The Philosophy of the Plays of Shakspere Unfolded

There is another natural curiosity, which strikes the eye of the founder of the Science of Nature, as quite the most curious and wonderful thing going, so far, at least, as his observation has extended, though he is willing to make, as he takes pains to state, philosophical allowance for the partiality of species in determining this judgment, and is perfectly willing to concede, that if any particular species of shell-fish, for instance, were to undertake a science of things in general, that particular species would, no doubt, occupy the principal place in that system; especially if arts, tending to the improvement and elevation of it, were necessarily based on this larger specific knowledge.

Men, and their proceedings and organisms, men, and their habits and modes of combining, did appear to the eye of this scientific observer quite as well worth observing and noting, also, as bees and beavers, for instance, and their societies; and, accordingly, he made some observations himself, and notes, too, in this particular department of his general science. For, as he tells us elsewhere, he did not wish to map out the large fields of the science of observation in general, and exhibit to the world, in bare description, the method of it, without leaving some specimens of his own, of what might be done with it, in proper hands, under favourable circumstances, selecting for his experiments the principal and noblest subjects – those of the most immediate human concern. And he has not only very carefully laboured a few of these; but he has taken extraordinary pains to preserve them to us in their proper scientific form, with just as little of the ligature of the time on them as it was possible to leave.

It is no kind of beetle or butterfly, then, that this philosopher comes down upon here from the heights of his universal science – his science of the nature of things in general, but that great Spenserian monstrosity, – that diseased product of nature, which individual human nature, in spite of its natural pettiness and helplessness, under certain favourable conditions of absorption and accretion, may be made to yield. It is that dragon of lawless power which was overspreading, in his time, all the common human affairs, and infolding in its gaudy, baleful wings all the life of men, – it is that which takes from the first the speculative eye of this new speculator, – this founder of the science of things, and not of words instead of them. Here is a man of science, a born naturalist, who understands that this phenomenon lies in his department, and takes it to be his business, among other things, to examine it.

It was, indeed, a formidable phenomenon, as it presented itself to his apprehension; and his own words are always the best, when one knows how to read them —

'He sits in state, like a thing made for Alexander.' 'When he walks, he moves like an engine, and the ground shrinks before his treading.' 'He talks like a knell, his hum is a battery; what he bids be done, is finished at his bidding. He wants nothing of a god but eternity, and a heaven to throne in.' 'Yes,' is the answer; 'yes, mercy, if you paint him truly.' 'I paint him in character.'

'Is it possible that so short a time can alter the conditions of a man?' inquires the speculator upon this phenomenon, and then comes the reply – 'There's a differency between a grub and a butterfly, yet your butterfly was a grub. This Marcius is grown from MAN TO DRAGON; he has wings, he is more than a creeping thing.'

This is Coriolanus at the head of his army; but in Julius Caesar, it is nature in the wildness of the tempest – it is a night of unnatural horrors, that is brought in by the Poet to illustrate the enormity of the evil he deals with, and its unnatural character – 'to serve as instrument of fear and warning unto some MONSTROUS STATE.'

'Now could I, Casca,  Name to thee a man most like this dreadful night;  That thunders, lightens, opens graves, and roars  As doth the lion in the Capitol:  A man no mightier than thyself, or me,  In personal action, yet prodigious grown,  And fearful, as these strange eruptions are.

Casca. Tis Caesar that you mean: Is it not, Cassius?

[I paint him in character.]

Cassius. Let it be – WHO IT IS: For Romans now Have thewes and limbs like to their ancestors.'

CHAPTER IV

POLITICAL RETROSPECT'I think he'll be to RomeAs is the osprey to the fish, who takes itBy sovereignty of nature.'FLOWER OF WARRIORS

The poet finds, indeed, this monstrosity full-blown in his time. He finds it 'in the civil streets,' 'talking plain cannon', 'humming batteries' in the most unmistakeable manner, with no particular account of its origin to give, without, indeed, appearing to recollect exactly how it came there, retaining only a general impression, that a descent from the celestial regions had, in some way, been effected during some undated period of human history, under circumstances which the memory of man was not expected to be able to recall in detail, and a certificate to that effect, divinely subscribed, was understood to be included among its properties, though it does not appear to have been, on the face of it, so absolutely conclusive as to render a little logical demonstration, on the part of royalty itself, superfluous.

It was not very far from this time, that a very able and loyal servant of the crown undertook, openly, to assist the royal memory on this delicate point; and, though the details of that historical representation, and the manner of it, are, of course, quite different from those of the Play, it will be found, upon careful examination, not so dissimilar in purport as the exterior would have seemed to imply. The philosopher does not feel called upon, in either case, to begin by contradicting flatly, in so many words, the theory which he finds the received one on that point. Even the poet, with all his freedom, is compelled to go to work after another fashion.

'And thus do we, of wisdom, and of reach, With windlasses, and with ASSAYS of BIAS, By indirections find directions out.'

He has his own way of creating an historical retrospect. No one need know that it is a retrospect; no one will know it, perhaps, who has not taken the author's clue elsewhere. The crisis is already reached when the play begins. The collision between the civil want and the military government is at its height. It is a revolution on which the curtain rises. It is a city street filled with dark, angry swarms of men, who have come forth to seek out this government, in the person of its chief, who stop only to conduct their summary trial of it, and then hurry on to execute their verdict.

But the poet arrests this revolution. Before we proceed any further, 'Hear me speak,' he cries, through the lips of the plebeian leader. The man of science demands a hearing, before this movement proceed any further. He has a longer story to tell than that with which Menenius Agrippa appeases his Romans. There is a cry of war in the streets. The obscure background of that portentous scene opens, and the long vista of the heroic ages, with all its pomp and stormy splendours, scene upon scene, grows luminous behind it. The foreground is the same. The arrested mutineers stand there still, with the frown knit in their angry brows, with the weapons of their civil warfare in their hands; there is no stage direction for a change of costume, and none perceives that they have grown older as they stand, and that the shadow of the elder time is on them. But the manager of this stage is one who knows that the elder time of history is the childhood of his kind.

There is a cry of war in that ancient street. The enemy of the infant state is in arms. The people rush forth to conflict with the leader of armies at their head. But this time, for the first time in the history of literature, the philosopher goes with him. The philosopher, hitherto, has been otherwise occupied. He has been too busy with his fierce war of words; he has had too much to do with his abstract generals, his logical majors and minors, to get them in squadrons and right forms of war, to have any eye for such vulgar solidarities. 'All men are mortal. Peter and John are men. Therefore Peter and John are mortal,' he concludes; but that is his nearest and most vivacious approach to historical particulars, and his cell is broad enough to contain all that he needs for his processes and ends. He finds enough and to spare, ready prepared to his hands, in the casual, rude, unscientific observations and spontaneous distinctions of the vulgar. His generalizations are obtained from their hasty abstractions. It has never occurred to him, till now, that he must begin with criticising these terms; that he must begin by making a new and scientific terminology, which shall correspond to terms in nature, and not be air-lines merely; – that he must take pains to collect them himself, from severest scrutiny of particulars, before ever he can arrive at 'the notions of nature,' the universal notions, which differ from the spontaneous specific notions of men, and their chimeras; before ever he can put man into his true relations with nature, before ever he can teach him to speak the word which she responds to, – the words of her dictionary – the word which is power.

This is, in fact, the first time that the philosopher has undertaken to go abroad. It is the first time he has ever been in the army. Softly, invisibly, he goes. There is nothing to show that he is there. As modestly, as unnoticed, as the Times 'own correspondent,' amid all the clang and tumult, the pomp and circumstance of glorious war, he goes. But he is there notwithstanding. There is no breath of scholasticism, no perfume of the cell, that the most vigorous and robust can perceive, in his battle. The scene unwinds with all its fierce reality, undimmed by the pale cast of thought: the shout is as wild, the din as fearful, the martial fury rises, as if the old heroic poet had it still in hand.

But it is not the poet's voice that you hear, bursting forth into those rhythmical ecstasies of heroic passion, – unless that faint tone of exaggeration, – that slight prolonging of it, be his. That mad joy in human blood, that wolfish glare, that lights the hero's eye, gets no reflection in his: those fiendish boasts are not from his lips. Through all the frenzy of that demoniacal scene, he is still himself, with all his human sense about him. Through all the crowded incidents of that day of blood – into which he condenses, with dramatic license, the siege and assault of the city, the conquest and plunder of it, and the conflict in the open field, – he is keeping watch on his hero. He is eyeing him, and sketching him, as critically as if he were indeed an entomological or botanical specimen. He is making a specimen of him, for scientific purposes, – not 'a preservation,' – he does not think much of dried specimens in science. He proposes to dismiss the logical Peter and John, and the logical man himself, that abstract notion which the metaphysicians have been at loggerheads about so long. It is the true heroism, – it is the sovereign flower which he is in search of. This specimen that he is taking here will, indeed, go by the board. He is taking him on his negative table. But for that purpose, – in order to get him on his 'table of rejections,' it is necessary to take him alive. The question is of government, of supreme power, and universal suffrage, of the abnegation of reason, of the annihilation of judgment, in behalf of a superiority which has been understood, heretofore, to admit of no question. The question is of awe and reverence, and worship, and submission. The Poet has to put his sacrilegious hand through the dust that lies on antique time, through the sanctity of prescription and time-honoured usage, through 'mountainous error' 'too highly heaped for truth to overpeer,' in order to make this point in his scientific table. And he wishes to blazon it a little. He will pin up this old exploded hero – this legacy of barbaric ages, to the ages of human advancement – in all his actualities, in all the heroic splendours of his original, without 'diminishing one dowle that's in his plume.'

But this retrospect has not yet reached its limit. It is not enough to go back, in the unravelling of this business, to the full-grown hero on the field of victory. 'For that which, in speculative philosophy, corresponds to the cause in practical philosophy becomes the rule;' and it is the Cure of the Common Weal, which the poet is proposing, and having determined to proceed specially against Caius Marcius, or against him first, he undertakes now to 'delve him to the root.' We are already on the battle field; but before ever a stroke is struck there, before he will attempt to show us the instinct of the warrior in his game, – 'he is a lion that I am proud to hunt,' – when all is ready and just as the hunt is going to begin, he steals softly back to Rome; he unlocks the hero's private dwelling, he lays open to us the secrets of that domestic hearth, the secrets of that nursery in which his hero had had his training; he shows us the breasts from which he drew that martial fire; he produces the woman alive who sent him to that field. [Act 1, Scene 3. An apartment in the martial chieftain's house; two women, 'on two low stools, sewing.' 'There is where your throne begins, whatever it be.'] In that exquisite relief which the natural graces of youth and womanhood provide for it, in the young, gentle, feminine wife, desolate in her husband's absence, starting at the rumour of news from the camp, and driving back from her appalled conception, the images which her mother-in-law's fearful speech suggests to her, – in that so beautiful relief, comes out the picture of the Roman matron, the woman in whom the martial instincts have been educated and the gentler ones repressed, by the common sentiments of her age and nation, the woman in whom the common standard of virtue, the conventional virtue of her time, has annihilated the wife and the mother.

Virgilia. Had he died in the business, madam, what then?

Volumnia. Then his good report should have been my son, I therein would have found issue.

It is the multiplied force of a common instinct in the nation, it is the pride of conquest in a whole people, erected into the place of virtue and usurping all its sanctity, which has entered this woman's nature and reformed its yielding principles. It is the Martial Spirit that has subdued her, for she is virtuous and religious. It is her people's god to whom she has borne her son, and in his temple she has reared him.

But the poet is not satisfied with all this. It is not enough to introduce us to the hero's mother and permit us to listen to her confidential account of his birth and training. He will produce the little Coriolanus himself – Coriolanus in germ – he will show us the rudiments of those instincts, which his unscientific education has stimulated into such monstrous 'o'ergrowth' (but not enlightened), so that the hero on the battle-field who is winning there the oaken crown, which he will transmit if he can to his posterity, is only, after all, a boy overgrown, – a boy with his boyishness unnaturally prolonged by his culture, – the impersonation of the childishness of a childish time, – the crowned impersonation of the instinct which is SOVEREIGN in an age of instinct. He shows us the drum and the sword in the nursery, and the boy who would rather look at the military parade than his schoolmaster; – he shows us the little viperous egg of a hero torturing and tearing the butterfly, with his 'confirmed countenance, in one of his father's moods.'

Surely we have reached 'the grub' at last, 'the creeping thing' that will have one day imperial armies in its wings. And we return from this little excursion to the field again, in time for the battle; and when we see the tiger in the man let loose there, and the boy's father comes out in one of his own moods, that we may note it the better; we begin to observe where we are in the human history, and what age of the Advancement of Learning it is that this poet is driving at so stedfastly, and trying to get dated; and whether it is indeed one from which the advancing ages of Learning can accept the bourne of the human wisdom, the limit of that advance.

'And to speak truly [and that after all is the best way of speaking] Antiquitas seculi juventus mundi.'

'Those times are the ancient times, when the world is ancient and not those we account ancient by a computation backward from ourselves.' —Advancement of Learning. But that was put down in a book in which we have only general statements, very wise indeed, and both new and true, most exactly true, but not ready for practice, as the author stops to tell us, and it is practice he is aiming at. That is from a book in which we have only 'the husks and shells of sciences, all the kernel being forced out,' as the author informs us, 'by the torture and press of the method.' But it was a method which saved them, notwithstanding. This is the book that contains the 'nuts,' and this is the kernel that goes in that particular shell or a corner of it, 'Antiquitas seculi juventus mundi.'

There, on the spot, he shows us the process by which a king, – an historic king, – is made. He detects and brings out and blazons, the moment in which the inequality of fortune begins, in the division of the spoils of victory. His hero is not, as he takes pains to tell us, covetous, —unless it be a sin to covet honour, if it be, he is the most offending soul alive; – it is because he is not mercenary, that his soldiers will enrich him. The poet shows us where the throne begins, and the machinery of that engine which the earth shrinks from when it moves. On his stage, it is the moment in which, the soldiers raise their victorious leader from his feet, and carry him in triumph above them. We are there at the ceremony, for this is selected, illuminated history; this, too, is what he calls 'visible history,' but amid all those martial acclamations and plaudits, the philosopher contrives to get in a word.

'He that has effected his good will, has o'ertaken my act.'

From the field he tracks his hero to the chair of state. First we have the news of the victory in the city, and its effect: —

'I'll report itWhere senators shall mingle tears with smiles;  Where great patricians shall attend, and shrug;  I' the end admire; where ladies shall be frighted,  And, gladly quaked, hear more; where the dull tribunes,  That, with the fusty plebeians, hate thine honours,  Shall say against their hearts, We thank the gods  Our Rome hath such a soldier.'

Then we have the hero's return – the conqueror's reception; first in the city whose battle he has won, and afterwards his reception in the city he has conquered. Here is the latter: —

'Your native town you entered like a post,  And had no welcomes home; but he returns,  Splitting the air with noises.  And patient fools,  Whose children he hath slain, their base throats tear  WITH GIVING HIM GLORY.''A goodly city is this Antium! City,'Tis I that made thy widows; many an heir  Of these fair edifices, 'fore my wars  Have I heard groan and droop. Then know me not,  Lest that thy wives with spits, and boys with stones,  In puny battle slay me.' [ —know me not – lest– '  'Let us kill him, and we will have corn, at our own price.']

But the Poet does not forget that it is the proof of the military virtue, as well as the history of the military power, that he has undertaken; 'the touch of its nobility,' as he himself words it. He is trying it by his own exact scientific standard; he is putting the test to it which the new philosophy, which is the philosophy of nature, authorises.

For, in truth, this philosopher, this civilian, is a little jealous of this simple virtue of valour, which he finds in his time, as in the barbaric ages, still in such esteem, as 'the chiefest virtue, and that which most dignifies the haver.' He is of opinion, that there may be some other profession, beside that of the sword, worth an honest man's attention; that, if the world were more enlightened, there would be another kind of glory, that would make 'the garland of war' shrivel. He thinks that Jupiter, and not Mars, should reign supreme: that there is another kind of distinction and leadership, better worth the public esteem, better deserving the popular gratitude and reverence.

And when he has once taken an analysis of this kind in hand, he is not going to permit any scruples of delicacy to impair the operation. He will invade that graceful modesty in the hero, who shrinks from hearing his exploits narrated. He will analyse that blush, and show us chemically what its hue is made of. He will bring out those retiring honours from the haze and mist which the vague, unanalytic, popular notions, have gathered about them. Tucked up in scarlet, braided with gold, under its forest of feathers, through all its pomp and blazonry, through all its drums; and trumpets, and clarions, undaunted by the popular cry, undaunted by that so potent word of 'patriotism' which guards it from invasion, he will search it out.

For this purpose he will go a little nearer to it than is the heroic poet's wont. When the city is wild with the news of this great victory, and the streets are swarming at the tidings of the hero's approach, he will take his stand with the family party, and beckon us to a place where we can listen to what is going on there, though the heroics and the blank verse must halt for it.

The glee and fluster might appear to a cool spectator a little undignified; but then we are understood to be, like Menenius, old friends of the family, and too much carried away with the excitement of the moment to be very critical.

Volumnia. Honourable Menenius, my boy, Marcius, approaches. For the love of Juno, let's go.

Men. Ha! Marcius coming home!

Vol. Ay, worthy Menenius, and with most prosperous approbation.

Men. Take my cap, Jupiter, and I thank thee. Hoo! Marcius coming home?

Two Ladies. Nay, 't is true.

Vol. Look! Here's a letter from him; the state hath another, his wife another, and I think there's one at home for you.

Men. I will make my very house reel to night: – A letter for me?

The Wife. Yes, certainly, there a letter for you; I saw it.

Men. A letter for me! It gives me an estate of seven years' health; in which time I will make a lip at the physician … Is he not wounded? He was wont to come home wounded.

The Wife. Oh, no, no, no!

The Mother. Oh, he is wounded. I thank the gods for 't.

Men. So do I, too, if it be not too much: —Brings a victory in his pocket: The wounds become him.

Vol. On's brow, Menenius: he comes the third time home with the oaken garland.

Men… Is the senate possessed of this?

Vol. Good ladies, let's go! Yes, yes, yes: the senate has letters from the general, wherein he gives my son the whole name of the war.

Valeria. In truth, there's wondrous things spoke of him.

Men. Wondrous, ay, I warrant you…

Vir. The gods grant them true!

Vol. True? Pow wow!

Men. True? I'll be sworn they are true. Where's he wounded?

[To the Tribunes, who come forward.] Marcius is coming home: he

has —more cause to be– PROUD. – Where is he wounded?

Vol. I' the shoulder, and i' the left arm: There will be large cicatrices to shew the people, when he shall stand FOR HIS PLACE. He received in the repulse of Tarquin seven hurts i' the body.

Men. One in the neck, and two in the thigh, – there's nine that I know.

Vol. He had, before this last expedition, twenty-five wounds upon him.