PART I.

PART I.

LEAR'S PHILOSOPHER

                           'Thou'dst shun a bear;
  But if thy way lay towards the raging sea,
  Thou'dst meet the bear i' the mouth.'

CHAPTER I. PHILOSOPHY IN THE PALACE.

  'I think the king is but a man, as I am.'—King Henry.
  'They told me I was everything.'—Lear.

OF course, it was not possible that the prerogative should be openly dealt with at such a time, questioned, discussed, scientifically examined, in the very presence of royalty itself, except by persons endowed with extraordinary privileges and immunities, persons, indeed, of quite irresponsible authority, whose right to do and say what they pleased, Elizabeth herself, though they should enter upon a critical analysis of the divine rights of kings to her face, and deliberately lay bare the defects in that title which she was then attempting to maintain, must needs notwithstanding, concede and respect.

And such persons, as it happened, were not wanting in the retinue of that sovereignty which was working in disguise here then, and laying the foundations of that throne in the thoughts of men, which would replace old principalities and powers, and not political dominions merely. To the creative genius which waited on the philosophic mind of that age, making up in the splendour of its gifts for the poverty of its exterior conditions, such persons,—persons of any amount or variety of capacity which the necessary question of its play might require, were not wanting:—'came with a thought.'

Of course, poor Bolingbroke, fevered with the weight of his ill-got crown, and passing a sleepless night in spite of its supposed exemptions, unable to command on his state-bed, with all his royal means and appliances, the luxury that the wet sea boy in the storm enjoys,—and the poet appears, to have had some experience of this mortal ill, which inclines him to put it down among those which ought to be excluded from a state of supreme earthly felicity,—the poor guilty disgusted usurper, discovering that this so blessed 'invention' was not included in the prerogative he had seized, under the exasperation of the circumstances, might surely be allowed to mutter to himself, in the solitude of his own bed-chamber, a few general reflections on the subject, and, indeed, disable his own position to any extent, without expecting to be called to an account for it, by any future son or daughter of his usurping lineage. That extraordinary, but when one came to look at it, quite incontestable fact, that nature in her sovereignty, imperial still, refused to recognize this artificial difference in men, but still went on her way in all things, as if 'the golden standard' were not there, classing the monarch with his 'poorest subject;'—the fact that this charmed 'round of sovereignty,' did not after all secure the least exemption from the common individual human frailty, and helplessness,—this would, of course, strike the usurper who had purchased the crown at such an expense, as a fact in natural history worth communicating, if it were only for the benefit of future princes, who might be disposed to embark in a similar undertaking. Here, of course, the moral was proper, and obvious enough; or close at hand, and ready to be produced, in case any serious inquiry should be made for it; though the poet might seem, perhaps, to a severely critical mind, disposed to pursue his philosophical inquiry a little too curiously into the awful secrets of majesty, retired within itself, and pondering its own position;—openly searching what Lord Bacon reverently tells us, the Scriptures pronounce to be inscrutable, namely, the hearts of kings, and audaciously laying bare those private passages, those confessions, and misgivings, and frailties, for which policy and reverence prescribe concealment, and which are supposed in the play, indeed, to be shrouded from the profane and vulgar eye, a circumstance which, of course, was expected to modify the impression.

So, too, that profoundly philosophical suspicion, that a rose, or a violet, did actually smell, to a person occupying this sublime position, very much as it did to another; a suspicion which, in the mouth of a common man, would have been literally sufficient to 'make a star-chamber matter of'; and all that thorough-going analysis of the trick and pageant of majesty which follows it, would, of course, come only as a graceful concession, from the mouth of that genuine piece of royalty, who contrives to hide so much of the poet's own 'sovereignty of nature,' under the mantle of his free and princely humours, the brave and gentle hero of Agincourt.

'Though I speak it to you,' he says, talking in the disguise of a 'private,' 'I think the King is but a man as I am, the violet smells to him as it doth to me; all his senses, have but human conditions. His ceremonies laid by, in his nakedness, he appears but a man; and though his affections are higher mounted than ours, yet, when they stoop, they stoop with the like wing. When he sees reason of fears, as we do, his fears, out of doubt, be of the same relish as ours are'; and in the same scene, thus the royal philosopher versifies, and soliloquises on the same delicate question.

'And what have kings that "privates" have not, too, save ceremony,—save general ceremony? And what art thou, thou idol ceremony?—What is thy soul of adoration?'

A grave question, for a man of an inquiring habit of mind, in those times: let us see how a Poet can answer it.

  'Art thou aught else but place, degree and form,
  Creating awe and fear in other men?
  Wherein, thou art less happy, being feared,
  Than they in fearing?

[Again and again this man has told us, and on his oath, that he cherished no evil intentions, no thought of harm to the king; and those who know what criticisms on the state, as it was then, he had authorised, and what changes in it he was certainly meditating and preparing the way for, have charged him with falsehood and perjury on that account; but this is what he means. He thinks that wretched victim of that most irrational and monstrous state of things, on whose head the crown of an arbitrary rule is placed, with all its responsibilities, in his infinite unfitness for them, is, in fact, the one whose case most of all requires relief. He is the one, in this theory, who suffers from this unnatural state of things, not less, but more, than his meanest subject. 'Thou art less happy being feared, than they in fearing.']

  What drink'st thou oft instead of homage sweet
  But poison'd flattery? O! be sick, great greatness,
  And bid thy ceremony give thee cure.
  Thinkest thou the fiery fever will go out
  With titles blown from adulation?
  Will it give place to flexure and low bending?

Interesting physiological questions! And though the author, for reasons of his own, has seen fit to put them in blank verse here, it is not because he does not understand, as we shall see elsewhere, that they are questions of a truly scientific character, which require to be put in prose in his time—questions of vital consequence to all men. The effect of 'poisoned flattery,' and 'titles blown from adulation' on the minds, of those to whose single will and caprice the whole welfare of the state, and all the gravest questions for this life and the next, were then entrusted, naturally appeared to the philosophical mind, perseveringly addicted to inquiries, in which the practical interests of men were involved, a question of gravest moment.

But here it is the physical difference which accompanies this so immense human distinction, which he appears to be in quest of; it is the control over nature with which these 'farcical titles' invest their possessor, that he appears to be now pertinaciously bent upon ascertaining. For we shall find, as we pursue the subject, that this is not an accidental point here, a casual incident of the character, or of the plot, a thing which belongs to the play, and not to the author; but that this is a poet who is somehow perpetually haunted with the impression that those who assume a divine right to control, and dispose of their fellow-men, ought to exhibit some sign of their authority; some superior abilities; some magical control; some light and power that other men have not. How he came by any such notions, the critic of his works is, of course, not bound to show; but that which meets him at the first reading is the fact, the incontestable fact, that the Poet of Shakspere's stage, be he who he may, is a poet whose mind is in some way deeply occupied with this question; that it is a poet who is infected, and, indeed, perfectly possessed, with the idea, that the true human leadership ought to consist in the ability to extend the empire of man over nature,—in the ability to unite and control men, and lead them in battalions against those common evils which infest the human conditions,—not fevers only but 'worser' evils, and harder to be cured, and to the conquest of those supernal blessings which the human race have always been vainly crying for. 'I am a king that find thee,' he says.

And having this inveterate notion of a true human regality to begin with, he is naturally the more curious and prying in regard to the claims of the one which he finds in possession; and when by the mystery of his profession and art, he contrives to get the cloak of that factitious royalty about him, he asks questions under its cover which another man would not think of putting.

'Canst thou,' he continues, walking up and down the stage in King Hal's mantle, inquiring narrowly into its virtues and taking advantage of that occasion to ascertain the limits of the prerogative—that very dubious question then,—

'Canst thou when thou command'st the beggar's knee, Command the health of it?'—

No? what mockery of power is it then? But, this in connection with the preceding inquiry in regard to the effect of titles on the progress of a fever, or the amenability of its paroxysm, to flexure and low bending, might have seemed perhaps in the mouth of a subject to savour somewhat of irony; it might have sounded too much like a taunt upon the royal helplessness under cover of a serious philosophical inquiry, or it might have betrayed in such an one a disposition to pursue scientific inquiries farther than was perhaps expedient. But thus it is, that THE KING can dare to pursue the subject, answering his own questions.

'No, thou proud dream That playst so subtly with a king's repose; I am a king that find thee; and I know 'Tis not the THE BALM, THE SCEPTRE, and THE BALL, THE SWORD, THE MACE, THE CROWN IMPERIAL, The inter-tissued ROBE of gold and pearl, The FARCED TITLE—

What is that?—Mark it:—the farced TITLE!—A bold word, one would say, even with a king to authorise it.

  'The farced TITLE running 'fore the king,
  THE THRONE he sits on, nor the tide of POMP
  That beats upon the high shore of this world,
  No, not all these, thrice gorgeous CEREMONY,
  Not all these laid in BED MAJESTICAL,
  Can sleep so soundly as the wretched slave
  Who, with a body filled, and vacant mind,
  Gets him to rest crammed with distressful bread,
  Never sees horrid night, the child of hell,
  But like a lackey from the rise to set
  Sweats in the eye of Phoebus; and all night
  Sleeps in Elysium.

Yes, there we have him, at last. There he is exactly. That is the scientific picture of him, 'poor man,' as this poet calls him elsewhere. What malice could a philosophic poet bear him? That is the monarchy that men were 'sanctifying themselves with,' and 'turning up the white of the eye to,' then. That is the figure that it makes when it comes to be laid in its state-bed, upon the scientific table of review, not in the formal manner of 'the second part' of this philosophy, but in that other manner which the author of the Novum Organum, speaks of so frequently, as the one to be used in applying it to subjects of this nature. That is the anatomy of him, which 'our method of inquiry and investigation,' brings out without much trouble 'when we come to particulars.' 'Truly we were in good hands,' as the other one says, who finds it more convenient, for his part, to discourse on these points, from a distance.

That is the figure the usurping monarch's pretensions make at the first blush, in the collections from which 'the vintage' of the true sovereignty, and the scientific principles of governments are to be expressed, when the true monarchy, the legitimate, 'one only man power,' is the thing inquired for. This one goes to 'the negative' side apparently. A wretched fellow that cannot so much as 'sleep o' nights,' that lies there on the stage in the play of Henry the Fourth, in the sight of all the people, with THE CROWN on his very pillow, by way 'facilitating the demonstration,' pining for the 'Elysium' at his meanest subject,—that the poor slave, 'crammed with distressful bread,' commands; crying for the luxury that the wet seaboy, on his high and giddy couch enjoys;—and from whose note-book came that image, dashed with the ocean spray,—who saw that seaboy sleeping in that storm?

But, as for this KING, it is the king which the scientific history brings out; whereas, in the other sort of history that was in use then, lie is hardly distinguishable at all from those Mexican kings who undertook to keep the heavenly bodies in their places, and, at the same time, to cause all things to be borne by the earth which were requisite for the comfort and convenience of man; a peculiarity of those sovereigns, of which the Man on the Mountains, whose study is so well situated for observations of that sort, makes such a pleasant note.

But whatever other view we may take of it, this, it must be conceded, is a tolerably comprehensive exhibition, in the general, of the mere pageant of royalty, and a pretty free mode of handling it; but it is at the same time a privileged and entirely safe one. For the liberty of this great Prince to repeat to himself, in the course of a solitary stroll through his own camp at midnight, when nobody is supposed to be within hearing, certain philosophical conclusions which he was understood to have arrived at in the course of his own regal experience, could hardly be called in question. And as to that most extraordinary conversation in which, by means of his disguise on this occasion, he becomes a participator, if the Prince himself were too generous to avail himself of it to the harm of the speakers, it would ill become any one else to take exceptions at it.

And yet it is a conversation in which a party of common soldiers are permitted to 'speak their minds freely' for once, though 'the blank verse has to halt for it,' on questions which would be considered at present questions of 'gravity.' It is a dialogue in which these men are allowed to discuss one of the most important institutions of their time from an ethical point of view, in a tone as free as the president of a Peace Society could use to-day in discussing the same topic, intermingling their remarks with criticisms on the government, and personal allusions to the king himself, which would seem to be more in accordance with the manners of the nineteenth century, than with those of the Poet's time.

But then these wicked and treasonous grumblings being fortunately encountered on the spot, and corrected by the king himself in his own august person, would only serve for edification in the end; if, indeed, that appeal to the national pride which would conclude the matter, and the glory of that great day which was even then breaking in the East, should leave room for any reflections upon it. For it was none other than the field of Agincourt that was subjected to this philosophic inquiry. It was the lustre of that immortal victory which was to England then, what Waterloo and the victories of Nelson are now, that was thus chemically treated beforehand. Under the cover of that renowned triumph, it was, that these soldiers could venture to search so deeply the question of war in general; it was in the person of its imperial hero, that the statesman could venture to touch so boldly, an institution which gave to one man, by his own confession no better or wiser than his neighbours, the power to involve nations in such horrors.

But let us join the king in his stroll, and hear for ourselves, what it is that these soldiers are discussing, by the camp-fires of Agincourt;—what it is that this first voice from the ranks has to say for itself. The king has just encountered by the way a poetical sentinel, who, not satisfied with the watchword—'a friend,'— requests the disguised prince 'to discuss to him, and answer, whether he is an officer, or base, common, and popular,' when the king lights on this little group, and the discussion which Pistol had solicited, apparently on his own behalf, actually takes place, for the benefit of the Poet's audience, and the answer to these inquiries comes out in due order.

Court. Brother John Bates, is not that the morning which breaks yonder?

  Bates. I think it be, but we have no great cause to desire the
  approach of day.

Will. We see yonder the beginning of the day, but I think we shall never see the end of it. Who goes there?

King Henry. A friend.

Will. Under what captain serve you?

King. Under Sir Thomas Erpingham.

Will. A good old commander, and a most kind gentleman: I pray you, what thinks he of our estate?

King. Even as men wrecked upon a sand, that look to be washed off the next tide.

Bates. He hath not told his thought to the king?

King. No; nor it is not meet that he should; for though I speak it to you, I think the king is but a man as I am.

And it is here that he proceeds to make that important disclosure above quoted, that all his senses have but human conditions, and that all his affections, though higher mounted, stoop with the like wing; and therefore no man should in reason possess him with any appearance of fear, lest he, by showing it, 'should dishearten his army.'

Bates. He may show what outward courage he will; but, I believe, as cold a night as 'tis, he could wish himself in the Thames, up to the neck; and so I would he were, and I by him, at all adventures, so we were quit here.

King. By my troth, I will speak my conscience of the king. I think he would not wish himself anywhere but where he is.

Bates. Then would he were here alone; so should he be sure to be ransomed, and a many poor men's lives saved.

King. I dare say you love him not so ill as to wish him here alone; howsoever you speak this to feel other men's minds; Methinks I could not die anywhere so contented as in the king's company; his cause being just, and his quarrel honorable.

Will. That's more than we know.

Bates. Ay, or more than we should seek after; for we know enough, if we know we are the king's subjects; if his cause be wrong, our obedience to the king wipes the crime of it out of us.

Will. But if the cause be not good, the king himself hath a heavy reckoning to make; when all those legs and arms and heads chopped off in a battle shall join together at the latter day, and cry all—We died at such a place; some swearing, some crying for a surgeon, some upon their wives left poor behind them; some upon the debts they owe; some upon their children rawly left. I am afeared that few die well, that die in battle; for how can they charitably dispose of anything when blood is their argument? Now if these men do not die well, it will be a black matter for the king that led them to it; whom to disobey were against all proportion of subjection.

King. So, if a son that is by his father sent about merchandise, do sinfully miscarry upon the sea, the imputation of his wickedness, by your rule, should be imposed upon his father that sent him: or if a servant, under his master's command, transporting a sum of money, be assailed by robbers, and die in many irreconciled iniquities, you may call the business of the master the author of the servant's damnation.—But this is not so…. There is no king, be his cause never so spotless, if it come to the arbitrament of swords, can try it out with all unspotted soldiers.

But the king pursues this question of the royal responsibility until he arrives at the conclusion that every subject's DUTY is THE KING'S, BUT EVERY SUBJECT'S SOUL IS HIS OWN, until he shows, indeed, that there is but one ultimate sovereignty; one to which the king and his subjects are alike amenable, which pursues them everywhere, with its demands and reckonings,—from whose violated laws there is no escape.

Will. 'Tis certain, every man that dies ill, the ill is upon his own head—[no unimportant point in the theology or ethics of that time]—THE KING is not to answer for it.

Bates. I do not desire the king should answer for me, and yet I determine to fight lustily for him.

King. I, myself, heard the king say, he would not be ransomed.

Will. Ay, he said so, to make us fight cheerfully; but when our throats are cut, he may be ransomed and we ne'er the wiser.

King. If I live to see it, I will never trust his word after.

Will. Mass, you'll pay him then! That's a perilous shot out of an elder gun, that a poor and private displeasure can do against a monarch. You may as well go about to turn the sun to ice, with fanning in his face with a peacock's feather.

And, indeed, thus and not any less absurd and monstrous, appeared the idea of subjecting the king to any effect from the subject's displeasure, or the idea of calling him to account—this one, helpless, frail, private man, as he has just been conceded by the king himself to be, for any amount of fraud or dishonesty to the nation, for any breach of trust or honour. For his relation to the mass and the source of this fearful irresponsible power was not understood then. The soldier states it well. One might, indeed, as well go about to turn the sun to ice, with fanning in his face with a peacock's feather.

  'You'll never trust his word after,' the soldier continues.
  'Come, 'tis a foolish saying.'

'Your reproof is something too round,' is the king's reply. It is indeed round. It is one of those round replies that this poet is so fond of, and the king himself becomes 'the private' of it, when once the centre of this play is found, and the sweep of its circumference is taken. For the sovereignty of law, the kingship of the universal law in whomsoever it speaks, awful with God's power, armed with his pains and penalties is the scientific sovereignty; and in the scientific diagrams the passions, 'the poor and private passions,' and the arbitrary will, in whomsoever they speak, no matter what symbols of sovereignty they have contrived to usurp, make no better figure in their struggles with that law, than that same which the poet's vivid imagination and intense perception of incompatibilities, has seized on here. The king struggles vainly against the might of the universal nature. It is but the shot out of an 'elder gun;' he might as well 'go about to turn the sun to ice with fanning in his face with a peacock's feather.' 'I should be angry with you,' continues the king, after noticing the roundness of that reply, 'I should be angry with you, if the time were convenient.'

But as to the poet who composes these dialogues, of course he does not know whether the time is convenient or not;—he has never reflected upon any of those grave questions which are here so seriously discussed. They are not questions in which he can be supposed to have taken any interest. Of course he does not know or care what it is that these men are talking about. It is only for the sake of an artistic effect, to pass away the night, and to deepen for his hero the gloom which was to serve as the foil and sullen ground of his great victory, that his interlocutors are permitted to go on in this manner.

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

And thus King Lear—that impersonation of absolutism—the very embodiment of pure will and tyranny in their most frantic form, taken out all at once from that hot bath of flatteries to which he had been so long accustomed, that his whole self-consciousness had become saturated, tinctured in the grain with them, and he believed himself to be, within and without, indestructibly, essentially,—'ay, every inch A KING;' with speeches on his supremacy copied, well nigh verbatim, from those which Elizabeth's courtiers habitually addressed to her, still ringing in his ears, hurled out into a single-handed contest with the elements, stripped of all his 'social and artificial lendings,' the poor, bare, unaccommodated, individual man, this living subject of the poet's artistic treatment,—this 'ruined Majesty' anatomized alive, taken to pieces literally before our eyes, pursued, hunted down scientifically, and robbed in detail of all 'the additions of a king'—must, of course, be expected to evince in some way his sense of it; 'for soul and body,' this poet tells us, 'rive not more in parting than greatness going off.'

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

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

  'Thou shalt find
  I will resume that shape, which thou dost think
  I have cast off for ever; thou shalt, I warrant thee.'
  'Do you mark that, my lord?'

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

CHAPTER II.

UNACCOMMODATED MAN.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  'Take physic, POMP;
  Expose thyself to feel what wretches feel,
  That thou may'st shake the superflux to them,
  And show the heavens more just.
  Oh, I have taken too little care of This!'

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

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

So busy is he, indeed, in laying by this king's 'ceremonies' for him, beginning with the first doubtful perception of a most faint neglect,—a falling off in the ceremonious affection due to majesty 'as well in the general dependents as in the duke himself and his daughter,'—so faint that the king dismisses it from his thought, and charges it on his own jealousy till he is reminded of it by another,—beginning with that faint beginning, and continuing the process not less delicately, through all its swift dramatic gradations,—the direct abatement of the regal dignities,—the knightly train diminishing,—nay, 'fifty of his followers at a clap' torn from him, his messenger put in the stocks,—and 'it is worse than murder,' the poor king cries in the anguish of his slaughtered dignity and affection, 'to do upon respect such violent outrage,'—so bent is the Poet upon this analytic process; so determined that this shaking out of a 'preconception,' shall be for once a thorough one, so absorbed with the dignity of the scientific experiment, that he seems bent at one moment on giving a literal finish to this process; but the fool's scruples interfere with the philosophical humour of the king, and the presence of Mad Tom in his blanket, with the king's exposition, suffices to complete the demonstration. For not less lively than this, is the preaching and illustration, from that new rostrum which this 'Doctor' has contrived to make himself master of. 'His ceremonies laid by, in his nakedness he appears but a man,' says King Hal. 'Couldst thou save nothing?' says King Lear to the Bedlamite. 'Why thou wert better in thy grave than to answer with thy uncovered body this extremity of the skies.' 'Is man,'—it is the king who generalises, it is the king who introduces this levelling suggestion here in the abstract, while the Poet is content with the responsibility of the concrete exhibition—'Is man no wore than this? Consider him well. Thou owest the worm no silk, the beast no hide, the cat no perfume:—Ha! here's three of us are sophisticated. Thou art the thing itself. UNACCOMMODATED MAN is no more but such a poor, bare, forked animal, as thou art. Off, off, you lendings.' But 'the fool' is of the opinion that this scientific process of unwrapping the artificial majesty, this philosophical undressing, has already gone far enough.

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

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

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

into which he turns his royal patient 'unbonneted.'

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

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

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

And thus it is, that this poor king must needs be brought out into this wild uproar of nature, and stripped of his last adventitious aid, reduced to the authority and forces that nature gave him, invaded to the skin, and ready in his frenzy to second the poet's intent, by yielding up the last thread of his adventitious and artistic defences. All his artificial, social personality already dissolved, or yet in the agony of its dissolution, all his natural social ties torn and bleeding within him, there is yet another kind of trial for him, as the elected and royal representative of the human conditions. For the perpetual, the universal interest of this experiment arises from the fact, that it is not as the king merely, dissolving like 'a mockery king of snow' that this illustrious form stands here, to undergo this fierce analysis, but as the representative, 'the conspicuous instance,' of that social name and figure, which all men carry about with them, and take to be a part of themselves, that outward life, in which men go beyond themselves, by means of their affections, and extend their identity, incorporating into their very personality, that floating, contingent material which the wills and humours and opinions, the prejudices and passions of others, and the variable tide of this world's fortunes make—that social Name and Figure in which men may die many times, ere the physical life is required of them, in which all men must needs live if they will live in it at all, at the mercy of these uncontrolled social eventualities.

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

'Are you our daughter? Does anyone here know me?' That is the word with which he breaks the silence of that dumb amazement, that paralysis of frozen wonder which Goneril's first rude assault brings on him. 'Why, this is not Lear; Ha! sure it is not so. Does any one here know me? Who is it that can tell me who I am?'

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

  'But yet thou art my flesh, my blood, my daughter.
  Or rather, a disease that's in my flesh
  Which I must needs call mine.
  Filial ingratitude!
  Is it not as this mouth should tear this hand
  For lifting food to it?'

For that is the poet's conception of the extent of this social life and outgoing—that is the interior of that social whole, in which the dissolution he represents here is proceeding,—and that is the kind of new phenomenon which the science of man, when it takes him as he is, not the abstract man of the schools, not the logical man that the Realists and the Nominalists went to blows for, but 'the thing itself,' exhibits. As to that other 'man,'—the man of the old philosophy,—he was not 'worth the whistle,' this one thinks. 'His bones were marrowless, his blood was cold, he had no speculation in those eyes that he did glare with.' The New Philosopher will have no such skeletons in his system. He is getting his general man out of particular cases, building him up solid, from a basis of natural history, and, as far as he goes, there will be no question, no two words about it, as to whether he is or is not. 'For I do take,' says the Advancer of Learning, 'the consideration in general, and at large, of Human Nature, to be fit to be emancipated and made a knowledge by itself.' No wonder if some new aspects of these ordinary phenomena, these 'common things,' as he calls them, should come out, when they too come to be subjected to a scientific inquiry, and when the Poet of this Advancement, this so subtle Poet of it, begins to explore them.

And as to this particular point which he puts down with so much care, this point which poor Lear is illustrating here, viz. 'that our affections carry themselves beyond us,' as the sage of the 'Mountain' expresses it, this is the view the same Poet gives of it, in accounting for Ophelia's madness.

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

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

  'Your old kind father, whose frank heart gave all,—
  O that way madness lies; let me shun that,
  No more of that.'

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

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

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

But Regan's views on this point are seconded and sustained, and there seems to be but one opinion on the subject among those who happen to have that castle in possession; at least the timid owner of it does not feel himself in a position to make any forcible resistance to the orders which his illustrious guests, who have 'taken from him the use of his own house,' have seen fit to issue in it. 'Shut up your doors, (says Cornwall),

'Shut up your doors, my lord: 'tis a wild night. My REGAN COUNSELS well; COME OUT O' THE STORM.'

And it is because this representation is artistic and dramatic, and not simply historical, and the Poet must seek to condense, and sum and exhibit in dramatic appreciable figures, the unreckonable, undefinable historical suffering of years, aad lifetimes of this vain human struggle,—because, too, the wildest threats which nature in her terrors makes to man, had to be incorporated in this great philosophic piece; and because, lastly, the Poet would have the madness of the human will and passion, presented in its true scientific relations, that this storm collects into itself such ideal sublimities, and borrows from the human passion so many images of cruelty.

In all the mad anguish of that ruined greatness, and wronged natural affection, the Poet, relentless as fortune herself in her sternest moods, intent on his experiment only, will bring out his great victim, and consign him to the wind and the rain, and the lightning, and the thunder, and bid his senses undergo their 'horrible pleasure.'

For the senses, scorned as they had been in philosophy hitherto, the senses in this philosophy, have their report also,—their full, honest report, to make to us. And the design of this piece, as already stated in the general, required in its execution, not only that these two kinds of suffering, these two grand departments of human need, should be included and distinguished in it, but that they should be brought together in this one man's experience, so that a deliberate comparison can be instituted between them; and the Poet will bid the philosophic king, the living 'subject' himself, report the experiment, and tell us plainly, once for all, whether the science of the physical Arts only, is the science which is wanting to man; or whether arts—scientific arts—that take hold of the moral nature, also, and deal with that not less effectively, can be dispensed with; whether, indeed, man is in any condition to dispense with the Science and the Art which puts him into intelligent and harmonious relations with nature in general.

It was necessary to the purpose of the play to exhibit man's dependence on art, by means of his senses and his sensibilities, and his intellectual conditions, and all his frailties and liabilities,— his dependence on art, based on the knowledge of natural laws, universal laws,—constitutions, which include the human. It was necessary to exhibit the whole misery, the last extreme of that social evil, to which a creature so naturally frail and ignorant is liable, under those coarse, fortuitous, inartistic, unscientific social conglomerations, which ignorant and barbarous ages build, and under the tyranny of those wild, barbaric social evils, which our fine social institutions, notwithstanding the universality of their terms, and the transcendant nature of the forces which they are understood to have at their disposal, for some fatal reason or other, do not yet succeed in reducing.

It is, indeed, the whole ground of the Scientific Human Art, which is revealed here by the light of this great passion, and that, in this Poet's opinion, is none other than the ground of the human want, and is as large and various as that. And the careful reader of this play,—the patient searcher of its subtle lore,—the diligent collector of its thick-crowding philosophic points and flashing condensations of discovery, will find that the need of arts, is that which is set forth in it, with all the power of its magnificent poetic embodiment, and in the abstract as well,—the need of arts infinitely more noble and effective, more nearly matched with the subtlety of nature, and better able to entangle and subdue its oppositions, than any of which mankind have yet been able to possess themselves, or ever the true intention of nature in the human form can be realized, or anything like a truly Human Constitution, or Common-Weal, is possible.

But let us return to the comparison, and collect the results of this experiment.—For a time, indeed, raised by that storm of grief and indignation into a companionship with the wind and the rain, and the lightning, and the thunder, the king 'strives in his little world of man,'—for that is the phrasing of the poetic report, to out-scorn these elements. Nay, we ourselves hear, as the curtain rises on that ideal representative form of human suffering, the wild intonation of that human defiance—mounting and singing above the thunder, and drowning all the elemental crash with its articulation; for this is an experiment which the philosopher will try in the presence of his audience, and not report it merely. With that anguish in his heart, the crushed majesty, the stricken old man, the child-wounded father, laughs at the pains of the senses; the physical distress is welcome to him, he is glad of it. He does not care for anything that the unconscious, soulless elements can do to him, he calls to them from their heights, and bids them do their worst. Or it is only as they conspire with that wilful human wrong, and serve to bring home to him anew the depth of it, by these tangible, sensuous effects,—it is only by that means that they are able to wound him.

'Nor rain, wind, thunder, fire, are my daughters,'

that is the argument.

'I tax you not, you elements, with unkindness.'

Surely that is logical; that is a distinction not without a difference, and appreciable to the human mind, as it is constituted,—surely that is a point worth putting in the arts and sciences.

  'I never gave you kingdoms, called you children;
  You owe me no subscription; why, then, let fall
  Your horrible pleasure? Here I stand your slave,
  A poor, infirm, weak, and despised old man;
  But yet, I call you servile ministers,
  That have with two pernicious daughters joined
  Your high, engendered battles 'gainst a head
  So old and white as this. O, O, 'tis foul.'

And in his calmer mood, when the storm has done its work upon him, and all the strength of his great passion is exhausted,—when his bodily powers are fast sinking under it, and like the subtle Hamlet's 'potent poison,' it begins at last to 'o'er-crow his spirit'—when he is faint with struggling with its fury, wet to the skin with it, and comfortless and shivering, he still maintains through his chattering teeth the argument; he will still defend his first position—

  'Thou thinkst 'tis much that this contentious storm
  Invades us to the skin; so 'tis to thee,
  But where the greater malady is fixed,
  The lesser is scarce felt.'

  'The tempest in my mind
  Doth from my senses take all feeling else,
  Save what beats there.'

  'In such a night
  To shut me out! Pour on, I will endure.
  In such a night as this.'

And when the shelter he is at last forced to seek is found, at the door his courage fails him; and he shrinks back into the storm again, because 'it will not give him leave to think on that which hurts him more.'

So nicely does the Poet balance these ills, and report the swaying movement. But it is a poet who does not take common-place opinions on this, or on any other such subject. He is one whose poetic work does not consist in illustrating these received opinions, or in finding some novel and fine expression for them. He is observing nature, and undertaking to report it, as it is, not as it should be according to these preconceptions, or according to the established poetic notions of the heroic requisitions.

But there is no stage that can exhibit his experiment here in its real significance, excepting that one which he himself builds for us; for it is the vast lonely heath, and the Man, the pigmy man, on it—and the KING, the pigmy king, on it;—it is all the wild roar of elemental nature, and the tempest in that 'little world of man,' that have to measure their forces, that have to be brought into continuous and persevering contest. It is not Gloster only, who sees in that storm what 'makes him think that a man is but a worm.'

Doubtless, it would have been more in accordance with the old poetic notions, if this poor king had maintained his ground without any misgiving at all; but it is a poet of a new order, and not the old heroic one, who has the conducting of this experiment; and though his verse is not without certain sublimities of its own, they have to consist with the report of the fact as it is, to its most honest and unpoetic, unheroic detail.

And notwithstanding all the poetry of that passionate defiance, it is the physical storm that triumphs in the end. The contest between that little world of man and the great outdoor world of nature was too unequal. Compelled at last to succumb, yielding to 'the tyranny of the open night, that is too rough for nature to endure—the night that frightens the very wanderers of the dark, and makes them keep their caves, while it reaches, with its poetic combination of horrors, that border line of the human conception which great Nature's pencil, in this Poet's hand, is always reaching and completing,—

'Man's nature cannot carry The affliction nor the fear.'

—Unable to contend any longer with 'the fretful element'—unable to 'outscorn' any longer 'the to and fro conflicting wind and rain'—weary of struggling with 'the impetuous blasts,' that in their 'eyeless rage' and 'fury' care no more for age and reverence than his daughters do—that seize his white hairs, and make nothing of them—'exposed to feel what wretches feel'—he finds at last, with surprise, that art—the wretch's art—that can make vile things precious. No longer clamoring for 'the additions of a king,' but thankful for the basest means of shelter from the elements, glad to avail himself of the rudest structure with which art 'accommodates' man to nature, (for that is the word of this philosophy, where it is first proposed)—glad to divide with his meanest subject that shelter which the outcast seeks on such a night—ready to creep with him, under it, side by side—'fain to hovel with swine and rogues forlorn, in short and musty straw'—surely we have reached a point at last where the action of the piece itself—the mere 'dumb show' of it—becomes luminous, and hardly needs the player's eloquence to tell us what it means.

Surely this is a little like 'the language' of Periander's message, when he bid the messenger observe and report what he saw him do. It is very important to note that ideas may be conveyed in this way as well as by words, the author of the Advancement of Learning remarks, in speaking of the tradition of the principal and supreme sciences. He takes pains to notice, also, that a representation, by means of these 'transient hieroglyphics,' is much more moving to the sensibilities, and leaves a more vivid and durable impression on the memory, than the most eloquent statement in mere words. 'What is sensible always strikes the memory more strongly, and sooner impresses itself, than what is intellectual. Thus the memory of brutes is excited by sensible, but not by intellectual things;' and thus, also, he proposes to impress that class which Coriolanus speaks of, 'whose eyes are more learned than their ears,' to whom 'action is eloquence.' Here we have the advantage of the combination, for there is no part of the dumb show, but has its word of scientific comment and interpretation.

  'Art cold [to the Fool]?
  I am cold myself. Where is this STRAW, my fellow?
  The art of our necessities is strange,
  That can make vile things precious. Come, your hovel.
  Come, bring us to this hovel.'

For this is what that wild tragic poetic resistance and defiance comes to—this is what the 'unaccommodated man' comes to, though it is the highest person in the state, stripped of his ceremonies and artificial appliances, on whom the experiment is tried.

  'Where is this straw, my fellow? Art cold? I am cold myself.
  Come, your hovel. Come, bring us to this hovel.'

When that royal edict is obeyed,—when the wonders of the magician's art are put in requisition to fulfil it,—when the road from the palace to the hovel is laid open,—when the hovel, where Tom o' Bedlam is nestling in the straw, is produced on the stage, and THE KING—THE KING—stoops, before all men's eyes, to creep into its mouth,—surely we do not need 'a chorus to interpret for us'—we do not need to wait for the Poet's own deferred exposition to seize the more obvious meanings. Surely, one catches enough in passing, in the dialogues and tableaux here, to perceive that there is something going on in this play which is not all play,—something that will be earnest, perhaps, ere all is done,—something which 'the groundlings' were not expected to get, perhaps, in 'their sixe-penn'orth' of it at the first performance,—something which that witty and splendid company, who made up the Christmas party at Whitehall, on the occasion of its first exhibition there, who sat there 'rustling in silk,' breathing perfumes, glittering in wealth that the alchemy of the storm had not tried, were not, perhaps, all informed of; though there might have been one among them, 'a gentleman of blood and breeding,' who could have told them what it meant.

'We construct,' says the person who describes this method of philosophic instruction, speaking of the subtle prepared history which forces the inductions—'we construct tables and combinations of instances, upon such a plan, and in such order, that the understanding may be enabled to act upon them.'

'They told me I was everything.'

They told me I was everything,' says the poor king himself, long afterwards, when the storm has had its ultimate effect upon him.

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

'I think the king is but a man, as I am' [says King Hal], 'All his senses have the like conditions; and his affections, though higher mounted, when they stoop, stoop with the like wing.'

But at the door of that rude hut the ruined majesty pauses. In vain his loving attendants, whom, for love's sake, this Poet will still have with him, entreat him to enter. Storm-battered, and wet, and shivering as he is, he shrinks back from the shelter he has bid them bring him to. He will not 'in.' Why? Is it because 'the tempest will not give him leave to ponder on things would hurt him more.' That is his excuse at first; but another blast strikes him, and he yields to 'the to and fro conflicting wind and rain,' and says—

'But I'll go in.'

Yet still he pauses. Why? Because he has not told us why he is there;—because he is in the hands of the Poet of the Human Kind, the poet of 'those common things that our ordinary life consisteth of,' who will have of them an argument that shall shame that 'resplendent and lustrous mass of matter' that old philosophers and poets have chosen for theirs;—because the rare accident—the wild, poetic, unheard-of accident—which has brought a man, old in luxuries, clothed in soft raiment, nurtured in king's houses, into this rude, unaided collision with nature;—the poetic impossibility, which has brought the one man from the apex of the social structure down this giddy depth, to this lowest social level;—the accident which has given the 'one man,' who has the divine disposal of the common weal, this little casual experimental taste of the weal which his wisdom has been able to provide for the many—of the weal which a government so divinely ordered, from its pinnacle of personal ease and luxury, thinks sufficient and divine enough for the many,—this accident—this grand poetic accident—with all its exquisite poetic effects, is, in this poet's hands, the means, not the end. This poor king's great tragedy, the loss of his social position, his broken-heartedness, his outcast suffering, with all the aggravations of this poetic descent, and the force of its vivid contrasts—with all the luxurious impressions on the sensibilities which the ideal wonders of the rude old fable yield so easily in this Poet's hands,—this rare accident, and moving marvel of poetic calamity,—this 'one man's' tragedy is not the tragedy that this Poet's soul is big with. It is the tragedy of the Many, and not the One,—it is the tragedy that is the rule, and not the exception,—it is the tragedy that is common, and not that which is singular, whose argument this Poet has undertaken to manage.

'Come, bring us to your hovel.'

The royal command is obeyed; and the house of that estate, which has no need to borrow its title of plurality to establish the grandeur of its claim, springs up at the New Magician's word, and stands before us on the scientific stage in its colossal, portentous, scientific grandeur; and the king—the king—is at the door of it: the Monarch is at the door of the Many. For the scientific Poet has had his eye on that structure, and he will make of it a thing of wonder, that shall rival old poets' fancy pieces, and drive our entomologists and conchologists to despair, and drive them off the stage with their curiosities and marvels. There is no need of a Poet's going to the supernatural for 'machinery,' this Poet thinks, while there's such machinery as this ready to his hands unemployed. 'There's something in this more than natural, if philosophy could find it out.' There's no need of going to the antique for his models; for he is inventing the arts that will make of this an antiquity.

The Monarch has found his meanest subject's shelter, but at the door of it he is arrested—nailed with a nail fastened by the Master of Assemblies. He has come down from that dizzy height, on the Poet's errand. He is there to speak the Poet's word,—to illustrate that grave abstract learning which the Poet has put on another page, with a note that, as it stands there, notwithstanding the learned airs it has, it is not learning, but 'the husk and shell' of it. For this is the philosopher who puts it down as a primary Article of Science, that governments should be based on a scientific acquaintance with 'the natures, dispositions, necessities and discontents of the people'; and though in his book of the Advancement of Learning, he suggests that these points 'ought to be,' considering the means of ascertaining them at the disposal of the government, 'considering the variety of its intelligences, the wisdom of its observations, and the height of the station where it keeps sentinel, transparent as crystal,'—here he puts the case of a government that had not availed itself of those extraordinary means of ascertaining the truth at a distance, and was therefore in the way of discovering much that was new, in the course of an accidental personal descent into the lower and more inaccessible regions of the Common Weal it had ordered. This is the crystal which proves after all the most transparent for him. This is the help for weak eyes which becomes necessary sometimes, in the absence of the scientific crystal, which is its equivalent.

The Monarch is at the hovel's door, but he cannot enter. Why? Because he is in that school into which his own wise REGAN, that 'counsels' so 'well'—that Regan who sat at his own council-table so long, has turned him; and it is a school in which the lessons must be learned 'by heart,' and there is no shelter for him from its pitiless beating in this Poet's economy, till that lesson he was sent there to learn has been learned; and it was a Monarch's lesson, and at the Hovel's door he must recite it. He will not enter. Why? Because the great lesson of state has entered his soul: with the sharpness of its illustration it has pierced him: his spirit is dilated, and moved and kindling with its grandeur: he is thinking of 'the Many,' he has forgotten 'the One,'—the many, all whose senses have like conditions, whose affections stoop with the like wing. He will not enter, because he thinks it unregal, inhuman, mean, selfish to engross the luxury of the hovel's shelter, and the warmth of the 'precious' straw, while he knows that he has subjects still abroad with senses like his own, capable of the like misery, still exposed to its merciless cruelties. It was the tenant of the castle, it was the man in the house who said, 'Come, let's be snug and cheery here. Shut up the door. Let's have a fire, and a feast, and a song,—or a psalm, or a prayer, as the case may be; only let it be within—no matter which it is':

'Shut up your doors, my lord; 'tis a wild night,— My Regan counsels well; come out o' the storm.'

But here it is the houseless man, who is thinking of his kindred,—his royal family, for whom God has made him responsible, out in this same storm unbonneted; and in the tenderness of that sympathy, in the searching delicacy of that feeling with which he scrutinizes now their case, they seem to him less able than himself to resist its elemental 'tyranny.' For in that ideal revolution—in that exact turn of the wheel of fortune—in that experimental 'change of places,' which the Poet recommends to those who occupy the upper ones in, the social structure, as a means of a more particular and practical acquaintance with the conditions of those for whom they legislate, new views of the common natural human relations; new views of the ends of social combinations are perpetually flashing on him; for it is the fallen monarch himself, the late owner and disposer of the Common Weal, it is this strangely philosophic, mysteriously philosophic, king—philosophic as that Alfred who was going to succeed him—it is the king who is chosen by the Poet as the chief commentator and expounder of that new political and social doctrine which the action of this play is itself suggesting.

In that school of the tempest; in that one night's personal experience of the misery that underlies the pompous social structure, with all its stately splendours and divine pretensions; in that New School of the Experimental Science, the king has been taking lessons in the art of majesty. The alchemy of it has robbed him of the external adjuncts and 'additions of a king,' but the sovereignty of MERCY, the divine right of PITY, the majesty of the HUMAN KINDNESS, the grandeur of the COMMON WEAL, 'breathes through his lips' from the Poet's heart 'like man new made.'

Kent. Good, my lord, enter here.

  Lear. Prythee, go in thyself. Seek thine own ease.
   . . . . But, I'll go in.
  In, boy,—go first—[To the Fool.]
  You, houseless poverty'—

He knows the meaning of that phrase now.

'Nay get thee in. I'll PRAY, and then I'll sleep.'

[Fool goes in.]

  'Poor, naked wretches, wheresoe'er you are
  That bide the pelting of this pitiless storm,'—

There are no empty phrases in this prayer, the critic of it may perceive: it is a learned prayer; the petitioner knows the meaning of each word in it: the tempest is the book in which he studied it.

'How shall your houseless heads and unfed sides, Your looped and windowed raggedness defend you From seasons such as these? O, I have taken Too little care of THIS. [Hear, hear]. Take physic, POMP; [Hear.] Expose thyself to feel what wretches feel, That thou mayest shake the superflux to them, And show the HEAVENS more just.'

That is his prayer. To minds accustomed to the ceremonial a religious worship, 'with court holy water in a dry house' only, or to those who have never undertaken to compose a prayer for the king and all the royal family at the hovel's mouth, and in such immediate proximity to animals of a different species, it will not perhaps seem a very pious one. But considering that it was understood to have been composed during the heathen ages of this realm, and before Christianity had got itself so comfortably established as a principle of government and social regulations, perhaps it was as good a prayer for a penitent king to go to sleep on, as could well be invented. Certainly the spirit of Christianity, as it appeared in the life of its Founder, at least, seems to be, by a poetic anachronism incorporated in it.

But it is never the custom of this author to leave the diligent student of his performances in any doubt whatever as to his meaning. It is a rule, that everything in the play shall speak and reverberate his purpose. He prolongs and repeats his burthens, till the whole action echoes with them, till 'the groves, the fountains, every region near, seem all one mutual cry.' He has indeed the Teacher's trick of repetition, but then he is 'so rare a wondered teacher,' so rich in magical resources, that he does not often find it necessary to weary the sense with sameness. He is prodigal in variety. It is a Proteus repetition. But his charge to his Ariel in getting up his Masques, always is,—

                  'Bring a corollary,
  Rather than want a spirit.'

Nay, it would be dangerous, not wearisome merely, to make the text of this living commentary continuous, or to bring too near together 'those short and pithy sentences' wherein the action unwinds and fashions into its immortal groups. And the curtain must fall and rise again, ere the outcast duke,—his eyes gouged out by tyranny, turned forth to smell his way to Dover,—can dare to echo, word by word, the thoughts of the outcast king.

Led by one whose qualification for leadership is, that he is 'Madman and Beggar, too,'—for as Gloster explains it to us, explaining also at the same time much else that the scenic language of the play, the dumb show, the transitory hieroglyphic of it presents, and all the criticism of it,

''T IS THE TIME'S PLAGUE WHEN MADMEN LEAD THE BLIND'—

groping with such leadership his way to Dover—'smelling it out'—thus it is that his secret understanding with the king, in that mad and wondrous philosophical humour of his, betrays itself.

  Gloster. Here, take this purse [to Tom o'Bedlam], thou whom the
  heaven's plagues
  Have humbled to all strokes: that I am wretched
  Makes thee the happier:—Heavens, deal so still!
  Let the superfluous and lust-dieted man
  That slaves your ordinance, that will not SEE
  Because he doth not FEEL, feel your power quickly;
  So distribution should undo excess,
  And each man have enough.

Lear. O I have taken Too little care of this. Take physic, Pomp; Expose thyself to FEEL what wretches FEEL, That thou may'st shake the superflux to them, And show the Heavens more just.

Truly, these men would seem to have been taking lessons in the same school. But it is very seldom that two men in real life, of equal learning on any topic, coincide so exactly in their trains of thought, and in the niceties of their expression in discussing it. The emphasis is deep, indeed, when this author graves his meaning with such a repetition. But Regan's stern school-master is abroad in this play, enforcing the philosophic subtleties, bringing home to the senses the neglected lessons of nature; full of errands to 'wilful men,' charged with coarse lessons to those who will learn through the senses only great Nature's lore—that 'slave Heaven's ordinance—that will not SEE, because they do not FEEL.'

CHAPTER III.

THE KING AND THE BEGGAR.

Armado. Is there not a ballad, boy, of the King and the Beggar?

Moth. The world was very guilty of such a ballad some three ages since: but, I think, now 'tis not to be found; or, if it were, it would neither serve for the writing, nor for the tune.

  Armado. I will have the subject newly writ over, that I
  may example my digression
  by some mighty precedent.
             Love's Labour's Lost.

But the king's philosophical studies are not yet completed; for he is in the hands of one who does not rely on general statements for his effects; one who is pertinaciously bent on exploring those subterranean social depths, that the king's prayer has just glanced at—who is determined to lay bare to the utmost, to carry the torch of his new science into the lowest recess of that wild, nameless mass of human neglect and misery, which the regal sympathy has embraced for him in the general; though not, indeed, without some niceties of detail, which shew that the eye of a true human pity has collected the terms in which he expresses it.

That vast, immeasurable mass of social misery, which has no learned speech, no tragic dialect—no, or 'it would bear such an emphasis,' that 'its phrase of sorrow might conjure the wandering stars, and bid them stand like wonder-wounded hearers'—that misery which must get a king's robe about it, ere, in the Poet's time, it could have an audience, must needs be produced here, ere all this play was played, in its own native and proper shape and costume, daring as the attempt might seem.

The author is not satisfied with the picturesque details of that misery which he has already given us, with its 'looped and windowed raggedness,' its 'houseless head,' its 'unfed sides'; it must be yet more palpably presented. It must be embodied and dramatically developed; it must be exhibited with its proper moral and intellectual accompaniments, too, before the philosophic requisitions of this design can be fulfilled.

To the lowest deeps of the lowest depths of the unfathomed social misery of that time, the new philosopher, the Poet of the Advancement of Learning, will himself descend; and drag up to the eye of day,—undeterred by any scruple of poetic sensibility,—in his own unborrowed habiliments, with all the badges of his position in the state upon him, the creature he has selected as one of the representatives of the social state as he finds it;—the creature he has selected as the representative of those loathsome, unpenetrated masses of human life, which the unscientific social state must needs generate.

For the design of this play, in its exhibition of the true human need, in its new and large exhibition of the ground which the Arts of a true and rational human civilization must cover, could not but include the defects of that, which passed for civilization then. It involved necessarily, indeed, the most searching and relentless criticisms of the existing institutions of that time. That cry of social misery which pervades it, in which the natural, and social, and artificial evils are still discriminated through all the most tragic bursts of passion—in which the true social need, in all its comprehension, is uttered—that wild cry of human anguish, prolonged, and repeated, and reverberated as it is—is all one outcry upon the social wisdom of the Poet's time. It constitutes one continuous dramatic expression and embodiment of that so deeply-rooted opinion which the New Philosopher is known to have entertained, in regard to the practical knowledge of mankind as he found it; his opinion of the real advances towards the true human ends which had been made in his time; an opinion which he has, indeed, taken occasion to express elsewhere with some distinctness, considering the conditions which hampered the expression of his philosophical conclusions; but it is one which could hardly have been produced from the philosophic chair in his time, or from the bench, or at the council-table, in such terms as we find him launching out into here, without any fear or scruple.

For those who persuade themselves that it was any part of this player's intention to bring out, for the amusement of his audiences, an historical exhibition of the Life and Times of that ancient Celtic king of Britain, whose legendary name and chronicle he has appropriated so effectively, will be prevented by that view of the subject from ever attaining the least inkling of the matter here. For this Magician has quite other work in hand. He does not put his girdles round the earth, and enforce and harass with toil his delicate spirits,—he does not get out his book and staff, and put on his Enchanter's robe, for any such kind of effect as that. For this is not any antiquary at all, but the true Prospero; and when a little more light has been brought into his cell, his garments will be found to be, like the disguised Edgar's—'Persian.'

It is not enough, then, in the wild revolutionary sweep of this play, to bring out the monarch from his palace, and set him down at the hovel's door. It is not enough to open it, and shew us, by the light of Cordelia's pity—that sunshine and rain at once—the 'swine' in that human dwelling, and 'the short and musty-straw' there. For the poet himself will enter it, and drag out its living human tenant into the day of his immortal verse. He will set him up for all ages, on his great stage, side by side with his great brother. He will put the feet of these two men on one platform, and measure their stature—for all their senses have the like conditions, as we have heard already; and he will make the king himself own the KINDRED, and interpret for him. For this group must needs be completed 'to the eye'; these two extremes in the social scale must meet and literally embrace each other, before this Teacher's doctrine of 'MAN'—'man as distinguished from other species'—can be artistically exhibited. For it is this picture of the unaccommodated man—'unaccommodated' still, with all his empiric arts, with all his wordy philosophy—it is this picture of man 'as he is,' in the misery of his IGNORANCE, in his blind struggle with his law of KIND, which is his law of 'BEING,'— unreconciled to his place in the universal order, where he must live or have no life—for the beast, obedient to his law, rejects from his kinds the degenerate man—it is this vivid, condensed, scientific exhibition, this scientific collection of the fact of man as he is, in his empiric struggle with the law which universal nature enforces, and will enforce on him with all her pains and penalties till he learns it—it is this 'negation' which brings out the true doctrine of man and human society in this method of inquiry. For the scientific method begins with negations and exclusions, and concludes only after every species of rejection; the other, the common method, which begins with 'AFFIRMATION,' is the one that has failed in practice, the one which has brought about just this state of things which science is undertaking to reform.

But this levelling, which the man of the new science, with his new apparatus, with his 'globe and his machines,' contrives to exhibit here with so much 'facility,' is a scientific one, designed to answer a scientific purpose merely. The experimenter, in this case, is one who looks with scientific forebodings, and not with hope only, on those storms of violent political revolution that were hanging then on the world's horizon, and threatening to repeat this process, threatening to overwhelm in their wild crash, all the ancient social structures—threatening 'to lay all flat'! That is not the kind of change he meditates. His is the subtle, all-penetrating Radicalism of the New Science, which imitates the noiseless processes of Nature in its change and Re-formation.

There is a wild gibberish heard in the straw. The fool shrieks, 'Nuncle, come not in here,' and out rushes 'Tom o Bedlam'—the naked creature, as Gloster calls him—with his 'elf locks,' his 'blanketed loins,' his 'begrimed face,' with his shattered wits, his madness, real or assumed—there he stands.

We know, indeed, in this instance, that there is gentle, nay, noble blood, there, under that horrid guise. It is the heir of a dukedom, we are told, but an out-cast one, who has found himself compelled, for the sake of prolonging life, to assume that shape, as other wretches were in the Poet's time for that same purpose,—men who had lost their dukedoms, too, as it would seem, such as they were, in some way, and their human relationships, too. But notwithstanding this alleviating circumstance which enables the audience to endure the exhibition in this instance, it serves not the less effectually in the Poet's hand, as 'THE CONSPICUOUS INSTANCE' of that lowest human condition which this grand Social Tragedy must needs include in its delineations.

Here are some of the prose English descriptions of this creature, which we find already included in the commentaries on this tragedy; and which shew that the Poet has not exaggerated his portrait, and that it is not by way of celebrating any Anglo-Saxon or Norman triumph over the barbarisms of the joint reigns of REGAN and GONERIL, that he is produced here.

'I remember, before the civil wars, Tom o' Bedlams went about begging,' Aubrey says. Randle Holme, in his 'Academy of Arms and Blazon,' includes them in his descriptions, as a class of vagabonds 'feigning themselves mad.' 'The Bedlam is in the same garb, with a long staff,' etc., 'but his cloathing is more fantastic and ridiculous; for being a madman, he is madly decked and dressed all over with rubans, feathers, cuttings of cloth, and what not, to make him seem a madman, when he is no other than a dissembling knave.'

In the Bellman of London, 1640, there is another description of him—'He sweares he hath been in Bedlam, and will talk frantickely of purpose; you see pinnes stuck in sundry places of his naked flesh, especially in his armes, which paine he gladly puts himselfe to; calls himself by the name of Poore Tom; and coming near anybody, cries out, 'Poor Tom's a cold.' Of these Abraham men, some be exceeding merry, and doe nothing but sing songs, fashioned out of their own braines; some will dance; others will doe nothing but either laugh or weepe; others are dogged, and so sullen, both in looke and speech, that spying but a small company in a house, they bluntly and boldly enter, compelling the servants, through fear, to them what they demand.'

This seems very wicked, very depraved, on the part of these persons, especially the sticking of pins in their bare arms; but even our young dukeling Edgar says—

                           'While I may scape,
  I will preserve myself: and am bethought
  To take the basest and most poorest shape,
  That ever penury, in contempt of MAN,
  Brought near to beast: my face I'll grime with filth;
  Blanket my loins; elf all my hair in knots;
  And with presented nakedness outface
  The winds, and persecutions of the sky.
  The country gives me PROOF and PRECEDENT
  Of Bedlam beggars, who, with roaring voices,
  Strike in their numb'd and mortified bare arms,
  Pins, wooden pricks, nails, sprigs of rosemary;
  And with this horrible object, from low farms,
  Poor pelting villages, sheep-cotes and mills,
  Sometime with lunatic bans, sometime with prayers,
  Enforce their charity.—'Poor Turlygood!' 'poor Tom!'
  Thats something yet, Edgar I nothing am.

But the poet is not contented with the minuteness of this description. This character appears to have taken his eye as completely as it takes King Lear's, the moment that he gets a glimpse of him; and the poet betrays throughout that same philosophical interest in the study, which the monarch expresses so boldly; for beside the dramatic exhibition, and the philosophical review of him, which King Lear institutes, here is an autographical sketch of him, and of his mode of living—

'What are you there? Your names?'

cries Gloster, when he comes to the heath, with his torch, to seek out the king and his party; whereupon Tom, thinking that an occasion has now arrived for defining his social outline, takes it upon him to answer, for his part—

'Poor Tom; that eats the swimming frog, the toad, the tadpole, the wall-newt, and the water-[newt]; that in the fury of his heart, when the foul fiend rages, swallows the old rat, and the ditch-dog; drinks the green mantle of the standing pool; who is whipped from tything to tything' [this is an Anglo-Saxon institution one sees]; 'and stocked, punished, and imprisoned; who hath had three suits to his back' [fallen fortunes here, too] 'six shirts to his body, horse to ride, and weapon to wear.'

The Jesuits had been, then, recently and notoriously at work in England, endeavouring professedly to cast out 'the fiend' from many possessed persons; and it appeared, to this great practical philosopher, that this creature he has fetched up here from the subterranean social abysses of his time, presented a very fitting subject for the operations of practitioners professing any miraculous or superior influence over the demons that infest human nature, or those that have power over human fortunes. He has brought him out here thus distinctly, for the purpose of inquiring whether there is any exorcism which can meet his case, or that of the great human multitude, that no man can number, of whose penury and vice he stands here as the elected, pre-eminent, royal representative. In that survey and report of human affairs, which this author felt himself called upon to make, the case of this poor creature had attracted his attention, and appeared to him to require looking to; and, accordingly, he has made a note of it.

He is admirably seconded in his views on this subject, by the king himself, who, in that fine philosophic humour which his madness and his misery have served to develop in him, stands ready to lend himself to the boldest and most delicate philosophical inquiries. For the point to be noted here,—and it is one of no ordinary importance,—is, that this mad humour for philosophical investigation, which has seized so strangely the royal mind, does not appear to be at all in the vein of that old-fashioned philosophy, which had been rattling its abstractions in the face of the collective human misery for so many ages. For the helplessness of the human creature in his struggle with the elements, and those conditions of his nature which put him so hopelessly at the mercy of his own kind and kindred, seem to suggest to the royal sufferer, who has the advantage of a fresh experience to stimulate his apprehension, that there ought to be some relief for the human condition from this source, that is, from PHILOSOPHY; and his inquiries and discoveries are all stamped with the unmistakeable impress of that fire new philosophy, which was not yet out of the mint elsewhere—which was yet undergoing the formative process in the mind of its great inventor;—that philosophy, which we are told elsewhere 'has for its principal object, to make nature subservient to the wants and state of Man';—and which concerns itself for that purpose with ideas as they exist in nature, as causes, and not as they exist in the mind of man as words merely.

If there had been, indeed, any intention of paying a marked compliment to the philosophy which still held all the mind of the world in its grasp, at that great moment in history, in which Tom o' Bedlam makes his first appearance on any stage, it is not likely that that sage would have been just the person appointed to hold the office of Philosopher in Chief, and Councillor extraordinary to his Majesty.

The selection is indeed made on the part of the king, in perfect good faith, whatever the Poet's intent may be; for from the moment that this creature makes his appearance, he has no eyes or ears for anything else. And he will not be parted from him. For this startling juxtaposition was not intended by the Poet to fulfil its effect as a mere passing tableau vivant. The relation must be dramatically developed; that astounding juxtaposition must be prolonged, in spite of the horror of the spectators, and the disgust and rude displeasure of the king's attendants. They seek in vain to part these two men. The king refuses to stir without him. 'He will still keep with his philosopher.' He has a vague idea that his regal administration stands in need of some assistance, and that philosophy ought to be able to give it, and that the Bedlamite is in some way connected with the subject, but confused as the association is, it is a pertinacious one; and, in spite of their disgust the king's friends are obliged to take this wretch with them. For Gloster does not know, after all, it is 'his own flesh and blood' he sees there. He cannot even recognize the common kindred in that guise, as the king does, when he philosophises on his condition. And the rough aristocratic contempt and indifference which is manifested by the king's party, as a matter of course, for this poor human victim of wrong and misfortune, is made to contrast with their boundless sympathy and tenderness for the king, while the poet aiming at broader relationships, finds the mantle of his humanity wide enough for them, both.

As for the king,—startled in the midst of those new views of human wretchedness which his own sufferings have occasioned, and while those desires to remedy it, with which his penitence is accompanied, are still on his lip, by this wild apparition and embodiment of his thought, in that new accession of his mental disorder, which the presence of this object seems to occasion, that confounding of proximate conceptions, which leads him to regard this man as a source of new light on human affairs, is one of those exquisite physiological exhibitions of which only this scientific artist is capable.

And, in fact, it must be confessed, that this 'learned Theban' himself, notwithstanding the unexpected dignity of his promotion, does not appear to be altogether wanting in a taste, at least, for that new kind of philosophical investigation, which seems to be looked for at his hands. The king's inquiries appear to fall in remarkably with the previous train of his pursuits. In the course of his experiments, he seems himself to have struck upon that new philosophic proceeding, which has been called 'putting philosophy upon the right road again.'

Only the philosophic domain which that new road in philosophy leads to, appears to be very considerably broader, as 'Tom' takes it, than that very vivid, but narrow limitation of its fields, which Mr. Macaulay has set down in our time, would make it. Indeed, this 'philosopher,' that Lear so much inclines to, appears to have included in his investigations the two extremes of the new science of practice. He has sounded it apparently 'from its lowest note to the top of its key.'

'What is your study?' says the king to him, eyeing him curiously, and apparently struck with the practical result—anxious to have a word with him in private, but obliged to conduct the examination on the stage.

'How to prevent THE FIEND,' is Tom's reply. 'How to prevent the fiend and to kill vermin.'

This is the Poet who says elsewhere, 'that without good nature, men are themselves but a nobler kind of vermin.'

One cannot but observe, however, that Poor Tom's researches in this quite new field of a practical philosophy, do not appear to have been followed up since his time with any very marked success. One of these departments of 'his study' has indeed been seized, and is now occupied by whole troops of modern philosophers; but their inquiries, though very interesting and doubtlessly useful, do not appear to exhibit that direct and palpable bearing on practice, to which Tom's programme so severely inclines. For he is one who would make 'the art and practic part of life, the mistress to his theoric.' And as to that other mysterious object of his inquiries, Mr. Macaulay is not the only person who appears to think, that that does not come within the range of anything human. Many of our scholars are still of the opinion that, 'court holy water' is the best application in the world for him; and the fact that he does not appear to get 'prevented' with it; it is a fact which of course has nothing to do with the logical result. For our philosophers are still determined to reason it 'thus and thus,' without taking into account the circumstance, that 'the sequent effect' with which 'nature finds itself scourged,' is not touched by their reasons.

King Lear's own inquiries seem also to include with great distinctness, the two great branches of the new philosophical inquiry. His mind is indeed very eagerly bent on the pursuit of causes. And though in the paroxysms of his mental disorder, he is apt to confound them occasionally, this very confusion, as it is managed, only serves to develop the breadth of the philosophic conception beneath it.

'He hath no daughters, Sir.' 'Death, traitor! Nothing could have subdued nature to such a lowness, but—his UNKIND daughters.' It is, of course, his own new and terrible experience which points the inquiry, and though the physical causes are not omitted in it, it is not strange that the moral should predominate, and that his mind should seem to be very curiously occupied in tracking the ethical phenomena to their sources 'in nature.'

In the midst of the uproar of the Tempest, he does indeed begin with the physical investigation. He puts to his 'learned Theban' the question, which no learned Theban had then ever suspected of lying within the range of the scholar's investigations—that question which has been put to some purpose since—'What is the cause of thunder?' But his philosophic inquiry does not stop there,—where all the new philosophy has stopped ever since, and where some of our scholars declare it was meant to stop, notwithstanding the plainest declarations of its inventor to the contrary—with the investigation of physical causes.

For, after all, it is 'the tempest in his mind' that most concerns him. His philosopher, his practical philosopher, must be able to explore the conditions of that, and find the conductors for its lightnings. 'For where the greater malady is fixed, the lesser is scarce felt.' 'Nor rain, wind, thunder, fire, are his daughters.' After all, it is Regan's heart that appears to him to be the trouble—it is that which must first be laid on the table; and as soon as he decides to have a philosopher among 'his hundred,' he gives orders to that effect.

'Then let them anatomise Regan; see what breeds about her heart: Is there any CAUSE IN NATURE that makes these hard hearts?'

A very fair subject for philosophical inquiry, one would say; and, on the whole, as profitable and interesting a one, perhaps, as some of those that engage the attention of our men of learning so profoundly at present. In these days of enlightened scientific procedure, one would hardly undertake the smallest practical affair with the aid of any such vague general notions or traditional accounts of the properties to be dealt with, as those which our learned Thebans appear to find all-sufficient for their practices, in that particular department which Lear seems inclined to open here as a field for scientific exploration.

And it is perfectly clear that the author, whoever he may be, is very much of Lear's mind on this point, for he does not depend upon Lear alone to suggest his views upon it. There is never a person of this drama that does not do it.

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.'