The Philosophy of the Plays of Shakspere Unfolded Part 26

'_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 clas.h.i.+ng 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 G.o.ddess 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 fas.h.i.+on, '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 cla.s.s, 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 _pa.s.sion_ 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 G.o.ds [_for these are the G.o.ds, whose 'Commission' is sitting here_]'tis most _ign.o.bly_ 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 pa.s.sages, 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, n.o.ble 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 inst.i.tutions 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 c.o.ke, 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.