'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.