The Orphic Voice, page 16
Nature, the prime genial artist, inexhaustible in diverse powers, is equally inexhaustible in forms . . . and even such is the appropriate excellence of her chosen poet, of our own Shakespeare,— himself a nature humanized, a genial understanding directing self-consciously a power and an implicit wisdom deeper even than our consciousness.
And going beyond this, he sketches in a time sequence in which these forms can develop, identifying this process with the progression of the human species in its temporal biological evolution.
O! few have there been among critics who have followed with the eye of the imagination the imperishable yet ever wandering spirit of poetry through its various metempsychoses, and consequent metamorphoses;— or who have rejoiced in the light of clear perception at beholding with each new birth . . . the human race frame to itself a new body, by assimilating materials of nourishment out of its new circumstances, and work for itself new organs of power appropriate to the new sphere of its motion and activity!58
Here is poetry or postlogic seen as Bacon saw his new organon, an instrument of power perpetually renewed.
The three divisions of Bacon’s instrument begin now to draw together into a closer unity than even their author proposed for them. If, as we claimed at the very beginning of this Part, something happened to thought in the first ten years of the seventeenth century in England, this is the point of that happening: the work of Shakespeare. In this work we are to witness as a part of natural process the metamorphosis of one of the forms in human thought. So we come to the third Baconian category, the way to the new method of mind and language. The Organum itself is here a form inside the natural history.
It is encouraging that certain Shakespearean critics have recognized that Shakespeare in his drama accomplishes the Baconian work. The claim is made for one play specifically, King Lear: “Shakespeare’s own creation, the real Novum Organum of human thought” (Danby).59 We have looked at postlogic in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and beyond King Lear lies The Tempest with which we shall not have space to deal but which belongs in this trilogy of especially mythological plays in which Shakespeare is working intensively at the instrument of thought.
That earlier Shakespearean mythological Dream included mental order within the natural order, but Lear includes the moral order as well. In this play the great questions are asked, of love, justice, evil, suffering, the Godhead. We said, at the beginning of this Part, that we were going to leave human nature, as love and morals, out of our investigation for the present, holding only to Orpheus’ power over nature. To deal with King Lear on these terms may seem crazy if not almost sacrilegious. But it can and must be done for our limited scope. I believe the play will bear it. Great works, like great people, are patient of small approaches.
That this play deals with the nature of Nature is common knowledge; indeed, it has come to be regarded as a kind of essay on this subject.60 But we shall consider it not as an essay but as an experiment, in Baconian terms, as the Dream was also in lesser fashion. It is a field of operation. In Lear the Orphic mind will order, in a cosmic darkness, according to its own poetic forms, those forms of nature, fierce, intransigent or merely inert, human and inhuman, which move in that darkness also. Orpheus confronts here nature in her most inexorable and inclusive forms; not only the fearful powers of wind and weather, sea or fire or beasts of prey, though the play includes all these, but also every form nature can take in man. The unity of nature is so held that Orpheus’ moving of stones and trees and beasts must here be corresponded to by humanity also, where eyes are crystals, naked men are worms, limbs of families and limbs of men are one with limbs of trees, a man mad as the sea crowns himself with weeds, and the evil bring with them all the bestial terrors of the wilderness, vultures, kites, tigers, boars, while lesser men are dogs and rats and geese. Yet it is not upon any of these in the first place but upon the mind of man, the thinking instrument, that a change is to be worked. That is why it is a play to be afraid of.
This has long been recognized.61 Keats speaks of it in his sonnet On Sitting Down to Read King Lear Once Again. These are its last ten lines:
Adieu! for once again the fierce dispute
Betwixt damnation and impassion’d clay
Must I burn through; once more humbly assay
The bitter-sweet of this Shakespearean fruit.
Chief poet! and ye clouds of Albion,
Begetters of our deep eternal theme,
When through the old oak forest I am gone,
Let me not wander in a barren dream;
But when I am consumed in the fire,
Give me new Phoenix wings to fly at my desire.
The image of fire, of the trying of metal in it which accompanies the chemical or alchemical word “assay,” the prayer for a purification into a new life after a phoenix-like destruction—these mean what they say. The last thing this transformation (if it be possible at all) must do for us is deliver us to a barren dream. That would be the false poetry which Bacon set up when he called poetry “a dream of learning” and separated it from logic and science. In King Lear poetry is to be not an empty dream of learning but a dream of logic in which we as well as the characters in the play are the subject of the experiment. Postlogic in its most intense drive will go through logic itself and establish itself if it can on the far side. So it is to logic that Lear is delivered, not in abstraction but in terms of flesh and blood,62 and accompanied by the whole natural universe. This logic, as Bacon wished his new logic to be, is indeed close to things. Nature accompanies the mind in its vivisection by the logic it has itself set up. The more the analysis of the King proceeds, the mind into incoherence, the heart “into a hundred thousand flaws,” the more is the closeness with the natural universe emphasized. Logic is here not merely a form of the mind but, in and through the mind, a form of nature itself, part of the operation of a natural law. As such, it is allowed to analyze into nothingness both mind and nature in the person of the King:
O ruined piece of nature, this great world
Shall so wear out to naught. Dost thou know me?63
This cannot fail to remind us of Prospero whose great globe too will dissolve, leaving no wrack behind; but it is useless to long for the beauty of that postlogical affirmation of dream, for we are a long way from it yet. We are committed at present to logic. On rigorously logical terms, and on these alone, must the Orphic power begin its operations if it is not to deny the mind its rightful instruments but transform them for new purposes and discoveries. Shakespeare accepts the terms, and on these elements he is ready to work for us.
9
The word sun, or the figures s, u, n, are purely arbitrary modes of recalling the object, and for visual mere objects they are not only sufficient, but have infinite advantages from their very nothingness per se. But the language of nature is a subordinate Logos, that was in the beginning, and was with the thing it represented, and was the thing it represented. Now the language of Shakespeare, in his Lear for instance, is a something intermediate between these two; or rather it is the former blended with the latter
SO MANY THINGS have been said about tragedy and about King Lear that we need to be as simple as possible, and to keep our eyes on Lear himself: for Lear, the King, the image and embodiment of natural power (and kingship is here, I believe, seen as a natural phenomenon, as it is in fairy tales64 and dreams)— the King learns. This is the myth of the play, its working figure; and as myth it bears a reflexive relation to itself and to us. King Lear is at once an account of imaginary happenings and an instrument for understanding them, a means of learning and a treatise upon learning. Myth is also inclusive. It is never a mere narrative, a detached report to be detachedly received. It is always an invitation or command to mind and body to identify with it in order to attain a power of interpretation. Because of the nature of the dramatic situation between play, players, and audience, the theater is one of the greatest means yet discovered by which this function of myth can work upon us, its experimental epistemological side. In the Midsummer Night’s Dream myth entered as fairy world and as play-within-play, and the complexity protected characters and audience alike from the demand of myth that we unite with it in its function of change. In Lear, however, the narrative or fable of the play does not comment upon or include myth, it is myth itself. Bottom’s contact with myth changes him only temporarily in a metamorphosis which is passing and painless; the change required of Lear is such that body and mind alike are broken by it.
Two great forms or systems are presented in the play to the King and to ourselves. Each is a power of change; thus Bacon saw his forms, inside and outside the mind. The first figure I shall call analytic logic; it has inevitability for its characteristic; the image associated with it in the play is a machine, engine, or wheel; its term is nothingness, the logical end of analysis. The second figure I am calling postlogic; its characteristic is recurrent transformation or metamorphosis; its image in the play is the human being itself, in its living polarity of life and death, youth and age, fertility and decay; its term seems to be the endless iteration of itself. The sphere of operation of both is the universe, but very particularly the human organism, where figures natural and mental meet. The play is not to be seen as a dialectic between two opposing systems; rather, each offers man a means of interpretation of nature, including his own. The touchstone of each system is death. (The repetition of the word “nothing,” as of the word “nature” in this play, is too well known to need emphasis.) Yet Gloucester utters the curious phrase “the quality of nothing” as if that might vary, and death as nothingness may vary too, appearing as annihilation or as the point of metamorphosis in a system which has power to recreate form out of so total and inclusive a transformation. By their deaths you shall know them. The characters align themselves partially or wholly with one or other of these forms of change, and undergo and exemplify them. Only Lear embodies both.
The first figure of logic as operation, engine, or machine in nature and human nature might be law or chance or blind fortune with her wheel or the stars. But as the play’s action and the process of learning advance, it becomes clear to the characters and to us that “chance,” and this whole system, is in fact iron necessity, operating upon us all but imposed not from without, by circumstances, but from within, self-induced and consciously willed, and hence not an external tyranny but a true logic.
The two characters in the play who are wholly committed to analytic logic are Goneril and Regan. That it leads them to their destruction is not here to be taken as an indictment of the method of operation; it is merely the following through of the analysis to its logical conclusion. These two characters logic themselves into nothingness; in the end they seem almost to disappear. In the great scene where Lear begins to speak his transfigured speech, Act v, Scene 3, he answers Cordelia’s question, “Shall we not see these daughters and these sisters?” with “No, no, no, no,” as if he recognizes that they are already vanishing. Their deaths are logical conclusions to their system of operation and yet irrelevant to what is going on in the later reaches of the play. After their bodies are brought in, Albany’s brief, “Even so. Cover their faces,” expresses this, and it comes out yet more plainly in the exchange between Lear and Kent a little later:
KENT Your eldest daughters have fordone themselves,
And desperately are dead.
LEAR Aye, so I think.
This is not mere wandering. It is the poetic statement of the nothingness inherent in these deaths. Lear’s mind, and the mind of the play, are busied elsewhere. Edmund is the third character who adopts the figure of analytic logic as his own. Like the two women, he is reduced to nothingness and irrelevance (“That’s but a trifle here” is how the news of his death is greeted), but he is more interesting than either of them, because of his identification of himself with “Nature,” and because, at his death, while he recognizes the logic of his own progression, he seems to try to transfer himself into the other system, the metamorphic rather than logical. “Some good I mean to do, Despite of mine own nature,” he says when he tries to undo the command he and Goneril have given for the death of Lear and Cordelia. It is characteristic of the logic of the play that he is unsuccessful.
The other figure, of youth and age, birth and death, threads through the play in the same way. The two terms of the image are not seen, however, as beginning and end of a logical progression, but rather as implying possible substitution, transformation, and affinity. Sometimes the two poles of the image are inverted, in contempt feigned or real. Edmund puts into Edgar’s mouth the theory that old fathers should become their sons’ wards (1.2); Goneril speaks out for herself, “Old fools are babes again.” Later the Fool in his own vein of bitterness takes up the theme, “ever since thou madest thy daughters thy mothers,” talking of the hedge-sparrow with the cuckoo nestling, that “had its head bit off by its young.” Sometimes there is a kind of counterpoint between them. (Since we are thinking of pre- into post- logic it is interesting that the prefixes in the play would, under a living figure, move toward one another.) In the scene between the mad Lear and the blinded Gloucester, the one old man says this to the other:
LEAR Thou must be patient; we came crying hither: Thou knowst, the first time that we smell the air We wawl and cry.— I will preach to thee: mark.
It is a strange sermon but it bears out this figure, and later a younger man, Edgar, speaks it more directly still.
Men must endure
Their going hence, even as their coming hither. Ripeness is all.
The relationship between these extremities, youth and age, birth and death, is deep and subtle in this play. Humanity or postlogic is figured by both, not alone by death but by life too, not a logical progression into nothingness but a transformational operation.
The transformation is to be seen at the point where the two systems encounter one another in human beings. Change is the lot meted out by logic to those whose working system is not analytic logic. Cordelia is the first to meet it, with a suddenness which is highly dramatic; then Kent; then Edgar; lastly, and with a difference, Lear himself. This nothingness or analysis or move toward death tends to take the same pattern. It affects those two special instruments of postlogic, language and the body. The first is reduced to silence, namelessness or incoherence, according to the particular case; the second to nakedness, or mutilation, at worst death. Edgar loses his name— “Edgar I nothing am”— and adopts a disguise of nakedness. Kent is stripped by Lear’s sentence of banishment to a “trunk”; we learn at the end of the play that after banishment he had called himself Caius, but when he first appears in the guise of a servant he answers simply “A man” to Lear’s question “What art thou?” Cordelia herself renounces the use of speech which has been so profaned by her sisters’ misuse of it, and is then stripped of position and dowry, lastly of her life. Lear when he begins to realize the workings of his own logic, in which he is caught, says “Does any here know me? This is not Lear . . . Who is it that can tell me who I am?” and a moment later asks his daughter’s name; as the process goes forward he too moves toward nakedness, up to the cry “Off, off, you lendings: come, unbutton here.”
Thus Lear follows the general pattern of the other postlogical characters when their system crosses with that of analytic logic. Yet his essential role is infinitely larger than this. He alone in the play embodies the two systems, logic and postlogic. He has to transfigure the one into the other, in his own body and mind. He stands where Bacon’s Interpreter of Nature was to stand, between man as body and mind, and nature, with speech at the meeting point, and is questioned on the relationship of all three. It is his inadequacy in this role which brings about all the disasters of the play. He mistakes the relationship of nature and man doubly in himself, by misunderstanding his own figure as King, and his bond with his daughters. The two come together in the test he has imagined in this connection— the kingdom is to be divided according to his children’s power to put their love for him into words in public. The importance of language in the right and due relationship between nature and men is implied all the way through this scene, though not by Lear. His emphasis is wrong— “Which of you shall we say doth love us most?” “Our eldest-born, speak first,” and such false emphasis wins the answer it deserves, “I love you more than words can wield the matter.” In the kingship he delivers himself over to analysis, dividing the kingdom “with reservation of a hundred knights,” and, as he fondly supposes possible, “the name and all the additions to a king.” Language here cannot be split from its proper contact with natural reality, upon which all poetry and truth depend. So Kent who sees what is at issue says “Reserve thy state.” But Lear chooses logic in place of postlogic, and is then analyzed by those skilled in this instrument, on his and its own terms— “What need you five-and-twenty, ten, or five?” Just as he accepts the unnatural division of the kingdom, so too he accepts the hyperbole of Goneril and Regan as poetry, conforming to their true nature, whereas for them language is a manipulative tool for particular ends. Lear sides with logic here also, aligning himself with those who are to operate on this system. His own speech takes on the mechanical and inflexible qualities of analytic logic, and is turned upon Cordelia and Kent, in the “vows” and “sentences” which are never to be altered or subverted. Misunderstanding nature and man as he does, he causes the death of language in its four great functions of poetry, naming, truth-telling, and prayer.65 Cordelia’s “Nothing,” the renunciation of the poetry that is rightly hers, is the first death of the play. Thus the end is prefigured in the beginning.
Lear emerges from this first scene having made his choice: thereafter he is left to be ground by the engine of his choice. Gradually he begins to learn that the choice was wrong. He cannot annul logic—that would in any case be impermissible, for it has its own rights in the universe. All he can achieve is to embody within himself a transformation of logic into postlogic, of engine back into organism, of the old man into something like a child again. He will not see Cordelia again until this metamorphosis is almost completed.
