BOOK II.
ELIZABETHAN ‘SECRETS OF MORALITY AND POLICY’;
OR,
THE FABLES OF THE NEW LEARNING.
Reason cannot be so sensible, nor examples so fit. _Advancement of Learning._
INTRODUCTORY.
CHAPTER I.
THE DESIGN.
The object of this Volume is merely to open _as a study_, and a study of primary consequence, those great Works of the Modern Learning which have passed among us hitherto, for lack of the historical and scientific key to them, as Works of Amusement, merely.
But even in that superficial acquaintance which we have had with them in that relation, they have, all the time, been subtly operating upon the minds in contact with them, and perpetually fulfilling the first intention of their Inventor.
‘For,’ says the great Innovator of the Modern Ages,–the author of the _Novum_ Organum, and of the _Advancement_ of Learning,–in claiming this department of Letters as the necessary and proper instrumentality of a new science,–of a science at least, ‘foreign to opinions received,’–as he claims elsewhere that it is, under all conditions, the inevitable essential form of this science in particular. ‘Men have proposed to answer two different and contrary ends by the use of parables, for they serve as well to _instruct_ and _illustrate_ as to _wrap up and envelope_, so that, though for the present, we drop the concealed use, and suppose them to be _vague undeterminate things_, formed for AMUSEMENT merely, still the other _use_ remains. ‘And every man of _any_ learning must readily concede,’ he says, ‘the value of that use of them as a method of popular instruction, grave, sober, exceedingly useful, and sometimes necessary in the _sciences_, as it opens an easy and _familiar_ passage to the human understandings in _all new_ discoveries, that are abstruse and out of the road of vulgar opinion. They were used of old by _philosophers_ to express any point of reason more sharp and subtle than the vulgar, and nevertheless _now_, and _at all times_, these allusive parabolical forms retain much life and vigor, because _reason_ cannot be _so sensible_ nor _examples so fit_.’ That philosophic use of them was to inform and teach, whilst the minds of men continued rude and unpractised in matters of subtilty and speculation, and even impatient and in a manner incapable of receiving anything that did not directly fall under and strike the senses. ‘And, even to this day, if any man would let new light in upon the human understanding, and conquer prejudices without raising animosities, opposition, or _disturbance_, he must still go in _the same path_ and have recourse to the like method.’
That is the use which the History and Fables of the New Philosophy have already _had_ with us. We have been feeding without knowing it, on the ‘principal and supreme sciences’–the ‘Prima Philosophia’ and its noblest branches. We have been taking the application of the Inductive Philosophy to the principal concerns of our human life, and to the phenomena of of the human nature itself, as mere sport and pastime; though the precepts concluded, the practical axioms inclosed with it have already forced their way into our learning, for all our learning is, even now, inlaid and glittering with those ‘dispersed directions.’
We have profited by this use of them. It has not been pastime merely with us. We have not spent our time in vain on this first stage of an Advancing Learning, a learning that will not cease to advance until it has invaded all our empiricisms, and conquered all our practice; a learning that will recompence the diligence, the exactitude, the severity of observance which it will require here also (when it comes to put in its claim here, as Learning and not Amusement merely), with that same magnitude of effects that, in other departments, has already justified the name which its Inventor gave it–a Learning which will give us here, also, in return for the severity of observance it will require, what no ceremonial, however exacting can give us, that control of effects, with which, even in its humblest departments, it has already fulfilled, in the eyes of all the world, the prophecy which its Inventors uttered when they called it the NEW MAGIC.
That first use of the Histories and Fables of the Modern Learning, we have had already; and it is not yet exhausted. But in that rapid development of a common intelligence, to which the new science of practice has itself so largely contributed, even in its lower and limited developments, we come now to that other and so important use of these Fables, which the philosophic Innovator proposed to drop for the time, in his argument–that use of them, in which they serve ‘to wrap up and conceal’ for the time, or to limit to the few, who are able to receive them, those new discoveries which are as yet too far in advance of the common beliefs and opinions of men, and too far above the mental habits and capacities of the masses of men, to be safely or profitably communicated to the many in the abstract.
But in order to arrive at this second and nobler use of them, it will be necessary to bestow on them a very different kind of study from any that we have naturally thought it worth while to spend on them, so long as we regarded them as works of pastime merely; and especially while that insuperable obstacle to any adequate examination of them, which the received history of the works themselves created, was still operating on the criticism. The truths which these Parabolic and Allusive Poems wrap up and conceal, have been safely concealed hitherto, because they are not those common-place truths which we usually look for as the point and moral of a tale which is supposed to have a moral or politic intention,–truths which we are understood to be in possession of beforehand, while the parable or instance is only designed to impress the sensibility with them anew, and to reach the will that would not take them from the reason, by means of the senses or the imagination. It is not that spontaneous, intuitive knowledge, or those conventional opinions, those unanalysed popular beliefs, which we usually expect to find without any trouble at all, on the very surface of any work that has morality for its object, it is not any such coarse, lazy performance as that, that we need trouble ourselves to look for here. This higher intention in these works ‘their real import, genuine interpretation, and full depth,’ has not yet been found, _because_ the science which is wrapped in them, though it is the principal science in the plan of the Advancement of Learning, has hitherto escaped our notice, and _because_ of the exceeding subtlety of it,–because the truths thus conveyed or concealed are new, and recondite, and out of the way of any casual observation,–because in this scientific collection of the phenomena of the human life, designed to serve as the basis of new social arts and rules of practice, the author has had occasion to go behind the vague, popular, unscientific terms which serve well enough for purposes of discourse, and mere oratory, to those principles which are actual and historical, those simple radical forms and differences on which the doctrine of power and practice must be based.
It is pastime no longer. It is a study, the most patient, the most profoundly earnest to which these works now invite us. Let those who will, stay in the playground still, and make such sport and pastime of it there, as they may; and let those who feel the need of inductive rules here also,–here on the ground which this pastime covers–let those who perceive that we have as yet, set our feet only on the threshold of the Great Instauration, find here with diligent research, the ascent to the axioms of practice,–that ascent which the author of the science of practice in general, made it _his labour_ to hew out _here_, for _he_ undertook ‘to collect here into an art or science, that which had been pretermitted by others as matters of common sense and experience.’
It does not consist with the design of the present work to track that draught of a new science of morality and policy, that ‘table’ of an inductive science of human nature, and human life, which the plan of the Advancement of Learning contains, with all the lettering of its compartments put down, into these systematic scientific collections, which the Fables of the Modern Learning,–which these magnificent Parabolical Poems have been able hitherto to wrap up and conceal.
This work is merely introductory, and the design of it is to remove that primary obstacle to the diligent study of these works, which the present theory of them contains; since that concealment of their true intention and history, which was inevitable at the time, no longer serves the author’s purpose, and now that the times are ripe for the learning which they contain, only serves indeed to hinder it. And the illustrations which are here produced, are produced with reference to that object, and are limited strictly to the unfolding of those ‘_secrets of policy_,’ which are the necessary introduction to that which follows.
CHAPTER II.
THE MISSING BOOKS OF THE GREAT INSTAURATION; OR, PHILOSOPHY ITSELF.
Did it never occur to the student of the _Novum Organum_ that the constant application of that ‘_New Machine_’ by the inventor of it himself, to one particular class of subjects, so constant as to produce on the mind of the careless reader the common impression, that it was intended to be applied to that class only, and that the relief of the human estate, in that one department of the human want, constituted its whole design: did it never occur to the curious inquirer, or to the active experimenter in this new rule of learning, that this apparently so rigorous limitation of its applications in the hands of its author is–under all the circumstances–a thing worthy of being inquired into? Considering who the author of it is, and that it is on the face of it, a new method of dealing with facts in general, a new method of obtaining axioms of practice from history in general, and not a specific method of obtaining them from that particular department of history from which his instances are taken; and, considering, too, that the author was himself aware of the whole sweep of its applications, and that he has taken pains to include in his description of its powers, the assertion,–the distinct, deliberate assertion–that it is capable of being applied as _efficiently_, to those nobler departments of the human need, which are marked out for it in the Great Instauration–those very departments in which he was known himself to be so deeply interested, and in which he had been all his life such a diligent explorer and experimenter. Did it never occur to the scholar, to inquire why he did not apply it, then, himself to those very subjects, instead of keeping so stedfastly to the physical forces in his illustration of its powers? And has any one ever read the plan of this man’s works? Has any one seen the scheme of that great enterprise, for which he was the responsible person in his own time–that scheme which he wrote out, and put in among these published acknowledged works of his, which he dared to produce in his own name, to show what parts of his ‘_labor_,’–what part of chief consequence was _not_ thus produced? Has any one seen that plan of a new system of Universal Science, which was published in the reign of James the First, under the patronage of that monarch? And if it has been seen, what is the reason there has been no enquiry made for those works, in which the author openly proposes to apply his new organum in person to these very subjects; and that, too, when he takes pains to tell us, in reference to that undertaking, that he is _not_ a vain promiser.
There is a pretence of supplying that new kind of history, which the new method of discovery and invention requires as the first step towards its conclusions, which is put down as the THIRD PART of the Instauration, though the natural history which is produced for that purpose is very far from fulfilling the description and promise of that division. But where is the FOURTH part of the Great Instauration? Has anybody seen the FOURTH part? Where is that so important part for which all that precedes it is a preparation, or to which it is subsidiary? Where is that part which consists of EXAMPLES, that are nothing but a _particular_ application of the SECOND; that is, the Novum Organum,–‘and to _subjects of the noblest kind_?’ Where is ‘that part of our work which enters upon PHILOSOPHY ITSELF,’ instead of dealing any longer, or professing to deal, with THE METHOD merely of finding that which man’s relief requires, or instead of exhibiting that method any longer _in the abstract_? Where are the works in which he undertakes to show it in operation, with its new ‘grappling hooks’ on the matter of the human life–applied by the inventor himself to ‘the noblest subjects?’ Surely that would be a sight to see. What is the reason that our editors do not produce these so important works in their editions? What is the reason that our critics do not include them in their criticism? What is the reason that our scholars do not quote them? Instead of stopping with that mere report of the condition of learning and its deficiences, and that outline of what is to be done, which makes the FIRST PART or Introduction to this work; or stopping with the description of the new method, or the Novum Organum, which makes the SECOND; why don’t they go on to the ‘new philosophy itself,’ and show us that as well,–the very object of all this preparation? When he describes in the SECOND part his _method_ of finding true terms, or rather the method of his school, when he describes this new method of finding ‘_ideas_,’ ideas as they are in nature, powers, causes, the elements of history, or _forms_, as he more commonly calls them, when he describes this new method of deducing axioms, axioms that are ready for practice, he does, indeed, give us _instances_; but it so happens, that the instances are all of _one kind_ there. They are the physical powers that supply his examples in that part.
In describing this method merely, he produces what he calls his Tables of Invention, or Tables of REVIEW OF INSTANCES; but where is that part in which he tells us we shall find these same tables again, with ‘the nobler subjects’ on them? He produces them for careful scrutiny in his second part; and he makes no small parade in bringing them in. He shews them up very industriously, and is very particular to direct the admiring attention of the reader to their adaptation as means to an end. But certainly there is nothing in that specimen of what can be done with them which he contents himself with there, that would lead any one to infer that the power of this invention, which is the novelty of it, was going to be a dangerous thing to society, or, indeed, that they were not the most harmless things in the world. It is the true cause of HEAT, and the infallible means of producing that under the greatest variety of conditions, which he appears to be trying to arrive at there. But what harm can there be in that, or in any other discovery of that kind. And there is no real impression made on any one’s mind by that book, that there is any other kind of invention or discovery intended in the practical applications of this method? The very free, but of course not pedantic, use of the new terminology of a new school in philosophy, in which this author indulges–a terminology of a somewhat figurative and poetic kind, one cannot but observe, for a philosopher of so strictly a logical turn of mind, one whose thoughts were running on abstractions so entirely, to construct; his continued preference for these new scholastic terms, and his inflexible adherence to a most profoundly erudite mode of expression whenever he approaches ‘the part operative’ of his work, is indeed calculated to awe and keep at a distance minds not yet prepared to grapple formally with those ‘nobler subjects’ to which allusion is made in another place. King James was a man of some erudition himself; but he declared frankly that for his part he could not understand this book; and it was not strange that he could not, for the author did not intend that he should. The philosopher drops a hint in passing, however, that all which is essential in this method, might perhaps be retained without quite so much formality and fuss in the use of it, and that the proposed result might be arrived at by means of these same tables, without any use of technical language at all, under other circumstances.
The results which have since been obtained by the use of this method in that department of philosophy to which it is specially applied in the Novum Organum, give to the inquirer into the causes of the physical phenomena now, some advantages which no invention could supply them. That was what the founders of this philosophy expected and predicted. They left this department to their school. The author of the Novum Organum orders and initiates this inquiry; but the basis of the induction in this department is as yet wanting; and the collections and experiments here require combinations of skill and labour which they cannot at once command. They will do what they can here too, in their small way, just to make a beginning; but they do not lay much stress upon any thing they can accomplish with the use of their own method in this field. It serves, however, a very convenient purpose with them; neither do they at all underrate its intrinsic importance.
But the man who has studiously created for himself a social position which enables him to assume openly, and even ostentatiously, the position of an innovator–an innovator _in the world of letters_, an advancer of–_learning_–is compelled to introduce his innovation with the complaint that he finds the mind of the world so stupified, so bewildered with evil, and so under the influence of dogmas, that the first thing to be done is to get so much as a thought admitted of the possibility of a better state of things. ‘The present system of philosophy,’ he says, ‘cherishes in its bosom certain positions or dogmas which it will be found, are calculated to produce a full conviction that no difficult, commanding, and powerful operation on nature _ought_ to be anticipated, through the means of art.’ And, therefore, after criticising the theory and practice of the world as he finds it, reporting as well as he can,–though he can find no words, he says, in which to do justice to his feeling in regard to it–_the deficiencies_ in its learning, he devotes a considerable portion of the description of his new method to the grounds of ‘hope’ which he derives from this philosophic survey, and that that hope is not a hope of a better state of things in respect to the physical wants of man merely, that it is not a hope of a renovation in the arts which minister to those wants exclusively, any very careful reader of the first book of the Novum Organum will be apt on the whole to infer. But the statements here are very general, and he refers us to another place _for particulars_.
‘Let us then speak of _hope_’ he says, ‘_especially_ as we are not vain promisers, nor are willing to enforce or ensnare men’s judgments; but would rather lead them _willingly_ forward. And although we shall employ the most cogent means of _enforcing hope when we bring them_ TO PARTICULARS, and _especially_ those which are digested and arranged in our Tables of Invention, the subject partly of the SECOND, but–_principally_–mark it, _principally_ of the FOURTH part of the Instauration, which are, indeed, rather the very objects of our hopes than hope itself.’ Does he dare to tell us, in this very connection, that he is _not_ a vain promiser, when no such PART as that to which he refers us here is to be found anywhere among his writings–when this _principal_ part of his promise remains unfulfilled. ‘The FOURTH part of the Instauration,’ he says again in his formal description of it, ‘enters upon philosophy itself, furnishing _examples of inquiry and investigation_, according to our own method, _in certain subjects of the noblest kind_, but greatly differing from each other, that a specimen may be had of _every sort_. By these examples, we mean _not illustrations of rules and precepts_,’ [He will show the facts in such order, in such scientific, select, methodical arrangements, that rules and precepts will be forced from them; for he will show them, on the tables of invention, and rules and precepts are the vintage that flows from the illustrious instances–the prerogative instances–the ripe, large, cleared, selected clusters of facts, the subtle prepared history which the tables of invention collect. The definition of the simple original elements of history, the pure definition is the first vintage from these; but ‘that which in speculative philosophy corresponds to the cause, in practical philosophy becomes the rule’ and _the axiom of practice_, ready for use, is the final result.] ‘but perfect models, which will exemplify the SECOND PART of this work, and represent, as it were, to _the eye_ the whole progress of the mind, and _the continued structure and order of invention_ in THE MORE CHOSEN SUBJECTS’–note it, in the _more_ chosen subjects; but this is not at all–‘_after the same manner as globes and machines facilitate the more abstruse and subtle demonstrations in mathematics_.’ But in another place he tells us, that the poetic form of demonstration is the form to which it is necessary to have recourse on these subjects, _especially_ when we come to these more abstruse and subtle demonstrations, as it opens an easy and familiar passage to the human understanding in all new discoveries, that are abstruse and out of the road of vulgar opinion; and that at the time he was writing out this plan of his works, any one, who would let in new light on the human understanding, and conquer prejudices, without raising animosity, opposition, or disturbance, had no choice–_must go in that same path_, or none. Where are those diagrams? And what does he mean, when he tells us in this connection that he is not a vain promiser? Where are those particular cases, in which this method of investigation is applied to the noblest subjects? Where are the diagrams, in which the order of the investigation is represented, as it were, to the eye, which serve the same purpose, ‘that globes and machines serve in the more abstruse and subtle demonstrations in mathematics?’ We are all acquainted with one poem, at least, published about that time, in which some very abstruse and subtle investigations appear to be in progress, _not_ without the use of diagrams, and very lively ones too; but one in which the intention of the poet appears to be to the last degree ‘enigmatical,’ inasmuch as it has engaged the attention of the most philosophical minds ever since, and inasmuch as the most able critics have never been able to comprehend that intention fully in their criticism. And it is bound up with many others, in which the subjects are not less carefully chosen, and in which the method of inquiry is the same; in which that same method that is exhibited in the ‘Novum Organum’ in the abstract, or in its application to the investigation of the physical phenomena, is everywhere illustrated in the most chosen subjects–in subjects of the noblest kind. This volume, and another which has been mentioned here, contain the THIRD and FOURTH PARTS of the Great Instauration, whether this man who describes them here, and who forgot, it would seem, to fulfil his promise in reference to them, be aware of it or not.
That is the part of the Great Instauration that we want now, and we are fairly entitled to it, because these are not ‘the next ages,’ or ‘the times which were nearer,’ and which this author seldom speaks of without betraying his clear foresight of the political and social convulsions that were then at hand. These are the times, which were farther off, to which he appeals from those nearer ages, and to which he expressly dedicates the opening of his designs.
Now, what is it that we have to find? What is it that is missing out of this philosophy? Nothing less than the ‘principal’ part of it. All that is good for anything in it, according to the author’s own estimate. The rest serves merely ‘to pass the time,’ or it is good as it serves to prepare the way for this. What is it that we have to look for? The ‘Novum Organum,’ that severe, rigorous method of scientific inquiry, applied to _the more chosen subjects_ in the reigns of Queen Elizabeth and James I. Tables of Review of Instances, and all that Logic which is brought out in the doctrine of the PREROGATIVE INSTANCES, whereby the mind of man is prepared for its encounter with fact in general, brought down to particulars, and applied to the noblest subjects, and to every sort of subject which the philosophic mind of that age _chose_ to apply it to. That is what we want to find.
‘The prerogative instances’ in ‘the _more_ chosen subjects.’ The whole field which that philosophy chose for its field, and called the noblest, the principal, the chosen, the more chosen one. Every part of it reduced to scientific inquiry, put under the rule of the ‘Novum Organum’; that is what we want to find. We know that no such thing could possibly be found in the acknowledged writings of this author. Nothing answering to that description, composed by a statesman and a philosopher, with an avowed intention in his writing–an intention to effect changes, too, in the actual condition of men, and ‘to suborn practice and actual life,’ no such work by such an author could by any means have been got through the press then. No one who studies the subject will think of looking for that FOURTH PART of the Instauration among the author’s acknowledged writings. Does he give us any hint as to where we are to look for it? Is there any intimation as to the particular form of writing in which we are to find it? for find it we must and shall, because he is _not_ a vain promiser. The _subject_ itself determines the form, he says; and the fact that the whole ground of the discovery is ground already necessarily comprehended in the preconceptions of the many–that it is ground covered all over with the traditions and rude theories of unlearned ages, this fact, also, imperiously determines the method of the inculcation. Who that knows what the so-called Baconian method of learning really is, will need to be told that the principal books of it will be–books of INSTANCES and PARTICULARS, SPECIMENS–living ones, and that these will occupy the prominent place in the book; and that the conclusions and precepts will come in as abstractions from these, drawn freshly and on the spot from particulars, and, therefore, ready for use, ‘knowing the way to particulars again?’ Who would ever expect to find the principal books of this learning–the books in which it enters upon philosophy itself, and undertakes to leave a specimen of its own method in the noblest subjects in its own chosen field–who would ever expect to find these books, books of abstractions, books of precepts, with instances or examples brought in, to illustrate or make them good? For this is not a point of method merely, but a point of substance, as he takes pains to tell us. And who that has ever once read his own account of the method in which he proposes to _win_ the human mind from its preconceptions, instead of undertaking to overcome it with Logic and sharp disputations,–who that knows what place he gives to Rhetoric, what place he gives to the Imagination in his scheme of innovation, will expect to find these books, books of a dry didactic learning? Does the student know how many times, in how many forms, under how many different heads, he perseveringly inserts the bold assurance, that the form of poesy and enigmatic allusive writing is the _only_ form in which the higher applications of his discovery can be made to any purpose in that age? Who would expect to find this part in any professedly scientific work, when he tells us expressly, ‘Reason cannot be so sensible, nor examples so fit,’ as the examples which his scientific terminology includes in the department of _Poesy?_
All the old historical wisdom was in that form, he says; all the first philosophy was poetical; all the old divinity came in history and parable; and even to this day, he who would let in new light upon the human understanding, without raising opposition or disturbance, must still go in the same path, and have recourse to the like method.
He was an innovator; he was _not_ an agitator. And he claims that mark of a divine presence in his work, that its benefactions come, without noise or perturbation, _in aura leni_. Of innovations, there has been none in history like that which he propounded, but neither would he strive nor cry. There was no voice in the streets, there was no red ensign lifted, there was no clarion-swell, or roll of the conqueror’s drum to signal to the world that entrance. He, too, claims a divine authority for his innovation, and he declares it to be of God. It is the providential order of the world’s history which is revealed in it; it is the fulfilment of ancient prophecy which this new chief, laden with new gifts for men, openly announces.
‘Let us begin from God,’ he says, when he begins to open his ground of _hope_, after he has exposed the wretched condition of men as he finds them, without any scientific knowledge of the laws and institutes of the universe they inhabit, engaged in a perpetual and mad collision with them; ‘Let us begin from God, and show that our pursuit, from its exceeding goodness, _clearly_ proceeds from Him, the Author of GOOD and Father of LIGHT. Now, _in all divine works_, the smallest beginnings lead assuredly to some results; and the rule in spiritual matters, that the Kingdom of God cometh without observation, is also found to be true _in every great work of_ PROVIDENCE, so that everything glides in quietly, without confusion or noise; and the matter is achieved before men even think of perceiving that it is commenced.’ ‘Men,’ he tells us, ‘men should imitate Nature, who innovateth _greatly_ but _quietly_, and by degrees scarce to be perceived,’ who will not dispense with the old form till the new one is finished and in its place.
What is that we want to find? We want to find the new method of scientific inquiry applied to the questions in which men are most deeply interested–questions which were then imperiously and instantly urged on the thoughtful mind. We want to see it applied to POLITICS in the reign of James the First. We want to see it applied to the open questions of another department of inquiry,–certainly not any less important,–in that reign, and in the reign which preceded it. We want to see the facts sifted through those scientific tables of review, from which the true form of SOVEREIGNTY, the _legitimate_ sovereignty, is to be inducted, and the scientific axioms of government with it. We want to see the science of observation and experiment, the science of nature in general, applied to the cure of the common-weal in the reign of James the First, and to that particular crisis in its disease, in which it appeared to the observers to be at its last gasp; and that, too, by the principal doctors in that profession,–men of the very largest experience in it, who felt obliged to pursue their work conscientiously, whether the patient _objected_ or not. But are there any such books as these? Certainly. You have the author’s own word for it. ‘Some may raise this question,’ he says, ‘this _question_ rather than _objection_’–[it is better that it should come in the form of a _question_, than in the form of _an objection_, as it would have come, if there had been no room to ‘_raise the question_’]–‘_whether we talk_ of perfecting _natural philosophy_’ [using the term here in its usual limited sense], ‘whether we talk of perfecting natural philosophy _alone_, according to our method, or, _the other_ sciences–_such as_, ETHICS, LOGIC, POLITICS.’ _That_ is the question ‘raised.’ ‘We certainly intend to comprehend them ALL.’ _That_ is _the author’s_ answer to it. ‘And as _common logic_ which _regulates matters by syllogism_, is applied, not only to natural, but to every other science, _so_ our inductive method _likewise_ comprehends them ALL.’ With such iteration will he think fit to give us this point. It is put in here for those ‘who raise the question’–the question ‘rather than objection.’ The other sort are taken care of in other places. ‘_For_,’ he continues, ‘we form a history and tables of invention, for _anger, fear, shame,_ and _the like_; and _also for examples in civil life_’ [that was to be the principal part of the science when he laid out the plan of it in the advancement of learning] ‘and the _mental_ operations of _memory, composition, division, judgment_, and the rest; _as well_ as for _heat_ and _cold, light_ and _vegetation_, and _the like_.’ That is the plan of the new science, as the author sketches it for the benefit of those who raise questions rather than objections. That is its comprehension precisely, whenever he undertakes to mark out its limits for the satisfaction of this class of readers. But this is that same FOURTH PART to which he refers us in the other places for the application of his method to those nobler subjects, those more chosen subjects; and that is just the part of his science which appears to be wanting. How happens it? Did he get so occupied with the question of _heat_ and _cold_, _light_ and vegetation, and _the like_, that after all he forgot this part with its nobler applications? How could that be, when he tells us expressly, that they are the more chosen subjects of his inquiry. This part which he speaks of here, is the missing part of his philosophy, unquestionably. These are the books of it which have been missing hitherto; but in that Providential order of events to which he refers himself, the time has come for them to be inquired for; and this inquiry is itself a part of that movement, in which the smallest beginnings lead assuredly to some result. For, ‘let us begin from God,’ he says, ‘and show that our pursuit, from its exceeding goodness, clearly proceeds from Him, the Author of GOOD, and not of misery; the Father of LIGHT, and not of darkness.’
Of course, it was impossible to get out any scientific doctrine of the human society, without coming at once in collision with that doctrine of the divinity of arbitrary power which the monarchs of England were then openly sustaining. Who needs to be told, that he who would handle that argument scientifically, then, without military weapons, as this inquirer _would_, must indeed ‘pray in aid of _similes_.’ And yet a very searching and critical inquiry into the claims of that institution, which the new philosophy found in possession of the human welfare, and asserting a divine right to it as a thing of private property and legitimate family inheritance,–such a criticism was, in fact, inevitably involved in that inquiry into the principles of a _human_ subjection which appeared to this philosopher to belong properly to the more chosen subjects of a scientific investigation.
And notwithstanding the delicacy of the subjects, and the extremely critical nature of the investigation, when it came to touch those particulars, with which the personal observations and experiments of the founders of this new school in philosophy had tended to enrich their collections in this department,–‘and the aim is better,’ says the principal spokesman of this school, who quietly proposes to introduce this method into _politics_, ‘the aim is better _when the mark is alive_;’ notwithstanding the difficulties which appeared to lie then in the way of such an investigation, the means of conducting it to the entire satisfaction, and, indeed, to the large entertainment of the persons chiefly concerned, were not wanting. For this was one of those ‘secrets of policy,’ which have always required the aid of fable, and the idea of _dramatising_ the fable for the sake of reaching in some sort those who are incapable of receiving any thing ‘which does not directly fall under, and strike the senses,’ as the philosopher has it; those who are capable of nothing but ‘dumb shows and noise,’ as Hamlet has it; this idea, though certainly a very happy, was not with these men an original one. Men, whose relations to the state were not so different as the difference in the forms of government would perhaps lead us to suppose,–men of the gravest learning and enriched with the choicest accomplishments of their time, had adopted that same method of influencing public opinion, some two thousand years earlier, and even as long before as that, there were ‘secrets of morality and policy,’ to which this form of writing appeared to offer the most fitting veil.
Whether ‘the new’ philosopher,–whether ‘the new magician’ of this time, was, in fact, in possession of any art which enabled him to handle without diffidence or scruple the great political question which was then already the question of the time; whether ‘THE CROWN’–that double crown of military conquest and priestly usurpation, which was the one estate of the realm at that crisis in English history, did, among other things in some way, come under the edges of that new analysis which was severing _all_ here then, and get divided clearly with ‘the mind, that divine fire,’–whether any such thing as that occurred here then, the reader of the following pages will be able to judge. The careful reader of the extracts they contain, taken from a work of practical philosophy which made its appearance about those days, will certainly have no difficulty at all in deciding that question. For, first of all, it is necessary to find that political key to the Elizabethan art of delivery, which unlocks the great works of the Elizabethan philosophy, and that is the necessity which determines the selection of the Plays that are produced in this volume. They are brought in to illustrate the fact already stated, and already demonstrated, the fact which is the subject of this volume, the fact that the new practical philosophy of the modern ages, which has its beginning here, was not limited, in the plan of its founders, to ‘natural philosophy’ and ‘the part operative’ of that,–the fact that it comprehended, as its principal department, the department in which its ‘noblest subjects’ lay, and in which its most vital innovations were included, a field of enquiry which could not then be entered without the aid of fable and parable, and one which required not then only, ‘but now, and at all times,’ the aid of a vivid poetic illustration; they are brought in to illustrate the fact already demonstrated from other sources, the fact that the new philosophy was the work of men able to fulfil their work under such conditions, able to work, if not for the times that were nearer, for the times that were further off; men who thought it little so they could fulfil and perfect their work and make their account of it to the Work-master, to robe another with their glory; men who could relinquish the noblest works of the human genius, that they might save them from the mortal stabs of an age of darkness, that they might make them over unharmed in their boundless freedom, in their unstained perfection, to the farthest ages of the advancement of learning,–that they might ‘teach them how to live and look fresh’ still,
‘When tyrants’ crests, and tombs of brass are spent.’
That is the one fact, the indestructible fact, which this book is to demonstrate.
PART I.
LEAR’S PHILOSOPHER
‘Thou’dst shun a bear;
But if thy way lay towards the raging sea, Thou’dst meet the bear i’ the mouth.’
CHAPTER I.
PHILOSOPHY IN THE PALACE.
‘I think the king is but a man, as I am.’–_King Henry_. ‘They told me I was everything.’–_Lear_.
OF course, it was not possible that the prerogative should be openly dealt with at such a time, questioned, discussed, scientifically examined, in the very presence of royalty itself, except by persons endowed with extraordinary privileges and immunities, persons, indeed, of quite irresponsible authority, whose right to do and say what they pleased, Elizabeth herself, though they should enter upon a critical analysis of the divine rights of kings to her face, and deliberately lay bare the defects in that title which she was then attempting to maintain, must needs notwithstanding, concede and respect.
And such persons, as it happened, were not wanting in the retinue of that sovereignty which was working in disguise here then, and laying the foundations of that throne in the thoughts of men, which would replace old principalities and powers, and not political dominions merely. To the creative genius which waited on the philosophic mind of that age, making up in the splendour of its gifts for the poverty of its exterior conditions, such persons,–persons of any amount or variety of capacity which the necessary question of its play might require, were not wanting:–‘came with a thought.’
Of course, poor Bolingbroke, fevered with the weight of his ill-got crown, and passing a sleepless night in spite of its supposed exemptions, unable to command on his state-bed, with all his royal means and appliances, the luxury that the wet sea boy in the storm enjoys,–and the poet appears, to have had some experience of this mortal ill, which inclines him to put it down among those which ought to be excluded from a state of supreme earthly felicity,–the poor guilty disgusted usurper, discovering that this so blessed ‘invention’ was not included in the prerogative he had seized, under the exasperation of the circumstances, might surely be allowed to mutter to himself, in the solitude of his own bed-chamber, a few general reflections on the subject, and, indeed, disable his own position to any extent, without expecting to be called to an account for it, by any future son or daughter of his usurping lineage. That extraordinary, but when one came to look at it, quite incontestable fact, that nature in her sovereignty, imperial still, refused to recognize this artificial difference in men, but still went on her way in all things, as if ‘the golden standard’ were not there, classing the monarch with his ‘poorest subject;’–the fact that this charmed ’round of sovereignty,’ did not after all secure the least exemption from the common _individual_ human frailty, and helplessness,–this would, of course, strike the usurper who had purchased the crown at such an expense, as a fact in natural history worth communicating, if it were only for the benefit of future princes, who might be disposed to embark in a similar undertaking. Here, of course, the moral was proper, and obvious enough; or close at hand, and ready to be produced, in case any serious inquiry should be made for it; though the poet might seem, perhaps, to a severely critical mind, disposed to pursue his philosophical inquiry a little too curiously into the awful secrets of majesty, retired within itself, and pondering its own position;–openly searching what Lord Bacon reverently tells us, the Scriptures pronounce to be inscrutable, namely, _the hearts_ of _kings_, and audaciously laying bare those private passages, those confessions, and misgivings, and frailties, for which policy and reverence prescribe concealment, and which are supposed in the play, indeed, to be shrouded from the profane and vulgar eye, a circumstance which, of course, was expected to modify the impression.
So, too, that profoundly philosophical suspicion, that a rose, or a violet, did actually smell, to a person occupying this sublime position, very much as it did to another; a suspicion which, in the mouth of a common man, would have been literally sufficient to ‘make a star-chamber matter of’; and all that thorough-going analysis of the trick and pageant of majesty which follows it, would, of course, come only as a graceful concession, from the mouth of that genuine piece of royalty, who contrives to hide so much of the poet’s own ‘sovereignty of nature,’ under the mantle of his free and princely humours, the brave and gentle hero of Agincourt.
‘Though _I_ speak it to you,’ he says, talking in the disguise of a ‘private,’ ‘_I think the King is but a man as I am_, the violet smells to him as it doth to me; all his senses, _have but human conditions_. His ceremonies laid by, in his nakedness, he appears but a man; and though his affections are higher mounted than ours, yet, when they stoop, they stoop with the like wing. When he sees reason of fears, as we do, his fears, out of doubt, be of the same relish as ours are’; and in the same scene, thus the royal philosopher versifies, and soliloquises on the same delicate question.
‘And what have _kings_ that “_privates_” have not, too, save ceremony,–save general ceremony? And what art thou, thou _idol ceremony?_–_What is_ thy _soul_ of _adoration_?’
A grave question, for a man of an inquiring habit of mind, in those times: let us see how a Poet can answer it.
‘Art thou aught else but _place, degree_ and _form_, Creating awe and fear in _other men?_
Wherein, thou _art less happy, being feared_, _Than they in fearing_?
[Again and again this man has told us, and on his oath, that he cherished no evil intentions, no thought of harm to the king; and those who know what criticisms on the state, as it was then, he had authorised, and what changes in it he was certainly meditating and preparing the way for, have charged him with falsehood and perjury on that account; but this is what he means. He thinks that wretched victim of that most irrational and monstrous state of things, on whose head the crown of an arbitrary rule is placed, with all its responsibilities, in his infinite unfitness for them, is, in fact, the one whose case most of all requires relief. He is the one, in this theory, who suffers from this unnatural state of things, not less, but more, than his meanest subject. ‘Thou art less happy being feared, than they in fearing.’]
What drink’st thou oft _instead of homage sweet_ But _poison’d flattery_? O! be sick, great greatness, And bid thy _ceremony_ give thee _cure_. Thinkest thou the _fiery fever will go out_ With _titles blown from adulation_?
Will it give place to flexure and low bending?
Interesting physiological questions! And though the author, for reasons of his own, has seen fit to put them in blank verse here, it is not because he does not understand, as we shall see elsewhere, that they are questions of a truly scientific character, which require to be put in prose in his time–questions of vital consequence to all men. The effect of ‘poisoned flattery,’ and ‘titles blown from adulation’ on the minds, of those to whose single will and caprice the whole welfare of the state, and all the gravest questions for this life and the next, were then entrusted, naturally appeared to the philosophical mind, perseveringly addicted to inquiries, in which the practical interests of men were involved, a question of gravest moment.
But here it is the physical difference which accompanies this so immense human distinction, which he appears to be in quest of; it is the control over nature with which these ‘_farcical titles_’ invest their possessor, that he appears to be now pertinaciously bent upon ascertaining. For we shall find, as we pursue the subject, that this is not an accidental point here, a casual incident of the character, or of the plot, a thing which belongs to the play, and not to the author; but that this is a poet who is somehow perpetually haunted with the impression that those who assume a divine right to control, and dispose of their fellow-men, ought to exhibit some sign of their authority; some superior abilities; some magical control; some light and power that other men have not. How he came by any such notions, the critic of his works is, of course, not bound to show; but that which meets him at the first reading is the fact, the incontestable fact, that the Poet of Shakspere’s stage, be he who he may, is a poet whose mind is in some way deeply occupied with this question; that it is a poet who is infected, and, indeed, perfectly possessed, with the idea, that the true human leadership ought to consist in the ability to extend the empire of man over nature,–in the ability to unite and control men, and lead them in battalions against those common evils which infest the human conditions,–not fevers only but ‘worser’ evils, and harder to be cured, and to the conquest of those supernal blessings which the human race have always been vainly crying for. ‘I am a king that find thee,’ he says.
And having this inveterate notion of a true human regality to begin with, he is naturally the more curious and prying in regard to the claims of the one which he finds in possession; and when by the mystery of his profession and art, he contrives to get the cloak of that factitious royalty about him, he asks questions under its cover which another man would not think of putting.
‘Canst thou,’ he continues, walking up and down the stage in King Hal’s mantle, inquiring narrowly into its virtues and taking advantage of that occasion to ascertain the limits of the prerogative–that very dubious question then,–
‘Canst thou when thou command’st the beggar’s knee, _Command the health_ of it?’–
_No_? what mockery of power is it then? But, this in connection with the preceding inquiry in regard to the effect of titles on the progress of a fever, or the amenability of its paroxysm, to flexure and low bending, might have seemed perhaps in the mouth of a subject to savour somewhat of irony; it might have sounded too much like a taunt upon the royal helplessness under cover of a serious philosophical inquiry, or it might have betrayed in such an one a disposition to pursue scientific inquiries farther than was perhaps expedient. But thus it is, that THE KING can dare to pursue the subject, answering his own questions.
‘No, thou proud dream
That _playst so subtly with a king’s repose_; _I_ am a king _that find thee_; and I know ‘Tis not the THE BALM, THE SCEPTRE, and THE BALL, THE SWORD, THE MACE, THE CROWN IMPERIAL, _The inter-tissued_ ROBE of _gold and pearl_, The FARCED TITLE–
What is that?–Mark it:–the _farced_ TITLE!–A bold word, one would say, even with _a king_ to authorise it.
‘The farced TITLE running ‘fore the king, THE THRONE he sits on, nor _the tide_ of POMP That beats upon the high shore of this world, No, not all these, thrice gorgeous CEREMONY, Not all these laid in BED MAJESTICAL,
Can _sleep so soundly_ as the wretched slave Who, with a body filled, and vacant mind, Gets him to rest crammed with distressful bread, Never sees horrid night, the child of hell, But like a lackey from the rise to set
Sweats in the eye of Phoebus; and all night Sleeps in Elysium.
Yes, there we have him, at last. There he is exactly. That is the scientific picture of him, ‘poor man,’ as this poet calls him elsewhere. What malice could a philosophic poet bear him? That is the monarchy that men were ‘sanctifying themselves with,’ and ‘turning up the white of the eye to,’ then. That is the figure that it makes when it comes to be laid in its state-bed, upon the scientific table of review, not in the formal manner of ‘the second part’ of this philosophy, but in that other manner which the author of the _Novum Organum_, speaks of so frequently, as the one to be used in applying it to subjects of this nature. That is the anatomy of him, which ‘_our_ method of inquiry and investigation,’ brings out without much trouble ‘when we come to particulars.’ ‘Truly we were in good hands,’ as the other one says, who finds it more convenient, for his part, to discourse on these points, from a distance.
That is the figure the usurping monarch’s pretensions make at the first blush, in the collections from which ‘_the vintage_’ of the true sovereignty, and the scientific principles of governments are to be expressed, when the true _monarchy_, the legitimate, ‘one only man power,’ is the thing inquired for. This one goes to ‘the negative’ side apparently. A wretched fellow that cannot so much as ‘sleep o’ nights,’ that lies there on the stage in the play of Henry the Fourth, in the sight of all the people, with THE CROWN on his very pillow, by way ‘facilitating the demonstration,’ pining for the ‘Elysium’ at his meanest subject,–that the poor slave, ‘crammed with distressful bread,’ commands; crying for the luxury that the wet seaboy, on his high and giddy couch enjoys;–and from whose note-book came that image, dashed with the ocean spray,–who saw that seaboy sleeping in _that_ storm?
But, as for this KING, it is the king which the scientific history brings out; whereas, in the other sort of history that was in use then, lie is hardly distinguishable at all from those Mexican kings who undertook to keep the heavenly bodies in their places, and, at the same time, to cause all things to be borne by the earth which were requisite for the comfort and convenience of man; a peculiarity of those sovereigns, of which the Man on the Mountains, whose study is so well situated for observations of that sort, makes such a pleasant note.
But whatever other view we may take of it, this, it must be conceded, is a tolerably comprehensive exhibition, in the general, of the mere pageant of royalty, and a pretty free mode of handling it; but it is at the same time a privileged and entirely safe one. For the liberty of this great Prince to repeat to himself, in the course of a solitary stroll through his own camp at midnight, when nobody is supposed to be within hearing, certain philosophical conclusions which he was understood to have arrived at in the course of his own regal experience, could hardly be called in question. And as to that most extraordinary conversation in which, by means of his disguise on this occasion, he becomes a participator, if the Prince himself were too generous to avail himself of it to the harm of the speakers, it would ill become any one else to take exceptions at it.
And yet it is a conversation in which a party of common soldiers are permitted to ‘speak their minds freely’ for once, though ‘the blank verse has to halt for it,’ on questions which would be considered at present questions of ‘gravity.’ It is a dialogue in which these men are allowed to discuss one of the most important institutions of their time from an ethical point of view, in a tone as free as the president of a Peace Society could use to-day in discussing the same topic, intermingling their remarks with criticisms on the government, and personal allusions to the king himself, which would seem to be more in accordance with the manners of the nineteenth century, than with those of the Poet’s time.
But then these wicked and treasonous grumblings being fortunately encountered on the spot, and corrected by the king himself in his own august person, would only serve for edification in the end; if, indeed, that appeal to the national pride which would conclude the matter, and the glory of that great day which was even then breaking in the East, should leave room for any reflections upon it. For it was none other than the field of _Agincourt_ that was subjected to this philosophic inquiry. It was the lustre of that immortal victory which was to England then, what Waterloo and the victories of Nelson are now, that was thus chemically treated beforehand. Under the cover of that renowned triumph, it was, that these soldiers could venture to search so deeply the question of war in general; it was in the person of its imperial hero, that the statesman could venture to touch so boldly, an institution which gave to one man, by his own confession no better or wiser than his neighbours, the power to involve nations in such horrors.
But let us join the king in his stroll, and hear for ourselves, what it is that these soldiers are discussing, by the camp-fires of _Agincourt_;–what it is that this first voice from the ranks has to say for itself. The king has just encountered by the way a poetical sentinel, who, not satisfied with the watchword–‘_a friend_,’– requests the disguised prince ‘to discuss to him, and answer, whether he is an _officer_, or _base, common_, and _popular_,’ when the king lights on this little group, and the discussion which Pistol had solicited, apparently on his own behalf, actually takes place, for the benefit of the Poet’s audience, and the answer to these inquiries comes out in due order.
_Court_. Brother John Bates, is not that the morning which breaks yonder?
_Bates_. I think it be, _but we have no great cause to desire the approach of day_.
_Will_. We see yonder the beginning of the day, but I think we shall never see the end of it. Who goes there?
_King Henry_. A friend.
_Will_. Under what captain serve you?
_King_. Under Sir Thomas Erpingham.
_Will_. A good old commander, and a most kind gentleman: I pray you, what thinks he of our estate?
_King._ Even as men wrecked upon a sand, that look to be washed off the next tide.
_Bates_. _He hath not told his thought to the king_?
_King_. No; nor it is not meet that he should; for though _I speak it to you_, I think the king is but a man as I am.
And it is here that he proceeds to make that important disclosure above quoted, that all his senses have but human conditions, and that all his _affections_, though _higher mounted, stoop with the like wing_; and therefore no man should in reason possess him with any appearance of fear, lest he, by showing it, ‘should dishearten his army.’
_Bates_. He may show what outward courage he will; but, _I_ believe, as cold a night as ’tis, he could wish himself in the Thames, up to the neck; and so I would he were, and I by him, at all adventures, so we were quit here.
_King_. By my troth, I will speak my conscience of the king. I think he would not wish himself anywhere but where he is.
_Bates_. Then would he were here alone; so should he be sure to be ransomed, and a many poor men’s lives saved.
_King_. I dare say you love him not so ill as to wish him here alone; _howsoever you speak this to feel other men’s minds_; Methinks I could not die anywhere so contented as in the king’s company; _his cause being just, and his quarrel honorable_.
_Will. That’s more than we know._
_Bates_. Ay, or more than we should seek after; for we know enough, if we know we are the king’s subjects; if his cause be wrong, our obedience to the _king_ wipes the crime of it out of us.
_Will_. But _if the cause be not good_, the _king himself hath a heavy reckoning to make_; when all those legs and arms and heads chopped off in a battle shall join together at the latter day, and cry all–We died at such a place; some swearing, some crying for a surgeon, some upon their wives left poor behind them; some upon the debts they owe; some upon their children rawly left. I am afeared that few die well, that die in battle; for how can they _charitably_ dispose of anything _when blood is their argument_? Now if these men do not die well, it will be a black matter for the king that led them to it; whom to disobey were _against all proportion of subjection_.
_King_. So, if a son that is by his father sent about merchandise, do sinfully miscarry upon the sea, the imputation of his wickedness, by your rule, should be imposed upon his father that sent him: or if a servant, under his master’s command, transporting a sum of money, be assailed by robbers, and die in many irreconciled iniquities, you may call the business of the master the author of the servant’s damnation.–But this is not so…. There is no king, be his cause never so spotless, if it come to the arbitrament of swords, can try it out with all unspotted soldiers.
But the king pursues this question of the royal responsibility until he arrives at the conclusion that _every subject’s_ DUTY is THE KING’S, BUT EVERY SUBJECT’S SOUL IS HIS OWN, until he shows, indeed, that there is but one ultimate sovereignty; one to which the king and his subjects are alike amenable, which pursues them everywhere, with its demands and reckonings,–from whose violated laws there is no escape.
_Will_. ‘Tis certain, every man that dies ill, the ill is upon his own head–[no unimportant point in the theology or ethics of that time]–THE KING is not to answer for it.
_Bates_. I do not desire the king should answer for me, and yet I determine to fight lustily for him.
_King_. I, myself, heard the king say, he would not be ransomed.
_Will_. Ay, he said so, to make us fight cheerfully; but when our throats are cut, he may be ransomed and we ne’er the wiser.
_King_. If I live to see it, I will never trust his word after.
_Will_. _Mass, you’ll pay him then!_ That’s a perilous shot out of an _elder gun_, that a poor and _private_ displeasure can do against a monarch. _You may as well go about to turn the sun to ice_, with fanning in his face with a peacock’s feather.
And, indeed, thus and not any less absurd and monstrous, appeared the idea of subjecting the king to any effect from the subject’s displeasure, or the idea of calling him to account–this one, helpless, frail, private man, as he has just been conceded by the king himself to be, for any amount of fraud or dishonesty to the nation, for any breach of trust or honour. For his relation to the _mass_ and the source of this fearful irresponsible power was not understood then. The soldier states it well. One might, indeed, as well go about to turn the sun to ice, _with fanning in his face_ with a peacock’s feather.
‘You’ll never trust his word after,’ the soldier continues. ‘Come, ’tis a foolish saying.’
‘Your reproof is something _too round_,’ is the king’s reply. It is indeed round. It is one of those round replies that this poet is so fond of, and the king himself becomes ‘the private’ of it, when once the centre of this play is found, and the sweep of its circumference is taken. For the sovereignty of law, the kingship of the universal law _in whomsoever it speaks_, awful with God’s power, armed with _his_ pains and penalties is the scientific sovereignty; and in the scientific diagrams the passions, ‘the poor and private passions,’ and the arbitrary will, in whomsoever they speak, no matter what symbols of sovereignty they have contrived to usurp, make no better figure in their struggles with that law, than that same which the poet’s vivid imagination and intense perception of incompatibilities, has seized on here. The king struggles vainly against the might of the universal nature. It is but the shot out of an ‘_elder gun_;’ he might as well ‘go about to _turn the sun to ice_ with fanning in his face with a _peacock’s_ feather.’ ‘I should be angry with you,’ continues the king, after noticing the roundness of that reply, ‘I should be angry with you, if _the time_ were convenient.’
But as to the poet who composes these dialogues, of course he does not know whether the time is convenient or not;–he has never reflected upon any of those grave questions which are here so seriously discussed. They are not questions in which he can be supposed to have taken any interest. Of course he does not know or care what it is that these men are talking about. It is only for the sake of an artistic effect, to pass away the night, and to deepen for his hero the gloom which was to serve as the foil and sullen ground of his great victory, that his interlocutors are permitted to go on in this manner.
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 unsurpassable boldness of their political criticism, are too natural and proper to the circumstances, 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 pronounced 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 constitutes 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 analysis, 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 shells 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 ‘illustrated 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 God with a godlike 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 God–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 God, 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 constitutional 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 circumference, 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 ‘_titles blown_ from adulation,’ unmindful of the true ends of government, reckless of the duties which that regal assumption 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 passions 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 passion of grief, and bids her murmur to us her recovering confession.
‘No more, but e’en a woman; and _commanded_ By such poor passion, 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 diminishing,–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 analytic 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 illustration, 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 passions, 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 nobler nature with its more living susceptibility to injury, unsheathed, at the mercy of the brute forces that unscientific civilizations, with their coarse 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 adventitious 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 adventitious 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 illustrious form stands here, to undergo this fierce analysis, 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 identity, incorporating into their very personality, that floating, contingent material which the wills and humours and opinions, the prejudices and passions 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 identity.
‘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 assault 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 ingratitude!
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 emancipated 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 illustrating 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 relationship that the Poet is intent on clearing, while he notes the special relationship also; he does not limit his humanities to the ties of blood, or household sympathies, or social gradations.
But Regan’s views on this point are seconded and sustained, and there seems to be but one opinion on the subject among those who happen to have that castle in possession; at least the timid owner of it does not feel himself in a position to make any forcible resistance to the orders which his illustrious guests, who have ‘taken from him the use of his own house,’ have seen fit to issue in it. ‘Shut up your doors, (says Cornwall),
‘Shut up your doors, my lord: ’tis a wild night. _My_ REGAN COUNSELS _well_; COME OUT O’ THE STORM.’
And it is because this representation is artistic and dramatic, and not simply historical, and the Poet must seek to condense, and sum and exhibit in dramatic appreciable figures, the unreckonable, undefinable historical suffering of years, aad lifetimes of this vain human struggle,–because, too, the wildest threats which nature in her terrors makes to man, had to be incorporated in this great philosophic piece; and because, lastly, the Poet would have the madness of the human will and passion, presented in its true scientific relations, that this storm collects into itself such ideal sublimities, and borrows from the human passion so many images of cruelty.
In all the mad anguish of that ruined greatness, and wronged natural affection, the Poet, relentless as fortune herself in her sternest moods, intent on his experiment only, will bring out his great victim, and consign him to the wind and the rain, and the lightning, and the thunder, and bid his _senses_ undergo _their_ ‘horrible pleasure.’
For the senses, scorned as they had been in philosophy hitherto, the senses in this philosophy, have _their_ report also,–their full, honest report, to make to us. And the design of this piece, as already stated in the general, required in its execution, not only that these two kinds of suffering, these two grand departments of human need, should be included and distinguished in it, but that they should be brought together in this one man’s experience, so that a deliberate comparison can be instituted between them; and the Poet will bid the philosophic king, the living ‘subject’ himself, report the experiment, and tell us plainly, once for all, whether the science of the physical Arts only, is the science which is wanting to man; or whether arts–scientific arts–that take hold of the moral nature, also, and deal with that not less effectively, can be dispensed with; whether, indeed, man is in any condition to dispense with _the_ Science and _the_ Art which puts him into intelligent and harmonious relations with nature in general.
It was necessary to the purpose of the play to exhibit man’s dependence on art, by means of his senses _and_ his sensibilities, and his intellectual conditions, and all his frailties and liabilities,– his dependence on art, based on the knowledge of natural laws, universal laws,–constitutions, which _include_ the human. It was necessary to exhibit the whole misery, the last extreme of that social evil, to which a creature so naturally frail and ignorant is liable, under those coarse, fortuitous, inartistic, unscientific social conglomerations, which ignorant and barbarous ages build, and under the tyranny of those wild, barbaric social evils, which our fine social institutions, notwithstanding the universality of their terms, and the transcendant nature of the forces which they are understood to have at their disposal, for some fatal reason or other, do not yet succeed in reducing.
It is, indeed, the whole ground of the Scientific Human Art, which is revealed here by the light of this great passion, and that, in this Poet’s opinion, is none other than the ground of the human want, and is as large and various as that. And the careful reader of this play,–the patient searcher of its subtle lore,–the diligent collector of its thick-crowding philosophic points and flashing condensations of discovery, will find that the _need of arts_, is that which is set forth in it, with all the power of its magnificent poetic embodiment, and in the abstract as well,–the need of arts infinitely more noble and effective, more nearly matched with the subtlety of nature, and better able to entangle and subdue its oppositions, than any of which mankind have yet been able to possess themselves, or ever the true intention of nature in the human form can be realized, or anything like a truly Human Constitution, or Common-Weal, is possible.
But let us return to the comparison, and collect the results of this experiment.–For a time, indeed, raised by that storm of grief and indignation into a companionship with the wind and the rain, and the lightning, and the thunder, the king ‘strives in his little world of man,’–for that is the phrasing of the poetic report, to _out-scorn_ these elements. Nay, we ourselves hear, as the curtain rises on that ideal representative form of human suffering, the wild intonation of that human defiance–mounting and singing above the thunder, and drowning all the elemental crash with its articulation; for this is an experiment which the philosopher will try in the presence of his audience, and not report it merely. With that anguish in his heart, the crushed majesty, the stricken old man, the child-wounded father, laughs at the pains of _the senses_; the physical distress is welcome to him, he is glad of it. He does not care for anything that the _unconscious_, soulless elements can do to him, he calls to them from their heights, and bids them do their worst. Or it is only as they conspire with that _wilful human_ wrong, and serve to bring home to him anew the depth of it, by these tangible, sensuous effects,–it is only by that means that they are able to wound him.
‘Nor rain, wind, thunder, fire, are my daughters,’
_that_ is the argument.
‘I tax you _not_, you elements, with _unkindness_.’
Surely that is logical; that is a distinction not without a difference, and appreciable to the human mind, as it is constituted,–surely that is a point worth putting in the arts and sciences.
‘I never gave you kingdoms, called you _children_; You _owe_ me no subscription; why, _then_, let fall Your horrible pleasure? Here I stand _your_ slave, A poor, infirm, weak, and despised old man; But _yet_, I call you _servile ministers_, That have with two pernicious daughters _joined_ Your high, engendered battles ‘gainst a head _So old and white_ as this. O, O, ‘_tis foul_.’
And in his calmer mood, when the storm has done its work upon him, and all the strength of his great passion is exhausted,–when his bodily powers are fast sinking under it, and like the subtle Hamlet’s ‘potent poison,’ it begins at last to ‘o’er-crow his spirit’–when he is faint with struggling with its fury, wet to the skin with it, and comfortless and shivering, he still maintains through his chattering teeth the argument; he will still defend his first position–
‘Thou thinkst ’tis much that this _contentious_ storm Invades _us_ to the skin; so ’tis to thee, But where the greater _malady_ is fixed, The _lesser_ is scarce felt.’
‘The tempest in my mind
Doth from my senses take all feeling else, Save what beats there.’
‘In _such_ a night
_To shut me out! Pour on_, I will endure. _In such a night as this_.’
And when the shelter he is at last forced to seek is found, at the door his courage fails him; and he shrinks back into the storm again, because ‘it will not give him leave to think on that _which hurts him more_.’
So nicely does the Poet balance these ills, and report the swaying movement. But it is a poet who does not take common-place opinions on this, or on any other such subject. He is one whose poetic work does not consist in illustrating these received opinions, or in finding some novel and fine expression for them. He is observing nature, and undertaking to report it, as it is, not as it should be according to these preconceptions, or according to the established poetic notions of the heroic requisitions.
But there is no stage that can exhibit his experiment here in its real significance, excepting that one which he himself builds for us; for it is the vast lonely heath, and the _Man_, the pigmy man, on it–and the KING, the pigmy king, on it;–it is all the wild roar of elemental nature, and the tempest in that ‘_little world_ of man,’ that have to measure their forces, that have to be brought into continuous and persevering contest. It is not Gloster only, who sees in that storm what ‘makes him think that _a man_ is but _a worm_.’
Doubtless, it would have been more in accordance with the old poetic notions, if this poor king had maintained his ground without any misgiving at all; but it is a poet of a new order, and not the old heroic one, who has the conducting of this experiment; and though his verse is not without certain sublimities of its own, they have to consist with the report of the fact as it is, to its most honest and unpoetic, unheroic detail.
And notwithstanding all the poetry of that passionate defiance, it is the physical storm that triumphs in the end. The contest between that little world of man and the great outdoor world of nature was too unequal. Compelled at last to succumb, yielding to ‘the tyranny of the open night, that is _too rough_ for _nature to endure_–the night that frightens the very wanderers of the dark, and makes _them_ keep their caves, while it reaches, with its poetic combination of horrors, that border line of the human conception which great Nature’s pencil, in this Poet’s hand, is always reaching and completing,–
‘_Man’s_ nature cannot carry
The affliction nor _the fear_.’
–Unable to contend any longer with ‘the _fretful_ element’–unable to ‘_outscorn_’ any longer ‘the to and fro conflicting wind and rain’–weary of struggling with ‘the _impetuous_ blasts,’ that in their ‘eyeless _rage_’ and ‘_fury_’ care no more for age and reverence than his _daughters_ do–that seize his white hairs, and make nothing of them–‘exposed to _feel_ what _wretches_ feel’–he finds at last, with surprise, that art–the wretch’s art–that can make vile things _precious_. No longer clamoring for ‘the additions of a king,’ but thankful for the basest means of shelter from the elements, glad to avail himself of the rudest structure with which art ‘_accommodates_’ man to nature, (for that is the word of this philosophy, where it is first proposed)–glad to divide with his meanest subject that shelter which the outcast seeks on such a night–ready to creep with him, under it, side by side–‘fain to hovel with _swine_ and rogues forlorn, in short and musty straw’–surely we have reached a point at last where the _action_ of the piece itself–the mere ‘dumb show’ of it–becomes luminous, and hardly needs the player’s eloquence to tell us what it means.
Surely this is a little like ‘the language’ of _Periander’s_ message, when he bid the messenger observe and _report what he saw him do_. It is very important to note that ideas may be conveyed in this way as well as by words, the author of the Advancement of Learning remarks, in speaking of the tradition of the principal and supreme sciences. He takes pains to notice, also, that a representation, by means of these ‘transient hieroglyphics,’ is much more moving to the sensibilities, and leaves a more vivid and durable impression on the memory, than the most eloquent statement in mere words. ‘What is _sensible_ always strikes the memory more strongly, and sooner impresses itself, than what is _intellectual_. Thus the memory of _brutes_ is excited by sensible, but not by intellectual things;’ and thus, also, he proposes to impress that _class_ which Coriolanus speaks of, ‘whose eyes are more learned than their ears,’ to whom ‘action is eloquence.’ Here we have the advantage of the combination, for there is no part of the dumb show, but has its word of scientific comment and interpretation.
‘Art cold [to the Fool]?
I am cold myself. _Where is this_ STRAW, _my fellow_? The art of our necessities is strange,
That can make vile things _precious_. Come, _your hovel_. Come, bring us to this _hovel_.’
For this is what that wild tragic poetic resistance and defiance comes to–this is what the ‘unaccommodated man’ comes to, though it is the highest person in the state, stripped of his ceremonies and artificial appliances, on whom the experiment is tried.
‘Where is this straw, my fellow? Art _cold_? I am cold _myself_. Come, your hovel. Come, bring us to this _hovel_.’
When that royal edict is obeyed,–when the wonders of the magician’s art are put in requisition to fulfil it,–when the road from the palace to the hovel is laid open,–when the hovel, where Tom o’ Bedlam is nestling in the straw, is produced on the stage, and THE KING–THE KING–stoops, before all men’s eyes, to creep into its mouth,–surely we do not need ‘a _chorus_ to interpret for us’–we do not need to wait for the Poet’s own deferred exposition to seize the more obvious meanings. Surely, one catches enough in passing, in the dialogues and tableaux here, to perceive that there is something going on in this play which is not all play,–something that will be earnest, perhaps, ere all is done,–something which ‘the groundlings’ were not expected to get, perhaps, in ‘their sixe-penn’orth’ of it at the first performance,–something which that witty and splendid company, who made up the Christmas party at Whitehall, on the occasion of its first exhibition there, who sat there ‘rustling in silk,’ breathing perfumes, glittering in wealth that the alchemy of the storm had not tried, were not, perhaps, all informed of; though there might have been one among them, ‘a gentleman of blood and breeding,’ who could have told them what it meant.
‘We construct,’ says the person who describes this method of philosophic instruction, speaking of the subtle prepared history which forces the inductions–‘we construct tables and combinations of instances, upon such a plan, and in such order, that the understanding may be enabled to act upon them.’
‘They told me I was everything.’
_They told me I was everything_,’ says the poor king himself, long afterwards, when the storm has had its ultimate effect upon him.
‘To say ay and no to everything that I said!–[To say] ay and no _too_ WAS NO GOOD DIVINITY. They told me, I had _white_ hairs in my beard, ere the _black_ ones were there. When the rain came to wet me once, and the wind to make 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_.’
‘_I_ think the king is but a man, as I am’ [says King Hal], ‘All his _senses_ have the like conditions; and his _affections_, though higher mounted, when they stoop, stoop with _the like wing_.’
But at the door of that rude hut the ruined majesty pauses. In vain his loving attendants, whom, for love’s sake, this Poet will still have with him, entreat him to enter. Storm-battered, and wet, and shivering as he is, he shrinks back from the shelter he has bid them bring him to. He will not ‘_in_.’ Why? Is it because ‘the tempest will not give him leave to ponder on things would hurt him more.’ That is his excuse at first; but another blast strikes him, and he yields to ‘the to and fro conflicting wind and rain,’ and says–
‘_But_ I’ll go in.’
Yet still he pauses. Why? Because he has not told us why he is there;–because he is in the hands of the Poet of the Human Kind, the poet of ‘those common things that our ordinary life consisteth of,’ who will have of them an argument that shall shame that ‘resplendent and lustrous mass of matter’ that old philosophers and poets have chosen for theirs;–because the rare accident–the wild, poetic, unheard-of accident–which has brought a man, old in luxuries, clothed in soft raiment, nurtured in king’s houses, into this rude, unaided collision with nature;–the poetic impossibility, which has brought the one man from the apex of the social structure down this giddy depth, to this lowest social level;–the accident which has given the ‘one man,’ who has the divine disposal of the common weal, this little casual experimental taste of the weal which his wisdom has been able to provide for the many–of the weal which a government so divinely ordered, from its pinnacle of _personal_ ease and luxury, thinks sufficient and divine enough for _the many_,–this accident–this grand poetic accident–with all its exquisite poetic effects, is, in this poet’s hands, the means, not the end. This poor king’s great tragedy, the loss of his social position, his broken-heartedness, his outcast suffering, with all the aggravations of this poetic descent, and the force of its vivid contrasts–with all the luxurious impressions on the sensibilities which the ideal wonders of the rude old fable yield so easily in this Poet’s hands,–this rare accident, and moving marvel of poetic calamity,–this ‘one man’s’ tragedy is not the tragedy that this Poet’s soul is big with. It is the tragedy of the Many, and not the One,–it is the tragedy that is the rule, and not the exception,–it is the tragedy that is common, and not that which is singular, whose argument this Poet has undertaken to manage.
‘Come, bring us to your hovel.’
The royal command is obeyed; and the house of that estate, which has no need to borrow its title of plurality to establish the grandeur of its claim, springs up at the New Magician’s word, and stands before us on the scientific stage in its colossal, portentous, scientific grandeur; and the king–the king–is at the door of it: the _Monarch_ is at the door of the _Many_. For the scientific Poet has had his eye on that structure, and he will make of it a thing of wonder, that shall rival old poets’ fancy pieces, and drive our entomologists and conchologists to despair, and drive them off the stage with their curiosities and marvels. There is no need of a Poet’s going to the supernatural for ‘machinery,’ this Poet thinks, while there’s such machinery as this ready to his hands unemployed. ‘There’s something in this more than natural, if philosophy could find it out.’ There’s no need of going to the antique for his models; for he is inventing the arts that will make of this an _antiquity_.
The Monarch has found his meanest subject’s shelter, but at the door of it he is arrested–nailed with a nail fastened by the Master of Assemblies. He has come down from that dizzy height, on the Poet’s errand. He is there to speak the Poet’s word,–to illustrate that grave abstract learning which the Poet has put on another page, with a note that, as it stands there, notwithstanding the learned airs it has, it is _not_ learning, but ‘the husk and shell’ of it. For this is the philosopher who puts it down as a primary Article of Science, that governments should be based on a scientific acquaintance with ‘the _natures, dispositions, necessities_ and _discontents_ of _the people_’; and though in his book of the Advancement of Learning, he suggests that these points ‘_ought to be_,’ considering the means of ascertaining them at the disposal of the government, ‘considering the variety of its intelligences, the wisdom of its observations, and the height of the station where it keeps sentinel, _transparent as crystal,’–here_ he puts the case of a government that had not availed itself of those extraordinary means of ascertaining the truth at a distance, and was therefore in the way of discovering much that was new, in the course of an accidental personal descent into the lower and more inaccessible regions of the _Common_ Weal it had ordered. This is the _crystal_ which proves after all the most transparent for him. This is the help for weak eyes which becomes necessary sometimes, in the absence of the scientific crystal, which is its equivalent.
The Monarch is at the hovel’s door, but he cannot enter. Why? Because he is in that school into which his own wise REGAN, that ‘_counsels_’ so ‘well’–that _Regan_ who sat at his own council-table so long, has turned him; and it is a school in which the lessons must be learned ‘_by heart_,’ and there is no shelter for him from its pitiless beating in this Poet’s economy, till that lesson he was sent there to learn has been learned; and it was a Monarch’s lesson, and at the Hovel’s door he must recite it. He _will_ not enter. Why? Because the great lesson of state has entered his soul: with the sharpness of its illustration it has _pierced_ him: his spirit is dilated, and moved and kindling with its grandeur: he is thinking of ‘the Many,’ he has forgotten ‘the One,’–the many, all whose senses have like conditions, whose affections stoop with the like wing. He will not enter, because he thinks it unregal, inhuman, mean, selfish to engross the luxury of the hovel’s shelter, and the warmth of the ‘precious’ straw, while he knows that he has subjects still abroad with senses like his own, capable of the like misery, still exposed to its merciless cruelties. It was the tenant of the castle, it was the man in the house who said, ‘Come, let’s be snug and cheery here. _Shut up the door_. Let’s have a fire, and a feast, and a song,–or a psalm, or a prayer, as the case may be; only let it be _within_–no matter which it is’:
‘Shut up your doors, my lord; ’tis a wild night,– _My Regan counsels_ well; come out o’ the storm.’
But here it is the houseless man, who is thinking of his kindred,–his royal family, for whom God has made him responsible, out in this same storm unbonneted; and in the tenderness of that sympathy, in the searching delicacy of that feeling with which he scrutinizes now their case, they seem to him less able than himself to resist its elemental ‘_tyranny_.’ For in that ideal revolution–in that exact turn of the wheel of fortune–in that experimental ‘change of places,’ which the Poet recommends to those who occupy the upper ones in, the social structure, as a means of a more particular and practical acquaintance with the conditions of those for whom they legislate, new views of the common natural human relations; new views of the ends of social combinations are perpetually flashing on him; for it is the fallen monarch himself, the late owner and disposer of the Common Weal, it is this strangely _philosophic_, mysteriously philosophic, king–philosophic as that Alfred who was going to succeed him–it is the king who is chosen by the Poet as the chief commentator and expounder of that new political and social doctrine which the action of this play is itself suggesting.
In that school of the tempest; in that one night’s personal experience of the misery that underlies the pompous social structure, with all its stately splendours and divine pretensions; in that New School of the Experimental Science, the king has been taking lessons in the art of majesty. The alchemy of it has robbed him of the external adjuncts and ‘additions of a king,’ but the sovereignty of MERCY, the divine right of PITY, the majesty of the HUMAN KINDNESS, the grandeur of the COMMON WEAL, ‘breathes through his lips’ from the Poet’s heart ‘like man new made.’
_Kent_. Good, my lord, enter here.
_Lear_. Prythee, go in thyself. _Seek thine own ease_. . . . . But, I’ll go in.
In, boy,–_go first–[To the Fool.]_ You, _houseless_ poverty’–
He knows the meaning of that phrase now.
‘Nay get thee in. I’ll PRAY, and then I’ll sleep.’
[_Fool goes in_.]
‘Poor, naked wretches, wheresoe’er you are That bide the pelting of this pitiless storm,’–
There are no empty phrases in this prayer, the critic of it may perceive: it is a learned prayer; the petitioner knows the meaning of each word in it: the tempest is the book in which he studied it.
‘How shall your _houseless heads_ and _unfed sides_, Your _looped_ and _windowed raggedness_ defend you From _seasons such as these_? O, I have taken _Too little care of_ THIS. [Hear, hear]. Take physic, POMP; [Hear.] Expose thyself to _feel_ what wretches _feel_, _That thou mayest shake the superflux to them_, _And show the_ HEAVENS _more just_.’
That is his _prayer_. To minds accustomed to the ceremonial a religious worship, ‘with court holy water in a dry house’ only, or to those who have never undertaken to compose a prayer for the king and all the royal family at the hovel’s mouth, and in such immediate proximity to animals of a different species, it will not perhaps seem a very pious one. But considering that it was understood to have been composed during the heathen ages of this realm, and before Christianity had got itself so comfortably established as a principle of government and social regulations, perhaps it was as good a prayer for a penitent king to go to sleep on, as could well be invented. Certainly the spirit of Christianity, as it appeared in the life of its Founder, at least, seems to be, by a poetic anachronism incorporated in it.
But it is never the custom of this author to leave the diligent student of his performances in any doubt whatever as to his meaning. It is a rule, that everything in the play shall speak and reverberate