Chapter IV: The Use of Eyes

'All that follow their noses are led by their eyes, but--_blind men_.'

The Play is all strewn throughout, and tinctured in the grain, with the finest natural philosophy, of that new and very subtle and peculiar kind, which belongs to the earlier stages of the physical inquiry, and while it was still in the hands of its original inventors. Even in physics, there are views here which have not been developed any further since this author's time. It is not merely in the direct discourse on questions of physical science, as in the physician's report of the resources of his art, or in Cordelia's invocation to 'all the _blessed secrets_--the _unpublished_ virtues of the earth,' that the track of the new physiological science, which this work embodies, may be seen. It runs through it all; it betrays itself at every turn. But the subtle and occult relations of the moral and physical are noted here, as we do not find them noted elsewhere, in less practical theories of nature.

That there is something in the design of this play which requires an elaborate and systematic exhibition of the '_special_' human relationships, natural and artificial, political, social, and domestic, almost any reading of it would show. And that this design involves, also, a systematic exhibition of the social _consequences_ arising from the violation of the natural laws or duties of these relationships, and that this violation is everywhere systematically aggravated,--carried to its last conceivable extreme, so that all the play is filled with the uproar of one continued outrage on _humanity_; this is not less evident for the Poet is not content with the material which his chronicle offered him, already invented to his hands for this purpose, but he has deliberately tacked to it, and intricately connected with it throughout, another plot, bearing on the surface of it, and in the most prominent statements, the author's intention in this respect; which tends not only in the most unequivocal manner to repeat and corroborate the impressions which the story of Lear produces, but to widen the dramatic exhibition, so as to make it capable of conveying the whole breadth of the philosophic conception. For it is the scientific doctrine of MAN that is taught here; and that is, that man must be _human_ in _all_ his relations, or '_cease to be_.' It is the violation of the ESSENTIAL humanity. It is a DEGENERACY which is exhibited here, and the 'SEQUENT EFFECTS' which belong naturally to the violation of a law that has the force of the universe to sustain it. And it is not by accident that the story of the illegitimate Edmund begins the piece; it is not for nothing that we are compelled to stop to hear that, before even Lear and his daughters can make their entrance. The whole story of the _base_ and base-born one, who makes what he calls _nature_--the rude, brutal, spontaneous nature--his goddess and his law, and ignores the human distinction; this part was needed in order to supply the deficiences in the social diagrams which the original plot presented; and, indeed, the whole story of the Duke of Gloster, which is from first to last a clear Elizabethan invention, and of which this of Edmund is but a part, was not less essential for the same purpose.

Neither does one need to go very far beneath the surface, to perceive a new and extraordinary treatment of the ethical principle in this play throughout; one which the new, artistic, practical 'stand-point' here taken naturally suggested, but one which could have proceeded only from the inmost heart of the new philosophy. It is just the kind of treatment which the proposal to introduce the Inductive method of inquiry into this department of the human practice inevitably involved. A disposition to go behind the ethical phenomena, to pursue the investigation to its scientific conclusion, a refusal to accept the facts which, to the unscientific observation, appear to be the ultimate ones--a refusal to accept the coarse, vague, spontaneous notions of the dark ages, as the solution of these so essential phenomena, is everywhere betraying and declaring itself. Cordelia's agonised invocation and summons to the unpublished forces of nature, to be aidant and remediate to the good man's distress, is continually echoed by the poet, but with a broader application. It is not the bodily malady and infirmity only--it is not that kind of madness, only with which the poor king is afflicted in the later stages of the play, which appears to him to need scientific treatment--it is not for the cure of these alone that he would open his Prospero book, 'nature's infinite book of secresy,' as he calls it in Mark Antony--'the true magic,' as he calls it _elsewhere_--the book of the unpublished laws--the scientific book of 'KINDS'--the book of 'the historic laws'--'the book of God's power.'

All the _interior_ phenomena which attend the violation of duty are strictly omitted here. That psychological exhibition of it belongs to other plays; and the Poet has left us, as we all know, no room to suspect the tenderness of his moral sensibility, or the depth of his acquaintance with these subjective phenomena. The _social_ consequences of the violation of duty in all the human relationships, the consequence to _others_, and the _social reaction_, limits the exhibition here. The object on which our sympathies are chiefly concentrated is, as he himself is made to inform us--

'One more sinned _against_, than sinning.'
'Oh, these eclipses do portend these divisions,'

says the base-born Edmund, sneeringly. '_Fa sol la mi_,' he continues, producing that particular conjunction of sounds which was forbidden by the ancient musicians, on account of its unnatural discord. The monkish writers on music call it diabolical. It is at the conclusion of a very long and elaborate discussion on this question, that he treats us to this prohibited piece of harmony; and a discussion in which Gloster refers to the influence of the _planets_, this _unnaturalness_ in all the human relations--this universal jangle--'this ruinous disorder, that hunts men disquietly to their graves.' But the 'base' Edmund is disposed to acquit the celestial influences of the evil charged on them. He does not believe in men being--

'Fools, by heavenly compulsion; knaves and thieves, by spherical
predominance; drunkards, liars, and adulterers, by an enforced
obedience of planetary influence; and all that they are evil in,
by a divine thrusting on.'

He has another method of accounting for what _he_ himself is. He does not think it necessary to go quite so far, to find the origin of his own base, lawless, _inhuman, unconscionable_ dispositions. But the inquiries, which are handled so boldly in the soliloquies of Edmund, are started again and again elsewhere; and the recurrence is too emphatic, to leave any room to doubt that the author's intention in the play is concerned in it; and that this question of 'the several dispositions and characters of men,' and the inquiry as to whether there be '_any causes in_ nature' of these _degenerate_ tendencies, which he is at such pains to exhibit, is, for some reason or other, a very important point with him. That which in _contemplative philosophy_ corresponds to the _cause_, in _practical philosophy_ becomes the _rule_, the _founder_ of it tells us. But the play cannot be studied effectually without taking into account the fact, that the author avails himself of the date of his chronicle to represent that stage of human development in which the mysterious forces of nature were still blindly deified; and, therefore, the religious invocations with which the play abounds, are _not_, in the modern sense of the term, _prayers_, but only vague, poetic appeals to the unknown, unexplored powers in nature, which we call _second causes_. And when, as yet, there was no room for science in the narrow premature theories which men found imposed on them--when the new movement of human thought was still hampered by the narrowness of 'preconceived opinions,' the poet was glad to take shelter under the date of his legend now and then, here, as in Macbeth and other poems, for the sake of a little more freedom in this respect. He is very far from condemning '_presuppositions_' and '_anticipations_' but only wishes them kept in their proper places, because to bring them into the region of fact and induction, and so to falsify the actual condition of things--to undertake to face down the powers of nature with them, is a merely mistaken mode of proceeding; because these powers are powers which do not yield to the human beliefs, and the _practical_ doctrine must have respect to them. The great battle of that age--the battle of the second causes, which the new philosophers were compelled to fight in behalf of humanity at the peril of their lives--the battle which they fought in the open field with Aristotle and Plato--fills all this magnificent poetry with its reverberations.

It must be confessed, that those terrible appeals to the heavens, into which King Lear launches out in his anguish now and then, are anything but pious; but the boldness which shocks our modern sensibilities becomes less offensive, if we take into account the fact that they are not made to the object of our present religious worship, but are mere vague appeals, and questioning addresses to the unknown, unexplored causes in nature--the powers which lie behind the historical phenomena.

For that divine Ideal of Human Nature to which 'our large temples, crowded with the shows of peace,' are built now, had not yet appeared at the date of this history, in that form in which we now worship it, with its triumphant assurance that it came forth from the heart of God, and declared Him. Paul had not yet preached his sermon at Athens, in the age of this supposed King of Britain; and though the author was indeed painting his own age, and not that, it so happened that there was such a heathenish and inhuman, and, as he intimates, indeed, quite '_fiendish_' and diabolical state of things to represent here then, that this discrepancy was not so shocking as it might have been if he had found a divine religion in full operation here.

'If it be you,' says Lear, falling back upon the theory, which Edmund has already discarded, of a divine thrusting on--

'If it be _you_ that _stir these daughters' hearts_
Against their father, fool _me_ not so much
To bear it tamely; _touch me_ with noble anger.'

And here is an echo of the 'spherical predominance' which Gloster goes into so elaborately in the outset, confessing, much to the amusement of his graceless offspring, that he is disposed to think, after all, there may be something in it. 'For,' he says, 'though the _wisdom_ of _nature_ [the spontaneous wisdom] can REASON IT _thus and thus, yet_ nature _finds itself scourged_ by THE SEQUENT EFFECT;' and he is talking under the dictation of a philosopher who, though he ridicules the pretensions of astrology in the next breath, lays it down as a principle in the scientific Art, as a chief point in the science of Practice and Relief, that the _sequent effects_, with which nature finds itself scourged, are a better guide to the _causes_ which the _practical_ remedy must comprehend, than anything which the wisdom of nature can undertake to reason out _beforehand_, without any respect to the sequent effect--'_thus_, and--_thus_.' But here is the confirmation of Gloster's view of the subject, which the sound-minded Kent, who is not at all metaphysical, finds himself provoked to utter; and though this is in the Fourth Act, and Gloster's opinions are advanced in the First, the passages do, notwithstanding, 'look towards each other.'

'It is _the stars_.
The stars above us govern our conditions,
Else one self mate and mate could not beget
Such different issues.'

Of course, it is not the astrological theory of the constitutional original differences in the human dispositions which the honest Kent is made to advocate here, literally and in earnest. It is rather the absence of any known cause, and the necessity of supposing one in a case where this difference is so obtrusive and violent, which he expresses; the stars being the natural resort of men in such circumstances, and when other solutions fail; though Poor Tom appears to be in possession of a much more orthodox theory for the peculiar disorders in _his_ moral constitution: but, at the same time, it must be conceded that it is one which does not appear to have led, in his case, to any such felicitous practical results as the supposed origin of it might have seemed to promise.

For, indeed, this point of natural differences in the human dispositions, though, of course, quite overlooked in the moral regimen which is based on _a priori_ knowledge, and is able to dispense with science, and ride over the actual laws; this point of _difference_-- not in the dispositions of individuals only, but the differences which manifest themselves under the varying conditions of age and bodily health, of climate, or other physical differences in the same individual, as well as under the varying moral conditions of differing social and political positions and relations; this so essential point, overlooked as it is in the ordinary practice, has seized the clear eye of this great scientific practitioner, this Master of Arts, and he is making a radical point of it in his new speculation; he is making collections on it, and he will make a main point of it in 'the part operative' of his New Science, when he comes to make out the outline of it elsewhere, referring us distinctly to this place for his collections in it, for his collections on this point, as well as on others not less radical.

Lear himself, in his madness, appears, as we have seen already, much disposed to speculate upon this same particular question, which Gloster and Edmund and Kent have already indicated as 'a necessary question of the play'; namely, the question as to '_the causes in nature_' of the phenomena which the social condition of man exhibits; that is, the causes of that degeneracy, that violation of the essential human law to which all the evil is tracked here; and it is the scientific doctrine, that the _nature_ of a thing cannot be successfully studied in itself alone. It is not in water or in air only, or in any other single substance, that we find the nature of _oxygen_, or _hydrogen_, or any other of those principles in nature, which the application of this method to another department evolves from things which present themselves to the unscientific experience as most dissimilar. 'It is the greatest proof of want of skill to investigate _the nature_ of any object in itself alone; for _the same nature_ which seems concealed and hidden in some instances, is manifest and almost palpable in others; and, in general, those very things which are considered as secret, are manifest and common in other objects, but will never be clearly seen if the experiments and conclusions of men be directed to themselves alone': for it is a part of this doctrine, that man is not omitted in the order of nature--that the term HUMAN NATURE is _not_ a misnomer. The doctrine of this Play is, that those same powers which are at work in man's life, are at work without it also; that they are powers which belong, in their highest form, to the nature of things in general; and that man himself, with all his special distinctions, is under the law of that universal constitution. The scientific remedy for the state of things which this play exhibits is the knowledge of 'causes in nature,' which must be found here, as in the other case, by scientific investigation--the spontaneous method leading to no better result here than in the other case. Under cover of the excitements of this play, this inquiry is boldly opened, and the track of the new science is clearly marked in it.

Poor Lear is, indeed, compelled to leave the practical improvement of _his_ hints for another; and when it comes to the open question of the remedy for this state of things, which is the term of the inquiry, when he undertakes to put his absolute power in motion for the avowed purpose of effecting an improvement here, he appears indeed disposed to treat the subject in the most savage and despairing manner--that is, on his own account; but the vein of the scientific inquiry still runs unbroken through all this burst of passion. For in his scorn for that failure in human nature and human life of which society, as he finds it, stands convicted--that failure to establish the distinctive law of the human kind--that failure from which he is suffering so deeply--and in his struggle to express that disgust, he proposes, as an improvement on the state of things he finds, a law which shall obliterate that human distinction; though certainly _that_ is anything but the Poet's remedy; and the poor king himself does not appear to be in earnest, for the moral disgust in which the distinctive sentiment of the nobler nature, and the knowledge of _human_ good and evil betrays itself, breaks forth in floods of passion that overflow all the bounds of articulation before he can make an end of it.

But the radical nature of this question of _natural causes_, which the practical theory of the social arts must comprehend, is already indicated in this play, in the very beginning of the action.

This author is everywhere bent on graving the scientific distinction between those instinctive affections in which men degenerate, and tend to the rank of lower natures, and the noble natural, distinctively human affections; and when, in the first scene, the king betrays the selfishness of that fond preference for his younger daughter,--tender, and paternal, and deep as it was,--and the depth of those hopes he was resting on her kind care and nursery, by the very height of that frenzied paroxysm of rage and disappointment, which her unflattering and, as it seems to him, her unloving reply, creates;--when that 'small fault, which showed,' he tells us, 'so ugly' in _her_ whom 'he loved _most_'--which turned, in a moment, all the sweetness of his love for her '_to gall_, and like an engine, wrenched his _nature from its firm place_';--these are the terms in which he undertakes to annul the natural tie, and _disown_ her--

_Lear_. So young, and so untender?

_Cordelia_. So young, my lord, and true.

_Lear_. Let it be so.--Thy truth then be thy dower:
For, by the _sacred radiance of the sun_;
_The mysteries_ of _Hecate_, and _the night_;
_By all the operations_ of _the orbs,
From whom we do exist, and cease to be,
Here I disclaim all my paternal care_,
Propinquity and property of blood,
And as a stranger to my heart and me
Hold thee, from this, for ever. The barbarous Scythian,
Or he that makes his generation messes
To gorge his appetite, shall to my bosom
Be _as well neighboured, pitied, and relieved_,
As thou, _my sometime daughter_.

And when

'This even-handed justice
Commends the ingredients of his poisoned chalice
To his own lips'--

when his 'dog-hearted daughters' have returned to his own bosom the cruel edge of that _unnatural_ wrong which he has impiously dared to summon nature herself--violated nature--to witness, this is the greeting which the _unnatural_ Goneril receives, on her return to her husband, when she complains to him of her welcome--

_Goneril_. I have been worth the whistle.

_Albany_. O Goneril!
You are not worth _the dust which the rude wind
Blows in your face_.--I fear your _disposition:
That nature, which contemns_ ITS ORIGIN,
CANNOT BE BORDERED CERTAIN IN ITSELF;
She that herself will _sliver and disbranch_
From her MATERIAL SAP, PERFORCE MUST WITHER,
_And come to deadly use_.

[_Prima Philosophia_. Axioms which are not limited to the particular parts of sciences, but 'such as are more common, and of a higher stage.']

_Goneril_. No more; _the text_ is foolish.
_Albany_. Tigers, not daughters,--

[You have practised on yourself--you have destroyed in yourself the nobler, fairer nature which the law of _human_ kind--the law of human duty and affection--would have given you. Not DAUGHTERS,--_Tigers_.]

'A _father, and a gracious aged man_,
Whose reverence the head-lugged bear would lick,
Most barbarous, most DEGENERATE!'--

[_degenerate_--that is the point--most degenerate]--

'have you _madded_.
If that the _heavens_ do not _their_ visible spirits
Send quickly down, to _tame these vile offences_
'Twill come,
HUMANITY _must perforce prey on itself_,
Like monsters of the deep.'

[the land refuses a parallel.]

And it is the scientific distinction between man and the brute creation--it is the law of nature in the human kind, which the Poet is getting out scientifically here, in the face of that terrific failure and degeneration in the kind--which he paints so vividly, for the purpose of inquiring whether there is not, perhaps, after all, some more potent provisioning and arming of man for his place in nature, than this state of things would lead one to suppose--whether there are not, perhaps, some more efficacious 'humanities' than those mild ones which appear to operate so lamely on this barbaric, _degenerate_ thing. 'Milk-liver'd man!' replies Goneril, speaking not on her own behalf only, for the words have a double significance; and the Poet glances through them at that sufferance with which the state of things he has just noted was endured--

'_Milk-livered man_,
That bear'st a _cheek for blows_, a HEAD _for_ WRONGS;
Who hast not _in thy brows an eye_ discerning
Thine honour from thy sufferance; that not know'st,
FOOLS do those villains pity, _who are punished
Before they have done their mischief_. Where's thy _drum_?
France spreads his banners in _our noiseless land;
With plumed helm_ thy _slayer_ begins threats;
_Whilst thou_, a _Moral Fool_, sit'st still, and _cry'st,
Alack_! why does he so?'

This is found to be an appeal of the Poet's own when all is done, and one that goes far into the necessary questions of the play.

But Albany, in his rejoinder, returns to the idea of the lost, _degenerate_, dissolute _Humanity_ again. He has talked of tigers, and _head-lugged_ bears (and it was necessary to combine the proverbial sensitiveness of that animal to that particular mode of treatment, with the natural amiability of his disposition in general, in order to do justice to the Poet's conception here);--he has called upon 'the monsters of the deep,' and quoted the laws of their societies, in illustration of the state of things to which the unscientific human combination appears to him to be visibly tending. But this human _degeneracy_ and deformity, which the action of the play exhibits in diagrams--the _descent_ to the _lower_ nature from the higher; the _voluntary_ descent; the voluntary blindness and narrowness; the rejection of the distinctive human law--of VIRTUE and DUTY, as reason and conscience interpret it--appears to the scientific mind to require yet _other_ terms and comparisons. These conceits and comparisons, drawn from the habits of innocent, though not to man agreeable, animals, who have no law but blind instinct, do not suffice to convey the Poet's idea of this human failing; and, accordingly, he instructs this gentle and noble man, whom this criticism best becomes, to complete this view of the subject, in his attempt to express the disgust with which this _inhuman_, this _more_ than brutal conduct, in his high-born, and gorgeously-robed, and delicately-featured spouse, inspires him--

'See thyself, devil!'--

nay, he corrects himself--

_Proper deformity_ [DE-FORMITY] seems _not_ in the _fiend_
_So_ horrid, as in woman.

_Goneril_. O vain fool!

_Albany_. Thou _changed_ and _self-covered thing_. For shame,
Be-monster not thy _feature_. Were it my FITNESS'--

for here it is the _human_, and not the instinctive element--not '_the blood_' element that rules--

'Were it my FITNESS
To _let_ these hands _obey_ my blood,
_They_ are _apt_ enough to _dislocate_ and _tear_
Thy _flesh_ and _bones_,'

Rather tiger-like impulses for so mild a gentleman to own to; but the process which he confesses his hands are already inclined to undertake, is not half so cruel as the one which this woman has practised on herself while she was meditating only wrong to another, and pursuing her 'horrible pleasure' at the expense of madness and death to another; not half so cruel and injurious, for in that act she has trampled down, and torn, and dislocated, she has slaughtered in cold blood, the divine, angelic form of womanhood--that form of worth and celestial aspiration which great nature stamped upon her, and gave to her for her law in nature, her type, her essence, her ORIGINAL. She has desecrated, not that common form of humanity only which the common human sentiment of reason, which the human sentiment of duty is everywhere struggling to fulfil, but that lovelier soul of humanity--that softer, subtler, more gracious, more celestial, more commanding spirit of it, which the form of womanhood in its integrity must carry with it--which the form of womanhood will carry with it, if it be not counterfeit or degenerate, gone down into a lower range, 'be-monstered'--'a changed and _self-covered_ thing.' That is the Poet's reading.

'Howe'er,' the Duke of Albany concludes, after that struggle with his hands he speaks of--chivalrously refusing to let them obey that impulse of 'blood,' as a gentleman in such circumstances, under any amount of provocation, should--true to himself, true to his manliness and to his gentle breeding, though his wife is false to hers, and 'false to her nature'--

'Howe'er thou _art_ a, _fiend,
A woman's shape doth shield thee.

Goneril_. Marry! YOUR MANHOOD NOW.'

This is indeed a discourse in which the reader must have '_the text_,' or ever he can begin to catch the meaning of those philosophic points with which this orator, who _talks_ so 'pressly,' studs his lines.

For the passage which Goneril dismisses with such scorn is indeed the text, or it will be, when the word which her commentary on it contains has been added to it: for it is '_the foolishness_' of struggling with great Nature, and her LAW of KINDS--it is the folly of ignorance, the stupidity of living without respect to nature and its sequent effects, as well as its preformed decree--

(_'Perforce must_ wither,
And come to deadly use'--)

which this discourse is intended to illustrate. And one who has once tracked the dramatic development of this text, through all this moving exhibition of human society, and its violated rule in nature, will be at no loss to conjecture out of what 'New' book it comes, if indeed that book has ever been opened to him.

The whole subject is treated here scientifically--that is, from without. The generalizations of the higher stages of philosophy--the axioms of a universal philosophy--with all the force of their universality, must be brought to bear upon it, through all its developments. The universal historical laws, in that modification of them which the speciality of the human kind creates, must be impartially set forth here. The law of DUTY, as the NATURAL LAW of human society; the law of humanity, as the law, nay, THE FORM, of the HUMAN kind, stamped on it with the Creator's stamp, that _order_ from the universal law of kinds that gives to all life its SPECIAL bounds, its '_border_ in _itself_'--that form so _essential_, that there is no _humanity_ or _kind-ness_ where that is not--that law which we hear so much of, in its narrower aspects, under various names, in all men's speech, is produced here, in its broader relations, as the necessary basis of a scientific social art. And it is this author's deliberate opinion as a Naturalist, it is the opinion of this School in Natural Science, from which this work proceeds, that those who undertake to compose human societies, large or small, whether in families, or states, or empires, without recognising this principle--those who undertake to compose UNIONS, human unions and societies, on any other principle--will have a diabolical jangle of it when all is done. For this law of _unity_, which is written on the soul of man, this law of CONSCIENCE _within, is written without also_; and to erase it _within_ is to get the lesson from _without_ in that universal and downright speech and language which the axioms of nature are taught in--it is to get it in that fearful school in which nature _repeats_ the doctrine of her violated law, for those who are not able to solve and comprehend the science of it as it is _written_--written beforehand--in the natural law and constitutions of the human soul.

'That nature which, contemns its ORIGIN
Cannot be _bordered_ certain _in itself_.'

[These are the mysteries of day and night, that Lear, in his ignorance, vainly invokes, the operations of the orbs from _whom we do exist and cease to be_.]

'She that herself will _sliver_ and _disbranch_
From her _material_ sap, _perforce must_ wither,
And come to _deadly_ use.'
'The text is--FOOLISH.'

The teacher who takes it upon himself to get out this text from the text-book of Universal Laws, for the purpose of conducting it to its practical application in human affairs, for the purpose of suggesting the true remedy for those great human wants which he exhibits here, is _not_ one of those 'Milk-livered men,' those _Moral Fools_, that _Goneril_ delicately alludes to, who bear a cheek for blows, a _head_ for wrongs; who have not in their brows an _eye_ discerning their _honour_ from their sufferance; who think it enough to sit still under the murderous blows of what they call misfortune, fate, _Providence_, when it is their own im-_providence_; who think it is enough to sit still, and cry, _Alack_! without inquiring what it is that makes that _lack_; without ever putting the question in earnest, '_Why does he so_?' His Play is all full of the _practical application_ of the text, the application of it which Gloster sums up in a word--

''T is the Time's plague when MADMEN _lead_ THE BLIND.'

'I will preach to thee. Mark me: [says Lear]
When we are born, we cry that we are come
To this great stage of FOOLS. [Mark me!']

The whole Play is one magnificent intimation, on the part of the Poet, that eyes are made to see with; and that there is no so natural and legitimate use of them as that which human affairs were crying for, through all their lengths and breadths, in his time. It is that _eye_ which is one of the distinctive features of the human kind; that eye which looks before and after, which extends human vision so far beyond individual sensuous experience, which is able to converge the light of universal truth upon particular experience, which is able to bring the infallible guidance of universal axioms into all the particulars of human conduct--that is the eye which he finds wanting in human affairs. The play is pointing everywhere with the Poet's scorn of '_Blind Men_,' 'who will not see because they do not feel,'--who wait for the blows of 'fortune,' to teach them the lesson of Nature's laws--who wait to be scourged, or dashed to pieces with 'the sequent effect,' instead of making use of their faculty of reason to ascend to causes, and _so_ 'to trammel up the consequence.'

It is that same combination of human faculties, that same combination of sense and reason, which the Novum Organum provides for; it is that same scorn of abstract wordy speculation, on the one hand, and blind experimental groping, on the other, that is everywhere _suggested_ here. But with the aid of the persons of the Drama, and their suggestions, the new philosophy is carried into departments which it would have cost the Author of the Novum Organum and the Advancement of Learning his head to look into. He might as well have proposed to impeach the Government in Parliament outright, as to offer to advance his Novum Organum into these fields; fields which it enters safely enough under the cover of a spontaneous, inspired, dramatic philosophy, though it is a philosophy which overflows continually with those practical axioms, those aphorisms, which the Author of the Advancement of Learning assures us 'are made of the pith and heart of sciences'; and that 'no man can write who is not sound and grounded.' But then, if they are only written in 'with a goose-pen,' they pass well enough for unconscious, unmeaning, spontaneous felicities.

'Canst thou tell why one's nose stands in the middle of his face?' says the Fool, in the First Act, by way of entertaining his master, when the poor king's want of foresight and 'prudence' begins to tell on his affairs a little. 'Canst thou tell why one's nose stands in the middle of his face?' 'No.' 'Why, to keep his eyes on either side of it, that what a man _cannot smell out_ he may _spy into_.'

_Fool_. Canst tell how _an oyster_ makes _his_ shell?'

_Lear_. No.

_Fool_. Nor I neither; but I can tell why a snail has a house.

_Lear_. Why?

_Fool_. Why, to put his head in; not to give it away to his
daughters, and leave his horns without a case.

_Lear_. ... Be my horses ready?

_Fool_. Thy asses are gone about 'em. The reason why the seven stars
are no more than seven, is a pretty reason.

_Lear_. Because they are not eight?

_Fool_. Yes, indeed: Thou wouldest make a good--fool.

He cannot tell how an _oyster_ makes his shell, but the nose has not stood in the middle of _his_ face for nothing. There has been some prying on either side of it, apparently; and he has pried to such good purpose, that some of the prime secrets of the new philosophy appear to have turned up in his researches. 'To take it again _perforce_,' mutters the king. 'If thou wert my fool, Nuncle, I'd have thee beaten _for being_ OLD _before thy time_.' [This is a wit 'of the self-same colour' with that one who discovered that the times from which the world's practical wisdom was inherited, were the times when the world was young. 'They told me I had white hairs in my beard ere the black ones were there!'] 'I'd have thee beaten for being old before thy time.'--'_How's_ that?'--'Thou shouldst _not_ have been OLD _before thou hadst been_ WISE.'

And it is in the Second Act that poor Kent, in his misfortunes, furnishes occasion for another avowal on the part of this same learned critic, of a preference for a practical philosophy, though borrowed from the lower species. He comes upon the object of his criticism as he sits in the stocks, because he could not adopt the style of his time with sufficient earnestness, though he does make an attempt 'to go out of his dialect,' but was not more happy in it than some other men of his politics were, in the Poet's time.

'Sir, in good sooth, in sincere verity,
_Under the allowance of your grand aspect,
Whose influence, like the wreath of radiant fire
On flickering Phebus' front--_

_Cornwall_. 'What mean'st by this?'

_Kent_. 'To go out of my dialect, _which you discommend so much_.

[Halting in his blank verse for the explanation]:--It is from that seat, to which the plainness of this man, with the official dignities of his time, has conducted him, that he puts the inquiry to that keen observer, whose observations in natural history have just been quoted,--

_Kent_. How chances that the _king comes with so small a train_?

_Fool_. An thou had'st been set in the stocks for that question,
_thou, had'st well deserved it_.

_Kent_. Why, fool?

_Fool_. We'll set thee _to school to an ant_, to teach thee there
is no labouring in the winter. All that follow their noses are _led
by their eyes_, but--BLIND MEN.

_Kent_. Where learned'st thou _that_, fool?

_Fool_. Not in the stocks, _fool_.

[Not from being punished with the sequent effect; not in consequence of an improvidence, that an _ant_ might have taught me to avoid.]

'I have no _way_, and _therefore_ want no eyes,' says another duke, who is also the victim of that '_absolute_' authority which is abroad in this play. 'I stumbled when I _saw_,' and this is _his prayer_.

Let the superfluous and lust-dieted man
That slaves your ordinance; that will not SEE
Because he doth not FEEL, _feel_ your power quickly.

'Thou seest how this world goes,' says the outcast king, meeting this poor outcast duke, just after his eyes had been taken out of his head, by the persons then occupying the chief offices in the state. 'Thou seest how this world goes.' 'I SEE it FEELINGLY,' is the duke's reply.

_Lear_. What! art _mad_? A man may _see_ how this world goes with
_no_ eyes. Look with thine _ears_.

And his account of how it goes is--as we shall see--one that requires to be looked at with _ears_, for it contains, what one calls elsewhere in this play,--_ear-kissing_ arguments.--'Get thee _glass_ eyes,' he says, in conclusion, 'and like a scurvy _politician_ pretend to SEE, the things thou dost not.' And that was not the kind of politician, and that was not the kind of political eye-sight, to which this statesman, and seer, proposed to leave the times, that his legacy should fall on, whatever he might be compelled to tolerate in his own.

'Upon _the crown_ o' the cliff. What _thing_ was that
Which parted from you?'

'_A poor unfortunate beggar_.' [Softly.]
'_As I stood here_ BELOW, methought his eyes
Were two full moons; he had a thousand noses.
Horns welked and waved, like the enridged _sea_.'

'Now, Sir, what are you?' says the poor outcast duke to his true son, when in disguise he offers to attend him. 'A most poor man,' is the reply, 'made _lame_ by fortune's blows; who, by the ART of KNOWN AND FEELING SORROWS, am _pregnant_ to _good_ PITY. Give me your hand, _I'll_ lead you to some BIDING. Bear _free_ and _patient thoughts_,' is his whisper to him.

Surely this is a poet that has got an inkling, in some way, of the new idea of an _experimental philosophy_,--of a combination of the human faculties of sense and reason in some organum; one, too, whose eye passes lightly over the architectonic gifts of _univalves_ and _bivalves_, and _entomological_ developments of skill and forethought, intent on that great chrysalis, which has never been able to publish yet its Creator's glory. Here is a naturalist who would not think it enough to combine reason with experiment, in wind, and rain, and fire, and thunder, who would not think it enough to bring all the unpublished virtues of the earth, to the relief of the bodily human maladies. It is the Poet, who says elsewhere, 'Can'st thou not minister to a _mind_ diseased? No? Throw physic to the dogs, I'll none of it.' It is the poet who says, 'Nor wind, rain, fire, thunder, are my daughters.' '_Nothing_ could have brought him to such a lowness in nature, but his un-_kind_ daughters.' It is the naturalist who says, 'Then let Regan's heart be anatomized, and see what _it_ is that breeds about it. Is there any cause in NATURE that makes these hard hearts?'

In short, this play is from the hand of one who thinks that the human affairs are of a kind to require scientific investigation, scientific foresight and conduct. He is much of Lear's opinion on many points, and evidently judges that there would be no harm in getting a philosopher enrolled among the king's hundred. Not a logician, not a metaphysician, according to the common acceptance of these terms; not merely a natural philosopher, in the low and limited sense of that term, in which we use it; but a man of science--one who is able, by some method or other, to ascend to the actual principles of things, and so to base his remedies for the social evils, on the forms which are _forms_, which have efficacy in nature as _such_, instead of basing them on certain chimeras, or so-called logical conclusions of the human mind--conclusions which the logic of nature contradicts-- conclusions to which the universal consent of _things_ is wanting.

_Nature_, in the sense in which _Edmund_ uses that term, is _not_ this poet's _goddess_, or his LAW; though he regards 'the plague of CUSTOM' and 'the curiosity of nations,' and all their fantastic and arbitrary sway in human affairs, with an eye quite as critical--though he looks at 'that old Antic, the law,' as he expresses it elsewhere, with an eye quite as severe, on the world's behalf, as that which Edmund turns on it, on his own; he is very far from contending for the freedom of that savage, selfish, unreclaimed, spontaneous nature,--that lawless nature, to which the natural son of Gloster claims 'his services are due.' The poet teaches that the true and successful Social Art is, and must be scientific. That it must be based on the science of nature in general, and on the science of human nature in particular, on a science that recognizes the double _nature_ in man, that takes in, its heights as well as its depths, and its depths as well as its heights, that sounds it 'from its lowest note to the top of its key;' but it is one thing to quarrel with the unscientific, _imperfect_ social arts, and it is another to prefer nature in man _without_ arts. The picture of 'the Unaccommodated Man,' which forms so prominent a part of the representation here,--'the _thing itself_,' stripped of its social lendings, or setting at nought the social restraints, is not by any means an attractive one, as this philosopher does it for us. The scientific artist is no better pleased, than the king is with this kind of '_nature_.' It is the imperfection of the civilization which still generates, or leaves unchecked these savage evils, that he exposes.

But it is impossible, that the true social arts should be smelt out, or stumbled on, by accident, or arrived at by any kind of empirical groping; just as impossible as it is, on the other hand, that 'the wisdom of nature,' by throwing itself on its own internal resources, and reasoning it '_thus and thus_,' without taking into account the actual forces, should be able to invent them. Those forces which enter into all the plot of our human life, unworthy of philosophic note as they had seemed hitherto, those terrific, unmeasured strengths, against which the human kind are continually dashing themselves in their blind experiments,--those engines on which the human heart is racked, 'and stretched out so long,'--those rocky structures on which its choicest treasures are so wildly wrecked, these natural forces,--no matter what artificial combinations of them may have been accomplished,--'the causes _in nature_,' of the phenomena of human life, appeared to this philosopher a very fitting subject for philosophy, and one quite too important in its relation to human well-being and the Arts that promote it, to be left to mere blundering experiment; quite too subtle to be reached by any kind of empirical groping, quite too subtle to be entangled with the conclusions of the _philosophy_ which he found in vogue in his time, whose social efficacies and gifts in exorcisms, he has taken leave to connect in some way, with the appearance of Tom o' Bedlam in his history; a philosophy which had built up its system in defiant scorn of the nature of things; as if 'by reasoning it _thus_ and _thus_,' without any respect to the actual conditions, it could undertake to bridle the might of nature, and put a hook in the nose of her oppositions.

It did not seem to this philosopher well, that men who have eyes--eyes that are great nature's gift to them,--her gift to them in chief,--eyes that were meant to see with, should go on in this groping, star-gazing, fatally-stumbling fashion any longer.

_Lear_. [To the Bedlamite.] I do not like the fashion of your garments. _You will say that they are--Persian:--but_ let them be ALTERED.