'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.