The Philosophy of the Plays of Shakspere Unfolded Part 29

Thus, Hamlet, when his mind is once in a questionable state, can be permitted to make, with impunity, profane suggestions as to certain possible royal progresses, and the changes to which the dust of a Caesar might be liable, without being reminded out of the play, that to follow out these suggestions 'would be' indeed, 'to consider too curiously,' and that most extraordinary humour of his enables him also to relieve his mind of many other suggestions, 'which reason and sanity,' in his time, could not have been 'so prosperously delivered of.'

For what is it that men can set up as a test of _sanity_ in any age, but their own common beliefs and sentiments. And what surer proof of the king's madness,--what more pathetic indication of its midsummer height could be given, than those startling propositions which the poet here puts into his mouth, so opposed to the opinions and sentiments, not of kings only, but of the world at large; what madder thing could a poet think of than those political axioms which he introduces under cover of these suggestions,--which would lay the axe at the root of the common beliefs and sentiments on which the social structure then rested. How could he better show that this poor king's wits had, indeed, 'turned;' how could he better prove that he was, indeed, past praying for, than by putting into his mouth those bitter satires on the state, those satires on the 'one only man' power itself,--those wild revolutionary proposals, 'hark! in thine ear,--_change places_. Softly, in thine ear,-- _which is the_ JUSTICE, and which is THE THIEF?' 'Take that of _me_ who have the power to _seal the accuser's lips_. None does offend. I say none. I'll able 'em. Look when I stare, see how the subject quakes.' These laws have failed, you see. They shelter the most frightful depths of wrong. That Bench has failed, you see; and that Chair, with all its adjunct divinity. Come here and look down with me from this pinnacle, into these abysses. Look at that wretch there, in the form of man. Fetch him up in his blanket, and set him at the Council Table with his elf locks and begrimed visage and inhuman gibberish. Perhaps, he will be able to make some suggestion there; and those five fiends that are talking in him at once, would like, perhaps, to have a hearing there.

Make him 'one of your hundred.' You are of '_the commission_,' let him bench with _you_. Nay, change places, let him try your cause, and tell us which is the justice, which is _the thief_, which is the sapient Sir, and which is the Bedlamite. Surely, the man who authorizes these suggestions must be, indeed, 'far gone,' whether he be 'a king or a yeoman.' And mad indeed he is. Writhing under the insufficiency and incompetency of these pretentious, but, in fact, ignorant and usurping inst.i.tutions, his heart of hearts racked and crushed with their failure, the victim of this social empiricism, cries out in his anguish, under that safe disguise of the Robes that hide all: 'Take these away at least,--that will be something gained. Let us have no more of this mockery. None does offend--none--I say _none_.' Let us go back to the innocent instinctive brutish state, and have done with this vain disastrous struggle of nature after the human form, and _its_ dignity, and perfection. Let us talk no more of law and justice and humanity and DIVINITY forsooth, _divinity_ and the celestial graces, that divinity which is the end and perfection of the _human_ form.--Is not womanhood itself, and the Angel of it _fallen_--degenerate?--That is the humour of it.--That is the meaning of the savage edicts, in which this _human_ victim of the _inhuman_ state, the subject of a social state which has failed in some way of the human end, undertakes to utter through the king's lips, his sense of the failure. For the Poet at whose command he speaks, is the true scientific historian of nature and art, and the rude and struggling advances of the _human_ nature towards its ideal type, though they fall never so short, are none of them omitted in his note-book. He knows better than any other, what gain the imperfect civilization he searches and satirizes and lays bare here, _has made_, with all its imperfections, on the spontaneities and aids of the individual, unaccommodated man: he knows all the value of the acc.u.mulations of ages; he is the very philosopher who has put forth all his wisdom to guard the state from the shock of those convulsions, that to his prescient eye, were threatening then to lay all flat.

'O let him _pa.s.s_!' is the Poet's word, when the loving friends seek to detain a little longer, the soul on whom this cruel time has done its work,--its elected sufferer.

'O let him pa.s.s! _he hates him_ That would upon the rack of this tough world, Stretch him out longer.'

[Tired with all these, he cries in his own behalf.]

'Tired with all these, for _restful death_ I cry.

Thou seest how this world goes. I see it _feelingly_.'

_Albany_. The weight of this sad time _we must obey_, _Speak_ WHAT WE FEEL, _not what we ought to say_, The oldest hath borne most: we that are young Shall never see so much, nor live so long.

It needs but a point, a point which the Poet could not well put in,--one of those points which he speaks of elsewhere so significantly, to make the unmeaning line with which this great social Tragedy concludes, a sufficiently fitting conclusion to it; considering, at least, the pressure under which it was written; and the author has himself called our attention to that, as we see, even in this little jingle of rhymes, put in apparently, only for professional purposes, and merely to get the curtain down decently. It is a point, which it takes the key of the play--Lord Bacon's key, of 'Times,' to put in. It wants but a comma, but then it must be a comma in the right place, to make English of it. Plain English, unvarnished English, but poetic in its fact, as any prophecy that Merlin was to make.

'The oldest hath borne most, we that are _young_ Shall never see so much, nor live so long.'

There were boys 'in England then a-bed;' nay, some of them might have been present that day, for aught we know, on which one of the Managers of the Surrey Theatre, the owner of the wardrobe and stage-properties, and himself an actor, brought out with appropriate decorations and dresses, for the benefit of his audience on the Bankside, this little ebullition of his genius;--there were boys present then, perhaps, whose names would become immortal with the fulfilment of that prophecy;--there was one at Whitehall, when it was brought out there, whose name would be for ever linked with it. 'We that are young,--the oldest hath _borne_ most. We that are young shall never _see_ so much'

[I _see_ it feelingly],

'Shall never _see_ so much, nor live so _long_.'

So.

But there were evils included in that tragic picture, which those who were young then, would _not_ outlive; evils which the times that were near with their coa.r.s.e, fierce remedies, would not heal; evils which the Seer and Leader of the Times that were far off, would himself make over to _their_ cure;--evils in whose cure the Discoverer of the science of Nature, and the inventor of the New Magic which is the part operative of it, expected to be called upon for an opinion, when the time for that extension of his science, 'crushed together and infolded within itself in these books of Nature's learning,' should fully come.

Nothing almost sees MIRACLES _but_ MISERY, says poor Kent, in the stocks, waiting for the 'beacon' of the morning, by whose _comfortable_ beams, he might peruse his letter. 'I know,' he says,

''Tis from Cordelia, Who hath most fortunately been informed Of my obscured course, and shall find _time From this enormous state_--seeking--TO GIVE LOSSES THEIR REMEDIES.'

There is no attempt to demonstrate that the work here proposed as a study, worthy the attention of the philosophical student, is not, notwithstanding a Poem, and a Poet's gift, not to his contemporaries only, but to his kind. What is claimed is, indeed, that it is a Poem which, with all its overpowering theatrical effects, does, in fact, reserve its true poetic wealth, for those who will find the springs of its inmost philosophic purport. There is no attempt to show that this play belongs to the category of scientific works, according to our present limitation of the term, or that there could be found any niche for it, on those lower platforms and compartments of the new science of nature, which our modern works of natural science occupy.

It was inevitably a Poem. There was the essence of all Tragedy in the purely scientific exhibition, which the purpose of it required. The intention of the Poet to exhibit the radical idea of his plot impressively, so as to reach the popular mind through its appeal to the sensibilities, involved, of course, the finest series of conjunctions of artistic effects, the most exquisite characterization, the boldest grouping, the most startling and determined contrasts, which the whole range of his art could furnish.

But that which is only the incident of a genuine poetic inspiration, the effect upon the senses, which its higher appeals are sure to involve, becomes with those delighting in, and capable of appreciating, that sensuous effect merely, its sufficient and only end, and even a doctrine of criticism based on this inversion will not be wanting. But the difficulty of unlocking the great Elizabethan poems with any such theory of Art, arises from the fact that it is not the theory of Art, which the great Elizabethan Poets adopted, and whether we approve of theirs or not, we must take it, such as it was, for our torch in this exploration. As to that spontaneity, that seizure, that Platonic divination, that poetic 'fury,' which our prose philosopher scans in so many places so curiously, which he defines so carefully and strictly, so broadly too, as the _poetic_ condition that thing which he appears to admire so much, as having something a little demoniacal in it withal, that same 'fine' thing which the Poet himself speaks of by a term not any less questionable,--as to this poetic inspiration, it is not necessary to claim that it is a thing with which this Poet, the Poet of a new era, the Poet, the deliverer of an Inductive Learning, has had himself, personally, no acquaintance. He knows what it is. But it is a Poet who is, first of all, a man, and he takes his humanity with him into all things. The essential human principle is that which he takes to be the law and limit of the human const.i.tution. He is perfectly satisfied with 'the measure of a man,'

and he gives the preference deliberately, and on principle to the sober and rational state in the human mind. All the elements which enter into the human composition, all the states, normal or otherwise, to which it is liable, have pa.s.sed under his review, and this is his conclusion; and none born of woman, ever had a better chance to look at them, for all is alike heightened in him,--heightened to the ideal boundary of nature, in the human form; but that which seems to be heightened, most of all, that in which he stands preeminent and singular in the natural history of man, would seem to be the proportion of this heightening. It is what we have all recognized it to be, Nature's largest, most prodigal demonstration of her capacities in the human form, but it is, at the same time, her most excellent and exquisite balance of composition--her most subdued and tempered work.

And the reason is, that he is not a particular and private man, and the deficiencies and personalities of those from whom he is abstracted, are studiously, and by method, kept out of him. For this is the 'Will' not of one man only; it is the scientific abstract of a philosophic union. It is a will that has a rule in art as well as nature.

Certainly he is the very coolest Poet; and the fullest of this common earth and its affairs, of any sage that has ever showed his head upon it, in prose or metre. The st.u.r.diness with which he makes good his position, as an inhabitant, for the time being, of this terrestrial ball, and, by the ordinance of G.o.d, subject to its laws, and liable to its pains and penalties, is a thing which appears, to the careful reviewer of it, on the whole, the most novel and striking feature of this demonstration. He objects, on principle, to seizures and possessions of all kinds. He refuses to be taken off his feet by any kind of solicitation. He is a man who is never ashamed to have a reason,--one that he can produce, and make intelligible to common people, for his most exquisite proceedings; that is, if he chooses: but, 'if reasons were plentiful as blackberries,' he is not the man to give them on 'compulsion.' His ideas of the common mind, his notion of the common human intelligence, or capacity for intelligence, appears to be somewhat different from that of the other philosophers. The common sense--the common form--is that which he is always seeking and _identifying_ under all the differences. It is _that_ which he is bringing out and clothing with the 'inter-tissued robe' and all the glories which he has stripped from the extant majesty. 'Robes and furred gowns hide all' no longer.

He is not a bard who is careful at all about keeping his singing robes about him. He can doff them and work like a 'navvy' when he sees reason. He is very fond of coming out with good, sober, solid prose, in the heart of his poetry. He can rave upon occasion as well as another. Spontaneities of all kinds have scope and verge enough in his plot; but he always keeps an eye out, and they speak no more than is set down for them. His Pythoness foams at the mouth too, sometimes, and appears to have it all her own way, perhaps; but he knows what she is about, and there is never a word in the oracle that has not undergone his revision. He knows that Plato tells us 'it is in vain for a sober man to knock at the floor of the Muses'; but he is one who has discovered, scientifically, the human law; and he is ready to make it good, on all sides, against all comers. And, though the Muses knocked at his door, as they never had at any other, they could never carry him away with them. They found, for once, a sober man within, one who is not afraid to tell them, to their teeth, 'Judgment holds in me, always, a magisterial seat;'--and, with all their celestial graces and pretensions, he fetters them, and drags them up to that tribunal.

He superintends all his inspirations.

There never was a Poet in whom the poetic spontaneities were so absolutely under control and mastery; and there never was one in whose nature all the spontaneous force and faculty of genius showed itself in such tumultuous fulness, ready to issue, at a word, in such inexhaustible varieties of creative energy.

Of all the spirits that tend on mortal thoughts there is none to match this so delicate and gorgeous Ariel of his,--this creature that he keeps to put his girdles round the earth for him, that comes at a thought, and brings in such dainty banquets, such brave pageants in the earth or in the air; there is none other that knows so well the spells 'to make this place Paradise.' But, for all that, he is the merest tool,--the veriest drudge and slave. The magician's collar is always on his neck; in his airiest sweeps he takes his chain with him.

Caliban himself is not more sternly watched and tutored; and all the gorgeous masque has its predetermined order, its severe economy of grace; through all the slightest minutiae of its detail, runs the inflexible purpose, the rational _human_ purpose, the common human sense, the common human aim.

Yes, it is a Play; but it is the play of a mind sobered with all human learning. Yes, it is spontaneous; but it is the spontaneity of a heart laden with human sorrow, oppressed with the burthen of the common weal. Yes, indeed, it is a Poet's work; but it is the work of one who consciously and deliberately recognizes, in all the variety of his gifts, in all his natural and acquired power, under all the disabilities of his position, the one, paramount, human law, and essential obligation. Of 'Art,' as anything whatever, but an instrumentality, thoroughly subdued, and subordinated to _that_ end, of Art as anything in itself, with an independent tribunal, and law with an ethic and ritual of its own, this inventor of the one Art, that has for its end the relief of the human estate and the Creator's glory, knows nothing. Of any such idolatry and magnifying of the creature, of any such worship of the gold of the temple to the desecration of that which sanctifieth the gold, this Art-King in all his purple, this priest and High Pontiff of its inner mysteries knows--will know--nothing.

Yes, it is play; but it is not child's play, nor an _idiot's_ play, nor the play of a 'jigging' Baccha.n.a.l, who comes out on this grave, human scene, to insult our sober, human sense, with his mad humour, making a Belshazzar's feast or an Antonian revel of it; a creature who shows himself to our common human sense without _any_ human aim or purpose, ransacking all the life of man, exploring all worlds, pursuing the human thought to its last verge, and questioning, as with the cry of all the race, the infinities beyond, diving to the lowest depths of human life and human nature, and bringing up and publishing, the before unspoken depths of human wrong and sorrow, wringing from the hearts of those that died and made no sign, their death-buried secrets, articulating everywhere that which before had no word--and all for an artistic effect, for an hour's entertainment, for the luxury of a harmonized impression, or for the mere ostentation of his frolic, to feed his gamesome humour, to make us stare at his unconsciousness, to show what gems he can crush in his idle cup for a draught of pleasure, or in pure caprice and wantonness, confounding all our notions of sense, and manliness, and human duty and respect, with the boundless wealth and waste of his gigantic fooleries.

It is play, but let us thank G.o.d it is no such play as that; let our common human nature rejoice that it has not been thus outraged in its chief and chosen one, that it has not been thus disgraced with the boundless human worthlessness of the creature on whom its choicest gifts were lavished. It is play, indeed; but it is no such Monster, with his idiotic stare of unconsciousness, that the opening of it will reveal to us. Let us all thank G.o.d, and take heart again, and try to revive those notions of human dignity and common human sense which this story sets at nought, and see if we cannot heal that great jar in our abused natures which this chimera of the nineteenth century makes in it--this night-mare of modern criticism which lies with its dead weight on all our higher art and learning--this creature that came in on us unawares, when the interpretation of the Plays had outgrown the Play-tradition, when '_the Play_' had outgrown '_the Player_.'

It is a play in which the manliest of human voices is heard sounding throughout the order of it; it is a play stuffed to its fool's gibe, with the soberest, deepest, maturest human sense; and 'the tears of it,' as we who have tested it know, 'the tears of it are wet.' It is a play where the choicest seats, the seats in which those who see it _all_ must sit, are 'reserved;' and there is a price to be paid for these: 'children and fools' will continue to have theirs for nothing.

For after so many generations of players had come and gone, there had come at last on this human stage--on 'this great stage of fools,' as the Poet calls it--this stage filled with 'the natural fools of fortune,' having eyes, but seeing not--there had come to it at last a MAN, one who was--take him _for all in all_--that; one who thought it--for a man, enough to be truly that--one who thought he was fulfilling his part in the universal order, in _seeking to be_ modestly and truly that; one, too, who thought it was time that the _human_ part on the stage of this Globe Theatre should begin to be reverently studied by man himself, and scientifically and religiously ordered and determined through all its detail.

For it is the movement of the new time that makes this Play, and all these Plays: it is the spirit of the newly-beginning ages of human advancement which makes the inspiration of them; the beginning ages of a rational, instructed--and not blind, or instinctive, or demoniacal--human conduct.

It is such play and pastime as the prophetic spirit and leadership of those new ages could find time and heart to make and leave to them, on that height of vision which it was given to it to occupy. For an age in human advancement was at last reached, on whose utmost summits men could begin to perceive that tradition, and eyes of moonshine speculation, and a thousand noses, and horns welked and waved like the enridged sea, when they came to be jumbled together in one 'monster,'

did not appear to answer the purpose of human combination, or the purpose of human life on earth; appeared, indeed to be still far, 'far wide' of the end which human society is everywhere blindly pushing and groping for, _en ma.s.se_.

There was a point of observation from which this fortuitous social conjunction did not appear to the critical eye or ear to be making just that kind of play and music which human nature--singularly enough, considering what kind of conditions it lights on--is const.i.tutionally inclined to expect and demand; not that, or indeed any perceptible approximation to a paradisaical state of things. There _was_, indeed, a point of view--one which commanded not the political mysteries of the time only, but the household secrets of it, and the deeper secrets of the solitary heart of man, one which commanded alike the palace and the hovel, to their blackest recesses--there was a point of view from which these social agencies appeared to be making then, in fact, whether one looked with eyes or ears, a mere diabolical jangle, and '_fa, sol, la, mi_', of it, a demoniacal storm music; and from that height of observation all ruinous disorders could be seen coming out, and driving men to vice and despair, urging them to self-destruction even, and hunting them disquietly to their graves.

'Nothing almost sees miracles but misery;' and this was the Age in which the New Magic was invented.

It was the age in which that grand discovery was made, which the Fool undertakes to palm off here as the fruit of his own single invention; and, indeed, it was found that the application of it to certain departments of human affairs was more successfully managed by this gentleman in his motley, than by some of his brother philosophers who attempted it. It was the age in which the questions which are inserted here so safely in the Fool's catechism, began to be started secretly in the philosophic chamber. It was the age in which the identical answers which the cap and bells are made responsible for here, were written down, but with other applications, in graver authorities. It is the philosophical discovery of the time, which the Fool is undertaking to translate into the vernacular, when he puts the question, 'Canst thou tell why one's nose stands in the middle of his face?' And we have all the Novum Organum in what he calls, in another place, 'the boorish,' when he answers it; and all the choicest gems of 'the part operative' of the new learning have been rattling from his rattle in everybody's path, ever since he published his digests of that doctrine: '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 he cannot _smell out_ he may _spy into_.' And 'all that follow their noses are led by their eyes, but--_blind men_.' And 'the reason why the seven stars are seven, is because they are not eight;' and the king who makes that answer 'would have made a good--_fool_,' for it's 'a very pretty reason.' And neither times nor men should be 'old before their time'; neither times nor men should be revered, or clothed with authority or command in human affairs, 'till they are _wise_.' ['Thou _sapient_ sir, sit _here_.'] And it is a mistake for a leader of men to think that he 'has _white_ hairs in his beard, before the _black_ ones are there.' And 'ants,' and 'snails,' and 'oysters,'

are wiser than men in their arts, and practices, and pursuits of ends.

It was the age in which it was perceived that 'to say ay and no to everything' that a madman says, 'is _no good divinity_,' and that it is 'the time's plague when Madmen lead the Blind;' and that, instead of good men sitting still, like 'moral fools,' and crying out on wrong and mischief, 'Alack, why does it so?' it would be wiser, and more pious, too, to make use of the faculty of learning, with which the Creator has armed Man, 'against diseases of the world,' to ascend to the cause, and _punish_ that--punish _that_, 'ere it has done its mischief.' It was the age in which it was discovered that 'the sequent effect, with which nature finds itself scourged,' is not in the least touched by any kind of reasoning 'thus and thus,' except that kind which proceeds first by negatives, that kind which proceeds by a method so severe that it contrives to _exclude_ everything but the 'the _cause in nature_' from its affirmation, which 'in practical philosophy becomes _the rule_'--that is, the critical method,--which is for men, as distinguished from the spontaneous affirmation, which is for G.o.ds.

It is the beginning of these yet beginning Modern Ages, the ages of a practical learning, and scientific relief to the human estate, which this Pastime marks with its blazoned, illuminated initial. It is the opening of the era in which a common human sense is developed, and directed to the common-weal, which this Pastime celebrates; the opening of the ages in which, ere all is done, the politicians who expect mankind to entrust to them their destinies, will have to find something better than 'gla.s.s eyes' to guide them with; in which it will be no longer competent for those to whom mankind entrusts its dearest interests to go on in their old stupid, conceited, heady courses, their old, blind, ignorant courses,--stumbling, and staggering, and groping about, and smelling their way with their own narrow and selfish instincts, when it is the common-weal they have taken on their shoulders;--running foul of the nature of things--quarrelling with eternal necessities, and crying out, when the wreck is made, 'Alack! why does it so?'

This Play, and all these plays, were meant to be pastime for ages in which state reasons must needs be something else than 'the pleasure'

of certain individuals, 'whose disposition, all the world well knows, will not be rubbed or stopped;' or 'the quality,' 'fiery' or otherwise, of this or that person, no matter 'how unremoveable and fixed' he may be 'in his own course.'

It was to the 'far off times;' and not to the 'near,' it was to the advanced ages of the Advancement of Learning, that this Play was dedicated by its Author. For it was the spirit of the modern ages that inspired it. It was the new Prometheus who planned it; the more aspiring t.i.tan, who would bring down in his New Organum a new and more radiant gift; it was the Benefactor and Foreseer, who would advance the rude kind to new and more enviable approximations to the celestial summits. He knew there would come a time, in the inevitable advancements of that new era of scientific 'prudence' and forethought which it was given to him to initiate, when all this sober historic exhibition, with its fearful historic earnest, would read, indeed, like some old fable of the rude barbaric past--some Player's play, bent on a feast of horrors--some Poet's impossibility. And _that_--was the Play,--that was the Plot. He knew that there would come a time when all this tragic mirth--sporting with the edged tools of tyranny--playing around the edge of the great axe itself--would be indeed safe play; when his Fool could open his budget, and unroll his bitter jests--crushed together and infolded within themselves so long--and have a world to smile with him, and not the few who could unfold them only. And that--that was 'the humour of it.'

Yes, with all their philosophy, these plays are Plays and Poems still.

There's no spoiling the 'tragical mirth' in them. But we are told, on the most excellent contemporaneous authority--on the authority of one who was in the inmost heart of all this Poet's secrets--that 'as we often judge of the greater by the less, so the very pastimes of great men give an honourable idea to the clear-sighted of THE SOURCE FROM WHICH THEY SPRING.'

PART II.

JULIUS CAESAR;

OR,

THE EMPIRICAL TREATMENT IN DISEASES OF THE COMMON-WEAL EXPLAINED.

Good does not necessarily succeed evil; another evil may succeed, and a worse, as it happened with Caesar's killers, who brought the republic to such a pa.s.s that they had reason to repent their meddling with it.... It must be examined in what condition THE a.s.sAILANT is.--_Michael de Montaigne_.

_Citizen_. I fear there will a worse one come in his place.

_Ca.s.sius_. He were no lion, were not Romans hinds.

CHAPTER I.

THE DEATH OF TYRANNY; OR, THE QUESTION OF THE PREROGATIVE.