The Philosophy of the Plays of Shakspere Unfolded Part 59

_Cit_. To the rock, to the rock with him.

_Sic_. Peace.

We need not put _new matter_ to his charge: What you have _seen_ him do, and heard him speak, _Beating_ your _officers, cursing yourselves_, Opposing _laws_ with _strokes_, and here defying Those whose great power must try him; even THIS, So _criminal_, and in such CAPITAL _kind_, Deserves the extremest death....

For that he has, As much as in him lies, from time to time, Envied against the people; _seeking means_ To _pluck away their power_: as now, at last, Given hostile strokes, and that, not in the presence Of dreaded justice, but on the _ministers_ _That do distribute it; in the name o' the people_, And in the _power of us, the tribunes, we_, Even from _this instant_, banish him our city, In _peril of precipitation_ From off the rock Tarpeian, never more To enter _our_ Rome's gates. I' THE PEOPLE'S NAME _I say it shall be so_.

_Cit_. _It shall be so, it shall be so_: let him away, He's banish'd, and it _shall be so_.

_Com_. Hear me, MY MASTERS, and my COMMON FRIENDS.

_Sic_. HE'S SENTENCED: no more hearing.

_Com_. Let me speak:--

_Bru_. THERE'S NO MORE TO BE SAID, BUT HE IS BANISHED, _As_ ENEMY _to the_ PEOPLE, AND HIS COUNTRY: IT SHALL BE SO.

_Cit_. IT SHALL BE SO, IT SHALL BE SO.

And this is the story that was set before a king! One, too, who was just then bestirring himself to get the life of 'that last king of England who was his ancestor' brought out; a king who was taking so much pains to get his triple wreath of conquest brightened up, and all the lines in it laid out and distinguished--one who was taking so much pains to get the fresh red of that last 'conqueror,' who also 'came in by battle,' cleared up in his coat of arms, in case his double line of white and red from the old _Norman_ should not prove sufficient-- sufficient to convince the English nation of his divine right, and that of his heirs for ever, to dispose of it and its weal at his and their pleasure, with or without laws, as they should see fit. A pretty scene this to amuse a king with, whose ancestor, the one from whom he directly claimed, had so lately seated himself and his line by battle- -by battle with the English people _on those very questions_; who had 'beaten them in' in their mutinies with his single sword, 'and taken all from them'; who had planted his chair of state on their suppressed liberties, and 'the charters that they bore in the body of the weal'-- that chair which was even then beginning to rock a little--while there was that in the mien and bearing of the royal occupant and his heir which might have looked to the prescient mind, if things went on as they were going then, not unlike to break some one's neck.

'Bid them home,'

says the Tribune, after the military hero is driven out by the uprisen people, with shouting, from the city gates for ever; charged never more to enter them, on peril of precipitation from the Tarpeian Rock.

'Bid them home: Say, _their great enemy is gone_, and THEY STAND _in their ancient strength_.'

But it is in the conquered nation that this scene of the deposing of the military power is completed. Of course one could not tell beforehand what effect that cautious, but on the whole luminous, exhibition of the recent conquest of the English PEOPLE, prepared at the suggestion and under the immediate criticism of royalty, might have with the profoundly loyal English people themselves, in the way of 'striking an awe into them,' and removing any lurking opposition they might have to the exercise of an arbitrary authority in government; but with people of the old Volscian pluck, according to this Poet's account of the matter, an allusion to a similar success on the part of the Conqueror at a critical moment, and when his _special_ qualifications for government happened to be pa.s.sing under review, was not attended with those happy results which appear to have been expected in the other instance.

'_If_ you have writ _your annals true_, 't is there, That _like an_ EAGLE in a dove-cote, _I_ Flutter'd your Volsces in Corioli: _Alone, I did it_.'

'Why--

[The answer is, in this case,]

'_Why_, n.o.ble lords, _Will you be put in mind_ of his blind fortune, Which was _your shame_, by this unholy braggart, 'Fore _your own eyes and ears_?

_Cons_. Let him die for't. [Several speak at once.]

_Citizens_ [Speaking _promiscuously_]. Tear him to pieces; do it presently. He killed _my son_--_my daughter_;--he killed my cousin Marcus;--he killed _my father_....

O that I had him, With six Aufidiuses, or more, _his tribe_, To use _my lawful sword_.

Insolent villain!

...Traitor!--how now?....

Ay, TRAITOR, Marcius.

_Marcius_?

Ay, _Marcius_, Caius Marcius. _Dost thou think_ I'll grace thee with that ROBBERY--thy STOLEN NAME, _Coriola.n.u.s_, in CORIOLI?....

[.... Honest, my lord? 'Ay, honest.']

_Cons_. Kill, kill, kill, kill, kill him.'

'Would you proceed especially against _Caius Marcius?_ Against him FIRST.'

Surely, if that 'Heir apparent' to whom the _History_ of HENRY THE SEVENTH was dedicated by the author, with an urgent recommendation of the '_rare accidents_' in that reign to the royal notice and consideration; if that prince had but chanced in some thoroughly thoughtful mood to light upon this yet more 'ancient piece,' he might have found here, also, some things worthy of his notice. It cannot be denied, that the poet's mode of handling the same historical question is much more bold and clear than that of the professed philosopher.

But probably this Prince was not aware that his father entertained at Whitehall then, not a literary Historian, merely--a Book-maker, able to compose narratives of the past in an orderly chronological prosaic manner, according to the received method--but a Show-man, also, an Historical Show-man, with such new gifts and arts; a true Magician, who had in his closet a mirror which possessed the property of revealing, not the past nor the present only, but the future, 'with a near aim,' an aim so _near_ that it might well seem 'magical'; and that a cloud was flaming in it, even then, 'which drizzled blood upon the Capitol.' This Prince of Wales did not know, any more than his father did, that they had in their court then an historical scholar, with such an indomitable pa.s.sion for the stage, with such a decided turn for acting--one who felt himself divinely prompted to a part in that theatre which is the Globe--one who had laid out all for his share in that. They did not either of them know, fortunately for us, that they had in their royal train such an Historic Sport-Manager, such a Prospero for Masques; that there was a true 'Phil-harmonus'

there, with so clear an inspiration of scientific statesmanship. They did not know that they had in that servant of the crown, so supple, so 'patient--patient as the midnight sleep,' patient 'as the ostler that for the poorest piece will bear the knave by the volume'--such a born aspirant for rule; one who had always his eye on the throne, one who had always in mind their usurpation of it. They did not know that they had a Hamlet in their court, who never lost sight of his purpose, or faltered in his execution of it; who had found a scientific ground for his actions, an end for his ends; who only affected incoherence; and that it was he who was intriguing to such purpose with the PLAYERS.

The Elizabethan revolutionist was suppressed: then 'Fame, who is the posthumous sister of rebellion, sprang up.'

'O like a book of sports thou'lt read me o'er, But there's more in me than thou'lt understand.'

'Henceforth guard thee well, For I'll not kill thee there, nor there, nor there; But _by the forge_ that st.i.thied Mars his helm, I'll kill thee everywhere, yea o'er and o'er.'

CHAPTER XIII.

CONCLUSION.

'How I have thought of this, and of these times, I shall recount hereafter, . . .

. . . . . and find a time Both meet to hear and answer such high things.

_Till then_, my n.o.ble friend, _chew upon this_; Brutus had rather he _a villager_, Than _to repute himself_ a son of Rome, Under these hard conditions _as this time_ _Is like to lay upon us_.

Inasmuch as the demonstration contained in this volume has laboured throughout under this disadvantage, that however welcome that new view of the character and aims of the great English philosopher, which is involved in it, as welcome it must be to all true lovers of learning, it presents itself to the mind of the reader as a view directly opposed, not merely to what may possibly be his own erroneous preconceptions of the case; but to facts which are among the most notable in the history of this country; and not only to facts sustained by unquestionable contemporary authority, and attested by public doc.u.ments,--facts which history has graven with her pen of iron in the rock for ever, but with other exhibitions of this man's character, not less, but more painful, for which he is himself singly responsible;--not the forced exhibition of a confession wrung from him by authority,--not the craven self-blasting defamation of a glorious name that was not his to blast,--that was the property of men of learning in all coming ages, precious and venerable in their eyes for ever, at the bidding of power,--not that only, but the voluntary exhibition of those qualities with which he stands charged,--which he has gone out of his way to leave to us,--memorials of them which he has collected with his own hands, and sealed up, and sent down to posterity 'this side up,' with the most urgent directions to have them read, and examined, and considered deeply,--that posterity, too, to which he commends, with so much a.s.surance, the care of his honor, the cure of his fame.

The demonstrated fact must stand. The true mind must receive it.

Because our criticism or our learning is not equal to the task of reconciling it with that which we know already, or with that which we _believed_, and thought we _knew_, we must not on that account reject it. That is to hurt ourselves. That is to destroy the principle of integrity at its source. We must take our facts and reconcile them, if we can; and let them take care of themselves, if we can not. G.o.d is greater than we are, and whatever other sacrifices he may require of us, painful to our human sensibilities, to make way with facts, for the sake of advancing truths, or for any other reason never so plausible, is a thing which he never does, and never did require of any mind. The conclusion that requires facts to be dispensed with, or shorn, on either side to make it tenable, is not going to stand, let it come in what name, or with what authority it will; because the truth of history is, in its least particular, of a universal quality, and is much more potent than anything that the opinion and will of man can oppose to it.

To the mind which is able to receive under all conditions the demonstrated truth, and give to it its full weight,--to the mind to which truth is religion, this book is dedicated. The facts which it contains are able to a.s.sert themselves,--will be, at least, hereafter.

They will not be dependent ultimately upon the mode of their exhibition here. For they have the large quality, they have the solidity and dimensions of historical truth, and are accessible on more sides than one.

But to those to whom they are already able to commend themselves in the form in which they are here set forth, the author begs leave to say, in conclusion, though it must stand for the present in the form of a simple statement, but a statement which challenges investigation, that so far from coming into any real collision with the evidence which we have on this subject from other sources, those very facts, and those very historical materials on which our views on this subject have been based hitherto, are, that which is wanting to the complete development of the views contained here.

It is the true history of these great events in which the hidden great men of this age played so deep a part; it is the true history of that great crisis in which the life-long plots of these hidden actors began to show themselves on the historic surface in scenic grandeur,--in those large tableaux which history takes and keeps,--which history waits for,--it is the very evidence which has supplied the princ.i.p.al basis of the received views on this subject,--it is the history of the initiation of that great popular movement,--that movement of new ages, with which the chief of popular development, and the leader of these ages, has been hitherto so painfully connected in our impressions; it is that very evidence,--that blasting evidence which the Learning of the Modern Ages has always carried in its stricken heart,--it is _that_ which is wanting here. That also is a part of the story which has begun to be related here.

And those very letters which have furnished 'confirmations strong as proofs of holy writ' of the impressions which the other historical evidence, as it stands at present, inevitably creates,--those very letters which have been collected by the party whose character was concerned in them, and preserved with so much diligence and caution,--which we have been asked with so much emphasis to read and ponder,--which have been recommended to our attention as the very best means, when all is done, of putting ourselves into sympathetic relations with the writer, and attaining at last to a complete understanding of his position, and to a complete acquaintance with his character and aims,--with his _natural dispositions_, as well as his deliberate scientific _aims_,--these letters, long as we have turned from them,--often as we have turned from them,--chilled, confounded, sick at heart,--unable, in spite of those recommendations, to find in them any gleam of the soul of these proceedings,--these very letters will have to be read, after all, and with that very diligence which the directions enjoin upon us; they will have, when all is done, to take just that place in the development of this plot which the author, who always knows what he is about when he is giving directions, designed them to take. There is one very obvious reason why they should be studied--why they would have to be studied in the end. They have on the face of them a claim to the attention of the learned.

There is nothing like them in the history of mankind. For, however mean and disreputable the acts of men may be, when it comes to words,--that medium of understanding and sympathy, in which the ident.i.ty of the common nature is perpetually declared, even in the most private conferences,--there is usually an attempt to clothe the forlorn and shrinking actuality with the common human dignity, or to make it, at least, pa.s.sably respectable, if the claim to the heroic is dispensed with,--even in oral speech. But in writing, in letters, destined to never so brief and limited an existence, who puts on paper for the eye of another, for the review of that criticism which in the lowest, basest of mankind, stands in unimpeachable dignity, prepared to detect and pa.s.s sentence, and cry out as one aggrieved, on the least failure, or shadow of failure in the best--who puts in writing,--what tenant of Newgate will put on paper, when it comes to that, a deliberate display of meanness,--what convicted felon, but will undertake in that case to give some sort of heroic colour to his proceedings--some air of suffering virtue to his durance?

But a great man, consciously great, who knows that his most trifling letter is liable to publication; a great man, writing on subjects and occasions which insure publicity to his writing; a man of fame, writing letters expressly for publication, and dedicating them to the far-off times; a man of poetic sensibilities, alive to the finest shades of moral differences; one of unparalleled dignity and grandeur of aims--aims pursued from youth to age, without wavering, under the most difficult conditions, pursued to their successful issue; a man whose aim in life it was to advance, and enn.o.ble, and enrich his kind; in whose life-success the race of men are made glad; such a one sending down along with the works, in which the n.o.bility and the deliberate worth and grandeur of his ends are set forth and proved, memorials of himself which exhibit studiously on the surface of them, by universal consent, the most odious character in history; this is the phenomenon which our men of learning have found themselves called upon to encounter here. To separate the man and the philosopher--to fly out upon the _man_, to throw him overboard with every expression of animosity and disgust, to make him out as bad as possible, to collect diligently every sc.r.a.p of evidence against him, and set it forth with every conceivable aggravation--this has been the resource of an indignant scholarship in this case, bent on uttering its protest in some form; this has been the defence of learning, cast down from its excellency, and debased in all men's eyes, as it seemed for ever, in the person of its high-priest.

The objection to the work here presented to the public is, that it does not go far enough. From the point of review that the research of which it is the fruit has now attained, this is the criticism to which it appears to be liable. From this point of view, the _complaint_ to be made against it is, that at the place where it stops it leaves, for want of that part of the evidence which contains it, the historical grandeur of our great men unrevealed or still obscured. For we _have_ had them, in the sober day-light of our occidental learning, in the actualities of history, and not in the mists of a poetic past only--monstrous idealisms, outstretched shadows of man's divinity, demi-G.o.ds and heroes, impersonations of ages and peoples, stalking through the twilight of the ante-historic dawn, or in the twilight of a national popular ignorance, embalmed in the traditions of those who are always 'beginners.' We have had them; we need not look to a foreign and younger race for them; we have them, fruit of our own stock; we have had them, not cloaked with falseness, but exposed in the searching noonday glare of our western science. We have had them, we have them still, with all their mortal frailty and littleness and ignorance confessed, with all their 'weaved-up follies ravelled out,'

with all the illimitable capacity of affection and pa.s.sion and will in man, with all his illimitable capacity for folly and wrong-doing, a.s.sumed and acknowledged in their own persons, symbolically, vicariously, a.s.sumed and confessed. 'I am very proud, revengeful, ambitious; with more offences at my beck than I have thoughts to put them in, imagination to give them shape, or time to act them in.' We have them, _our_ Interpreters, _our_ Poets, _our_ Reformers, who start from the actualities--from the actualities of nature in general, and of the human nature in particular--who make the most careful study of man as he is, in themselves and in all men, the basis of their innovation, the beginning of their advancement to the ideal or divine.

We have them; and they, too, they also come to us, with that old garland of glory on their brows, with that same 'crown' of victory, which the world has given from of old to those who have taken her affairs to be their business.

That the historical evidence which lies on the surface of an age, like that age from which our modern philosophy proceeds, is of a kind to require, for its unravelling, a different species of criticism from that which suffices for the historical evidence which our own times and inst.i.tutions produce, is a fact which would hardly seem to require any ill.u.s.tration in the present state of our historical knowledge, in the present state of our knowledge in regard to the history of this age in particular; when not the professed scholar only, but every reader, knows what age in the const.i.tutional history of England, at least, that age was; when we have here, not the erudite historian only, with his rich harvests for the scholar, that are _caviare_ to the mult.i.tude, but the Poets of history also, wresting from dull prose and scholasticism its usurped domains, and giving back to the peoples their own, to tell us what age this was. The inner history of this time is indeed still wanting to us; and the reason is, that we have not yet applied to the reading of its princ.i.p.al doc.u.ments that key of times which our contemporary historians have already put into our hands--that key which, we are told on good authority, is, in certain cases, indispensable to the true interpretation.

That the direct contemporary testimony on which history depends is, in this case, vitiated, tainted at its source, and through all its details--that the doc.u.ments are all of them, on the face of them, 'suspicious,' and not fit to be received as historical evidence without the severest scrutiny and re-examination--this is the fact which remains to be taken into the account here. For this is a case in which the witnesses come into court, making signs, seeking with mute gesticulation to attract our attention, pointing significantly to the difficulties of the position, asking to be cross-examined, soliciting a second cogitation on what they say, telling us that they mortally hate obscurity, and would avoid it if they could; intimating that if their testimony should be re-examined in a higher court, and when the Star Chamber and the Court of Ecclesiastical Commission are no longer in session, it might perhaps be found to be susceptible of a different reading. This is a case in which the party convicted comes in with his finger on his lips, and an appeal to another tribunal, to another _age_.

We all know what age in the history of the immemorial liberties and dignities of a race--what age in the history of its recovered liberties, rescued from oppression and recognised and confirmed by statute, this was. We know it was an age in which the decisions of the Bench were prescribed to it by a power that had 'the laws of England at its commandment,' that it was an age in which Parliament, and the press, and the pulpit, were gagged, and in which that same justice had charge, diligent charge 'of amus.e.m.e.nts also, and of those who only played at working.' That this was a time when the Play House itself,--in that same year, too, in which these philosophical plays began first to attract attention, and again and again, was warned off by express ordinances from the whole ground of 'the forbidden questions.' We know that this was an age in which not the books of the learned only were subjected to 'the press and torture which expulsed'

from them all those 'particulars that point to action'--action, at least, in which the common-weal of men is most concerned; that it was a time when the private ma.n.u.script was subjected to that same censorship and question, and corrected with those same instruments and engines, which made then a regular part of the machinery of the press; when the most secret cabinet of the Statesman and the Man of Letters must be kept in order for that revision, when his most confidential correspondence, his private note-book and diary must be composed under these restrictions; when in the church, not the pulpit only, but the secrets of the study, were explored for proofs of opposition to the power then predominant; when the private desk and drawers of the poor obscure country clergyman were ransacked, and his half-formed studies of sermons, his rude sketches and hypothetical notes of sermons yet to be--which might or might not be--put down for private purposes perhaps, and never intended to be preached--were produced by Government as an excuse for subjecting him to indignities and cruelties to which those practised upon the Duke of Kent and the Duke of Gloster, in the play, formed no parallel.

To the genius of a race in whose mature development speculation and action were for the first time systematically united, in the intensities of that great historical impersonation which signalises its first entrance upon the stage of human affairs, stimulated into preternatural activity by that very opposition which would have shut it out from its legitimate fields, and shut it up within those impossible, insufferable limits that the will of the one man prescribed to it then,--to that many-sided genius, bent on playing well its part even under those conditions, all the more determined on it by that very opposition--kept in mind of its manliness all the time by that all comprehending prohibition on manhood, that took charge of every act--irritated all the time into a protesting human dignity by the perpetual meannesses prescribed to it, instructed in the doctrine of the human nature and its n.o.bility in the school of that sovereignty which was keeping such a costly 'crib' here then; 'Let a beast be lord of beasts,' says Hamlet, 'and your crib shall stand at the king's mess;' 'Would you have me false to _my nature_? says another, '_rather_ say I _play_ the _man_ I am'; to that so conscious man, playing his part under these hard conditions, on a stage so high; knowing all the time what theatre that was he played it in, how '_far_' those long-drawn aisles extended; what 'far-off' crowding ages filled them, watching his slightest movements; who knew that he was acting 'even in the eyes of all posterity that wear this world out to the ending doom'; to such a one studying out his part beforehand under such conditions, it was not one disguise only, it was not one secret literary instrumentality only, that sufficed for the plot of it. That toy stage which he seized and converted so effectually to his ends, with all its masks did not suffice for the exigencies of this speaker's speech, 'who came prepared to speak well,' and 'to give to his speech a grace by action.'