The Philosophy of the Plays of Shakspere Unfolded

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 suтfficed 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.