The Philosophy of the Plays of Shakspere Unfolded Part 19

It is easy to see, however, what extraordinary capabilities this particular form of writing offered to one who _had_ any purpose, or to an author, who wished on any account, to '_infold_' somewhat his meaning;--that was the term used then in reference to this style of writing. For certainly, many things dangerous in themselves could be shuffled in under cover of an artistic effect, which would not strike at the time, amid the agitations, and the skilful checks, and counteractions, of the scene, even the quick ear of despotism itself.

And thus King Lear--that impersonation of absolutism--the very embodiment of pure will and tyranny in their most frantic form, taken out all at once from that hot bath of flatteries to which he had been so long accustomed, that his whole self-consciousness had become saturated, tinctured in the grain with them, and he believed himself to be, within and without, indestructibly, essentially,--'ay, every inch A KING;' with speeches on his supremacy copied, well nigh verbatim, from those which Elizabeth's courtiers habitually addressed to her, still ringing in his ears, hurled out into a single-handed contest with the elements, stripped of all his 'social and artificial lendings,' the poor, bare, unaccommodated, individual man, this living subject of the poet's artistic treatment,--this 'ruined Majesty'

anatomized alive, taken to pieces literally before our eyes, pursued, hunted down scientifically, and robbed in detail of all 'the additions of a king'--must, of course, be expected to evince in some way his sense of it; 'for soul and body,' this poet tells us, 'rive not more in parting than greatness going off.'

Once conceive the possibility of presenting the action, the dumb show, of this piece upon the stage at that time, (there have been times since when it could not be done), and the dialogue, with its illimitable freedoms, follows without any difficulty. For the surprise of the monarch at the discoveries which this new state of things forces upon him,--the speeches he makes, with all the levelling of their philosophy, with all the unsurpa.s.sable boldness of their political criticism, are too natural and proper to the circ.u.mstances, to excite any surprise or question.

Indeed, a king, who, nurtured in the flatteries of the palace, was unlearned enough in the nature of things, to suppose that _the name_ of a king was anything but a shadow when _the power_ which had sustained its prerogative was withdrawn,--a king who thought that he could still be a king, and maintain 'his state' and 'his hundred knights,' and their prerogatives, and all his old arbitrary, despotic humours, with their inevitable encroachment on the will and humours, and on the welfare of others, merely on grounds of respect and affection, or on grounds of duty, when not merely the care of 'the state,' but the revenues and power of it had been devolved on others--such a one appeared, indeed, to the poet, to be engaging in an experiment very similar to the one which he found in progress in his time, in that old, decayed, riotous form of military government, which had chosen the moment of its utter dependence on the popular will and respect, as the fitting one for its final suppression of the national liberties. It was an experiment which was, of course, modified in the play by some diverting and strongly p.r.o.nounced differences, or it would not have been possible to produce it then; but it was still the experiment of _the unarmed prerogative_, that the old popular tale of the ancient king of Britain offered to the poet's hands, and that was an experiment which he was willing to see traced to its natural conclusion on paper at least; while in the subsequent development of the plot, the presence of an insulted trampled outcast majesty on the stage, furnishes a cover of which the poet is continually availing himself, for putting the case of that other outraged sovereignty, whose cause under one form or another, under all disguises, he is always pleading. And in the poet's hands, the debased and outcast king, becomes the impersonation of a debased and violated state, that had given all to its daughters,--the victim of a tyranny not less absolute, the victim, too, of a blindness and fatuity on its own part, not less monstrous, but not, not--_that_ is the poet's word--_not_ yet irretrievable.

'Thou shalt find I will resume that shape, which thou dost think I have cast off for ever; thou shalt, I warrant thee.'

'Do you mark that, my lord?'

But the question of that prerogative, which has consumed, in the poet's time, all the faculties of government const.i.tutes only a subordinate part of the action of that great play, into which it is here incorporated; a play which comprehends in its new philosophical reaches, in its new and before-unimagined subtilties of a.n.a.lysis, the most radical questions of a practical human science; questions which the practical reason of these modern ages at the moment of its awakening, found itself already compelled to grapple with, and master.

CHAPTER II.

UNACCOMMODATED MAN.

'Consider him well.--Three of us are sophisticated.'

For this is the grand SOCIAL tragedy. It is the tragedy of an unlearned human society; it is the tragedy of a civilization in which grammar, and the relations of sounds and abstract notions to each other have sufficed to absorb the attention of the learned,--a civilization in which the parts of speech, and their relations, have been deeply considered, but one in which the social elements, the parts of life, and their unions, and their prosody, have been left to spontaneity, and empiricism, and all kinds of rude, arbitrary, idiomatical conjunctions, and fortuitous rules; a civilization in which the learning of 'WORDS' is put down by the reporter--invented-- and the learning of 'THINGS'--omitted.

And in a movement which was designed to bring the human reason to bear scientifically and artistically upon those questions in which the deepest human interests are involved, the wrong and misery of that social state to which the New Machine, with its new combination of sense and reason, must be applied, had to be fully and elaborately brought out and exhibited. And there was but one language in which the impersonated human misery and wrong,--the speaker for countless hearts, tortured and broken on the rude machinery of unlearned social customs, and lawless social forces, could speak; there was but one tongue in which it could tell its story. For this is the place where science becomes inevitably poetical. That same science which fills our cabinets and herbariums, and chambers of natural history, with mute stones and sh.e.l.ls and plants and dead birds and insects--that same science that fills our scientific volumes with coloured pictures true as life itself, and letter-press of prose description--that same science that anatomises the physical frame with microscopic nicety,--in the hand of its master, found in the soul, that which had most need of science; and his 'ill.u.s.trated book' of it, the book of his experiments in it, comes to us filled with his yet living, 'ever living' _subjects_, and resounding with the tragedy of their complainings.

It requires but a little reading of that book to find, that the author of it is a philosopher who is strongly disposed to ascertain the limits of that thing in nature, which men call fortune,--that is, in their week-day speech,--they have another name for it 'o' Sundays.' He is greatly of the opinion, that the combined and legitimate use of those faculties with which man is beneficently 'armed against diseases of the world,' would tend very much to limit those fortuities and accidents, those wild blows,--those vicissitudes, that men, in their ignorance and indolent despair, charge on Fate or ascribe to Providence, while at the same time it would furnish the art of _accommodating_ the human mind to that which is inevitable. It is not fortune who is blind, but man, he says,--a creature endowed of nature for his place in nature, endowed of G.o.d with a G.o.dlike faculty, looking before and after--a creature who has eyes, eyes adapted to his special necessities, but one that will not use them.

Acquaintance with law, as it is actual in nature, and inventions of arts based on that acquaintance, appear to him to open a large field of relief to the human estate, a large field of encroachment on that human misery, which men have blindly and stupidly acquiesced in hitherto, as necessity. For this is the philosopher who borrows, on another page, an ancient fable to teach us that that is not the kind of submission which is pleasing to G.o.d--that that is not the kind of 'suffering' that will ever secure his favour. He, for one, is going to search this social misery to the root, with that same light which the ancient wise man tells us, 'is as the lamp of G.o.d, wherewith He searcheth the inwardness of all secrets.'

The weakness and ignorance and misery of the _natural_ man,--the misery too of the _artificial man_ as he is,--the misery of man in society, when that society is cemented with arbitrary customs, and unscientific social arts, and when the instinctive spontaneous demoniacal forces of nature, are at large in it; the dependence of the social Monad, the const.i.tutional specific _human_ dependence, on the specific _human_ law,--the exquisite human liability to injury and wrong, which are but the natural indications of those higher arts and excellencies, those unborn pre-destined human arts and excellencies, which man must struggle through his misery to reach;--that is the scientific notion which lies at the bottom of this grand ideal representation. It is, in a word, the human social NEED, in all its circ.u.mference, clearly sketched, laid out, scientifically, as the basis of the human social ART. It is the negation of that which man's conditions, which the _human_ conditions require;--it is the collection on the Table of Exclusion and Rejection, which must precede the _practical_ affirmation.

_King_. Have you heard the argument? Is there no offence in it?

_Hamlet_. None in the world. It's the image of a murder done in Vienna.

In the poetic representation of that state of things which was to be redressed, the central social figure must, of course, have its place.

For it is the Poet, the Experimental Poet, unseen indeed, deep buried in his fable, his new movements all hidden under its old garb, and deeper hidden still, in the new splendours he puts on it--it is the Poet--invisible but not the less truly, he,--it is the Scientific Poet, who comes upon the monarch in his palace at noonday, and says, 'My business is with thee, O king.' It is he who comes upon the selfish arrogant old despot, drunk with Elizabethan flatteries, stuffed with '_t.i.tles blown_ from adulation,' unmindful of the true ends of government, reckless of the duties which that regal a.s.sumption of the common weal brings with it--it is the Poet who comes upon this Doctor of Laws in the palace and prescribes to him a course of treatment which the royal patient himself, when once it has taken effect, is ready to issure from the hovel's mouth, in the form of a general prescription and state ordinance.

'Take physic, POMP; Expose thyself to _feel_ what wretches _feel_, That thou may'st shake the superflux to them, And show the heavens more just.

Oh, I have taken _too little care_ of This!'

It is that same Poet who has already told us, confidentially, under cover of King Hal's mantle, that 'the king himself is but a man' and that 'all his senses have but human conditions and that his affections, too, though higher mounted when they stoop, stoop with the like wing; that his ceremonies laid by, in his nakedness he appears but a man';--it is that same Poet, and, in carrying out the purpose of this play, it has come in his way now to make good that statement. For it was necessary to his purpose here, to show that the State is composed throughout, down to its most loathsome unimaginable depths of neglect and misery, of individual men, social units, clothed of nature with the same faculties and essential human dignities and susceptibilities to good and evil, and crowned of nature with the common sovereignty of reason,--down-trodden, perhaps, and wrung and trampled out of them, but elected of nature to that dignity; it was necessary to show this, in order that the wisdom of the State which sacrifices to the senses of _one_ individual man, and the judgment that is narrowed by the one man's senses, the weal of the whole,--in order that the wisdom of the State, which puts at the mercy of the arbitrary will and pa.s.sions of _the one_, the weal of _the many_, might be mathematically exhibited,--might be set down in figures and diagrams. For this is that Poet who represents this method of inquiry and investigation, as it were, to _the eye_. This is that same Poet, too, who surprises elsewhere _a queen_ in her swooning pa.s.sion of grief, and bids her murmur to us her recovering confession.

'No more, but e'en a woman; and _commanded_ By such poor pa.s.sion, as the maid that milks, And does the meanest chares.'

So busy is he, indeed, in laying by this king's 'ceremonies' for him, beginning with the first doubtful perception of a most faint neglect,--a falling off in the ceremonious affection due to majesty 'as well in the general dependents as in the duke himself and his daughter,'--so faint that the king dismisses it from his thought, and charges it on his own jealousy till he is reminded of it by another,--beginning with that faint beginning, and continuing the process not less delicately, through all its swift dramatic gradations,--the direct abatement of the regal dignities,--the knightly train diminis.h.i.+ng,--nay, 'fifty of his followers at a clap'

torn from him, his messenger put in the stocks,--and '_it is worse than murder_,' the poor king cries in the anguish of his slaughtered dignity and affection, 'to do upon _respect_ such violent outrage,'--so bent is the Poet upon this a.n.a.lytic process; so determined that this shaking out of a '_preconception_,' shall be for once a thorough one, so absorbed with the dignity of the scientific experiment, that he seems bent at one moment on giving a literal finish to this process; but the fool's scruples interfere with the philosophical humour of the king, and the presence of Mad Tom in his blanket, with the king's exposition, suffices to complete the demonstration. For not less lively than this, is the preaching and ill.u.s.tration, from that new rostrum which this 'Doctor' has contrived to make himself master of. 'His ceremonies laid by, in his nakedness he appears but a man,' says King Hal. 'Couldst thou save nothing?'

says King Lear to the Bedlamite. 'Why thou wert better in thy grave than to answer with thy uncovered body this extremity of the skies.'

'_Is man_,'--it is _the king_ who generalises, it is the king who introduces this levelling suggestion here in the _abstract_, while the Poet is content with the responsibility of the concrete exhibition--'_Is man no wore than this_? Consider him well. Thou owest the worm no silk, the beast no hide, the cat no perfume:--Ha! here's three of us are _sophisticated. Thou art the thing itself_.

UNACCOMMODATED MAN is no more but such a poor, bare, forked animal, as thou art. Off, off, you lendings.' But 'the fool' is of the opinion that this scientific process of unwrapping the artificial majesty, this philosophical undressing, has already gone far enough.

'Pry'thee, Nuncle, be contented,' he says, 'it is a naughty night to swim in.'

For it is the great heath wrapped in one of those storms of wind and rain and thunder and lightning, which this wizard only of all the children of men knows how to raise, that he chooses for his physiological exhibition of majesty, when the palace-door has been shut upon it, and the last 'additions of a king' have been subtracted.

It is a night--

'Wherein the cub-drawn bear would couch, The lion, and the belly-pinched wolf Keep their fur dry'--

into which he turns his royal patient '_unbonneted_.'

For the tyranny of wild nature in her elemental uproar must be added to the tyranny of the human wildness, the cruelty of the elements must conspire, like pernicious ministers, with the cruelty of arbitrary HUMAN will and pa.s.sions, the irrational, INHUMAN social forces must be joined by those other forces that make war upon us, before the real purpose of this exhibition and the full depth and scientific comprehension of it can begin to appear. It is in the tempest that Lear finds occasion to give out the Poet's text. Is _man_ no more than this? Consider him well. Unaccommodated man in his struggle with nature. Man without social combinations, man without arts to aid him in his battle with the elements, or _with_ arts that fence in his body, and robe it, it may be, in delicate and gorgeous apparelling, arts that roof his head with a princely dome it may be, and add to his native dignity and forces, the means and appliances of a material civilization, but leave his n.o.bler nature with its more living susceptibility to injury, unsheathed, at the mercy of the brute forces that unscientific civilizations, with their coa.r.s.e laws, with their cobwebs of WORDY learning, with their science of abstractions, unmatched with the subtilty of THINGS, are compelled to leave at large, uncaught, unentangled.

Yes, it is man in his relation to nature, man in his dependence on artificial aid, man in his two-fold dependence on art, that this tempest, this double tempest wakes and brings out, for us to 'consider,'--to 'consider well';--'the naked creature,' that were better in his grave than to answer with his uncovered body that extremity of the skies, and by his side, with his soul uncovered to a fiercer blast, his royal brother with 'the tempest in his mind, that doth from his senses take all feeling else, save what beats there.'

It is the _personal_ weakness, the moral and intellectual as well as the bodily frailty and limitation of faculty, and liability to suffering and outrage, the liability to wrong from treachery, as well as violence, which are 'the common' specific _human_ conditions, common to the King in his palace, and Tom o'Bedlam in his hovel; it is this exquisite human frailty and susceptibility, still unprovided for, that fills the play throughout, and stands forth in these two, impersonated; it is that which fills all the play with the outcry of its anguish.

And thus it is, that this poor king must needs be brought out into this wild uproar of nature, and stripped of his last advent.i.tious aid, reduced to the authority and forces that nature gave him, invaded to the skin, and ready in his frenzy to second the poet's intent, by yielding up the last thread of his advent.i.tious and artistic defences.

All his artificial, social personality already dissolved, or yet in the agony of its dissolution, all his natural social ties torn and bleeding within him, there is yet another kind of trial for him, as the elected and royal representative of the human conditions. For the perpetual, the universal interest of this experiment arises from the fact, that it is not as _the king_ merely, dissolving like 'a mockery king of snow' that this ill.u.s.trious form stands here, to undergo this fierce a.n.a.lysis, but as the representative, 'the conspicuous instance,' of that social name and figure, which all men carry about with them, and take to be a part of themselves, that outward life, in which men go beyond themselves, by means of their affections, and extend their ident.i.ty, incorporating into their very personality, that floating, contingent material which the wills and humours and opinions, the prejudices and pa.s.sions of others, and the variable tide of this world's fortunes make--that social Name and Figure in which men may die many times, ere the physical life is required of them, in which all men must needs live if they will live in it at all, at the mercy of these uncontrolled social eventualities.

The tragedy is complicated, but it is only that same complication which the tragedy it stands for, is always exhibiting. The fact that this blow to his state is dealt to him by those to whom nature herself had so dearly and tenderly bound him, nay, with whom she had so hopelessly identified him, is that which overwhelms the sufferer. It is that which he seeks to understand in vain. He wishes to reason upon it, but his mind cannot master it; under that it is that his brain gives way,--the first mental confusion begins there. The blow to his state is a subordinate thing with him. It only serves to measure the wrong that deals it. The poet takes pains to clear this complication in the experiment. It is the wound in the affections which untunes the jarring senses of 'this _child-changed father_.' It is that which invades his ident.i.ty.

'Are you _our_ daughter? Does anyone here know me?' That is the word with which he breaks the silence of that dumb amazement, that paralysis of frozen wonder which Goneril's first rude a.s.sault brings on him. 'Why, _this is not Lear_; Ha! sure it is not so. Does any one here know me? Who is it that can tell me _who I am_?'

But with all her cruelty, he cannot shake her off. He curses her; but his curses do not sever the tie.

'But yet _thou art_ my flesh, my blood, _my daughter_.

Or rather, a disease that's in my flesh Which I must needs call _mine_.

Filial ingrat.i.tude!

Is _it not as this mouth should tear this hand For lifting food to it_?'

For that is the poet's conception of the extent of this social life and outgoing--that is the _interior_ of that social whole, in which the dissolution he represents here is proceeding,--and that is the kind of new phenomenon which the science of man, when it takes him as he is, not the abstract man of the schools, not the logical man that the Realists and the Nominalists went to blows for, but 'the thing itself,' exhibits. As to that other '_man_,'--the man of the old philosophy,--he was not 'worth the whistle,' this one thinks. 'His bones were marrowless, his blood was cold, he had no speculation in those eyes that he did glare with.' The New Philosopher will have no such skeletons in his system. He is getting his _general_ man out of particular cases, building him up solid, from a basis of natural history, and, as far as he goes, there will be no question, no two words about it, as to whether he _is_ or _is not_. 'For I do take,'

says the Advancer of Learning, 'the _consideration_ in general, and at large, of _Human Nature_, to be fit to be emanc.i.p.ated and made a knowledge by itself.' No wonder if some new aspects of these ordinary phenomena, these 'common things,' as he calls them, should come out, when they too come to be subjected to a scientific inquiry, and when the Poet of this Advancement, this so subtle Poet of it, begins to explore them.

And as to this particular point which he puts down with so much care, this point which poor Lear is ill.u.s.trating here, viz. 'that our affections carry themselves beyond us,' as the sage of the 'Mountain'

expresses it, this is the view the same Poet gives of it, in accounting for Ophelia's madness.

'Nature is fine in love; and where 'tis fine, It sends some precious instance of itself, After the thing it loves.'

'Your old kind father,' continues Lear, searching to the quick the secrets of this 'broken-heartedness,' as people are content to call it, this ill to which the human species is notoriously liable, though philosophy had not thought it worth while before 'to find it out;'

'Your old kind father, whose frank heart gave all,-- O _that way_ madness lies; let me shun _that_, No more of _that_.'

And it is while he is still undergoing the last extreme of the suffering which the human wrong is capable of inflicting on the affections, that he comes in the Poet's hands to exhibit also the unexplored depth of that wrong,--that monstrous, inhuman social error, that perpetual outrage on nature in her _human_ law, which leaves the helpless human outcast to the rough discipline of nature, which casts him out from the family of man, from its common love and shelter, and leaves him in his vices, and helplessness, and ignorance, to contend alone with great nature and her unrelenting consequences.

'To wilful men The injuries that they themselves procure, Must be their school-masters,'--

is the point which the philosophic Regan makes, as she bids them shut the door in her father's face; but it is the common human relations.h.i.+p that the Poet is intent on clearing, while he notes the special relations.h.i.+p also; he does not limit his humanities to the ties of blood, or household sympathies, or social gradations.