsewhere, it is the king himself on whom the bolder political expositions are thrust. But it is not his royalty only that has need to be put in requisition here, to bring out successfully all that was working then in this Poet's mind and heart, and which had to come out in some way. It was something more than royalty that was required to protect this philosopher in those astounding freedoms of speech in which he indulges himself here, without any apparent scruple or misgiving. The combination of distresses, indeed, which the old ballad acc.u.mulates on the poor king's head, offers from the first a large poetic license, of which the man of art--or '_prudence_,' as he calls it--avails himself somewhat liberally.

With those _daughters_ in the foreground always, and the parental grief so wild and loud--with that deeper, deadlier, infinitely more cruel _private_ social wrong interwoven with all the political representation, and overpowering it everywhere, as if that inner social evil were, after all, foremost in the Poet's thought--as if that were the thing which seemed crying to him for redress more than all the rest--if, indeed, any thought of 'giving losses their remedies' could cross a Player's dream, when, in the way of his profession, 'the _enormous state_' came in to fill his scene, and open its subterranean depths, and let out its secrets, and drown the stage with its elemental horror;--with his daughters in the foreground, and all that magnificent accompaniment of the elemental war without--with all nature in that terrific uproar, and the Fool and the Madman to create a diversion, and his friends all about him to hush up and make the best of everything--with that great storm of pathos that the Magician is bringing down for him--with the stage all in tears, by their own confession, and the audience sobbing their responses--what the poor king might say between his chattering teeth was not going to be very critically treated; and the Poet knew it. It was the king, in such circ.u.mstances, who could undertake the philosophical expositions of the action; and in his wildest bursts of grief he has to manage them, in his wildest bursts of grief he has to keep to them.

But it is not until long afterwards, when the storm, and all the misery of that night, has had its ultimate effect--its chronic effect--upon him, that the Poet ventures to produce, under cover of the sensation which the presence of a mad king on the stage creates, precisely that exposition of the scene which has been, here, insisted on.

'They flattered me like a dog; they told me I had _white_ hairs in my beard, ere the _black_ ones were there. To say _Ay_ and _No_ to everything _I_ said!--Ay and No too was no good DIVINITY. _When the rain came to wet me once_, and _the wind made 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_.'

_Gloster_. The trick of that voice I do well remember:

Is't not THE KING?

_Lear_. _Ay_, every inch _a King_:

When _I_ do stare, _see, how the subject quakes_.

But it is a subject he has conjured up from his brain that is quaking under his regal stare. And it is the impersonation of G.o.d's authority, it is the divine right to rule men at its pleasure, _with or without laws, as it sees fit_, that stands there, tricked out like Tom o'Bedlam, with A CROWN of noisome _weeds_ on its head, arguing the question of the day, taking up for the divine right, defining its own position:--

_Is't not the king_?

Ay every inch a king:

_When I do stare, see how the subject quakes_.

_See_; yes, _see_. For that is what he stands there for, or that you may see _what it is_ at whose stare _the subject_ quakes. He is there to 'represent to the eye,' because impressions on the senses are more effective than abstract statements, the divine right and sovereignty, the majesty of the COMMON-weal, the rule that protects each helpless individual member of it with the strength of all, the rule awful with great nature's sanction, enforced with her dire pains and penalties.

He is there that you may see whether _that_ is it, or not; that one poor wretch, that thing of pity, which has no power to protect itself, in whom _the law_ itself, the sovereignty of reason, is dethroned.

That was, what all men thought it was, when this play was written; for the madness of arbitrary power, the impersonated will and pa.s.sion, was the _state_ then. That is the spontaneous affirmation of rude ages, on this n.o.blest subject,--this chosen subject of the new philosophy,--which stands there now to facilitate the demonstration, 'as globes and machines do the more subtle demonstrations in mathematics.' It is the 'affirmation' which the Poet finds pre-occupying this question; but this is the table of _review_ that he stands on, and this 'Instance' has been subjected to the philosophical tests, and that is the reason that all those dazzling externals of majesty, which make that 'IDOL CEREMONY' are wanting here; that is the reason that his crown has turned to weeds. This is the popular affirmative the Poet is dealing with; but it stands on the scientific 'Table of _Review_,' and the result of this inquiry is, that it goes to 'the table of NEGATIONS.' And the negative table of science in these questions is Tragedy, the World's Tragedy. 'Is't not the king?'