Chapter V: The Statesman's Note-Book--And the Play (1)

_Brutus._ How I have thought of this, and of _these times_,
I shall recount _hereafter_.

_Hamlet_. The Play's the thing.

_Brutus_. Tell us the manner of it, gentle Casca.
_Casca_. I can as well _be hanged_ as tell _the manner_
of it.

_Posthumus_. 'Shall's have _a Play of this_.--

The fact that the design of this play, whatever it may be, is one deep enough to go down to that place in the social system which Tom o' Bedlam was then peacefully occupying,--thinking of anything else in the world but a social revolution on his behalf--to bring him up for observation; and that it is high enough to go up to that apex of the social structure on which the crown was then fastened, to fetch down the impersonated state itself, for an examination not less curious and critical; the fact, too, that it was subtle enough to penetrate the retirement of the domestic life, and bring out its innermost passages for scientific criticism;--the fact that the relation of the Parent to the Child, and that of the Child to the Parent, the relation of Husband and Wife, and Sister and Brother, and Master and Servant, of Peasant and Lord, nay, the transient relation of Guest and Host, have each their place and part here, and the question of their duty marked not less clearly, than that prominent relation of the King and his Subjects;--the fact that these relations come in from the first, along with the political, and demand a hearing, and divide throughout the stage with them; the fact of the mere range of this social criticism, as it appears on the surface of the play, in these so prominent points,--is enough to show already, that it is a _Radical_ of no ordinary kind, who is at work behind this drop-scene.

It was evident, at a glance, that this so extensive bill of grievances was not one which any immediate or violent political revolution, or any social reformation which was then in contemplation, would be able to meet; and that very circumstance gave to the whole essay its profoundly quiet, conservative air. It passed only for one of those common outcries on the ills of human life, which men in general are expected, or permitted to make, according to their several abilities; one of those 'Alacks!'--'why does he so'? which, by relieving the mind of the complainant, tend to keep things quiet on the whole. This Poet, whoever he was, was making rather more ado about it than usual, apparently: but Poets are useful for that very purpose; they express other men's emotions for them, in a higher key than they could manage it themselves.

It was the breadth then,--the philosophic comprehension of this great philosophic design, which made it possible for the Poet to introduce into it, and exhibit in it, so glaringly, those evils of his time that were crying out to Heaven then, for redress, and could not wait for philosophic revolutions and reformations.

Tom o' Bedlam, strictly speaking, does appear, indeed, to have been one of those Elizabethan institutions which were modified or annulled, in the course of the political changes that so soon followed this exhibition of his case. 'Tom' himself, in his own proper person, appears to have been left--by accident or otherwise--on the other side of the Revolutionary gulf. 'I remember,' says Aubrey, '_before the civil wars_, Tom o' Bedlams went about begging,' etc.--but one cannot help remarking that a very numerous family connection of the collateral branches of his house--bearing, on the whole, a sufficiently striking family resemblance to this illustrious subject of the Poet's pencil,--appear to have got safely over all the political and social gulfs that intervene between our time and that. And, as to some of those other social evils which are exhibited here in their ideal proportions, they are not, perhaps, so entirely among the former things which have passed away with our reformations, that we should have to go to Aubrey's note book to find out what the Poet means. As to some of these, at least, it will not be necessary to hunt up an antiquary, who can remember whether any such thing ever was really in existence here, '_before the civil wars_.' And, notwithstanding all our advancements in Natural Science, and in the Arts which attend these advancements; notwithstanding the strong recommendations of the inventors of this Science,--Regan's heart, and that which breeds about it, appear, by a singular oversight, to have escaped, hitherto, any truly scientific inquiry; and the arts for improving it do not appear, after all, to have been very materially advanced since the time when this order was issued.

But notwithstanding that the subject of this piece appears to be so general,--notwithstanding the fact, that the social evils which are here represented include, apparently, the universal human conditions, and include evils which are still understood to be inherent in the nature of man, and, irreclaimable, or not, at least a subject for Art,--and notwithstanding the fact that this exhibition professes to borrow all its local hues and exaggerations from the barbaric times of the Ancient Britons--it is not very difficult to perceive that it does, in fact, involve a local exhibition of a different kind; and that, under the cover of that great revolution in the human estate, which the philosophic mind was then meditating,--_so broad_, that none could perceive its _project_,--another revolution,--that revolution which was then so near at hand, was clearly outlined; and that this revolution, too, is, after all, one towards which this Poet appears to '_incline_,' in a manner which would not have seemed, perhaps, altogether consistent with his position and assumptions elsewhere, if these could have been produced here against him; and in a manner, perhaps, somewhat more decided than the general philosophic tone, and the spirit of those large and peaceful designs to which he was chiefly devoted, might have led us to anticipate. This Play was evidently written at a time when the conviction that the state of things which it represents could not endure much longer, had taken deep hold of the Poet's mind; at a time when those evils had attained a height so unendurable--when that evil which lay at the heart of the commonweal, poisoning all the social relations with its infection, had grown so fearful, that it might well seem, even to the scientific mind, to require the fierce '_drug_' of the political revolution,--so fearful as to make, even to such a mind, the rude surgery of the civil wars at last welcome.

For, indeed, it cannot be denied that the state of things which this Play represents, is that with which the author's own experience was conversant; and that all the terrible tragic satire of it, points--not to that age in the history of Britain in which the Druids were still responsible for the national culture,--not to that time when the Celtic Triads, clothed with the sanctities of an unknown past, still made the standard works and authorities in learning, beyond which there was no going,--not to the time when the national morality was still mystically produced at Stonehenge, in those national colleges, from whose mysterious rites the awful sanctities of the oak and the mistletoe drove back in confusion the sacrilegious inquirer,--not to that time, but to the _Elizabethan_.

That instinctive groping and stumbling in all human affairs, that pursuit of human ends without any science of the natures to be superinduced, and without any science of the natures that were to be subjected,--those eyes of moonshine speculation, those glass eyes with which the scurvy politician affects to see the things he does not--those thousand noses that serve for eyes, and horns welked and waved like the enridged sea, and all the wild misery of that unlearned fortuitous human living, that waits to be scourged with the sequent effect, and knows not how to ascend to the cause--colossally exaggerated as it seems here--heightened everywhere, as if the Poet had put forth his whole power, and strained his imagination, and availed himself of his utmost poetic license, to give it, through all its details, its last conceivable hue of violence, its pure ideal shape, is, after all, but a copy an historical sketch. The ignorance, the stupidity, 'the _blindness_,' that this author paints, was his own 'Time's plague'; 'the madness' that 'led it,' was the madness of which he was himself a mute and manacled spectator.

By some singular oversight or caprice of tyranny, or on account of some fastidious scruple of the imagination perhaps, it does _not_ appear, indeed, to have been the fashion, either in the reigns of the Tudors or the Stuarts, to pluck out the living human eye as Gloster's eyes were plucked out; and that of itself would have furnished a reason why this poor duke should have been compelled to submit to that particular operation, instead of presenting himself to have his ears cut off in a sober, decent, civilized, Christian manner; or to have them grubbed out, if it happened that the operation had been once performed already; or to have his hand cut off, or his head, with his eyes in it; or to be roasted alive some noon-day in the public square, eyes and all, as many an honest gentleman was expected to present himself in those times, without making any particular demur or fuss about it. _These_ were operations that Englishmen of every rank and profession, soldiers, scholars, poets, philosophers, lawyers, physicians, and grave and reverend divines, were called on to undergo in those times, and for that identical offence of which the Duke of Gloster stood convicted, opposition to the will of a lawless usurping tyranny,--to its merest caprice of vanity or humour, perhaps,--or on grounds slighter still, on bare suspicion of a disposition to oppose it.

But then that, of course, was a thing of _custom_; so much so, that the victims themselves often took it in good part, and submitted to it as a divine institution, part of a sacred legacy, handed down to them, as it was understood, from their more enlightened ancestors.

Now, if the Poet, in pursuance of his more general philosophic intention, which involved a moving representation of the helplessness of the Social Monad--that bodily as well as moral susceptibility and fragility, which leaves him open to all kinds of personal injury, not from the elements and from animals of other species merely or chiefly, but chiefly from his own kind,--if the Poet, in the course of this exhibition, had caused poor Gloster to be held down in his chair on the stage, for the purpose of having his _ears_ pared off, what kind of sensation could he hope to produce with that on the sensibility of an audience, who might have understood without a commentator an allusion to 'the tribulation of Tower Hill'--spectators accustomed to witness performances so much more thrilling, and on a stage where the Play was in earnest. And as to that second operation before referred to, which might have answered the poetic purpose, perhaps; who knows whether that may not have been a refinement in civilization peculiar to the reign of that amiable and handsome Christian Prince, who was still a minor when this Play was first brought out at Whitehall? for it was in _his_ reign that that memorable instance of it occurred, which the subsequent events connected with it chanced to make so notorious. It was a learned and very conscientious lawyer, in the reign of Charles the First, whose criticism upon some of the fashionable amusements of the day, which certain members of the royal family were known to be fond of, occasioned the suggestion of this mode of satisfying the outraged Majesty of the State, when the prying eye of Government discovered, or thought it did, remains enough of those previously-condemned appendages on this author's person, to furnish material for a second operation. 'Methinks Mr. Prynne _hath_ ears!' does not, after all, sound so very different from--'going to pluck out Gloster's _other_ eye,' as that the governments under which these two speeches are reported, need to be distinguished, on that account only, by any such essential difference as that which is supposed to exist between the human and _divine_. Both these operations appear, indeed to the unprejudiced human mind, to savour somewhat of the diabolical--or of the Dark Ages, rather, and of the Prince of Darkness. And, indeed, that '_fiend_' which haunts the Play--which the monster, with his moonshine eyes, appeared to have a vague idea of--seems to have been as busy here, in this department, as he was in bringing about poor Tom's distresses.

But in that steady persevering exhibition of the liabilities of individual human nature, the COMMON liabilities which throw it upon the COMMON, the distinctive law of humanity for its WEAL--in that continuous picture of the suffering and ignominy, and mutilation to which it is liable, moral and intellectual, as well as physical, where that law of humanity is not yet scientifically developed and scientifically sustained--the Poet does not always go quite so far to find his details. It is not from the Celtic Regan's time that he brings out those ancient implements of state authority into which the feet of the poor Duke of Kent, travelling on the king's errands, are ignominiously thrust; while the Poet, under cover of the Fool's jests, shows prettily their relation to the human dignity.

But then it is a Duke on whom this indignity is practised; for it is to be remarked, in passing, that though this Poet is evidently bent on making his exhibition a thorough one, though he is determined not to leave out anything of importance in his diagrams, he does not appear inclined to soil his fingers by meddling with the lower orders, or to countenance any innovation in his art in that respect. Whenever he has occasion to introduce persons of this class into his pieces, they come in and go out, and perform their part in his scene, very much as they do elsewhere in his time. Even when his Players come in, they do not speak many words on their own behalf. They stand civilly, and answer questions, and take their orders, and fulfil them. That is all that is looked for at their hands. For this is not a Poet who has ever given any one occasion in his own time, to distinguish him as the Poet of the People. It is always from the highest social point of observation that he takes those views of the lower ranks, which he has occasion to introduce into his Plays, from the mobs of 'greasy citizens' to the details of the sheep-shearing feast; and even in Eastcheap he keeps it still.

There never was a more aristocratic poet apparently, and though the very basest form of outcast misery 'that ever penury in contempt of man brought near to beast,' though the basest and most ignoble and pitiful human liabilities, are every where included in his plan; he will have nothing but the rich blood of dukes and kings to take him through with it--he will have nothing lower and less illustrious than these to play his parts for him.

It is a king to whom 'the _Farm House_,' where _both_ fire and food are waiting, becomes a royal luxury on his return from the _Hovel's_ door, brought in chattering out of the tempest, in that pitiful stage of human want, which had made him ready to share with Tom o' Bedlam, nay, with the _swine_, their rude comforts. 'Art cold? I am cold myself. Where is this straw, my fellow. Your _hovel_:--come bring us to your _hovel_.'

It is a king who gets an ague in the storm, who finds the tyranny of the night too rough for nature to endure; it is a king on whose desolate outcast head, destitution and social wrongs accumulate their results, till his wits begin to turn, till his mind is shattered, and he comes on to the stage at last, a poor bedlamite.

Nay, 'Tom' himself, is a duke's son, we are told; though that circumstance does not hinder him from giving, with much frankness and scientific accuracy, the particulars of those personal pursuits, and tastes, and habits, incidental to that particular station in life to which it has pleased Providence to call _him_.

And so by means of that poetic order, which is the Providence of this piece, and that design which 'tunes the harmony of it,' it is a duke on whom that low correction, 'such as basest and most contemned wretches are punished with,' is exhibited, in spite of his indignant protest.

_Kent_. Call not your stocks for me. _I_ serve the king,
On _whose employment_ I was sent to you.
You shall do small _respect_, show too bold malice
Against the _grace_ and _person_ of my master,
Stocking his messenger.

_Cornwall_. Fetch forth the stocks.
As I have life and honour, there shall he sit till noon.'

_Regan_. Till noon,--till night my lord, and all night too.

[In vain the prudent and loyal Gloster remonstrates]

--The king must take it ill
That _he_, so slightly valued in his messenger,
Should have him thus restrained.

_Cornwall_. I'll answer that.

_Regan_. Put in his legs.

But then it must be confessed that the poet was not without some kind of precedent for this bold dramatic proceeding. He had, indeed, by means of the culture and diligent use of that gift of forethought, with which nature had so largely endowed him, been enabled thus far to keep his own person free from any such tangible encumbrance, though the '_lameness_' with which fortune had afflicted him personally, is always his personal grievance; but he had seen in his own time, ancient men and reverend,--men who claimed to be the ministers of heaven, and travelling on its errands, arrested, and subjected to this ludicrous indignity: he had seen this open stop, this palpable, corporeal, unfigurative arrest put upon the activity of scholars and thinkers in his time, conscientious men, between whose master and the state, there was a growing quarrel then, a quarrel that these proceedings were not likely to pacify. From noon till night, they, too, had sat thus, and all night too, they had endured that shameful lodging.

'When a man is _over_ lusty at legs,' says the Fool, who arrives in time to put in an observation or two on this topic, and who seems disposed to look at it from a critical point of view, concluding with the practical improvement of the subject, already quoted--'When a man is over lusty at legs'--(when his will, or his higher intelligence, perhaps, is allowed to govern them too freely,) 'he wears wooden nether stocks,' or 'cruel garters,' as he calls them again, by way of bestowing on this institution of his ancestors as much variety of poetic imagery as the subject will admit of. '_Horses_ are tied by the head, _dogs_ and _bears_ by the neck, _monkeys_ by the loins, and _men_ by the legs'; and having ransacked his memory to such good purpose, and produced such a pile of learned precedents, he appears disposed to rest the case with these; for it is a part of the play to get man into his place in the scale of nature, and to draw the line between him and the brutes, if there be any such thing possible; and the Fool seems to be particularly inclined to assist the author in this process, though when we last heard of him he was, indeed, proposing to send the principal man of his time 'to school to an ant,' to improve his sagacity; intimating, also, that another department of natural science, even conchology itself, might furnish him with some rather more prudent and fortunate suggestions than those which his own brain had appeared to generate; and it is to be remarked, that in his views on this point, as on some others of importance, he has the happiness to agree remarkably with that illustrious yoke-fellow of his in philosophy, who was just then turning his attention to the 'practic part of life' and _its_ 'theoric,' and who indulges himself in some satires on this point not any less severe, though his pleasantries are somewhat more covert. But the philosopher on this occasion, having produced such a variety of precedents from natural history, appears to be satisfied with the propriety and justice of the proceeding, inasmuch as beasts and men seem to be treated with impartial consideration in it; and though a certain distinction of form appears to obtain according to the species, the main fact is throughout identical.

'Then comes the time,' he says, in winding up that knotted skein of prophecy, which he leaves for Merlin to disentangle, for 'he lives before his time,' as he takes that opportunity to tell us--

'Then comes the time, who lives to see't,
That _going shall be used with feet_.'

Yes, it is a duke who is put in the stocks; it is a duke's son plays the bedlamite; it is a king who finds the hovel's shelter 'precious'; and it is a queen--it is a king's wife, and a daughter of kings--who is hanged; nay more, it is Cordelia--it is Cordelia, and none other, whom this inexorable Poet, primed with mischief, bent on outrage, determined to turn out the heart of his time, and show, in the selectest form, the inmost lining of its lurking humanities--it is Cordelia whom he will hang--And we forgive him still, and bear with him in all these assaults on our taste--in all these thick-coming blows on our outraged sensibilities; we forgive him when at last the poetic design flashes on us,--when we come to understand the providence of this piece, at least,--when we come to see at last that there is a meaning in it _all_, a meaning deep to justify even this procedure.

'We are not the _first_ who, with _the best_ meaning, have _incurred the worst_,' says the captive queen herself; nor was she the last of that good company, as the Poet himself might have testified;--

Upon such sacrifices the gods themselves _throw incense_.

We forgive the Poet here, as we forgive him in all these other pitiful and revolting exhibitions, because we know that he who would undertake the time's cure--he who would undertake the relief of the human estate in any age, must probe its evil--must reach, no matter what it costs, its deadliest _hollow_.

And in that age, there was no voice which could afford to lack 'the courtier's glib and oily art.' 'Hanging was the word' then, for the qualities of which this princess was the impersonation, or almost the impersonation, so predominant were they in her poetic constitution. There was no voice, gentle and low enough, to speak outright such truth as hers; and 'banishment' and 'the stocks' would have been only too mild a remedy for 'the plainness' to which Kent declares, even to the teeth of majesty, 'honour's bound, when majesty stoops to folly.'

The kind, considerate Gloster, with all his loyalty to the powers which are able to show the divine right of possession, and with all his disposition to conform to the times, is greatly distressed and perplexed with the outrages which are perpetrated, as it were, under his own immediate sanction and authority. He has a hard struggle to reconcile his duty as the subject of a state which he is not prepared to overthrow, with his humane impulses and designs. He goes pattering about for a time, remonstrating, and apologizing, and trying 'to smooth down,' and 'hush up,' and mollify, and keep peace between the offending parties. He stands between the blunt, straightforward manliness of the honest Kent on the one hand, and the sycophantic servility and self-abnegation, which knows no will but the master's, as represented by the Steward, on the other.

'I am sorry for thee,' he says to Kent, after having sought in vain to prevent this outrage from being perpetrated in his own court--

'I am sorry for thee, friend: _tis the duke's pleasure,
Whose disposition all the world well knows,
Will not be rubbed or stopped_'--

as he found to his cost, poor man, when he came to have his own eyes gouged out by it. He 'saw it _feelingly_' then, as he remarked himself.

'I'll entreat for thee,' he continues, in his conversation with the disguised duke in the stocks. 'The duke's to blame in this. '_Twill be ill taken_.'

And when the king, on his arrival, kept waiting in the court, in his agony of indignation and grief, is told that Regan and Cornwall are 'sick,' 'they are weary,' 'they have travelled hard to-night,' denounces these subterfuges, and bids Gloster fetch him a better answer, this is the worthy man's reply to him--

'My dear lord,
You know the fiery quality of the duke,
How unremovable and fixed he is
In his own course.'

But Lear, who has never had any but a subjective acquaintance hitherto with reasons of that kind, does not appear able to understand them from this point of view--

_Lear_. Vengeance! plague! death! confusion!
_Fiery_?--what _quality_? Why Gloster, Gloster,
I'd speak with the Duke of Cornwall and his wife.

_Gloster_. Well, my good lord, I have informed them so.

_Lear_. Informed them? Dost thou understand me?

_Gloster_. Ay, my good lord.

But though Gloster is not yet ready to break with tyranny, it is not difficult to see which way he secretly inclines; and though he still manages his impulses cautiously, and contrives to succour the oppressed king by stealth, his courage rises with the emergency, and grows bold with provocation. For he is himself one of the finer and finest proofs of the times which the Poet represents; one, however, which he keeps back a little, for the study of those who look at his work most carefully. This man stands here in the general, indeed, as the representative of a class of men who do not belong exclusively to this particular time--men who do not stand ready, as Kent and his class do, to fly in the face of tyranny at the first provocation; they are not the kind of men who 'make mouths,' as Hamlet says, 'at the invisible event;'--they are the kind who know beforehand that to break with the powers that are, single-handed, is to sit on the stage and have your eyes gouged out, or to undergo some process of mutilation and disfigurement, not the less painful and oppressive, by this Poet's own showing, because it does not happen, perhaps, to be a physical one, and not the less calculated, on that account, to impair one's usefulness to one's species, it may be.

But besides that more general bearing of the representation, the part and disposition of Gloster afford us from time to time, glimpses of persons and things which connect the representation more directly with the particular point here noted. Men who found themselves compelled to occupy a not less equivocal _position_ in the state, look through it a little now and then; and here, as in other parts of the play, it only wants the right key to bring out suppressed historical passages, and a finer history generally, than the chronicles of the times were able to take up.

'Alack, alack, Edmund,' says Gloster to his natural son, making _him_ the confidant of his nobler nature, putting what was then the perilous secret of his humanity, into the dangerous keeping of the base-born one--for this is the Poet's own interpretation of his plot; though Lear is allowed to intimate on his behalf, that the loves and relations which are recognised and good in courts of justice, are not always secured by that sanction from similar misfortune; that they are not secured by that from those penalties which great Nature herself awards in those courts in which her institutes are vindicated.

'Alack, alack, Edmund, I like not THIS UNNATURAL DEALING! When I desired _their leave that I might pity him_, they took from me _the use of mine own house_, and charged me on pain of their perpetual displeasure, _neither to speak_ of him, _entreat for him, nor in any way to sustain him_.'

_Edmund_. Most _savage and unnatural_.

_Gloster_. Go to, say you nothing.

[And say you nothing, my contemporary reader, if you perceive that this is one of those passages I have spoken of elsewhere, which carries with it another application besides that which I put it to].

'There is division between the dukes--and a worse matter than that: I have received a letter this night,--'tis dangerous to be spoken;--I have _locked_ the letter in my _closet: these injuries the king now bears_, will be revenged _at home_' [softly--say you nothing]. '_There_ is _part of a power already footed_: we _must incline to the king. I_ will seek him and _privily relieve him_. _Go you and maintain talk with the duke_, that my charity be not of him perceived. If he ask for me, I am ill, and gone to bed. If I die for it,--_as no less is threatened me_,--_the king, my old master_--MUST BE RELIEVED. There is some strange thing toward, Edmund. Pray you be careful.'

Even Edmund himself professes to be not altogether without some experience of the perplexity which the claims of apparently clashing duties, and relations in such a time creates, though he seems to have found an easy method of disposing of these questions. _Nature_ is his goddess and his law (that is, as _he_ uses the term, the baser nature, the degenerate, which is not nature for man, which is _unnatural_ for the human kind), and in his own 'rat'-like fashion, 'he bites the holy cords atwain.'

'How, my lord,' he says, in the act of betraying his father's secret to the Duke of Cornwall, in the hope of 'drawing to himself what his father loses'--'how I may be censured that NATURE, thus gives way to LOYALTY, _something fears me to think of_.' And again, 'I will persevere in my course of _loyalty_, though the conflict be sore between that and my _blood_.'

'_Know thou this_,' he says afterwards, to the officer whom he employs to hang Cordelia, 'THAT MEN ARE AS THE TIME IS. Thy great employment will not bear question. About it, I say, instantly, and carry it so as I have set it down.' 'I cannot _draw a cart_, nor _eat dried oats_,' is the officer's reply, who appears to be also in the poet's secret, and ready to aid his intention of carrying out the distinction between the human kind and the brute, 'I cannot draw a cart, nor eat dried oats;--if it be MAN'S WORK I will do it.'

But it is the steward's part, as deliberately explained by Kent himself, which furnishes in detail the ideal antagonism of that which Kent sustains in the piece; for beside those active demonstrations of his disgust, which the poetic order tolerates in him, though some of the powers within appear to take such violent offence at it, besides these tangible demonstrations, and that elaborate criticism, which the poet puts into his mouth, in which the steward is openly treated as the representative of a class, who seem to the poet apparently, to require some treatment in his time, Kent himself is made to notice distinctly this literally striking opposition.

'No _contraries_ hold more _antipathy_ than I, and such a knave,' he says to Cornwall, by way of explaining his apparently gratuitous attack upon the steward.

No one, indeed, who reads the play with any care, can doubt the poet's intention to incorporate into it, for some reason or other, and to bring out by the strongest conceivable contrasts, his study of loyalty and service, and especially of regal counsel, and his criticism of it, as it stood in his time in its most approved patterns. 'Such smiling rouges as these' ('that _bite_ the _holy cords atwain_').

'Smooth every _passion_
That in the _nature of their lord rebels_;
Bring oil to fire, snow _to their_ colder moods;
Revenge, affirm, and turn their halcyon beaks
With every _gale_ and _vary_ of their masters,
As _knowing nought_ like _dogs_ but--_following_.'

Such ruses as this would not, of course, be wanting in such a _time_ as that in which this piece was planned, if Edmund's word was, indeed, the true one. 'Know thou this, _men_ are as the time is.'

And even amidst the excitement and rough outrage of that scene--in which Gloster's trial is so summarily conducted, even in that so rude scene--the relation between the _guest_ and his _host_, and the relation of the _slave_ to his _owner_, is delicately and studiously touched, and the human claim in both is boldly advanced, in the face of an absolute authority, and _age_ and _personal dignity_ put in their claims also, and demand, even at such a moment, their full rights of reverence.

[_Re-enter servants with_ GLOSTER.]

_Regan_. Ingrateful fox! 'tis he.

_Cornwall_. Bind fast his _corky_ arms.

_Gloster_. What mean your graces?--Good my friends, _consider_.
_You are my guests_: do me no foul play, _friends_.

_Cornwall_. Bind him, I say.

_Regan_. Hard, hard:--O filthy traitor!

_Gloster_. Unmerciful lady as you are, I am none.

_Cornwall_. To this chair bind him:--Villain, thou shalt
find--[REGAN _plucks his beard_].

_Gloster_. By the KIND gods [_for these are the gods, whose
'Commission' is sitting here_]'tis most _ignobly_ done,
To pluck me by the beard.

_Regan_. So white, and such a traitor!

_Gloster_. Naughty lady,
_These hairs_, which thou dost ravish from my chin,
Will quicken and accuse thee.
_I am your host_:
With _robber hands_, my hospitable favours
You should not _ruffle_ thus.

Tied to the stake, questioned and cross-questioned, and insulted, finally, beyond even his faculty of endurance, he breaks forth, at last, in strains of indignation that overleap all arbitrary and conventional bounds, that are only the more terrible for having been so long suppressed. Kent himself, when he 'came between the dragon and his wrath,' was not so fierce.

_Cornwall_. Where hast thou sent the king?

_Gloster_. _To Dover_.

_Regan_. Wherefore
To Dover, was't thou not charged at peril?--

_Cornwall. Wherefore to Dover?_ Let him first answer that.

_Regan_. Wherefore _to Dover?_

_Gloster_. Because I would not see thy cruel nails
Pluck out his poor old eyes, _nor thy fierce sister_
In his anointed flesh stick boarish fangs.

...

_Regan_. One side will mock another; the other too.

_Cornwall_. If you 'see vengeance.'

_Servant_. Hold your hand, my lord:
_I have served you ever since I was a child_;
But _better service_ have I never done you,
Than now _to bid you hold_.

_Regan_. How now, you _dog_?

_Servant_. If you did wear a beard upon your chin,
I'd shake it on this quarrel: _What do you mean_?

[_Arbitrary power called to an account, requested to explain
itself_.]

_Cornwall. My_ villain!

_Regan_. A PEASANT _stand up thus_?

Thus too, indeed, in that rude scene above referred to, in which the king finds his messenger in the stocks, and Regan's door, too, shut against him, the same ground of criticism had already been revealed, the same delicacy and rigour in the exactions had already betrayed the depth of the poetic design, and the real comprehension of that _law_, whose violations are depicted here, the scientific law, the scientific sovereignty, the law of universal nature; commanding, in the human, that specific human excellence, for the _degenerate_ movement is in violation of nature, that is not _nature_ but her profanation and undoing.

This is one of those passages, however, which admit, as the modern reader will more easily observe than the contemporary of the Poet was likely to of a second reading.

_Goneril_. Why might not you, my lord, receive attendance
From those that she calls servants, or from mine?

* * * * *

What need you five-and-twenty, ten, or five,
To _follow_ in a _house_, where twice so many
_Have a command to tend you_?

_Regan_. What need one?

_Lear_. O reason not the _need_: our basest beggars
Are in the poorest things superfluous.

[_Poor Tom must have his 'rubans_.']

Allow not NATURE more than NATURE needs,
MAN'S LIFE were cheap as BEASTS [_and that's not nature_]
Thou art _a lady_;
If only to go warm were _gorgeous_,
Why, _nature_ needs not what _thou gorgeous_ wear'st,
Which scarcely keeps thee warm.--But, for TRUE NEED,
You heavens, give me THAT patience.--_Patience I need_.

It is, indeed, the doctrine of the 'true need' that is lurking here, and all that puts man into his true place and relations in the creative order, whether of submission or control is included in it. It is the doctrine of the natural human need, and the natural ground and limits of the arts, for which nature has endowed man beforehand, with a faculty and a sentiment corresponding in grandeur to his need,--large as he is little, noble as he is mean, powerful as he is helpless, felicitous as he is wretched; the faculty and the sentiment whereby the _want_ of man becomes the measure of his wealth and grandeur,--whereby his conscious _lowness_ becomes the means of his ascent to his ideal type in nature, and to the scientific perfection of his form.

And this whole social picture,--rude, savage as it is,--savage as it shews when its sharp outline falls on that fair ideal ground of criticism which the doctrine of a scientific civilization creates,--is but the Poet's report of the progress of human development as it stood in his time, and of the gain that it had made on savage instinct then. It is his report of the social institutions of his time, as he found them on his map of human advancement. It is his report of the wild social misery that was crying underneath them, with its burthen of new advancements. It is the Poet's Apology for his new doctrine of human living, which he is going to publish, and leave on the earth, for 'the times that are far off.' It is the negative, which is the first step towards that affirmation, which he is going to establish on the earth for ever, or so long as the species, whose law he has found, endures on it. Down to its most revolting, most atrocious detail, it is still the Elizabethan civility that is painted here. Even Goneril's unscrupulous mode of disposing of her rival sister, though _that_ was the kind of murder which was then regarded with the profoundest disgust and horror--(the queen in Cymbeline expresses that vivid sentiment, when she says: 'If Pisanio have given his mistress that confection which I gave him for a cordial, she is served as I would serve a rat')--even as to that we all know what a king's favourite felt himself competent to undertake then; and, if the clearest intimations of such men as Bacon, and Coke, and Raleigh, on such a question, are of any worth, the household of James the First was not without a parallel even for that performance, if not when this play was written, when it was published.

It is all one picture of social ignorance, and misery, and _frantic_ misrule. It is a faithful exhibition of the degree of personal security which a man of honourable sentiments, and humane and noble intentions, could promise himself in such a time. It shows what chance there was of any man being permitted to sustain an honourable and intelligent part in the world, in an age in which all the radical social arts were yet wanting, in which the rude institutions of an ignorant past spontaneously built up, without any science of the natural laws, were vainly seeking to curb and quench the Incarnate soul of new ages,--the spirit of a scientific human advancement; and, when all the common welfare was still openly intrusted to the unchecked caprice and passion of one selfish, pitiful, narrow, low-minded man.

To appreciate fully the incidental and immediate political application of the piece, however, it is necessary to observe that notwithstanding that studious exhibition of lawless and outrageous power, which it involves, it is, after all, we are given to understand, by a quiet intimation here and there, _a limited monarchy_ which is put upon the stage here. It is a constitutional government, very much in the Elizabethan stage of development, as it would seem, which these arbitrary rulers affect to be administering. It is a government which professes to be one of law, under which the atrocities of this piece are sheltered.

And one may even note, in passing, that that high Judicial Court, in which poor Lear undertakes to get his cause tried, appears to have, somehow, an extremely modern air, considering what age of the British history it was, in which it was supposed to be constituted, and considering that one of the wigs appointed to that Bench had to leave his speech behind him for Merlin to make, in consequence of living before his time: at all events it is already tinctured with some of the more notorious Elizabethan vices--vices which our Poet, not content with this exposition, contrived to get exposed in another manner, and to some purpose, ere all was done.

_Lear_. It shall be done, I will arraign them straight!
Come, sit thou here, _most learned Justice_.

[_To the_ BEDLAMITE_.]

Thou, _sapient_ Sir, sit here. [_To the_ FOOL.]

And again,--

I'll see _their trial_ first. _Bring in the evidence_.
Thou _robed_ MAN of JUSTICE take _thy_ place.

[_To_ TOM O'BEDLAM.]

And _thou_, his _yoke fellow_ of EQUITY _bench by his side_.

[_To the_ FOOL.]

You are of '_the Commission_'--sit _you too_.

[_To_ KENT.]

Truly it was a bold wit that could undertake to constitute that bench on the stage, and fill it with those speaking forms,--speaking to the eye the unmistakeable significance, for these judges, two of them, happened to be on the spot in full costume,--and as to the third, he was of '_the commission_.' 'Sit you, too.' Truly it was a bold instructor that could undertake 'to facilitate' the demonstration of 'the more chosen subjects,' with the aid of diagrams of this kind.

Arms! Arms! Sword, fire! CORRUPTION IN THE PLACE! _False justicer, why hast thou let her scape_?

The tongues of these ancient sovereigns of Britain, 'tang' throughout with Elizabethan 'arguments of state,' and even Goneril, in her somewhat severe proceedings against her _father_, justifies her course in a very grave and excellent speech, enriched with the choicest phrases of that particular order of state eloquence, in which majesty stoops graciously to a recognition of the subject nation;--a speech from which we gather that the '_tender of a wholesome weal_' is, on the whole, the thing which she has at heart most deeply, and though the proceeding in question is a painful one to her feelings, a state necessity appears to prescribe it, or at least, render it '_discreet_.'

Even in Gloster's case, though the process to which he is subjected, is, confessedly, an extemporaneous one, it appears from the Duke of Cornwall's statement, that it was only the _form_ which was wanting to make it legal. Thus he apologizes for it.--

Though well we may not pass upon his life
Without the form of justice, yet our _power_
Shall do a _courtesy_ to _our wrath_, which men
May blame, _but not control_.

Goneril, however, grows bolder at the last, and says outright, 'Say if I do, the _laws_ are _mine_ NOT THINE.' But it is the law which is _thine_ and _mine_, it is the law which is for Tom o' Bedlam and for thee, that great nature speaking at last through her interpreter, and explaining all this wild scene, will have vindicated.

_Most_ MONSTROUS, exclaims her illustrious consort; but at the close of the play, where so much of the meaning sometimes comes out in a word, he himself concedes that the government which has just devolved upon him is an _absolute_ monarchy.

'For us,' he says, 'WE WILL RESIGN, during the life of this old Majesty, OUR ABSOLUTE POWER.'

So that there seems to have been, in fact,--in the minds, too, of persons who ought, one would say, to have been best informed on this subject,--just that vague, uncertain, contradictory view of this important question, which appears to have obtained in the English state, during the period in which the material of this poetic criticism was getting slowly accumulated. But of course this play, so full of the consequences of arbitrary power, so full of Elizabethan politics, with its 'ear-kissing arguments,' could not well end, till that word, too, had been spoken outright; and, in the Duke of Albany's resignation, it slips in at last so quietly, so properly, that no one perceives that it is not there by accident.

This, then, is what the play contains; but those that follow the _story_ and the superficial plot only, must, of course, lose track of the interior identities. It does not occur to these that the Poet is occupied with principles, and that the change of _persons_ does not, in the least, confound his pursuit of them.

The fact that tyranny is in one act, or in one scene, represented by Lear, and in the next by his daughters;--the fact that the king and the father is in one act the tyrant, and in another, the victim of tyranny, is quite enough to confound the criticism to which a work of mere amusement is subjected; for it serves to disguise the philosophic purport, by dividing it on the surface: and the dangerous passages are all opposed and neutralised, for those who look at it only as a piece of dramatized, poetic history.

For this is a philosopher who prefers to handle his principles in their natural, historical combinations, in those modified unions of opposites, those complex wholes, which nature so stedfastly inclines to, instead of exhibiting them scientifically bottled up and labelled, in a state of fierce chemical abstraction.

His characters are not like the characters in the old 'Moralities,' which he found on the stage when he first began to turn his attention to it, mere impersonations of certain vague, loose, popular notions. Those sickly, meagre forms would not answer his purpose. It was necessary that the actors in the New Moralities he was getting up so quietly, should have some speculation in their eyes, some blood in their veins, a kind of blood that had never got manufactured in the Poet's laboratory till then. His characters, no matter how strong the predominating trait, though '_the conspicuous instance_' of it be selected, have all the rich quality, the tempered and subtle power of nature's own compositions. The expectation, the interest, the surprise of life and history, waits, with its charm on all their speech and doing.

The whole play tells, indeed, its own story, and scarcely needs interpreting, when once the spectator has gained the true dramatic stand-point; when once he understands that there is a teacher here,--a new one,--one who will not undertake to work with the instrumentalities that his time offered to him, who begins by rejecting the abstractions which lie at the foundation of all the learning of his time, which are not scientific, but vague, loose, popular notions, that have been collected without art, or scientific rule of rejection, and are, therefore, inefficacious in nature, and unavailable for 'the art and practic part of life;' a teacher who will build up his philosophy anew, from the beginning, a teacher who will begin with history and particulars, who will abstract his definitions from nature, and have _powers_ of them, and not _words_ only, and make _them_ the basis of his science and the material and instrument of his reform. 'I will teach you _differences_,' says Kent to the steward, alluding on the part of his author, for he does not profess to be metaphysical himself to another kind of distinction, than that which obtained in the schools; and accompanying the remark, on his own part, with some practical demonstrations, which did not appear to be taken in good part at all by the person he was at such pains to instruct in his doctrine of distinctions.

The reader who has once gained this clue, the clue which the question of design and authorship involves, will find this play, as he will find, indeed, all this author's plays, overflowing every where with the scientific statement,--the finest abstract statement of that which the action, with its moving, storming, laughing, weeping, praying diagrams, sets forth in the concrete.

But he who has not yet gained this point,--the critic who looks at it from the point of observation which the traditionary theory of its origin and intent creates, is not in a position to notice the philosophic expositions of its purport, with which the action is all inwoven. No,--though the whole structure of the piece should manifestly hang on them, though the whole flow of the dialogue should make one tissue of them, though every interstice of the play should be filled with them, though the fool's jest, and the Bedlamite's gibberish, should point and flash with them at every turn;--though the wildest incoherence of madness, real or assumed, to its most dubious hummings,--its snatches of old ballads, and inarticulate mockings of the blast, should be strung and woven with them; though the storm itself, with its wild accompaniment, and demoniacal frenzies, should articulate its response to them;--keeping open tune without, to that human uproar; and howling symphonies, to the unconquered demoniacal forces of human life,--for it is the Poet who writes in 'the storm continues,'--'the storm continues,'--'the storm continues;'--though even Edmund's diabolical '_fa, sol, lah, mi_,' should dissolve into harmony with them, while Tom's five fiends echo it from afar, and 'mop and mow' their responses, down to the one that '_since possesses chambermaids_;' nobody that takes the play theory, and makes a matter of faith of it merely; nobody that is willing to shut his eyes and open his mouth, and swallow the whole upon trust, as a miracle simply, is going to see anything in all this, or take any exceptions at it.

Certainly, at the time when it was written, it was not the kind of learning and the kind of philosophy that the world was used to. Nobody had ever heard of such a thing. The memory of man could not go far enough to produce any parallel to it in letters. It was manifest that this was _nature_, the living nature, the thing itself. None could perceive the tint of the school on its robust creations; no eye could detect in its sturdy compositions the stuff that books were made of; and it required no effort of faith, therefore, to believe that it was not that. It was easy enough to believe, and men were glad, on the whole, to believe that it was not that--that it was not learning or philosophy--but something just as far from that, as completely its opposite, as could well be conceived of.

How could men suspect, as yet, that this was the new scholasticism, the New Philosophy? Was it strange that they should mistake it for rude nature herself, in her unschooled, spontaneous strength, when it had not yet publicly transpired that something had come at last upon the stage of human development, which was stooping to nature and learning of her, and stealing her secret, and unwinding the clue to the heart of her mystery? How could men know that this was the subtlest philosophy, the ripest scholasticism, the last proof of all human learning, when it was still a secret that the school of nature and her laws, that the school of natural history and natural philosophy, too, through all its lengths and breadths and depths, was open; and that '_the schools_'--the schools of old chimeras and notions--the schools where the jangle of the monkish abstractions and the 'fifes and the trumpets of the Greeks' were sounding--were going to get shut up with it.

How should they know that the teacher of the New Philosophy was Poet also--must be, by that same anointing, a singer, mighty as the sons of song who brought their harmonies of old into the savage earth--a singer able to sing down antiquities with his new gift, able to sing in new eras?

But these have no clue as yet to track him with: they cannot collect or thread his thick-showered meanings. He does not care through how many mouths he draws the lines of his philosophic purpose. He does not care from what long distances his meanings look towards each other. But these interpreters are not aware of that. They have not been informed of that particular. On the contrary, they have been put wholly off their guard. Their heads have been turned, deliberately, in just the opposite direction. They have no faintest hint beforehand of the depths in which the philosophic unities of the piece are hidden: it is not strange, therefore, that these unities should escape their notice, and that they should take it for granted that there are none in it. It is not the mere play-reader who is ever going to see them. It will take the philosophic student, with all his clues, to master them. It will take the student of the New School and the New Ages, with the torch of Natural Science in his hand, to track them to their centre.