The Philosophy of the Plays of Shakspere Unfolded

by Delia Salter Bacon

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as in the physician's report of the resources of his art, or in Cordelia's invocation to 'all the blessed secrets—the unpublished virtues of the earth,' that the track of the new physiological science, which this work embodies, may be seen.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.

CHAPTER V.

THE STATESMAN'S NOTE-BOOK—AND THE PLAY.

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.

Here, too, as elsewhere, it is the king himself on whom the bolder political expositions are thrust. But it is not his royalty only that has need to be put in requisition here, to bring out successfully all that was working then in this Poet's mind and heart, and which had to come out in some way. It was something more than royalty that was required to protect this philosopher in those astounding freedoms of speech in which he indulges himself here, without any apparent scruple or misgiving. The combination of distresses, indeed, which the old ballad accumulates on the poor king's head, offers from the first a large poetic license, of which the man of art—or 'prudence,' as he calls it—avails himself somewhat liberally.

With those daughters in the foreground always, and the parental grief so wild and loud—with that deeper, deadlier, infinitely more cruel private social wrong interwoven with all the political representation, and overpowering it everywhere, as if that inner social evil were, after all, foremost in the Poet's thought—as if that were the thing which seemed crying to him for redress more than all the rest—if, indeed, any thought of 'giving losses their remedies' could cross a Player's dream, when, in the way of his profession, 'the enormous state' came in to fill his scene, and open its subterranean depths, and let out its secrets, and drown the stage with its elemental horror;—with his daughters in the foreground, and all that magnificent accompaniment of the elemental war without—with all nature in that terrific uproar, and the Fool and the Madman to create a diversion, and his friends all about him to hush up and make the best of everything—with that great storm of pathos that the Magician is bringing down for him—with the stage all in tears, by their own confession, and the audience sobbing their responses—what the poor king might say between his chattering teeth was not going to be very critically treated; and the Poet knew it. It was the king, in such circumstances, who could undertake the philosophical expositions of the action; and in his wildest bursts of grief he has to manage them, in his wildest bursts of grief he has to keep to them.

But it is not until long afterwards, when the storm, and all the misery of that night, has had its ultimate effect—its chronic effect—upon him, that the Poet ventures to produce, under cover of the sensation which the presence of a mad king on the stage creates, precisely that exposition of the scene which has been, here, insisted on.

'They flattered me like a dog; they told me I had white hairs in my beard, ere the black ones were there. To say Ay and No to everything I said!—Ay and No too was no good DIVINITY. When the rain came to wet me once, and the wind made me chatter; when the thunder would not peace at my bidding,—there I found them, there I smelt them out. Go to, they are not men of their words. They told me I was everything: 'tis a lie. I am not ague-proof.'

Gloster. The trick of that voice I do well remember:

Is't not THE KING?

Lear. Ay, every inch a King:

When I do stare, see, how the subject quakes.

But it is a subject he has conjured up from his brain that is quaking under his regal stare. And it is the impersonation of God's authority, it is the divine right to rule men at its pleasure, with or without laws, as it sees fit, that stands there, tricked out like Tom o'Bedlam, with A CROWN of noisome weeds on its head, arguing the question of the day, taking up for the divine right, defining its own position:—

Is't not the king?

Ay every inch a king:

When I do stare, see how the subject quakes.

See; yes, see. For that is what he stands there for, or that you may see what it is at whose stare the subject quakes. He is there to 'represent to the eye,' because impressions on the senses are more effective than abstract statements, the divine right and sovereignty, the majesty of the COMMON-weal, the rule that protects each helpless individual member of it with the strength of all, the rule awful with great nature's sanction, enforced with her dire pains and penalties. He is there that you may see whether that is it, or not; that one poor wretch, that thing of pity, which has no power to protect itself, in whom the law itself, the sovereignty of reason, is dethroned. That was, what all men thought it was, when this play was written; for the madness of arbitrary power, the impersonated will and passion, was the state then. That is the spontaneous affirmation of rude ages, on this noblest subject,—this chosen subject of the new philosophy,—which stands there now to facilitate the demonstration, 'as globes and machines do the more subtle demonstrations in mathematics.' It is the 'affirmation' which the Poet finds pre-occupying this question; but this is the table of review that he stands on, and this 'Instance' has been subjected to the philosophical tests, and that is the reason that all those dazzling externals of majesty, which make that 'IDOL CEREMONY' are wanting here; that is the reason that his crown has turned to weeds. This is the popular affirmative the Poet is dealing with; but it stands on the scientific 'Table of Review,' and the result of this inquiry is, that it goes to 'the table of NEGATIONS.' And the negative table of science in these questions is Tragedy, the World's Tragedy. 'Is't not the king?' 'Ay, every inch—a King. When I do stare, see how the subject quakes.' But the voice within overpowers him, and the axioms that are the vintage of science, the inductions which are the result of that experiment, are forced from his lips. 'To say ay and no to everything that I—that I—said! To say ay and no too, was no GOOD DIVINITY. They told me that I was everything. 'T IS A LIE. I am not ague proof.' 'T is A LIE'—that is, what is called in other places a 'negative.'

In this systematic exposure of 'the particular and private nature' in the human kind, and those SPECIAL susceptibilities and liabilities which qualify its relationships; in this scientific exhibition of its special liability to suffering from the violation of the higher law of those relationships—its special liability to injury, moral, mental, and physical—a liability from which the very one who usurps the place of that law has himself no exemption in this exhibition,— which requires that the king himself should represent that liability in chief—it was not to be expected that this particular ill, this ill in which the human wrong in its extreme capes is so wont to exhibit its consummations, should be omitted. In this exhibition, which was designed to be scientifically inclusive, it would have been a fault to omit it. But that the Poet should have dared to think of exhibiting it dramatically in this instance, and that, too, in its most hopeless form—that he should have dared to think of exhibiting the personality which was then 'the state' to the eye of 'the subject' labouring under that personal disability, in the very act, too, of boasting of its kingly terrors—this only goes to show what large prerogatives, what boundless freedoms and immunities, the resources of this particular department of art could be made to yield, when it fell into the hands of the new Masters of Arts, when it came to be selected by the Art-king himself as his instrument.

But we are prepared for this spectacle, and with the Poet's wonted skill; for it is Cordelia, her heart bursting with its stormy passion of filial love and grief, that, REBEL-LIKE, seeks to be QUEEN o'er her, though she queens it still, and 'the smiles on her ripe lips seem not to know what tears are in her eyes,' for she has had her hour with her subject grief, and 'dealt with it alone,'—it is this child of truth and duty, this true Queen, this impersonated sovereignty, whom her Poet crowns with his choicest graces, on whom he devolves the task of prefacing this so critical, and, one might think, perhaps, perilous exhibition. But her description does not disguise the matter, or palliate its extremity.

'Why, he was met even now,
Mad as the vexed sea, singing aloud;'

Crowned—.

'Crowned with rank fumiter, and furrow weeds,
With hardocks, hemlock, nettles, cuckow flowers,
Darnel, and all the idle weeds that grow
In our sustaining corn.'

That is the crown; and a very extraordinary symbol of sovereignty it is, one cannot help thinking, for the divine right to get on its head by any accident just then. Surely that symbol of power is getting somewhat rudely handled here, in the course of the movements which the 'necessary questions of this Play' involve, as the critical mind might begin to think. In the botanical analysis of that then so dazzling, and potent, and compelling instrument in human affairs, a very careful observer might perhaps take notice that the decidedly hurtful and noxious influences in nature appear to have a prominent place; and, for the rest, that the qualities of wildness and idleness, and encroaching good-for-nothingness, appear to be the common and predominating elements. It is when the Tragedy reaches its height that this crown comes out.

A hundred men are sent out to pursue this majesty; not now to wait on him in idle ceremony, and to give him the 'addition of a king'; but—to catch him—to search every acre in the high-grown field, and bring him in. He has evaded his pursuers: he comes on to the stage full of self-congratulation and royal glee, chuckling over his prerogative:—

'No; they cannot touch me for COINING. I am the king himself.'

'O thou side-piercing sight!' [Collateral meaning.]

'Nature's above Art in that respect.' ['So o'er that art which you say adds to nature, is an art that Nature makes.'] 'There's your press money. That fellow handles his bow like a crow-keeper: draw me a clothier's yard.—Look, look, a mouse! Peace, peace; this piece of toasted cheese will do't.—There's my gauntlet; I'll prove it on a giant_.'

But the messengers, who were sent out for him, are on his track.

Enter a Gentleman, with Attendants.

Gent. O here he is, lay hand upon him. Sir, Your most dear daughter—

Lear. No rescue? What, a prisoner? I am even The natural fool of fortune! Use me well; You shall have ransom. Let me have a surgeon, I am cut to the brains.

Gent. You shall have anything.

Lear. No seconds? All myself?

Gent. Good Sir,—

Lear. I will die bravely, like a bridegroom: What? I will be jovial. Come, come; I am a king, My masters; know you that?

Gent. You are, a royal one, and we obey you.

Lear. Then there's life in it. Nay, an you get it, you shall get it by running. Sa, sa, sa, sa. [Exit, running; Attendants FOLLOW.] ['Transient hieroglyphic.']

Gent. A sight most pitiful in the meanest wretch; Past speaking of, in A KING!

[not past exhibiting, it seems, however.]

But, of course, there was nothing that a king, whose mind was in such a state, could not be permitted to say with impunity; and it is in this very scene that the Poet puts into his mouth the boldest of those philosophical suggestions which the first attempt to find a theory for the art and practical part of life, gave birth to: he skilfully reserves for this scene some of the most startling of those social criticisms which the action this play is everywhere throwing out.

For it is in this scene, that the outcast king encounters the victim of tyranny, whose eyes have been plucked out, and who has been turned out to beggary, as the penalty of having come athwart that disposition in 'the duke,' that 'all the world well knows will not be rubbed or stopped';—it is in this scene that Lear finds him smelling his way to Dover, for that is the name in the play—the play name—for the place towards which men's hopes appear to be turning; and that conversation as to how the world goes, to which allusion has been already made, comes off, without appearing to suggest to any mind, that it is other than accidental on the part of the Poet, or that the action of the play might possibly be connected with it! For notwithstanding this great stress, which he lays everywhere on forethought and a deliberative rational intelligent procedure, as the distinctive human mark,—the characteristic feature of a man,—the poor poet himself, does not appear to have gained much credit hitherto for the possession of this human quality.—

Lear. Thou seest how this world goes?

Gloster. I see it feelingly.

Lear. What, art mad?—

[have you not the use of your reason, then? Can you not see with that? That is the kind of sight we talk of here. It's the want of that which makes these falls. We have eyes with which to foresee effects,—eyes which outgo all the senses with their range of observation, with their range of certainty and foresight.]

'What, art mad? A man may see how this world goes with no eyes. Look with thine—ears: see how yon justice rails upon yon simple thief. Hark, in thine ear: Change places, and, handy-dandy, which is the justice, and which is THE THIEF?' [Searching social questions, as before. 'Thou robed man of justice (to the Bedlamite), take thy place; and thou, his yoke-fellow of equity (to the Fool), bench by his side. Thou, sapient sir, sit here.']

So that it would seem, perhaps, as if wisdom, as well as honesty, might be wanting there—the searching subtle wisdom, that is matched in subtlety, with nature's forces, that sees true differences, and effects true reformations. 'Change places. Hark, in thine ear.' Truly this is a player who knows how to suit the word to the action, and the action to the word; for there has been a revolution going on in this play which has made as complete a social overturning—which has shaken kings, and dukes, and lordlings out of their 'places,' as completely as some later revolutions have done. 'Change places!' With one duke in the stocks, and another wandering blind in the streets—with a dukeling, in the form of mad Tom, to lead him, with a king in a hovel, calling for the straw, and a queen hung by the neck till she is dead—with mad Tom on the bench, and the Fool, with his cap and bells, at his side—with Tom at the council-table, and occupying the position of chief favourite and adviser to the king, and a distinct proposal now that the thief and the justice shall change places on the spot—with the inquiry as to which is the justice, and which is the thief, openly started—one would almost fancy that the subject had been exhausted here, or would be, if these indications should be followed up. What is it in the way of social alterations which the player's imagination could conceive of, which his scruples have prevented him from suggesting here?

But the mad king goes on with those new and unheard-of political and social suggestions, which his madness appears to have had the effect of inspiring in him—

Lear. Thou hast seen a farmer's dog bark at a beggar?

Gloster. Ay, sir.

Lear. And the creature run from the cur? There might'st thou
behold the great image of AUTHORITY: a dog's obeyed in office.
Through tattered robes small vices do appear;
Robes, and furred gowns, hide all.
[Robes,—robes, and furred gowns!]
Plate sin with gold,
And the strong lance of justice hurtless breaks;
Arm it with rags, a pigmy's straw doth pierce it.

But that was before Tom got his seat on the bench—that was before Tom got his place at the council-table.

'None does offend,—none—'

[unless you will begin your reform at the beginning, and hunt down the great rogues as well as the little ones; or, rather, unless you will go to the source of the evil, and take away the evils, of which these crimes, that you are awarding penalties to, are the result, let it all alone, I say. Let's have no more legislation, and no more of this JUSTICE, this EQUITY, that takes the vices which come through the tattered robes, and leaves the great thief in his purple untouched. Let us have no more of this mockery. Let us be impartial in our justice, at least.] 'None does offend. I say none. I'll able 'em.' [I'll show you the way. Soft. Hark, in thine ear.] 'Take that of me, my friend, who have the power TO SEAL THE ACCUSER'S LIPS.' [Soft, in thine ear.]—

'Get thee glass eyes,
And like a scurvy politician, seem
To see the things thou dost not.—Now, now, now, NOW.
* * * * *
I know thee well enough. Thy name is—Gloster.
Thou must be patient; we came crying hither.
Thou know'st the first time that we smell the air
We wawl and cry. I will preach to thee; mark me.

Gloster. Alack, alack, the day!

Lear. When we are born, we cry that we are come
To this great stage of—Fools.
[Mark me, for I preach to thee—of Fools.
I am even the natural fool of fortune.]
—'O matter and impertinency, mixed
Reason in madness.'—

—is the Poet's concluding comment on this regal boldness, a safe and saving explanation; 'for to define true madness,' as Polonius says, 'what is it but to be nothing else but mad.' If the 'all licensed fool,' as Goneril peevishly calls him, under cover of his assumed imbecility, could carry his traditional privilege to such dangerous extremes, and carp and philosophize, and fling his bitter jests about at his pleasure, surely downright madness might claim to be invested with a privilege as large. But madness, when conjoined with royalty, makes a double privilege, one which this Poet finds, however, at times, none too large for his purposes.

Thus, Hamlet, when his mind is once in a questionable state, can be permitted to make, with impunity, profane suggestions as to certain possible royal progresses, and the changes to which the dust of a Cæsar might be liable, without being reminded out of the play, that to follow out these suggestions 'would be' indeed, 'to consider too curiously,' and that most extraordinary humour of his enables him also to relieve his mind of many other suggestions, 'which reason and sanity,' in his time, could not have been 'so prosperously delivered of.'

For what is it that men can set up as a test of sanity in any age, but their own common beliefs and sentiments. And what surer proof of the king's madness,—what more pathetic indication of its midsummer height could be given, than those startling propositions which the poet here puts into his mouth, so opposed to the opinions and sentiments, not of kings only, but of the world at large; what madder thing could a poet think of than those political axioms which he introduces under cover of these suggestions,—which would lay the axe at the root of the common beliefs and sentiments on which the social structure then rested. How could he better show that this poor king's wits had, indeed, 'turned;' how could he better prove that he was, indeed, past praying for, than by putting into his mouth those bitter satires on the state, those satires on the 'one only man' power itself,—those wild revolutionary proposals, 'hark! in thine ear,—change places. Softly, in thine ear,— which is the JUSTICE, and which is THE THIEF?' 'Take that of me who have the power to seal the accuser's lips. None does offend. I say none. I'll able 'em. Look when I stare, see how the subject quakes.' These laws have failed, you see. They shelter the most frightful depths of wrong. That Bench has failed, you see; and that Chair, with all its adjunct divinity. Come here and look down with me from this pinnacle, into these abysses. Look at that wretch there, in the form of man. Fetch him up in his blanket, and set him at the Council Table with his elf locks and begrimed visage and inhuman gibberish. Perhaps, he will be able to make some suggestion there; and those five fiends that are talking in him at once, would like, perhaps, to have a hearing there. Make him 'one of your hundred.' You are of 'the commission,' let him bench with you. Nay, change places, let him try your cause, and tell us which is the justice, which is the thief, which is the sapient Sir, and which is the Bedlamite. Surely, the man who authorizes these suggestions must be, indeed, 'far gone,' whether he be 'a king or a yeoman.' And mad indeed he is. Writhing under the insufficiency and incompetency of these pretentious, but, in fact, ignorant and usurping institutions, his heart of hearts racked and crushed with their failure, the victim of this social empiricism, cries out in his anguish, under that safe disguise of the Robes that hide all: 'Take these away at least,—that will be something gained. Let us have no more of this mockery. None does offend—none—I say none.' Let us go back to the innocent instinctive brutish state, and have done with this vain disastrous struggle of nature after the human form, and its dignity, and perfection. Let us talk no more of law and justice and humanity and DIVINITY forsooth, divinity and the celestial graces, that divinity which is the end and perfection of the human form.—Is not womanhood itself, and the Angel of it fallen—degenerate?—That is the humour of it.—That is the meaning of the savage edicts, in which this human victim of the inhuman state, the subject of a social state which has failed in some way of the human end, undertakes to utter through the king's lips, his sense of the failure. For the Poet at whose command he speaks, is the true scientific historian of nature and art, and the rude and struggling advances of the human nature towards its ideal type, though they fall never so short, are none of them omitted in his note-book. He knows better than any other, what gain the imperfect civilization he searches and satirizes and lays bare here, has made, with all its imperfections, on the spontaneities and aids of the individual, unaccommodated man: he knows all the value of the accumulations of ages; he is the very philosopher who has put forth all his wisdom to guard the state from the shock of those convulsions, that to his prescient eye, were threatening then to lay all flat.

'O let him pass!' is the Poet's word, when the loving friends seek to detain a little longer, the soul on whom this cruel time has done its work,—its elected sufferer.

'O let him pass! he hates him
That would upon the rack of this tough world,
Stretch him out longer.'
[Tired with all these, he cries in his own behalf.]
'Tired with all these, for restful death I cry.
Thou seest how this world goes. I see it feelingly.'

Albany. The weight of this sad time we must obey, Speak WHAT WE FEEL, not what we ought to say, The oldest hath borne most: we that are young Shall never see so much, nor live so long.

It needs but a point, a point which the Poet could not well put in,—one of those points which he speaks of elsewhere so significantly, to make the unmeaning line with which this great social Tragedy concludes, a sufficiently fitting conclusion to it; considering, at least, the pressure under which it was written; and the author has himself called our attention to that, as we see, even in this little jingle of rhymes, put in apparently, only for professional purposes, and merely to get the curtain down decently. It is a point, which it takes the key of the play—Lord Bacon's key, of 'Times,' to put in. It wants but a comma, but then it must be a comma in the right place, to make English of it. Plain English, unvarnished English, but poetic in its fact, as any prophecy that Merlin was to make.

'The oldest hath borne most, we that are young
Shall never see so much, nor live so long.'

There were boys 'in England then a-bed;' nay, some of them might have been present that day, for aught we know, on which one of the Managers of the Surrey Theatre, the owner of the wardrobe and stage-properties, and himself an actor, brought out with appropriate decorations and dresses, for the benefit of his audience on the Bankside, this little ebullition of his genius;—there were boys present then, perhaps, whose names would become immortal with the fulfilment of that prophecy;—there was one at Whitehall, when it was brought out there, whose name would be for ever linked with it. 'We that are young,—the oldest hath borne most. We that are young shall never see so much' [I see it feelingly],

'Shall never see so much, nor live so long.'

So.

But there were evils included in that tragic picture, which those who were young then, would not outlive; evils which the times that were near with their coarse, fierce remedies, would not heal; evils which the Seer and Leader of the Times that were far off, would himself make over to their cure;—evils in whose cure the Discoverer of the science of Nature, and the inventor of the New Magic which is the part operative of it, expected to be called upon for an opinion, when the time for that extension of his science, 'crushed together and infolded within itself in these books of Nature's learning,' should fully come.

Nothing almost sees MIRACLES but MISERY, says poor Kent, in the stocks, waiting for the 'beacon' of the morning, by whose comfortable beams, he might peruse his letter. 'I know,' he says,

''Tis from Cordelia,
Who hath most fortunately been informed
Of my obscured course, and shall find time
From this enormous state—seeking—TO GIVE
LOSSES THEIR REMEDIES.'

There is no attempt to demonstrate that the work here proposed as a study, worthy the attention of the philosophical student, is not, notwithstanding a Poem, and a Poet's gift, not to his contemporaries only, but to his kind. What is claimed is, indeed, that it is a Poem which, with all its overpowering theatrical effects, does, in fact, reserve its true poetic wealth, for those who will find the springs of its inmost philosophic purport. There is no attempt to show that this play belongs to the category of scientific works, according to our present limitation of the term, or that there could be found any niche for it, on those lower platforms and compartments of the new science of nature, which our modern works of natural science occupy.

It was inevitably a Poem. There was the essence of all Tragedy in the purely scientific exhibition, which the purpose of it required. The intention of the Poet to exhibit the radical idea of his plot impressively, so as to reach the popular mind through its appeal to the sensibilities, involved, of course, the finest series of conjunctions of artistic effects, the most exquisite characterization, the boldest grouping, the most startling and determined contrasts, which the whole range of his art could furnish.

But that which is only the incident of a genuine poetic inspiration, the effect upon the senses, which its higher appeals are sure to involve, becomes with those delighting in, and capable of appreciating, that sensuous effect merely, its sufficient and only end, and even a doctrine of criticism based on this inversion will not be wanting. But the difficulty of unlocking the great Elizabethan poems with any such theory of Art, arises from the fact that it is not the theory of Art, which the great Elizabethan Poets adopted, and whether we approve of theirs or not, we must take it, such as it was, for our torch in this exploration. As to that spontaneity, that seizure, that Platonic divination, that poetic 'fury,' which our prose philosopher scans in so many places so curiously, which he defines so carefully and strictly, so broadly too, as the poetic condition that thing which he appears to admire so much, as having something a little demoniacal in it withal, that same 'fine' thing which the Poet himself speaks of by a term not any less questionable,—as to this poetic inspiration, it is not necessary to claim that it is a thing with which this Poet, the Poet of a new era, the Poet, the deliverer of an Inductive Learning, has had himself, personally, no acquaintance. He knows what it is. But it is a Poet who is, first of all, a man, and he takes his humanity with him into all things. The essential human principle is that which he takes to be the law and limit of the human constitution. He is perfectly satisfied with 'the measure of a man,' and he gives the preference deliberately, and on principle to the sober and rational state in the human mind. All the elements which enter into the human composition, all the states, normal or otherwise, to which it is liable, have passed under his review, and this is his conclusion; and none born of woman, ever had a better chance to look at them, for all is alike heightened in him,—heightened to the ideal boundary of nature, in the human form; but that which seems to be heightened, most of all, that in which he stands preeminent and singular in the natural history of man, would seem to be the proportion of this heightening. It is what we have all recognized it to be, Nature's largest, most prodigal demonstration of her capacities in the human form, but it is, at the same time, her most excellent and exquisite balance of composition—her most subdued and tempered work. And the reason is, that he is not a particular and private man, and the deficiencies and personalities of those from whom he is abstracted, are studiously, and by method, kept out of him. For this is the 'Will' not of one man only; it is the scientific abstract of a philosophic union. It is a will that has a rule in art as well as nature.

Certainly he is the very coolest Poet; and the fullest of this common earth and its affairs, of any sage that has ever showed his head upon it, in prose or metre. The sturdiness with which he makes good his position, as an inhabitant, for the time being, of this terrestrial ball, and, by the ordinance of God, subject to its laws, and liable to its pains and penalties, is a thing which appears, to the careful reviewer of it, on the whole, the most novel and striking feature of this demonstration. He objects, on principle, to seizures and possessions of all kinds. He refuses to be taken off his feet by any kind of solicitation. He is a man who is never ashamed to have a reason,—one that he can produce, and make intelligible to common people, for his most exquisite proceedings; that is, if he chooses: but, 'if reasons were plentiful as blackberries,' he is not the man to give them on 'compulsion.' His ideas of the common mind, his notion of the common human intelligence, or capacity for intelligence, appears to be somewhat different from that of the other philosophers. The common sense—the common form—is that which he is always seeking and identifying under all the differences. It is that which he is bringing out and clothing with the 'inter-tissued robe' and all the glories which he has stripped from the extant majesty. 'Robes and furred gowns hide all' no longer.

He is not a bard who is careful at all about keeping his singing robes about him. He can doff them and work like a 'navvy' when he sees reason. He is very fond of coming out with good, sober, solid prose, in the heart of his poetry. He can rave upon occasion as well as another. Spontaneities of all kinds have scope and verge enough in his plot; but he always keeps an eye out, and they speak no more than is set down for them. His Pythoness foams at the mouth too, sometimes, and appears to have it all her own way, perhaps; but he knows what she is about, and there is never a word in the oracle that has not undergone his revision. He knows that Plato tells us 'it is in vain for a sober man to knock at the floor of the Muses'; but he is one who has discovered, scientifically, the human law; and he is ready to make it good, on all sides, against all comers. And, though the Muses knocked at his door, as they never had at any other, they could never carry him away with them. They found, for once, a sober man within, one who is not afraid to tell them, to their teeth, 'Judgment holds in me, always, a magisterial seat;'—and, with all their celestial graces and pretensions, he fetters them, and drags them up to that tribunal. He superintends all his inspirations.

There never was a Poet in whom the poetic spontaneities were so absolutely under control and mastery; and there never was one in whose nature all the spontaneous force and faculty of genius showed itself in such tumultuous fulness, ready to issue, at a word, in such inexhaustible varieties of creative energy.

Of all the spirits that tend on mortal thoughts there is none to match this so delicate and gorgeous Ariel of his,—this creature that he keeps to put his girdles round the earth for him, that comes at a thought, and brings in such dainty banquets, such brave pageants in the earth or in the air; there is none other that knows so well the spells 'to make this place Paradise.' But, for all that, he is the merest tool,—the veriest drudge and slave. The magician's collar is always on his neck; in his airiest sweeps he takes his chain with him. Caliban himself is not more sternly watched and tutored; and all the gorgeous masque has its predetermined order, its severe economy of grace; through all the slightest minutiæ of its detail, runs the inflexible purpose, the rational human purpose, the common human sense, the common human aim.

Yes, it is a Play; but it is the play of a mind sobered with all human learning. Yes, it is spontaneous; but it is the spontaneity of a heart laden with human sorrow, oppressed with the burthen of the common weal. Yes, indeed, it is a Poet's work; but it is the work of one who consciously and deliberately recognizes, in all the variety of his gifts, in all his natural and acquired power, under all the disabilities of his position, the one, paramount, human law, and essential obligation. Of 'Art,' as anything whatever, but an instrumentality, thoroughly subdued, and subordinated to that end, of Art as anything in itself, with an independent tribunal, and law with an ethic and ritual of its own, this inventor of the one Art, that has for its end the relief of the human estate and the Creator's glory, knows nothing. Of any such idolatry and magnifying of the creature, of any such worship of the gold of the temple to the desecration of that which sanctifieth the gold, this Art-King in all his purple, this priest and High Pontiff of its inner mysteries knows—will know—nothing.

Yes, it is play; but it is not child's play, nor an idiot's play, nor the play of a 'jigging' Bacchanal, who comes out on this grave, human scene, to insult our sober, human sense, with his mad humour, making a Belshazzar's feast or an Antonian revel of it; a creature who shows himself to our common human sense without any human aim or purpose, ransacking all the life of man, exploring all worlds, pursuing the human thought to its last verge, and questioning, as with the cry of all the race, the infinities beyond, diving to the lowest depths of human life and human nature, and bringing up and publishing, the before unspoken depths of human wrong and sorrow, wringing from the hearts of those that died and made no sign, their death-buried secrets, articulating everywhere that which before had no word—and all for an artistic effect, for an hour's entertainment, for the luxury of a harmonized impression, or for the mere ostentation of his frolic, to feed his gamesome humour, to make us stare at his unconsciousness, to show what gems he can crush in his idle cup for a draught of pleasure, or in pure caprice and wantonness, confounding all our notions of sense, and manliness, and human duty and respect, with the boundless wealth and waste of his gigantic fooleries.

It is play, but let us thank God it is no such play as that; let our common human nature rejoice that it has not been thus outraged in its chief and chosen one, that it has not been thus disgraced with the boundless human worthlessness of the creature on whom its choicest gifts were lavished. It is play, indeed; but it is no such Monster, with his idiotic stare of unconsciousness, that the opening of it will reveal to us. Let us all thank God, and take heart again, and try to revive those notions of human dignity and common human sense which this story sets at nought, and see if we cannot heal that great jar in our abused natures which this chimera of the nineteenth century makes in it—this night-mare of modern criticism which lies with its dead weight on all our higher art and learning—this creature that came in on us unawares, when the interpretation of the Plays had outgrown the Play-tradition, when 'the Play' had outgrown 'the Player.'

It is a play in which the manliest of human voices is heard sounding throughout the order of it; it is a play stuffed to its fool's gibe, with the soberest, deepest, maturest human sense; and 'the tears of it,' as we who have tested it know, 'the tears of it are wet.' It is a play where the choicest seats, the seats in which those who see it all must sit, are 'reserved;' and there is a price to be paid for these: 'children and fools' will continue to have theirs for nothing. For after so many generations of players had come and gone, there had come at last on this human stage—on 'this great stage of fools,' as the Poet calls it—this stage filled with 'the natural fools of fortune,' having eyes, but seeing not—there had come to it at last a MAN, one who was—take him for all in all—that; one who thought it—for a man, enough to be truly that—one who thought he was fulfilling his part in the universal order, in seeking to be modestly and truly that; one, too, who thought it was time that the human part on the stage of this Globe Theatre should begin to be reverently studied by man himself, and scientifically and religiously ordered and determined through all its detail.

For it is the movement of the new time that makes this Play, and all these Plays: it is the spirit of the newly-beginning ages of human advancement which makes the inspiration of them; the beginning ages of a rational, instructed—and not blind, or instinctive, or demoniacal—human conduct.

It is such play and pastime as the prophetic spirit and leadership of those new ages could find time and heart to make and leave to them, on that height of vision which it was given to it to occupy. For an age in human advancement was at last reached, on whose utmost summits men could begin to perceive that tradition, and eyes of moonshine speculation, and a thousand noses, and horns welked and waved like the enridged sea, when they came to be jumbled together in one 'monster,' did not appear to answer the purpose of human combination, or the purpose of human life on earth; appeared, indeed to be still far, 'far wide' of the end which human society is everywhere blindly pushing and groping for, en masse.

There was a point of observation from which this fortuitous social conjunction did not appear to the critical eye or ear to be making just that kind of play and music which human nature—singularly enough, considering what kind of conditions it lights on—is constitutionally inclined to expect and demand; not that, or indeed any perceptible approximation to a paradisaical state of things. There was, indeed, a point of view—one which commanded not the political mysteries of the time only, but the household secrets of it, and the deeper secrets of the solitary heart of man, one which commanded alike the palace and the hovel, to their blackest recesses—there was a point of view from which these social agencies appeared to be making then, in fact, whether one looked with eyes or ears, a mere diabolical jangle, and 'fa, sol, la, mi', of it, a demoniacal storm music; and from that height of observation all ruinous disorders could be seen coming out, and driving men to vice and despair, urging them to self-destruction even, and hunting them disquietly to their graves. 'Nothing almost sees miracles but misery;' and this was the Age in which the New Magic was invented.

It was the age in which that grand discovery was made, which the Fool undertakes to palm off here as the fruit of his own single invention; and, indeed, it was found that the application of it to certain departments of human affairs was more successfully managed by this gentleman in his motley, than by some of his brother philosophers who attempted it. It was the age in which the questions which are inserted here so safely in the Fool's catechism, began to be started secretly in the philosophic chamber. It was the age in which the identical answers which the cap and bells are made responsible for here, were written down, but with other applications, in graver authorities. It is the philosophical discovery of the time, which the Fool is undertaking to translate into the vernacular, when he puts the question, 'Canst thou tell why one's nose stands in the middle of his face?' And we have all the Novum Organum in what he calls, in another place, 'the boorish,' when he answers it; and all the choicest gems of 'the part operative' of the new learning have been rattling from his rattle in everybody's path, ever since he published his digests of that doctrine: '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 he cannot smell out he may spy into.' And 'all that follow their noses are led by their eyes, but—blind men.' And 'the reason why the seven stars are seven, is because they are not eight;' and the king who makes that answer 'would have made a good—fool,' for it's 'a very pretty reason.' And neither times nor men should be 'old before their time'; neither times nor men should be revered, or clothed with authority or command in human affairs, 'till they are wise.' ['Thou sapient sir, sit here.'] And it is a mistake for a leader of men to think that he 'has white hairs in his beard, before the black ones are there.' And 'ants,' and 'snails,' and 'oysters,' are wiser than men in their arts, and practices, and pursuits of ends. It was the age in which it was perceived that 'to say ay and no to everything' that a madman says, 'is no good divinity,' and that it is 'the time's plague when Madmen lead the Blind;' and that, instead of good men sitting still, like 'moral fools,' and crying out on wrong and mischief, 'Alack, why does it so?' it would be wiser, and more pious, too, to make use of the faculty of learning, with which the Creator has armed Man, 'against diseases of the world,' to ascend to the cause, and punish that—punish that, 'ere it has done its mischief.' It was the age in which it was discovered that 'the sequent effect, with which nature finds itself scourged,' is not in the least touched by any kind of reasoning 'thus and thus,' except that kind which proceeds first by negatives, that kind which proceeds by a method so severe that it contrives to exclude everything but the 'the cause in nature' from its affirmation, which 'in practical philosophy becomes the rule'—that is, the critical method,—which is for men, as distinguished from the spontaneous affirmation, which is for gods.

It is the beginning of these yet beginning Modern Ages, the ages of a practical learning, and scientific relief to the human estate, which this Pastime marks with its blazoned, illuminated initial. It is the opening of the era in which a common human sense is developed, and directed to the common-weal, which this Pastime celebrates; the opening of the ages in which, ere all is done, the politicians who expect mankind to entrust to them their destinies, will have to find something better than 'glass eyes' to guide them with; in which it will be no longer competent for those to whom mankind entrusts its dearest interests to go on in their old stupid, conceited, heady courses, their old, blind, ignorant courses,—stumbling, and staggering, and groping about, and smelling their way with their own narrow and selfish instincts, when it is the common-weal they have taken on their shoulders;—running foul of the nature of things—quarrelling with eternal necessities, and crying out, when the wreck is made, 'Alack! why does it so?'

This Play, and all these plays, were meant to be pastime for ages in which state reasons must needs be something else than 'the pleasure' of certain individuals, 'whose disposition, all the world well knows, will not be rubbed or stopped;' or 'the quality,' 'fiery' or otherwise, of this or that person, no matter 'how unremoveable and fixed' he may be 'in his own course.'

It was to the 'far off times;' and not to the 'near,' it was to the advanced ages of the Advancement of Learning, that this Play was dedicated by its Author. For it was the spirit of the modern ages that inspired it. It was the new Prometheus who planned it; the more aspiring Titan, who would bring down in his New Organum a new and more radiant gift; it was the Benefactor and Foreseer, who would advance the rude kind to new and more enviable approximations to the celestial summits. He knew there would come a time, in the inevitable advancements of that new era of scientific 'prudence' and forethought which it was given to him to initiate, when all this sober historic exhibition, with its fearful historic earnest, would read, indeed, like some old fable of the rude barbaric past—some Player's play, bent on a feast of horrors—some Poet's impossibility. And that—was the Play,—that was the Plot. He knew that there would come a time when all this tragic mirth—sporting with the edged tools of tyranny—playing around the edge of the great axe itself—would be indeed safe play; when his Fool could open his budget, and unroll his bitter jests—crushed together and infolded within themselves so long—and have a world to smile with him, and not the few who could unfold them only. And that—that was 'the humour of it.'

Yes, with all their philosophy, these plays are Plays and Poems still. There's no spoiling the 'tragical mirth' in them. But we are told, on the most excellent contemporaneous authority—on the authority of one who was in the inmost heart of all this Poet's secrets—that 'as we often judge of the greater by the less, so the very pastimes of great men give an honourable idea to the clear-sighted of THE SOURCE FROM WHICH THEY SPRING.'