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  • 1857
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It is by means of this popular rejection of the Hero’s claims, which the tribunes succeed in procuring, that the Poet is enabled to complete his exhibition and test of the virtue which he finds in his time ‘chiefest among men, and that which most dignifies the haver’; the virtue which he finds in his time rewarded with patents of nobility, with patrician trust, with priestly authority, with immortal fame, and thrones and dominions, with the disposal of the human welfare, and the entail of it to the crack of doom–no matter what ‘goslings’ the law of entail may devolve it on.

He makes use of this incident to complete that separation he is effecting in the hitherto unanalysed, ill-defined, popular notions, and received and unquestioned axioms of practice–that separation of the instinctive military heroism, and the principle of the so-called heroic greatness, from the true principles of heroism and nobility, the true principle of subjection and sovereignty in the individual human nature and in the common-weal.

That _martial_ virtue has been under criticism and suspicion torn the beginning of this action. It was shown from the first–from that ground and point of observation which the sufferings of the diseased common-weal made for it–in no favourable light. It was branded in the first scene, in the person of its Hero, as ‘a dog to the commonalty.’ It is one of the wretched ‘commons’ who invents, in his distress, that title for it; but the Poet himself exhibits it, not descriptively only, but dramatically, as something more brutish than that–eating the poor man’s corn that the gods have sent him, and gnawing his vitals, devouring him soul and body, ‘tooth and fell.’ It was shown up from the first as an instinct that men share with ‘rats’. It was brought out from the first, and exhibited with its teeth in the heart of the common-weal. The Play begins with a cross-questioning in the civil streets, of that sentiment which the hasty affirmations of men enthrone. It was brought out from the first–it came tramping on in the first act, in the first scene–with its sneer at the commons’ distress, longing to make ‘a quarry of the _quartered_ slaves, as high’ as the plumed hero of it ‘could prick his lance’; and that, too, because they rebelled at famine, as slaves will do sometimes, when the common notion of hunger is permitted to instruct them in the principle of new unions; when that so impressive, and urgent, and unappeasable teacher comes down to them from the Capitol, and is permitted by their rulers to induct them experimentally into the doctrine of ‘extensive wholes,’ and ‘larger congregations,’ and ‘the predominance of powers.’ And it so happened, that the threat above quoted was precisely the threat which the founder of the reigning house had been able to carry into effect here a hundred years before, in putting down an insurrection of that kind, as this author chanced to be the man to know.

But the cry of the enemy is heard without; and this same principle, which shows itself in such questionable proofs of love at home, becomes with the change of circumstances–patriotism. But the Poet does not lose sight of its identity under this change. This love, that looks so like hatred in the Roman streets, that sniffs there so haughtily at questions about corn, and the price of ‘coals,’ and the price of labour, while it loves Rome so madly at the Volscian gates–this love, that sneers at the hunger and misery of the commons at home, while it makes such frantic demonstrations against the _common_ enemy abroad, appears to him to be a very questionable kind of _love_, to say the least of it.

In that fine, conspicuous specimen of this quality, which the hero of his story offers him–this quality which the hostilities of nations deify–he undertakes to sift it a little. While in the name of that virtue which has at least the merit of comprehending and conserving a larger unity, a more extensive whole, than the limit of one’s own personality, ‘it runs reeking o’er the lives of men, as ’twere a perpetual spoil’; while under cover of that name which in barbaric ages limits human virtue, and puts down upon the map the outline of it–the bound which human greatness and virtue is required to come out to; while in the name of _country_ it shows itself ‘from face to foot a thing of blood, whose every motion is timed with dying cries,’ undaunted by the tragic sublimities of the scene, this Poet confronts it, and boldly identifies it as that same principle of state and nobility which he has already exhibited at home.

That sanguinary passion which the heat of conflict provokes is but the incident; it is the principle of _acquisition_, it is the natural principle of absorption, it is the instinct that nature is full of, that nature is alive with; but the one that she is at war with, too–at war with in the parts–one that she is forever opposed to, and conquering in the members, with her mathematical axioms–with her law of the whole, of ‘the worthier whole,’ of ‘the greater congregation’; it is that principle of acquisition which it is the business of the state to set bounds to in the human constitution–which gets branded with _other_ names, very vulgar ones, too, when the faculty of grasp and absorption is smaller. That, and none other, is the principle which predominates, and is set at large here. The leashed ‘dog’ of the commonalty at home, is let slip here in the conquered town. The teeth that preyed on the Roman weal there, have elongated and grown wolfish on the Volscian fields. The consummation of the captor’s deeds in the captured city–those matchless deeds of valor–the consummation for _Coriolanus_ in _Corioli_, for ‘the _conqueror_ in the _conquest_,’ is–‘NOW ALL’S HIS.’ And the story of the battle without is–‘He never stopped to ease his breast with panting, till he could call both field and city–OURS.’

The Poet sets down nought in malice, but he will have the secret of this LOVE, he will have the heart out of it–this love that stops so short with geographic limits,–that changes with the crossing of a line into a demon from the lowest pit.

But it is a fair and noble specimen, it is a highly-qualified, ‘illustrious instance,’ of this instinctive heroic virtue, he has seized on here, and made ready now for his experiment; and even when he brings him in, reeking from the fresh battlefield, with the blood undried on his brow, rejoicing in his harvest, even amid the horrors of the conquered town, this Poet, with his own ineffable and matchless grace of moderation, will have us pause and listen while _his_ Coriolanus, ere he will take food or wine in _his_ Corioli, gives orders that the Volscian who was kind to him personally–the poor man at whose house he lay–shall be saved, when he is so weary with slaying Volscians that ‘his very memory is tired,’ and he cannot speak his poor friend’s name.

He tracks this conqueror home again, and he watches him more sharply than ever–this man, whose new name is borrowed from his taken town. CORIOLANUS of CORIOLI. _Marcius_, plain _Caius Marcius_, now no more. He will think it treason–even in the conquered city he will resent it–if any presume to call him by that petty name henceforth, or forget for a breathing space to include in his identity the town–the town, that in its sacked and plundered streets, and dying cries–that, with that ‘painting’ which he took from it so lavishly, though he scorned the soldiers who took ‘spoons’–has clothed him with his purple honours: those honours which this Poet will not let him wear any longer, tracked in the misty outline of the past, or in the misty complexity of the unanalysed conceptions of the vulgar, the fatal unscientific _opinion_ of the many-headed many; that old coat of arms, which the man of science will trace now anew (and not here only) with his new historic pencil, which he will fill now anew–not here only–which he will fill on another page also, ‘approaching his particular more near’–with all its fresh, recent historic detail, with all its hideous, barbaric detail.

He is jealous,–this new Poet of his kind,–he is jealous of this love that makes such work in Volscian homes, in Volscian mother’s sons, under this name, ‘that men sanctify, and turn up the white of the eyes to.’ He flings out suspicions on the way home, that it is even _narrower_ than it claims to be: he is in the city before it; he contrives to jet a jar into the sound of the trumpets that announce its triumphant entry; he has thrown over all the glory of its entering pageant, the suspicion that it is base and mercenary, that it is base and _avaricious_, though it puts nothing in its pocket, but takes its hire on its brows.

_Menenius_. Brings a victory in his pocket. _Volumnia_. On’s brows Menenius.

He surprises the mother counting up the cicatrices. He arrests the cavalcade on its way to the Capitol, and bids us note, in those private whispers of family confidence, how the Camp and the Capitol stand in this hero’s chart, put down on the road to ‘our own house.’ Nay, he will bring out the haughty chieftain in person, and show him on his stage, standing in his ‘wolfish gown,’ showing the scars that _he should hide_, and asking, like a mendicant, for his hire. And though he does it proudly enough, and as if he did not care for this return, though he sets down his own services, and expects the people to set them down, to a disinterested love for his _country_, it is to this Poet’s purpose to show that he was mistaken as to that. It is to his purpose to show that these two so different things which he finds confounded under one name and notion in the popular understanding here, and, what is worst of all, in the practical understanding of the populace, are two, and not one. That the mark of the primal differences, the original differences, the difference of things, the simplicity of nature herself divides them, makes two of them, two,–not one. He has caught one of those rude, vulgar notions here, which he speaks of elsewhere so often, those notions which make such mischief in the human life, and he is severely separating it–he is separating the martial virtue–from the true heroism, ‘with the mind, that divine fire.’ He is separating this kind of heroism from that cover under which it insinuates itself into governments, with which it makes its most bewildering claim to the popular approbation.

He is bound to show that the true love of the common-weal, that principle which recognises and embraces the weal of others as its own, that principle which enters into and constitutes each man’s own noblest life, is a thing of another growth and essence, a thing which needs a different culture from any that the Roman Volumnia could give it, a culture which unalytic, barbaric ages–wanting in all the scientific arts–could not give it.

He will show, in a conspicuous instance, what that kind of patriotism amounts to, in the man who aspires to ‘the helm o’ the State,’ while there is yet no state within himself, while the mere instincts of the lower nature have, in their turn, the sway and sovereignty in him. He will show what that patriotism amounts to in one so schooled, when the hire it asks so disdainfully is withheld. And he will bring out this point too, as he brings out all the rest, in that large, scenic, theatric, illuminated lettering, which this popular design requires, and which his myth furnishes him, ready to his hand. He will have his ‘transient hieroglyphics,’ his _tableaux vivants_, his ‘dumb-shows’ to aid him here also, because this, too, is for the spectators–this, too, is for the audience whose eyes are more learned than their ears.

It is a natural hero, one who achieves his greatness, and not one who is merely born great, whom the Poet deals with here. ‘He has that in his face which men love–_authority_.’ ‘As waves before a vessel under sail, so men obey him and fall below his stern.’ The Romans have stripped off his wings and turned him out of the city gates, but the heroic instinct of greatness and generalship is not thus defeated. He carries with him that which will collect new armies, and make him their victorious leader. Availing himself of the pride and hostility of nations, he is sure of a captaincy. His occupation is not gone so long as the unscientific ages last. The principle of his heroism and nobility has only been developed in new force by this opposition. He will have a new degree; he will purchase a new patent of it; he will _forge_ himself a new and _better_ name, for ‘the patricians are called _good_ citizens.’ He will forget Corioli; _Coriolanus_ now no more, he will conquer _Rome_, and incorporate that henceforth in his name. He will make himself great, not by the grandeur of a true citizenship and membership of the larger whole, in his private subjection to it,–not by emerging from his particular into the self that comprehends the whole; he will make himself great by subduing the whole to his particular, the greater to the less, the whole to the part. He will triumph over the Common-weal, and bind his brow with a new garland. That is his magnanimity. He will take it from without, if they will not let him have it within. He will turn against that country, which he loved so dearly, that same edge which the Volscian hearts have felt so long. ‘There’s some among you have _beheld_ me fighting,’ he says. ‘Come, _try upon yourselves_ what you have _seen me_?’ He is only that same narrow, petty, pitiful private man he always was, in the city, and in the field, at the head of the Roman legions, and in the legislator’s chair, when, to right his single wrong, or because the people would not let him have _all_ from them, he comes upon the stage at last with Volscian steel, and sits down, Captain of the Volscian armies, at Rome’s gates.

‘This morning,’ says Menenius, after the reprieve, ‘this morning for ten thousand of your throats, I’d not have given a doit.’ But this is only the same ‘good citizen’ we saw in the first scene, who longed to make a quarry of _thousands of the quartered slaves_, as high as he could prick his lance! That was ‘the altitude of his virtue’ _then_. It is the same citizenship with its conditions altered.

So well and thoroughly has the philosopher done his work throughout–so completely has he filled the Roman story with his ‘richer and bolder meanings,’ that when the old, familiar scene, which makes the denouement of the Roman myth, comes out at last in the representation, it comes as the crowning point of this Poet’s own invention. It is but the felicitous artistic consummation of the piece, when this hero, in his conflicting passions and instincts, gives at last, to one private affection and impulse, the State he would have sacrificed to another; when he gives to his boy’s prattling inanities, to his wife’s silence, to the moisture in her eyes, to a shade less on her cheek, to the loss of a line there, to his mother’s scolding eloquence, and her imperious commands, the great city of the gods, the city he would have offered up, with all its sanctities, with all its household shrines and solemn temples, as one reeking, smoking holocaust, to his wounded honour. That is the principle of the citizenship that was ‘accounted GOOD’ when this play began, when this play was written.

‘He was a kind of nothing, _titleless_,– Till he had forged himself _a name_ i’ the fire _Of burning Rome_.’

That is his modest answer to the military friend who entreats him to spare the city.

‘Though soft-conscienced men may be content to say _it was for his country_, he did it to please his mother, and to be partly proud.’

Surely that starving citizen who found himself at the beginning of this play, ‘as lean as a rake’ with this hero’s legislation, and in danger of more fatal evils, was not so very wide of the truth, after all, in his surmise as to the principles of _the heroic statesmanship_ and _warfare_, when he ventured thus early on that suggestion. The State banished him, as an enemy, and he came back with a Volscian army to make good that verdict. But his sword without was not more cruel than his law had been within. It was not starving only that he had voted for. ‘_Let them hang_,’ ay–(_ay_) ‘and BURN TOO,’ was ‘the disposition’ they had ‘thwarted’,–measuring ‘the quarry of _the quartered slaves_,’ which it _would_ make, ‘would the nobility but lay aside their ruth.’ That was the disposition, that was the ignorance, the blind, brutish, demon ignorance, that ‘in good time’ they had thwarted. They had ruled it out and banished it from their city on pain of death, forever; they had turned it out in its single impotence, and it came back ‘_armed_;’ for this was one of rude nature’s monarchs, and outstretched heroes.

Yet is he conquered and defeated. The enemy which has made war without so long, which has put Corioli and Rome in such confusion, has its warfare within also, and it is there that the hero is beaten and slain. For there is no state or fixed sovereignty in his soul. Both sides of the city rise at once; there is a fearful battle, and the red-eyed Mars is dethroned. The end which he has pursued at such a cost is within his reach at last; but he cannot grasp it. The city lies there before him, and his dragon wings encircle it; there is steel enough in the claws and teeth now, but he cannot take it. For there is no law and no justice of the peace, and no general within to put down the conflict of changeful, _warring selfs_, to suppress the mutiny of mutually opposing, mutually _annihilating_ selfish dictates.

In vain he seeks to make his will immutable; for the single passion has its hour, this ‘would-do’ changes. With the impression the passion changes, and the purpose that is _passionate_ must alter with it, unless pure obstinacy remain in its place, and fulfil the annulled dictate. For _such_ purpose, one person of the scientific drama tells us–one who had had some dramatic experience in it,–

‘is but _the slave to memory_,
Of violent birth, and poor validity, Which now, like fruit unripe, stick on the tree, But fall unshaken when they mellow be.
What to ourselves _in passion_ we propose, _The passion ending doth the purpose lose_.’

That is Hamlet’s verbal account of it, when he undertakes to reduce his philosophy to rhyme, and gets the player to insert some sixteen of his lines quietly into the court performance: that is his _verbal_ account of it; but _his_ action, too, speaks louder and more eloquently than his words.

The principle of identity and the true self is wanting in this so-called _self_-ishness. For the true principle of self is the peace principle, the principle of _state_ within and without.

‘_To thine own self be true,
And it must follow as_ the night the day, _Thou canst not then be false to any man_’

That is the doctrine, the scientific doctrine. But it is not the passionate, but thoughtful Hamlet, shrinking from blood, with his resolution sicklied o’er with the pale cast of _conscientious_ thought; it is not the humane, conscience-fettered Hamlet, but the man who aspires to make his single humours the law of the universal world, in whom the poet will show now this want of state and sovereignty.

He steels himself against Cominius; he steels himself against Menenius. ‘He sits in gold,’ Cominius reports, ‘_his eye red_ as ‘twould burn Rome’–a small flambeau the poet thinks for so large a city. ‘He no more remembers his mother than an eight year old horse,’ is the poor old Menenius querulous account of him, when with a cracked heart he returns and reports how the conditions of a man are altered in him: but while he is making that already-quoted report of this superhuman growth and assumption of a divine authority and honour in the Military Chieftain, the Poet is quietly starting a little piece of philosophical machinery that will shake out that imperial pageant, and show the slave that is hidden under it, for it is no _man_ at all, but, in very deed, a slave, as Hamlet calls it, ‘_passion’s slave_,’ ‘a pipe for fortune’s finger _to sound what stop she please_.’ For that _state_,–that command–depends on that which ‘_changes_,’– fortuities, impressions, nay, it has the principle of revolution within it. It is its nature to change. The single passion cannot engross the large, many-passioned, complex nature, so rich and various in motivity, so large and comprehensive in its surveys–the single passion seeks in vain to subdue it to its single end. That reigning passion must give way when it is spent, or sooner if its master come. You cannot make it look to-day as it looked yesterday; you cannot make it look when its rival affection enters as it looked when it reigned alone. An hour ago, the hue of resolution on its cheek glowed immortal red. It was strong enough to defy God and all his creatures; it would annul all worlds but that one which it was god of.

This is the speech of it on the lips of the actor who comes in to interpret to us _the thinker’s_ inaction, the thinker’s irresolution, for ‘it is _conscience_ that makes cowards of us all.’ Here is a man who is resolute enough. _His will_ is not ‘puzzled.’ _His_ thoughts, _his_ scruples will not divide and destroy his purpose. _Here_ is THE UNITY which precedes ACTION. This man is going to be revenged for his father. ‘What would you undertake to do?’ ‘To cut his throat i’ the church.’

‘To hell allegiance, vows to the blackest devil. Conscience and grace to the profoundest pit. I _dare_ damnation. To this point I stand That both the worlds _I_ give to negligence, Let come what comes, _only_ I’ll be revenged Most thoroughly for _my_ father.’ [_Only_.]

That is your passionate speech, your speech of fire. That was what the principle of vindictiveness said when it was _you_, when it mastered you, and called _itself_ by your name. Ay, it has many names, and many lips; but it is always _one_. That was what it said an hour ago; and now it is shrunk away you know not where, you cannot rally it, and you are there confounded, self-abandoned, self-annulled, a forgery, belying the identity which your visible form–which your _human_ form, was made to promise,–a slave,–a pipe for _fortune’s_ finger. This is the kind of action which is criticised in the scientific drama, and ‘rejected’; and the conclusion after these reviews and rejections, ‘after every species of rejection,’–the _affirmation_ is, that there is but one principle that is _human_, and that is GOOD yesterday, to-day, and for ever; and whose is true to that is true, in the human form, to the self which was, and will be. He cannot then be false to his yesterday, or tomorrow; he cannot then be false to himself; he cannot then be false to any man; for that is the self that is one in us all–that is the self of _reason_ and conscience, not passion.

But as for this affection that is tried here now, that the diagram of this scene exhibits so tangibly, ‘as it were, to the eye,’–this poor and private passion, that sits here, with its imperial crown on its head, in the place of God, but lacking His ‘mercy,’–this passion of the petty man, that has made itself so hugely visible with its monstrous outstretching, that lies stretched out and glittering on these hills, with its dragon coils unwound, with its deadly fangs–those little fangs, that crush our private hearts, and torture and rend our daily lives–exposed in this great solar microscope, striking the _common-weal_,–as for this petty, usurping passion, there is a spectacle approaching that will undo it.

Out of that great city there comes a little group of forms, which yesterday this hero ‘could not stay to pick out of that pile which had offended him,’ that was his word,–which yesterday he would have burnt in it without a scruple. Towards the great Volscian army that beleaguers Rome it comes–towards the pavilion where the Volscian captain sits in gold, with his wings outspread, it shapes its course. To other eyes, it is but a group of Roman ladies, two or three, clad in mourning, with their attendants, and a prattling child with them; but, with the first glance at it from afar, the great chieftain trembles, and begins to clasp his armour. He could think of them and doom them, in his over-mastering passion of revenge, with its heroic infinity of mastery triumphant in him,–he could _think_ of them and doom them; but the impressions of _the senses_ are more vivid, and the passions wait on them. As that group draws nearer, one sees, by the light of this Poet’s painting, a fair young matron, with subdued mien and modest graces, and an elder one, leading a wilful boy, with a ‘confirmed countenance,’ pattering by her side; just such a group as one might see anywhere in the lordly streets of Palatinus,–much such a one as one might find anywhere under those thousand-doomed plebeian roofs.

But to this usurping ‘private,’ to this man of passion and affection, and not reason–this man of private and particular motives only, and blind partial aims, it is more potent than Rome and all her claims; it outweighs Rome and all her weal–‘it is worth of senators and patricians a city full, of tribunes and plebeians a sea and land full’–it outweighs all the Volscians, and their trust in him.

His reasons of state begin to falter, and change their aspects, as that little party draws nearer; and he finds himself within its magnetic sphere.

For this is the pattern-man, for the man of mere impression and instinct. He is full of feeling within his sphere, though it is a sphere which does not embrace plebeians,–which crushes Volscians with clarions, and drums, and trumpets, and poets’ voices to utter its exultations. Within that private sphere, his sensibilities are exquisite and poetic in their depth and delicacy. He is not wanting in the finer impulses, in the nobler affections of the particular and private nature. He is not a base, brutal man. Even in his martial conquests, he will not take ‘leaden spoons.’ His soul is with a divine ambition fired to have _all_. It is instinct, but it is the instinct of the human; it is ‘conservation with _advancement_’ that he is blindly pursuing, for this is a generous nature. He knows the heights that reason lends to instinct in the human kind, and the infinities that affection borrows from it.

And the Poet himself has large and gentle views of ‘this particular,’ scientific views of it, scientific recognitions of its laws, such as no philosophic school was ever before able to pronounce. Even here, on this sad and tragic ground of a subdued and debased common-weal, he will not cramp its utterance–he will give it leave to speak, in all its tenderness and beauty, in its own sweet native dialect, all its poetic wildness, its mad verities, its sober impossibilities, even at the moment in which he asks in statesmanship for the rational motive, undrenched in humours and affections–for the motive of the weal that is common, and not for the motive of that which is private and exclusive.

In vain the hero struggles with his yielding passion, and seeks to retain it. In vain he struggles with a sentiment which he himself describes as ‘a gosling’s instinct,’ and seeks to subdue it. In vain he rallies his pride, and says, ‘Let it be _virtuous_ to be _obstinate_’; and determines to stand ‘as if a man were author of himself, and knew no other kin.’ His mother kneels. It is but a frail, aged woman kneeling to the victorious chieftain of the Volscian hosts; but to him it is ‘as if _Olympus_ to _a mole-hill_ stooped in supplication.’ His boy looks at him with an eye in which great Nature speaks, and says, ‘Deny not’; he sees the tears in the dove’s eyes of the beloved, he hears her dewy voice; we hear it, too, through the Poet’s art, in the words she speaks; and he forgets his part. We reach the ‘grub’ once more. The dragon wings of armies melt from him. He is his young boy’s father–he is his fair young wife’s beloved.

‘O a kiss, long _as_ my exile, sweet _as_ my revenge.’

There’s no decision yet. The scales are even now. But there is another there, waiting to be saluted, and he himself is but a boy–his own mother’s boy again, at her feet. It is she that schools and lessons him; it is she that conquers him. It _was_ ‘her boy,’ after all–it was her boy still, that was ‘coming home.’

Well might Menenius say–

‘_This Volumnia_ is worth of consuls, senators, patricians, A city full; of tribunes _such as you_, A sea and land full.’

But let us take the philosophic report of this experiment as we find it; for on the carefullest study, when once it is put in its connections, when once we ‘have heard the argument,’ we shall not find anything in it to spare. But we must not forget that this is still ‘the election,’ the ignorant election of the common-weal which is under criticism, and though this election has been revoked in the play already, and this is a banished man we are trying here, there was a play in progress when this play was played, in which that revocation was yet to come off; and this Poet was anxious that the subject should be considered first from the most comprehensive grounds, so that _the principle of ‘the election_’ need never again be called in question, so that the revolution should end in the state, and not in the principle of revolution.

‘My wife comes foremost; then the honoured mould Wherein this trunk was framed, and in her hand The grand-child to her blood. But, out, _affection_! All bond and privilege of nature, break! _Let it be virtuous to be obstinate_.– What is that curtsey worth? or those doves’ eyes, Which can _make gods forsworn_?

[‘He speaks of the people as if he were a god to punish, and not a man of infirmity.’]

‘I melt, _and am not_
Of STRONGER EARTH than others.–My mother bows; As if Olympus to a molehill should
In supplication nod: and my young boy Hath an aspect of intercession, which
Great Nature cries, ‘Deny not!’–Let the Volsces Plough Rome, and harrow Italy; I’ll never Be such a GOSLING to obey INSTINCT; but stand, As if a MAN were author of himself,
And knew no other kin.
These eyes are not the same I wore in Rome.

_Vir_.
The sorrow that delivers us thus changed, Makes you think so.

[The objects are altered, not the eyes. We are changed. But it is with sorrow. She bids him note that alteration, and puts upon it the blame of his loss of love. But that is just the kind of battery he is not provided for. His resolution wavers. That unrelenting warrior, that fierce revengeful man is gone already, and forgot to leave his part–the words he was to speak are wanting.]

_Cor_. Like a dull actor now,
I have forgot my part, _and I am out_, _Even to a full disgrace_. Best of my flesh, Forgive my tyranny; but do not say,
For that, Forgive our Romans.–O, a kiss Long as my exile, sweet as my revenge!
Now by the jealous queen of heaven, that kiss I carried from thee, dear; and my true lip Hath virgin’d it e’er since.–You gods! I prate, And the _most noble mother of the world_ Leave unsaluted: Sink, my knee, t’the earth; [_Kneels_.] Of _the deep duty_ more _impression_ show _Than that of common sons_.

_Vol_. O, stand up bless’d!
Whilst, with no softer cushion than the flint, I kneel before thee; and unproperly
_Show duty, as mistaken_–

[Note it–‘as mistaken,’ for this is the kind of learning described elsewhere, which differs from received opinions, and must, therefore, pray in aid of similes.]

–and improperly
Show DUTY, as mistaken all the while Between the child and parent.

[And the prostrate form of that which should command, is represented in the kneeling mother. The Poet himself points us to this hieroglyphic. It is the common-weal that kneels in her person, and the rebel interprets for us. It is the violated law that stoops for pardon.]

_Cor_. What is this?
Your knees to me? to _your corrected son_? _Then_ let the pebbles on the hungry beach Fillip the stars; _then_ let the _mutinous_ winds Strike the proud cedars ‘gainst the fiery sun; _Murdering impossibility, to make
What cannot be, slight work_.

_Vol_. Thou _art my warrior;
I holp to frame thee_.

[But it is not of the little Marcius only, the hero–the Roman hero in germ–that she speaks–there is more than her Roman part _here_, when she adds–]

_Vol_. This is a poor epitome of yours, Which _by the interpretation_ of _full time_ May show, _like all, yourself_.

[And hear now what benediction the true hero can dare to utter, what prayer the true hero can dare to pray, through this faltering, fluctuating, martial hero’s lips, when, ‘that whatsoever god who led him’ is failing him, and the flaws of impulse are swaying him to and fro, and darkening him for ever.]

_Cor._ ‘The god of soldiers
_With the consent of_ SUPREME JOVE,’–[the Capitolian, the god of state]–‘inform _Thy thoughts_ with NOBLENESS;’–[_inform thy thoughts._] ‘that thou may’st prove _The shame_ unvulnerable, and stick i’the wars Like a great sea-mark, _standing every flaw_, And saving those that eye thee.’

[But _this_ hero’s conclusion for himself, and his impulsive nature is–]

‘Not of a woman’s tenderness to be,
Requires nor child, nor woman’s face to see. I have sat too long.’

But the mother will not let him go, and her stormy eloquence completes the conquest which that dumb rhetoric had before well nigh achieved.

Yes, Menenius was right in his induction. His abstraction and brief summing up of ‘this Volumnia’ and her history, is the true one. She is very potent in the business of the state, whether you take her in her first literal acceptation, as the representative mother, or whether you take her in that symbolical and allusive comprehension, to which the emphasis on the name is not unfrequently made to point, as ‘the nurse and mother of all humanities,’ the instructor of the state, the former of its nobility, who _in_-forms their thoughts with nobleness, such nobleness, and such notions of it as they have, and who fits them for the place they are to occupy in the body of the common-weal.

Menenius has not exaggerated in his exposition the relative importance of _this_ figure among those which the dumb-show of this play exhibits. Among the ‘transient hieroglyphics’ which the diseased common-weal produces on the scientific stage, when the question of its CURE is the question of the Play–in that great crowd of forms, in that moving, portentous, stormy pageant of senators, and consuls, and tribunes, and plebeians, whose great acts fill the scene–there are none more significant than these two, whom we saw at first ‘seated on two low stools, sewing’; these two of the wife and mother–the commanding mother, and the ‘gracious silence.’

‘This Volumnia’–yes, let her school him, for it is from her school that he has come: let her conquer him, for she is the conserver of this harm. It is she who makes of it a tradition. To its utmost bound of consequences, she is the mother of it, and accountable to God and man for its growth and continuance. Consuls, and senators, and patricians, and tribunes, such as we have, are powerless without her, are powerless against her. The state begins with her; but, instead of it, she has bred and nursed the destroyer of the state. Let her conquer him, though her life-blood must flow for it now. This play is the Cure of the Common-weal, the convulsed and dying Common-weal; and whether the assault be from within or without, this woman must undo her work. The tribunes have sent for her now: she must go forth without shrinking, and slay her son. She was the true mother; she trained him for the common-weal, she would have made a patrician of him, but that craved a noble cunning; she was not instructed in it; she must pay the penalty of her ignorance–the penalty of her traditions–and slay him now. There is no help for it, for she has made with her traditions a thing that no common-weal can bear.

Woe for this Volumnia! Woe for the common-weal whose chiefs she has reared, whose great men and ‘GOOD CITIZENS’ she has made! Woe for her! Woe for the _common_-weal, for _her_ boy approaches! The land is groaning and shaken; the faces of men gather blackness; the clashing of arms is heard in the streets, blood is flowing, the towns are blazing. Great Rome will soon be sacked with Romans, for her boy is coming home; the child of her instinct, the son of her ignorance, the son of her RELIGION, is _coming home_.

‘O mother, mother!
What hast thou done?….
O my mother, mother! O,
You have won _a happy victory to Rome_,– But for your son–‘

Alas for him, and his gentle blood, and noble breeding, and his patrician greatness! Woe for the unlearned mother’s son, who has made him great with such a training, that Rome’s weal and his, Rome’s greatness and his, must needs contend together–that ‘Rome’s happy victory’ must needs be the blaze that shall darken him for ever!

Yet he storms again, with something like his old patrician fierceness; and yet not that, the tone is altered; he is humbler and tamer than he was, and he says himself, ‘It is the first time that ever I have learned to scold’; but he is stung, even to boasting of his old heroic deeds, when Aufidius taunts him with his un-martial, un-_divine_ infirmity, and brings home to him in very words, at last, the Poet’s suppressed verdict, the Poet’s deferred sentence, GUILTY!–of what? He is but A BOY, his nurse’s boy, and he undertook _the state_! He is but A SLAVE, and he was caught climbing to the imperial chair, and putting on the purple. He is but ‘a _dog_ to the commonalty,’ and he was sitting in the place of God.

Aufidius owns, indeed, to his own susceptibility to these particular and private affections. When Coriolanus turns to him after that appeal from Volumnia has had its effect, and asks:–

‘Now, good Aufidius,
Were _you in my stead_, say, would _you_ have heard A mother _less_, or granted _less_, Aufidius?’

He answers, guardedly, ‘I was moved _withal_.’ But the philosopher has his word there, too, as well as the Poet, slipped in under the Poet’s, covertly, ‘I was _moved_ with-_all_.’ [It is the Play of the Common-weal.] And what should the single private man, the man of exclusive affections and changeful humours, do with the weal of the whole? In his noblest conditions, what business has he in the state? and who shall vote to give him the out-stretched wings and claws of Volscian armies, that he may say of Rome, _all’s mine_, and give it to his wife or mother? Who shall follow in _his_ train, to plough Rome and harrow Italy, who lays himself and all his forces at his mother’s feet, and turns back at her word?

_Aufidius_. You lords and HEADS of the STATE, perfidiously Has he betrayed _your business_, and given up For certain drops of salt, _your city_ Rome– I say, _your city_–to _his wife and mother: Breaking his oath and resolution like
A twist of rotten silk; never admitting Counsel of the war_, but _at his nurse’s tears_ He whined and roar’d away your victory, That pages blushed at him, and men of heart _Looked wondering at each other_.

[There is a look which has come down to us. That is Elizabethan. That is the suppressed Elizabethan.]

_Cor_. Hear’st thou, _Mars_?

_Auf_. Name not _the god_ thou _Boy_ of tears.

_Cor_. _Ha_!

_Auf_. No MORE. [You are no more.]

_Cor_. Measureless liar, thou hast made my heart Too great for what contains it. _Boy? O Slave_! …. Boy? False _hound_!

[These are the names that are flying about here, now that the martial chiefs are criticising each other: it is no matter which side they go.]

‘_Boy? O slave_!
… Boy? False hound! [‘He is a very dog to the commonalty.’] Alone I did it. BOY?

But it is Volumnia herself who searches to the quick the principle of this boyish sovereignty, in her satire on the undivine passion she wishes to unseat. It is thus that she upbraids the hero with his un_manly_, ungracious, ignoble purpose:–

‘Speak to me, son.

Thou hast affected the fine strains of HONOUR, To imitate the graces of the gods;
To tear with thunder the wide cheeks o’ the air, And yet to charge thy sulphur with a bolt That should but rive an oak. Why dost not speak? Think’st thou it honourable for a NOBLE MAN Still to remember wrongs?

For that is the height of the scientific affirmation also; the other was, in scientific language, its ‘anticipation.’ He wants nothing of a god but an eternity, and a heaven to throne in (slight deficiences in a god already). ‘Yes, mercy, if you paint him truly.’ ‘I paint him in character.’

NOBILITY, HONOUR, MANLINESS, HEROISM, GOOD CITIZENSHIP, FREEDOM, DIVINITY, PATRIOTISM. We are getting a number of definitions here, vague popular terms, scientifically fixed, scientifically cleared, destined to waver, and be confused and mixed with other and fatally different things in the popular apprehension no more–when once this science is unfolded for that whole people for whom it was delivered–no more for ever.

There is no open dramatic embodiment in this play of the true ideal nobility, and manliness, and honour, and divinity. This is the false affirmation which is put upon the stage here, to be tried, and examined, and rejected. For it is to this Poet’s purpose to show–and very much to his purpose to show, sometimes–what is not the true affirmation. His method is critical, but his rejection contains the true definition. The whole play is contrived to shape it here; all hands combine to frame it. Volscians and Romans conspire to pronounce it; the world is against this ‘one man’ and his part-liness, though he be indeed ‘every man.’ He himself has been compelled to pronounce it; for the speaker for the whole is the speaker in each of us, and pronounces his sentences on ourselves with our own lips. ‘Being gentle wounded craves a noble cunning,’ is the word of the noble, who comes back with a Volscian army to exhibit upon the stage this grand hieroglyphic, this grand dramatic negative of that nobility.

But it is from the lips of the mother, brought into this deadly antagonism with the manliness she has trained, compelled now to echo that popular rejection, that the Poet can venture to speak out, at last, from the depths of his true heroism. It is this Volumnia who strikes now to the heart of the play with her satire on this affectation of the graces of the gods,–this assumption of nobility, and manliness, and the fine strains of _honour_,–in one who is led only by the blind demon gods, ‘that keep this dreadful pother o’er our heads,’–in one who is bounded and shut in after all to the range of his own poor petty private passions, shut up to a poverty of soul which forbids those assumptions, limited to a nature in which those _strictly_ human terms can be only affectations, one who concentrates all his glorious _special_ human gifts on the pursuit of ends for which the lower natures are also furnished. Honour, forsooth! the fine strains of honour, and the graces of the gods. Look at that Volscian army there.

‘To tear with thunder _the wide cheeks o’ the air, And yet_ to charge thy sulphur with a bolt That should but rive an oak.
_Why dost not speak_?’

He can not. There is no speech for that. It does not bear _review_.

‘Why dost not speak?
Think’st thou it honourable for a noble man _Still_ to remember wrongs?’

‘Let it be _virtuous_ to be _obstinate_,’ let there be no better principle of that identity which we insist on in men, that firmness which we call manliness, and the cherished _wrong_ is honour.

It is but an interrogative point, but the height of our affirmation is taken with it. It is a figure of speech and _intensifies_ the affirmative with its irony.

‘This a consul? No.’

‘No more, but e’en a woman, and COMMANDED By such _poor_ passion as the maid that milks, And does the meanest chares.’ [QUEEN.]

‘Give me that _man_ that is not _passion’s slave_.

Since my dear soul _was mistress of her choice, And could of men distinguish her election_, She hath seal’d thee for herself: _for_ thou hast been As one, in suffering _all_, that _suffers_ nothing.

But the man who rates so highly ‘this single mould of Marcius,’ and the wounded name of it, that he will _forge_ another for it ‘i’ the fire of burning Rome,’ who will hurt the world to ease the rankling of his single wrong, who will plough Rome and harrow Italy to cool the fever of his thirst for vengeance; this is not the man, this is not the hero, this is not THE GOD, that the scientific review accepts. Whoso has put him in the chair of state on earth, or in heaven, must ‘revoke that ignorant election.’ Whatever our ‘perfect example in civil life’ may be, and we are, perhaps, not likely to get it openly in the form of an historic ‘_composition_’ on this author’s stage, whatever name and shape it may take when it comes, this evidently is not it. This Caius Marcius is dismissed for the present from this Poet’s boards. This curule chair that stands here empty yet, for aught that we can see, and this crown of ‘olives of endless age,’ is not for him.

‘Would you proceed especially against Caius Marcius? Against him first.

‘We proceed first by negatives, and conclude after every species of rejection.’

On the surface of this play, lies everywhere the question of the Common-Weal, in its relation to the good that is private and particular, scientifically reviewed, as a question in proportion,–as the question of the whole against the part,–of the greater against the less,–nay, as the question of that which is against that which is not. For it is a treatment which throws in passing, the shadow of the old metaphysical suspicion and scepticism on that chaotic unaxiomatical condition of things which the scientific eye discovers here, for the new philosophy with all its new comprehension of the actual, with all its new convergency on practice, is careful to inform us that it observes, notwithstanding the old distinction between ‘being and becoming.’ This is an IDEAL philosophy also, though the notions of nature are more respected in it, than the spontaneous unconsidered notions of men.

It is the largeness of the objective whole, the historic whole and the faculty in man of comprehending it, and the sense of relation and obligation to it, as the highest historic law,–the _formal_, the _essential law_ of _kind_ in him, it is the breadth of reason, it is the circumference of conscience, it is the _grandeur_ of duty which this author arrays here scientifically against that oblivion and ignoring of the _whole_, that forgetfulness of the world, and the universal tie which the ignorance of the unaided sense and the narrowness of passion and private affection create, whether in the one, or the few, or the many. It is the Weal of the whole against the will of the part, no matter where the limit of that partiality, or ‘partliness,’ as the ‘_poor_ citizen’ calls it, is fixed whether it be the selfishness of the single self, or whether the household tie enlarges its range, whether it be the partiality of class or faction, or the partiality of kindred or race, or the partiality of geographic limits, the question of the play, the question of the whole, of the worthier whole, is still pursued with scientific exaction. It is the conflict with axioms which is represented here, and not with wordy axioms only, not with abstractions good for the human mind only, in its abstract self-sustained speculations, but with historical axioms, axioms which the universal nature knows, laws which have had the consent of things since this nature began, laws which passed long ago the universal commons.

It is the false unscientific state which is at war, not with abstract speculation merely, but with the nature of things and the received logic of the universe, which this man of a practical science wishes to call attention to. It is the crowning and enthroning of that which is private and particular, it is the anointing of passion and instinct, it is the arming of the absolute–the demon–will; it is the putting into the hands of the ignorant part the sceptre of the whole, which strikes the scientific Reviewer as the thing to be noted here. And by way of proceeding by negatives first, he undertakes to convey to others the impression which this state of things makes upon his own mind, as pointedly as may be, consistently with those general intentions which determine his proceedings and the conditions which limit them, and he is by no means timid in availing himself of the capabilities of his story to that end. The true spectacle of the play,–the principal hieroglyphic of it,–the one in which this hieroglyphic criticism approaches the metaphysical intention most nearly, is one that requires interpretation. It does not report itself to the eye at once. The showman stops to tell us before he produces it, that it _is_ a symbol,–that this is one of the places where he ‘prays in aid of similes,’–that this is a specimen of what he calls elsewhere ‘allusive’ writing. The true spectacle of the play,–the grand hieroglyphic of it,–is that view of the city, and the woman in the foreground kneeling _for it_, ‘to her _son_, her _corrected_ son,’ begging for pardon of her corrected rebel–hanging for life on the chance of his changeful moods and passions. It is _Rome_ that lies stretched out there upon her hills, in all her visible greatness and claims to reverence; it is Rome with her Capitolian crown, forth from which the Roman matron steps, and with no softer cushion than the flint, in the dust at the rebel’s feet, kneels ‘_to show_’–as she tells us–to show as clearly as the conditions of the exhibition allow it to be exhibited, DUTY as mistaken,–‘_as_ mistaken,’–_all the while_ between _the child_ and _parent_.

It is Jupiter that stoops; it is Olympus doing obeisance to the mole-hill; it is the divineness of the universal law–the _formal_ law in man–that is prostrate and suppliant in her person; and the Poet exhausts even his own powers of expression, and grows inarticulate at last, in seeking to convey his sense of this ineffable, impossible, historical pretension. It is as ‘if Olympus to a mole-hill should _in supplication nod_; it is as if _the pebbles_ on the hungry beach should _fillip the stars_; as if _the mutinous winds_ should strike the proud cedars against the fiery sun, _murdering impossibility_, to make what _can not be_, slight work,’–what can not _be_.

That was the spectacle of the play, and that was the world’s spectacle when the play was written. Nay, worse; a thousandfold more wild and pitiful, and confounding to the intellect, and revolting to its sensibilities, was the spectacle that the State offered then to the philosophic eye. The Poet has all understated his great case. He has taken the pattern-man in the private affections, the noble man of mere instinct and passion, and put _him_ in the chair of state;–the man whom nature herself had chosen and anointed, and crowned with kingly graces.

‘As waves before a vessel under sail So men obeyed him, and fell below his stern,’

‘If he would but incline to the people, there never was a worthier man.’

Not to the natural private affections and instincts, touched with the nobility of human sense,–not to the loyalty of the husband,–not to the filial reverence and duty of the son, true to that private and personal relationship at least; not to the gentleness of the patrician, true to that private patricianship also, must England owe her _weal_–such weal as she could beg and wheedle from her lord and ruler then. Not from the conquering hero with his fresh oakleaf on his brow, and the command of the god who led him in his speech and action,–and not from his lineal successor merely, must England beg her welfare then. It was not the venerable mother, or the gentle wife, with her dove’s eyes able to make gods of earth forsworn, who could say then, ‘The laws of England are at my commandment.’

Crimes that the historic pen can only point to,–not record,–low, illiterate, brutish stupidities, mad-cap folly, and wanton extravagancies and caprices, in their ideal impersonations–_these_ were the gods that England, in the majesty of her State, in the sovereignty of her chartered weal, must abase herself to then. To the vices of tyranny, to low companions and their companions, and _their_ kindred, the State must cringe and kneel then. To _these_,–men who meddled with affairs of State,–who took, even at such a time, the State to be _their_ business,–must address themselves; for these were the councils in which England’s peace and war were settled then, and the Tribune could enter them only in disguise. His _veto_ could not get spoken outright, it could only be pronounced in under-tones and circumlocutions. Not with noble, eloquent, human appeals, could the soul of power be reached and conquered then–the soul of him ‘within whose eyes sat twenty thousand deaths,’ the man of the thirty legions, to whom this _argument_ must be dedicated. ‘Ducking observances,’ basest flatteries, sycophancies past the power of man to utter, personal humiliations, and prostrations that seemed to teach ‘the mind a most inherent baseness,’ _these_ were the weapons,–the required weapons of the statesman’s warfare then. From these ‘dogs of the commonalty’ men who were indeed ‘noble,’ whose ‘fame’ did indeed ‘fold in the orb o’ the world,’ must take then, as a purchase or a gift, deliverance from physical restraint, and life itself. These were the days when _England’s_ victories were ‘blubbered and whined away,’ in such a sort, that ‘pages blushed at it, and men of heart looked wondering at each other.’

And, when science began first to turn her eye on history, and propose to herself the relief of the human estate, as her end, and the scientific arts as her means, this was the spectacle she found herself expected to endure; this was the state of things she found herself called upon to sanction and conserve. She could not immediately reform it–she must produce first her doctrine of ‘_true_ forms,’ her scientific definitions and precepts based on them, and her doctrine of constructions. She could not openly condemn it; but she could criticise and reject it by means of that method which is ‘sometimes necessary in the sciences,’ and to which ‘those who would let in new light upon the human mind must have recourse.’ She could seize the grand hieroglyphic of the heroic past, and make it ‘point with its finger’ that which was unspeakable,–her scorn of it. She could borrow the freedom of the old Roman lips, to repronounce, in her own new dialect,–not their anticipation of her _veto_ only, but her eternal affirmation,–the word of her consulship, the rule of her nobility,–the nobility of being,–being in the human,–the nobility of manliness,–_the divinity of State_, the _true_ doctrine of it;–and, to speak _truly, ‘Antiquitas seculi, juventus mundi._’

CHAPTER VIII.

METAPHYSICAL AID.

‘I do not like the fashion of your garments. You will say they are _Persian_ attire; but let them be changed.’– _The King to Tom o’ Bedlam._

‘Would you proceed especially against _Caius Marcius_? Against him _first_.’

It is the cure of the Common-weal which this author has undertaken, for he found himself pre-elected to the care of the people and to the world’s tribuneship. But he handles his subject in the natural, historical order, in the chronological order,–and not here only, but in that play of which this is a part,–of which this is the play within the Play,–in that grand, historical proceeding on the world’s theatre, which it was given to the author of this play to institute.

He begins with the physical wants of men. The hunger, and cold, and weariness, and all the physical suffering and destitution of that human condition which is the condition of the many, has arrested his human eye, with its dumb, patient eloquence, and it is _that_ which makes the starting point of his revolution. He translates its mute language, he anticipates its word. He is setting in movement operations that are intended to make ‘coals cheap’; he proposes to have corn at his own price. He has so much confidence in what his tongue can do in the way of flattery, that he expects to come back beloved of all the trades in Rome. He will ‘cog their hearts from them,’ and get elected _consul_ yet, with all their voices.

‘Scribbling seems to be the sign of a disordered age,’ says the philosopher, who finds so much occasion for the use of that art about these days. ‘It seems as if it were the season for vain things when the hurtful oppress us; in a time when doing ill is common, to do nothing but what signifies nothing is a kind of commendation. ‘Tis my comfort that I shall be one of the last that are called in question; and, whilst the greater offenders are calling to account, I shall have leisure to amend; for it would be unreasonable to punish _the less troublesome_, whilst we are infested with _the greater_. As the physician said to one who presented him his finger to dress, and who, he perceived, had an ulcer in his lungs, “Friend,” said he, “it is not now time to concern yourself about your fingers-ends”. And _yet_–[_and yet_]–I saw, some years ago, a person whose name and memory I have in very great esteem, in the very height of our great disorders, when there was neither law nor justice put in execution, _nor magistrate_ that performed _his office–no more than there is now_–publish, I know not what pitiful _reformations_, about _clothes, cookery, and law chicanery_. These are amusements wherewith to feed a people that are ill-used, _to show that they are not totally forgotten_.’

That is the account of it. That is the history of this innovation, beginning with books, proposing pitiful reformations in clothes, and cookery, and law chicanery. That would serve to show an ill-used people that there was some care for them stirring, some tribuneship at work already. ‘_What I say of physic generally_, may serve AS AN EXAMPLE OF ALL OTHER SCIENCES,’ says _this same_ scribbler, under his scribbling cognomen. ‘We certainly _intend_ to comprehend them _all_,’ says the graver authority, ‘such as Ethics, Politics, and Logic.’

That is, where we are exactly in this so entertaining performance, which was also designed for the benefit of an ill-used people; for this candidate for the chief magistracy is the _Aedile_ also, and while he stands for his place these spectacles will continue.

It is that physical suffering of ‘the poor citizens’ that he begins with here. It is the question of the price of corn with which he opens his argument. The dumb and patient people are on his stage already; dumb and patient no longer, but clamoring against the surfeiting and wild wanton waste of the few; clamoring for their share in God’s common gifts to men, and refusing to take any longer the portion which a diseased state puts down for them. But he tells us from the outset, that _this_ claim will be prosecuted in such a manner as to ‘throw forth greater themes for insurrection’s arguing.’

Though all the wretched poor were clothed and fed with imperial treasure, with imperial luxury and splendour–though all the arts which are based on the knowledge of physical causes should be put in requisition to relieve their need–though the scientific discoveries and inventions which are pouring in upon human life from that field of scientific inquiry which our men of science have already cultivated their golden harvests, should reach at last poor Tom himself–though that scientific movement now in progress should proceed till it has reached the humblest of our human kin, and surrounded him with all the goods of the private and particular nature, with the sensuous luxuries and artistic elegancies and refinements of the lordliest home–that good which is the distinctive human good, that good which is the constitutional human _end_, that good, that formal and essential good, which it is the end of this philosophy to bring to man, would not necessarily be realised.

For _that_, and nothing short of that, the ‘_advancement_’ of the species to that which it is blindly reaching for, painfully groping for–its form in nature, its ideal perfection–the advancement of it to something more noble than the nobility of a nobler kind of vermin–a state which involves another kind of individual growth and greatness, one which involves a different, a distinctively ‘human principle’ and tie of congregation, is that which makes the ultimate intention of this philosophy.

The organization of that large, complex, difficult form in nature, in which the many are united in ‘the greater congregation’; that more extensive whole, of which the units are each, not simple forms, but the complicated, most highly complex, and not yet subdued complexity, which the individual form of man in itself constitutes; this so difficult result of nature’s combinations and her laws of combination, labouring, struggling towards its consummation, but disordered, threatened, convulsed, asking aid of _art_, is the subject; the cure of it, the cure and healthful regimen of it, the problem.

And it is a born doctor who has taken it in hand this time; one of your natural geniuses, with an inward vocation for the art of _healing_, instructed of nature beforehand in that mystery and profession, and appointed of her to that ministry. Wherever you find him, under whatever disguise, you will find that his mind is running on the structure of _bodies_, the means of their conservation and growth, and the remedies for their disorders, and decays, and antagonisms, without and within. He has a most extraordinary and incurable natural bent and determination towards medicine and cures in general; he is always inquiring into the anatomy of things and the qualities of drugs, analysing them and mixing them, finding the art of their compounds, and modifying them to suit his purposes, or inventing new ones; for, like Aristotle, to whom he refers for a precedent, he wishes ‘to have a hand in everything.’

But he is not a quack. He has no respect for the old authoritative prescriptions, if they fail in practice, whether they come in Galen’s name, or another’s; but he is just as severe upon ‘the empiricutics,’ on the other hand, and he objects to ‘a horse-drench’ for the human constitution in the greater congregation, as much as he does in that distinctively complex delicate structure which the single individual human frame in itself constitutes.

Menenius [speaking of the letter which Volumnia has told him of, and putting in a word on this Doctor’s behalf, for it is not very much to the purpose on his own] says, ‘It gives me an estate of _seven years’_ health, _during which time I will make a lip at the physician_.’ A lip–_a lip_–and ‘what a deal of scorn looks beautiful on it,’ when once you get to see it. But this is the play of ‘conservation with advancement.’ It is the cure and preservation of the common-weal, to which all lines are tending, to which all points and parentheses are pointing; and thus he continues: ‘The _most sovereign prescription_ in _Galen_ is but empiricutic, and to _this_ preservative of no better report than a horse-drench.’ So we shall find, when we come to try it–_this_ preservative,–this conservation.

This Doctor has a great opinion of nature. He thinks that ‘the physician must rely on her powers for his cures in the last resort, and be able to make prescriptions of _them_, instead of making them out of his own pre-conceits, if he would not have of his cure a _conceit_ also.’ His opinion is, that ‘nature is made better by no mean, but she herself hath made that mean;’–

‘So o’er that art
Which you say adds to nature, is an art That nature makes…
…This is an art
Which does _mend nature_, _change_ it rather: but _The art itself_ is nature.’

That is the Poet’s view, but the Philosopher is of the same opinion. ‘Man while _operating_ can only _apply or withdraw_ natural bodies, nature internally _performs_ the rest.’ Those who become _practically_ versed in nature are the mechanic, the mathematician, the alchemist, and _the magician_, but _all_, as matters now stand with faint efforts and meagre success.’… ‘The syllogism forces _assent_ and not _things_.’

‘_The subtlety of nature is far beyond that of sense or of the understanding._ The syllogism consists of propositions, these of words, words are the signs of notions, notions represent things. If our notions are fantastical, the whole structure falls to the ground; but they are for the most part improperly abstracted and deduced from _things_.’

There is the whole of it; there it is in a nut-shell. As we are very apt to find it in this method of delivery by aphorisms; there is the shell of it at least. And considering ‘the torture and press of the method,’ and the instruments of torture then in use for correcting the press, on these precise questions, there is as much of the kernel, perhaps, as could reasonably be looked for, in those particular aphorisms; and ‘aphorisms representing a _knowledge broken_, do _invite_ men to inquire further;’ so _this_ writer of them tells us.

With all his reliance on nature then, and with all his scorn of the impracticable and arrogant conceits of learning as he finds it, and of the quackeries that are practised in its name, this is no empiric. He will not approach that large, complex, elaborate combination of nature, that laboured fruit of time,–her most subtle and efficacious agent, so prolific in results that amaze and confound our art, –he will not approach this great structure with all its unperceived interior adaptations,–with so much of nature’s own work in it, –hehas too much respect for her own ‘cunning hand,’ to approach it without learning,–to undertake its cure with blind ignorant experiments. He will not go to work in the dark on this structure, with drug or surgery. This is going to be a scientific cure. ‘Before we proceed any further, _hear me speak_.’ He will inquire beforehand the nature of this particular structure that he proposes to meddle with, and get its normal state defined at the outset. But that will take him into the question of structures in general, as they appear in nature, and the intention of nature in them. He will have a comparative anatomy to help him. This analysis will not stop with the social unit, he will analyze him. It will not stop with him. It will comprehend the principles of all combinations. He will not stop in his analysis of _this_ complexity till he comes to that which precedes all combination, and survives it–the original simplicity of nature. He will come to this cure armed with the universal ‘simples;’ he will have all the original powers of nature, ‘which are not many,’ in his hands, to begin with; and he will have more than that. He will have the doctrine of their combinations, not in man only, but _in all the kinds_;–those despised kinds, that claim such close relationship– such wondrous relationship with man; and he will not go to the primitive instinctive nature only for his knowledge on this point. He will inquire of art,–the empiric art,–and rude accident, what latent efficacies they have detected in her, what churlish secrets of hers they have wrung from her. You will find the gardener’s and the farmer’s reports, and not the physician’s and the surgeon’s only, inserted in his books of policy and ethics. The ‘nettles’ theory of the rights of private life, and his policy of foreign relationships, appears to this learned politician to strengthen his case a little, and the pertinacious refusal of the ‘old crab trees’ to lend their organizations, such as they are, to the fructification of a bud of nobler kind, is quoted with respect as a decision of nature in another court, on this same question, which is one of the questions here. For the principle of conservation as well as the other principles of the human conduct, appears to this philosopher to require a larger treatment than our men of learning have given it hitherto.

And this is the man of science who takes so much pains to acknowledge his preference for ‘good _compositions_’–who thinks so much of good _natural _compositions and their virtues, who is always expressing or betraying his respect for the happy combinations, the sound results, the luxuriant and beautiful varieties with which nature herself illustrates the secret of her fertility, and publishes her own great volume of examples in the Arts.

First it is the knowledge of the simple forms into which all the variety of nature is convertible, the definitions which account for all–that which is always the same in all the difference, that which is always permanent in all the change; first it is the doctrine of ‘those simple original forms, or differences of things, which like the alphabet are not many, _the degrees and co-ordinations_ whereof make all this variety,’ and then it is the doctrine of _their combinations_,–the combinations which nature has herself accomplished, those which the arts have accomplished, and those which are possible, which have _not_ been accomplished,–those which the universal nature working in the human, working in each, from the platform of the human, from that height in her ascending scale of species, dictates now, demands,–divinely orders,–divinely instructs us in.

This, and nothing short of this,–this so radical knowledge, reaching from the summit of the human complexity, to the primaeval depths of nature,–to the simplicity of the nature that is one in all,–to the indissoluble laws of being,–the laws of being in the species,–the law with which the specific law is convertible,–the law which cannot be broken in the species, which involves loss of species,–loss of being in the species,–this so large and rich and various knowledge, comprehending all the varieties of nature in its fields, putting all nature under contribution for its results, this–this is the knowledge with which the man of science approaches now, this grand particular.

The reader who begins to examine for himself, for the first time, in the original books of it, this great system of the Modern Science, impressed with the received notions in regard to its scope and intentions, will be, perhaps, not a little surprised and puzzled, to find that the thing which is, of all others, most strenuously insisted on by this author, in his own person, next to the worthlessness of the conceits which have no correspondence with things, is the fact that the knowledge of the physical causes is altogether inadequate to that relief of the condition of man, which he finds to be the immediate end of science; and that it is a system of metaphysics, a new metaphysics, which he is everywhere propounding to that end,–openly, and with all the latent force of his new rhetoric.

It is ‘metaphysical aid’ that he offers us; it is magic, but, ‘magic lawful as eating’; it is a priestly aid that he offers us, the aid of one who has penetrated to the inner sanctuary of the law,–the priest of nature, newly instructed in her mind and will, who comes forth from his long communing with her, with her own ‘great seal’ in his hands–with the rod of her enchantments, that old magicians desired to pluck from her, and did not–with the gift of the new and nobler miracles of science as the witness of his anointing–with the reading of ‘God’s book of power’–with the alphabet of its mystery, as the proof of his ordaining–with the key of it, hid from the foundation of the world until now.

The first difference between this metaphysics, and all the metaphysics that ever went before it or came after it, is, that it is practical. It carries in its hand, gathered into the simplicity of the causes that are not many, the secret of all motivity, the secret of all practice. It tells you so; over and over again, in so many words, it dares to tell you so. It opens that closed palm a little, and shows you what is there; it bids you look on while it stirs those lines but a little, and new ages have begun.

It is a practical metaphysics, and the first word of its speech is to forbid abstractions–your abstractions. It sets out from that which is ‘constant, eternal, and universal’; but from that which is ‘constant, eternal, and universal in nature.’ It sets out from that which is fixed; but it is from the fixed and constant causes: ‘_forms_’ not ‘_ideas_.’ The simplicity which it seeks is the simplicity into which the historical phenomena are resolvable; the terms which it seeks are the terms which do not come within the range of the unscientific experience; they are the unknown terms of the unlearned; they are the causes ‘which, like the alphabet, are not many’; they are the terms which the understanding knows, which the reason grasps, and comprehends in its unity; but they are the convertible terms of all the multiplicity and variety of the senses, they are the convertible terms–the _practically_ convertible terms of the known–practically –that is the difference.

In that pyramid of knowledges which the science of things constitutes; in that converging ascent to the original simplicity and identity of nature, beginning at that broad science which makes its base–the science of Natural History–beginning with the basis of the historical complexity and difference; in that pyramid of science, that new and solid pyramid, which the Inductive science–which the inquiry into causes that are operant in nature builds, this author will not stop, either on that broad field of the universal history of nature, which is the base of it, or on that first stage of the ascent which the platform of ‘the physical causes’ makes. The causes which lie next to our experience–the causes, which are variable and many, do not satisfy him. He gains that platform, and looks about him. He finds that even a diligent inquiry and observation _there_ would result in many new inventions beneficial to men; but the knowledge of these causes ‘takes men in narrow and restrained paths’; he wants for the founding of his rule of art the cause which, under all conditions, secures the result, which gives the widest possible command of means. He refuses to accept of the physical causes as the bourne of his philosophy, in theory or practice. He looks with a great human scorn on all the possible arts and solutions which lie on _that_ platform, when the proposal is to stop his philosophy of speculation and practice _there_. It is not for the scientific arts, which that field of observation yields, that he begs leave to revive and _re-integrate_ the misapplied and abused name of _natural magic_, which, in the true sense, is but natural wisdom, or ‘PRUDENCE.’

He can hardly stop to indicate the results which the culture of that field _does_ yield for the relief of the human estate. His eye is uplifted to that new platform of a solid metaphysics, an historical metaphysics, which the inductive method builds. His eye is intent always on that higher stage of knowledge where that which is common to the sciences is found. He takes the other in passing only. Beginning with the basis of a new observation and history of nature, he will found a new metaphysics–an _objective_ metaphysics–the metaphysics of induction. His logic is but a preparation for _that_. He is going to collect, by his inductive method, from all nature, from all species, the principles that are in _all things_; and he is going to build, on the basis of those _inducted_ principles,–on the sure basis of that which is constant, and eternal, and universal in nature, the sure foundations of his universal practice; for, like common logic, the inductive method comprehends ‘_all_.’ That same simplicity, which the abstract speculations of men aspire to, and create, _it_ aspires to and _attains_, by the rough roads, by the laboured stages of observation and experiment.

He is, indeed, compelled to involve his phraseology here in a most studious haze of scholasticism. Perspicuity is by no means the quality of style most in request, when we come to these higher stages of sciences. Impenetrable mists, clouds, and darkness, impenetrable to any but the eye that seeks also the whole, involve the heaven-piercing peak of this new height of learning, this new summit of a scientific divinity, frowning off–warding off, as with the sword of the cherubim, the unbidden invaders of this new Olympus, where sit the gods, restored again,–the simple powers of nature, recovered from the Greek abstractions,–not ‘the idols’–not the impersonated abstractions, the false images of the mind of man–not the logical forms of those spontaneous abstractions, emptied of their poetic content–but the strong gods that make our history, that compose our epics, that conspire for our tragedies, whether we own them and build altars to them or not. This is that summit of the _prima philosophia_ where the axioms that command all are found–where the observations that are common to the sciences, and the precepts that are based on these, grow. This is that height where the _same_ footsteps of nature, treading in different substances or matters, lost in the difference below, are all cleared and identified. This is the height of the forms of the understanding, of the unity of the reason; not as it is in man only, but as it is in all matters or substances.

He does not care to tell us,–he _could not_ well tell us, in _popular_ language, what the true name of that height of learning is: he could not well name without circumlocution, that height which a scientific abstraction makes,–an abstraction that attains simplicity without destroying the concrete reality, an abstraction that attains as its result only a higher history,–a new and more intelligible reading of it,–a solution of it–that which is fixed and constant and accounts for it,–an abstraction whose apex of unity is the highest, the universal history, that which accounts for all,–the equivalent,–the scientific equivalent of it.

But whatever it be, it is something that is going to take the place of the unscientific abstractions, both in theory and practice; it is something that is going to supplant ultimately the vain indolent speculation, the inert because unscientific speculation, that seeks to bind the human life in the misery of an enforced and sanctioned ignorance, sealing up with its dogmas to an eternal collision with the universal laws of God and nature,–laws that no dogma or conceit can alter,–all the unreckoned generations of the life of man. Whatever it be, it is going to strike with its primeval rock, through all the air palace of the vain conceits of men;–it is going straight up, through that old conglomeration of dogmas, that the ages of the human ignorance have built and left to us. The unity to which all things in nature, inspired with her universal instinct tend,–the unity of which the mind and heart of man in its sympathy with the universal whole is but an expression, that unity of its own which the mind is always seeking to impart to the diversities which the unreconciled experience offers it, which it must have in its objective reality, which it will make for itself if it cannot find it, which it _does_ make in ignorant ages, by falling back upon its own form and ignoring the historic reality,–which it builds up without any solid objective basis, by ignoring the nature of things, or founds on one-sided partial views of their nature, that unity is going to have its place in the new learning also–but it is going to be henceforth the unity of knowledge–not of dogmas, not of belief merely, for knowledge, and not belief merely,–knowledge, and not opinion, is _power_.

That man is not the only creature in nature, was the discovery of this philosophy. The founders of it observed that there were a number of species, which appeared to be maintaining a certain sort of existence of their own, without being dependent for it on the movements within the human brain. To abate the arrogance of the species,–to show the absurdity and ignorance of the attempt to constitute the universe beforehand within that little sphere, the human skull, ignoring the reports of the intelligencers from the universal whole, with which great nature has herself supplied us,–to correct the arrogance and specific bias of the human learning,–was the first attempt of the new logic. It is the house of the Universal Father that we dwell in, and it has ‘many mansions,’ and ‘man is not the best lodged in it.’ Noble, indeed, is his form in nature, inspired with the spirit of the universal whole, able in his littleness to comprehend and embrace the whole, made in the image of the universal Primal Cause, whose voice for us is _human_; but there are other dialects of the divine also,–there are nobler creatures lodged with us, placed above us; with larger gifts, with their ten talents ruling over our cities. There is no speech or language where _their_ voice is not heard. Their line is gone out through all the earth also, and their words unto the end of the world; and the poor beetle that we tread on, and the daisy and the lily in all its glory, and the sparrows that are going ‘two for a farthing,’ come in for their place also in this philosophy–the philosophy of science–the philosophy of the kinds, the philosophy of the nature that is one in them,–the metaphysics of history.

‘Although there exists nothing IN NATURE except individual bodies, exhibiting distinct individual _effects, according to individual_ LAWS, yet in each branch of LEARNING that very LAW,–_its investigation, discovery and development_–are the foundation _both of theory and practice_; this law, therefore, and its _parallel_ in each _science_, is what we understand by the term, FORM.’

That is a sentence to crack the heads of the old abstractionists. Before that can be read, the new logic will have to be put in requisition; the idols of the tribe will have to be dismissed first. The inveterate and ‘pernicious habit of abstraction,’–that so pernicious habit of the men of learning must be overawed first.

‘There exists nothing in nature except _individual_ bodies, exhibiting distinct _individual_ effects, according to _individual laws_.’ The concrete is very carefully guarded there against that ‘pernicious habit’; it is saved at the expense of the human species, at the expense of its arrogance. Nobody need undertake to abstract _those_ laws, whatever they may be, for this master has turned his key on them. They are in their proper place; they are in the things themselves, and cannot be taken out of them. The utmost that you can do is to attain to a scientific knowledge of them, one that exactly corresponds with them. That _correspondence_ is the point in the new metaphysics, and in the new logic;–_that_ was what was wanting in the old. ‘The investigation, discovery, and development of this law, in _every branch of learning_, are the foundation both of theory and practice. This law, therefore, and its _parallel_ in each science, is what _we_ understand by the term FORM.’ The distinction is very carefully made between the ’cause in nature,’ and that which _corresponds_ to it, in the human mind, the _parallel_ to it in the sciences; for the notions of men and the notions of nature are extremely apt to differ when the mind is left to form its notions without any scientific rule or instrument; and these ill-made abstractions, which do not correspond with the cause in nature, are of no efficacy in the arts, for nature takes no notice of them whatever.

There is one term in use here which represents at the same time the cause in nature, and that which corresponds to it in the mind of man–the parallel to it in the sciences. When these _exactly correspond_, one term suffices. The term ‘FORM’ is preferred for that purpose in this school. The term which was applied to the abstractions of the old philosophy, with a little modification, is made to signalise the difference between the old and the new. The ‘IDEAS’ of the old philosophy, the hasty abstractions of it, are ‘_the idols_’ of the new–the false deceiving images–which must be destroyed ere that which is fixed and constant _in nature_ can establish its own parallels in our learning. ‘Too untimely a departure, and too remote a recess from particulars,’ is the cause briefly assigned in this criticism for this want of correspondence hitherto. ‘But it is manifest that Plato, in his opinion of _ideas_, as one that had a wit of elevation situate as upon a cliff, did descry that forms were the true object of knowledge, but lost the real fruit of that opinion by considering of forms as absolutely abstracted from matter, and not _confined_ and _determined_ by matter.’ ‘Lost the fruit of that opinion’–this is the author who talks so ‘pressly.’ Two thousand years of human history are summed up in that so brief chronicle. Two thousand years of barren science, of wordy speculation, of vain theory; two thousand years of blind, empirical, _unsuccessful_ groping in all the fields of human practice. ‘And so,’ he continues, concluding that summary criticism with a little further development of the subject, ‘and _so_, turning _his opinion_ upon theology, wherewith all his natural philosophy is infected.’ Natural philosophy infected with ‘opinion,’–no matter whose opinion it is, or under what name it comes to us, whatever else it is good for, is not good for practice. And this is the philosophy which includes both theory and practice. ‘That which in speculative philosophy corresponds to the cause, in practical philosophy becomes the rule.’

But that which distinguishes this from all others is, that it is the philosophy of ‘HOPE’; and that is the name for it in both its fields, in speculation _and_ practice. The black intolerable wall, which those who stopped us on the lower platform of this pyramid of true knowledge brought us up with so soon–that blank wall with which the inquiry for the physical causes in nature limits and insults our speculation–has no place here, no place at all on this higher ground of science, which the knowledge of true forms creates–this true ground of _the understanding_, the understanding of nature, and the universal reason of things. ‘He who is acquainted with forms, comprehends the unity of nature in substances apparently most distinct from each other.’ Neither is that base and sordid limit, with which the philosophy of physical causes shuts in the scientific arts and their power for human relief, found here. For this is the _prima philosophia_, where the universal axioms, the axioms that command all, are found: and the precepts of the universal practice are formed on them. ‘Even the philosopher himself–openly speaking from this summit–will venture to intimate briefly to men of understanding’ the comprehension of its base, and the field of practice which it commands. ‘Is not the ground,’ he inquires, modestly, ‘is not the ground which Machiavel wisely and largely discourseth concerning governments, that the way to establish and _preserve_ them is to reduce them _ad principia_, a rule in _religion_ and _nature, as well as in civil administration_?’ There is the ‘administrative reform’ that will not need reforming, that waits for the science of _forms_ and constructions. But he proceeds: ‘Was not the _Persian_ magic’ [and that is the term which he proposes to restore for ‘_the part operative_’ of this knowledge of forms], ‘was not the Persian magic a _reduction_ or correspondence of _the principles_ and _architecture_ of _nature_ to the _rules_ and _policy_ of _governments_?’ There is no harm, of course, in that timid inquiry; but the student of the _Zenda-vesta_ will be able to get, perhaps, some intimation of the designs that are lurking here, and will understand the revived and reintegrated sense with which the term _magic_ is employed to indicate the part operative of this new ground of _science_. ‘Neither are these only similitudes,’ he adds, after extending these significant inquiries into other departments of practice, and demonstrating that this is the universality from which all other professions are nourished: ‘Neither are these only _similitudes_, as men of narrow observation may conceive them to be, but _the same_ footsteps of nature, treading or printing upon several subjects or matters.’

‘It must, however, be observed, that this method of operating’ [which considers nature as SIMPLE, though in a concrete body] [‘I the first of any, by my _universal being_.’ _Michael de Montaigne_.] ‘sets out from what is constant, eternal, and universal _in nature_; and opens such _broad_ paths to human _power_, as the thought of man can in the present state of things scarcely comprehend or figure to itself,’

Yes, it is the Philosophy of Hope. The perfection of the human form, the limit of the human want, is the limit of its practice; the limit of the human inquiry and demand is the limit of its speculation.

The control of effects which this higher knowledge of nature offers us–this knowledge of what she is beforehand–the practical certainty which this _interior_ acquaintance with her, this acquaintance that identifies her under all the variety of her manifestations, is able to command–that _comprehensive_ command of results which the knowledge of _the true causes_ involves–the causes which are always present in all effects, which are constant under all fluctuations, the same under all the difference–the ‘_power_’ of _this knowledge_, its power to relieve human suffering, is that which the discoverer of it insists on most in propounding it to men; but the mind in which that ‘wonder’–that is, ‘the seed of knowledge’–brought forth _this_ plant, was _not_ one to overlook or make light of that want in the human soul, which only knowledge can appease–that love which leads it to the truth, not for the sake of a secondary good, but because it is her life.

‘Although there is a most intimate connection, and almost an identity between the ways of human power and human knowledge, yet on account of the pernicious and inveterate habit of _dwelling_ upon abstractions, it is by far _the safest_ method to commence and build up sciences from those foundations which bear a relation to the practical division, _and to let them mark out and limit the theoretical_.’ Something like that the Poet must have been thinking of, when he spoke of making ‘the art and practic part of life, _the mistress_ to its theoric;’–‘let _that_ mark out and limit the theoretical.’

That inveterate and pernicious habit, which makes this course the safest one, is one that he speaks of in the Advancement of Learning, as that which has been of ‘such ill desert towards learning,’ as ‘to reduce it to certain _empty_ and barren generalities, the mere husks and shells of sciences,’ good for nothing at the very best, unless they serve to guide us to the kernels that have been forced out of them, by the torture and _press_ of the method,–the mere outlines and skeletons of knowledges, ‘that do but offer knowledge to scorn of practical men, and are no more aiding to practice,’ as the author of this universal skeleton confesses, ‘than an Ortelius’s universal map is, to direct the way between London and York.’

The way to steer clear of those empty and barren generalities, which do but offer learning to the scorn of the men of practice is, he says, to begin on the practical side, and that is just what we are doing here now in this question of the consulship,–that so practical and immediately urgent question which was, threatening then to drive out every other from the human consideration. If learning _had_ anything to offer on that subject, which would _not_ excite the scorn of practical men, then certainly was the time to produce it.

We begin on the practical side here, and as to theory, we are rigidly limited to that which the question of the play requires,–the practical question marks it out,–we have just as much as is required for the solution of that, and not so much as a ‘jot’ more. But mark the expression:–‘it is by far the safest method to commence and build up sciences’–the particular sciences,–the branches of science–from _those foundations which bear a relation_ to the practical division. We begin with a great practical question, and though the treatise is in a form which seems to offer it for amusement, rather than instruction, it has at least this advantage, that it does not offer it in the suspicious form of a theory, or in the distasteful form of a learned treatise,–a tissue of barren and empty generalities. The scorn of practical men is avoided, if it were only by its want of pretension; and the fact that it does not offer itself as a guide to practice, but rather insinuates itself into that position. We begin with the practical question, with its most sharply practical details, we begin with particulars, but that which is to be noted is, ‘the foundations’ of the universal philosophy are under our feet to begin with. At the first step we are on the platform of the prima philosophia; the last conclusions of the inductive science, the knowledge of the nature of things, is the ground,–the solid continuity–that we proceed on. That is the ground on which we build this practice. That is the trunk from which this branch of sciences is continued:–that trunk of universality which we are forbidden henceforth to _scorn_, because all the professions are nourished from it. That universality which the men of practice scorn no more, since they have tasted of its proofs, since they have reached that single bough of it, which stooped so low, to bring its magic clusters within their reach. Fed with their own chosen delights, with the proof of the divinity of science, on their sensuous lips, they cry, ‘Thou hast kept the good wine until now.’ Clasping on the _magic_ robes for which they have not toiled or spun, sitting down by companies,–not of fifties,–not of hundreds,–not of thousands–sitting down by myriads, to this great feast, that the man of science spreads for them, in whose eye, the eye of a divine pity looked forth again, and saw them faint and weary still, and without a shepherd,–sitting down to this feast, for which there is no sweat or blood on their brows, revived, rejoicing, gazing on the bewildering basketfuls that are pouring in, they cry, answering after so long a time, for their part Pilate’s question: _This_, so far as it goes at least, this is _truth_. And the rod of that enchantment was _plucked_ here. It is but a branch from this same trunk–this trunk of ‘universality,’ which the men of practice _will_ scorn no more, when once they reach the multitudinous boughs of this great tree of miracles, where the nobler fruits, the more chosen fruits of the new science, are hidden still.

Continued from that ‘trunk,’ heavy with its juices, stoops now _this_ branch; its golden ‘hangings’ mellowed,–time mellowed,–ready to fall unshaken. Built on _that_ ‘foundation,’ rises now this fair structure, the doctrine of _the state_. That knowledge of nature in general, that _interior_ knowledge of her, that loving insight, which is not baffled with her most foreign aspects; but detects her, and speaks her word, as from within, in all, is that which meets us here, that which meets us at the threshold. Our guide is veiled, but his raiment is priestly. It is great nature’s stole that he wears; he will alter our–_Persian_. We are walking on the pavements of Art; but it is Nature’s temple still; it is her ‘pyramid,’ and we are _within_, and the light from the apex is kindling all; and the dust ‘that the rude wind blows in our face,’ and ‘the poor beetle that we tread on,’ and the poor ‘madman and beggar too,’ are glorious in it, and of our ‘kin.’ Those universal forms which the book of science in the abstract has laid bare already, are running through all; the cord of them is visible in all the detail. Their foot-prints, which have been tracked to the height where nature is one, are seen for the first time cleared, uncovered here, in all the difference. This many-voiced speech, that sounds so deep from every point, deep as from the heart of nature, is _not_ the ventriloquist’s artifice, is _not_ a poor showman’s trick. It is great nature’s voice–her own; and the magician who has untied her spell, who knows the cipher of ‘the one in all’ the priest who has unlocked her inmost shrine, and plucked out the heart of her mystery–is ‘the Interpreter.’

CHAPTER IX.

THE CURE–PLAN OF INNOVATION–NEW DEFINITIONS.

‘Swear by thy double self
And that’s an oath of credit.’

‘Having thus far proceeded
… Is it not meet
That I did amplify my judgment in
Other conclusions?’

It is the trunk of the _prima philosophia_ then which puts forth these new and wondrous boughs, into all the fields of human speculation and practice, filling all our outdoor, penetrating all our indoor life, with their beauty and fragrance; overhanging every roof, stooping to every door, with their rich curtains and clusters of ornament and delight, with their ripe underhanging clusters of axioms of practice–brought down to particulars, ready for use–with their dispersed directions overhanging every path,–with their aphorisms made out of the pith and heart of sciences, ‘representing a broken knowledge, and, _therefore_, inviting the men of speculation to inquire farther.’

It is from this trunk of a _scientific_ universality, of a useful, practical, always-at-hand, all-inclusive, historical universality, to which the tracking of the principles, operant in history, to their simple forms and ‘_causes in nature_,’ conducts the scientific experimenter,–it is from this primal living trunk and heart of sciences, to which the new method of learning conducts us, that this great branch of scientific practice comes, which this drama with its ‘transitory shows’ has brought safely down to us;–this two-fold branch of ethics and politics, which come to us–conjoined–as ethics and politics came in other systems then not scientific,–making in their junction, and through all their divergencies, ‘the forbidden questions’ of science.

The _science_ of this essentially conjoined doctrine is that which makes, in this case, the novelty. ‘The nature _which is formed_ in everything,’ and not in man only, and the faculty, in man, of comprehending that wider nature, is that which makes the higher ground, from which a _science_ of his own specific nature, and the explanation of its phenomenon, is possible to man. Except from this height of a _common nature_, there is no such thing as a scientific explanation of these phenomena possible. And this explanation is what the specific nature in man, with its _speculative_ grasp of a larger whole–with its speculative grasp of a universal whole,–with its instinctive _moral_ reach and comprehension corresponding to that,–constitutionally demands and ‘anticipates.’

And the knowledge of this nature which is formed in everything, and not in man only, is the beginning, not of a speculative science of the human nature merely,–it is the beginning,–it is the indispensable foundation of the arts in which a successful artistic advancement of that nature, or an artistic cure or culture of it is propounded. The fact that the ‘human nature’ is, indeed, what it is called, a ‘_nature_,’ the fact that the human species is _a species_,–the fact that the human kind is but a _kind_, neighboured with many others from which it is isolated by its native walls of ignorance,–neighboured with many others, more or less known, known and unknown, more or less _kind_-ly, more or less hostile,–species, kinds, whose dialects of the universal laws, man has not found,–the fact that the universal, historic principles are operant in all the specific modifications of human nature, and control and determine them, the fact that the human life admits of a scientific analysis, and that its phenomena require to be traced to their true forms,–this is the fact which is the key to the new philosophy,–the key which unlocks it,–the key to the part speculative, and the part operative of it.

And this is the secret of the difference between this philosophy and all other systems and theories of man’s life on earth that had been before it, or that have come after it. For this new and so solid height of natural philosophy,–solid,–historical,–from its base in the divergency of natural history, to its utmost peak of unity,–this scientific height of a common nature, whose summit is ‘prima philosophia,’ with its new universal terms and axioms,–this height from which man, as a species, is also overlooked, and his spontaneous notions and theories criticised, subjected to that same criticism with which history itself is always flying in the face of them,–from which the specific bias in them is everywhere detected,–this new ‘pyramid’ of knowledge is the one on whose rock-hewn terraces the conflict of _views_, the clash of man’s _opinions_ shall not sound: this is the system which has had, and shall have, no rival.

And this is the key to this philosophy, not where it touches human nature only, but everywhere where it substitutes for abstract human notions–specific human notions that are powerless in the arts, or narrow observations that are restrained and uncertain in the rules of practice they produce,–powers, true forms, original agencies in nature, universal powers, sure as nature herself, and her universal form.

To abase the specific human arrogance, to overthrow ‘the idols of the tribe,’ is the ultimate condition of this learning. Man _as man_, is not a primal, if he be an ultimate, fact in nature. Nature is elder and greater than he, and requires him to learn of her, and makes little of his mere conceits and dogmas.

From the height of that new simplicity which this philosophy has gained–not as the elder philosophies had gained theirs, by pure contemplation, by hasty abstraction and retreat to the _a priori_ sources of knowledge and belief in man,–which it has gained, too, by a wider induction than the facts of the human nature can supply–with the torch of these universal principles cleared of their historic complexities, with the torch of the nature that is formed in everything, it enters here this great, unenclosed field of human life and practice, this Spenserian wilderness, where those old, gnarled trunks, and tangled boughs, and wretched undergrowths of centuries, stop the way, where those old monsters, which the action of this play exposes, which this philosophy is bound to drag out to the day, are hid.

The radical universal fact–the radical universal distinction of the _double_ nature of GOOD which is formed in everything, and not in man only, and the two universal motions which correspond to that, the one, as everything, is a total or substantive in itself, with its corresponding motion; for this is the principle of selfishness and war in nature–the principle which struggles everywhere towards decay and the dissolution of the larger wholes, and not in man only, though the foolish, unscientific man, who does not know how to track the phenomena of his own nature to their _causes_,–who has no bridge from the natural internal phenomena of his own consciousness into the continent of nature, may think that it is, and reason of it as if it were;–this double nature of good, ‘the one, as a thing, is a total or substantive in itself, the other as it is, _a part_ or _member_ of a greater body, whereof the latter is in degree _the greater_ and _the worthier_, as it tends to the conservation of a more general form’–this distinction, which the philosopher of this school has laid down in his work on the scientific advancement of the human species, with a recommendation that it should be _strongly planted_, which he has planted there, openly, as the root of a new science of ethics and policy, will be found at the heart of all this new history of the human nature; but in this play of the true nobility, and the scientific cure of the commonweal, it is tracked openly to its most immediate, obvious, practical application. In all these great ‘illustrated’ scientific works, which this new school of learning, with the genius of science for its master, contrived to issue, all the universally actual and active principles are tracked to their _proper_ specific modifications in man, and not to their development in his actual history merely; and the distinctive essential law of the human kind–the law whereby man is man, as distinguished from the baser kinds, is brought up, and worked out, and unfolded in all its detail, from the bosom of the universal law–is brought down from its barren height of isolation, and planted in the universal rule of being, in the universal law of kinds and essence. This double nature of good, as it is specifically developed in man, not as humanity only, for man is not limited to his kind in his intelligence, or in his will, or in his affections,–this double nature of good, as it is developed in man, with his contemplative, and moral, and religious grasp of a larger whole than his particular and private nature can comprehend–with his large discourse looking before and after, on the one hand, and his blind instincts, and his narrow isolating senses on the other–with that distinctive human nature on the one hand, whereby he does, in some sort, comprehend the world, and not intellectually only–that nature whereby ‘the world is set in his heart,’ and not in his mind only–that nature which by the law of advancement to the perfection of his form, he struggles to ascend to–that, on the one hand, and that whereby he is kindred with the lower natures on the other, swayed by a gosling’s instinct, held down to the level of the pettiest, basest kinds, forbidden to ascend to his own distinctive excellence, allied with species who have no such intelligent outgoing from particulars, who cannot grasp the common, whose sphere nature herself has narrowed and walled in,–these two universal natures of good, and all the passion and affection which lie on that tempestuous border line where they blend in the human, and fill the earth with the tragedy of their confusion,–this two-fold nature, and its tragic blending, and its true specific human development, whereby man is man, and not degenerate, lies discriminated in all these plays, tracked through all their wealth of observation, through all their characterization, through all their mirth, through all their tempests of passion, with a line so firm, that only the instrument of the New Science could have graven it.

Of all the sciences, Policy is the most immersed in matter, and the hardliest reduced to axiom’; but setting out from that which is constant and universal in nature, this philosopher is not afraid to undertake it; and, indeed, that is what he is bent on; for unless those universal, historical principles, which he has taken so much pains to exhibit to us clearly in their abstract form, ‘terminate in _matter_ and _construction according_ to _the true_ definitions, they are speculative and of little use.’ The termination of them in matter, and the new construction according to true definitions, is the business here. This, which is the hardliest reduced to axiom of any, is that which lies collected on the Inductive Tables here, cleared of all that interferes with the result; and the axiom of practice, which is the ‘second vintage’ of the New Machine, is expressed before our eyes. ‘For that which in speculative philosophy corresponds to the cause, in practical philosophy becomes the rule.’

He starts here, with this grand advantage which no other political philosopher or reformer had ever had before; he has _the true definition_ in his hands to begin with; not the specific and futile notions with which the human mind, shut up within itself, seeks to comprehend and predict and order all, but the solid actual universals that the mind of man, by the combination and scientific balance of its faculties, is able to ascend to. He has in his hands, to begin with, the causes that are universal and constant in nature, with which all the historical phenomena are convertible,–the motives from which all movement proceeds, the true original simple powers,–the unknown, into which all the variety of the known is resolvable, or rather the known into which all the variety of the unknown is resolvable; the forms ‘which are always present _when the particular nature_ is present, and universally attest that presence; which are always absent when the particular nature is absent, and universally attest that absence; which always increase as the particular nature increases; which always decrease as the particular nature decreases;’ that is the kind of definitions which this philosopher will undertake his moral reform with; that is the kind of idea which the English philosopher lays down for the basis of his politics. Nothing less solid than that will suit the turn of his genius, either in speculation or practice. He does full justice to the discoveries of the old Greek philosophers, whose speculation had controlled, not the speculation only, but all the practical doctrine of the world, from their time to his. He saw from what height of _genius_ they achieved their command; but that was two thousand years before, and that was in the south east corner of Europe; and when the Modern Europe began to think for itself, it was found that the Greeks could not give the law any longer. It was found that the _English_ notions at least, and the _Greek_ notions of things in general differed very materially–essentially–when they came to be put on paper. When the ‘representative men’ of those two corners of Europe, and of those two so widely separated ages of the human advancement, came to discourse together from their ‘cliffs’ and compare notes, across that sea of lesser minds, the most remarkable differences, indeed, began to be _perceptible_ at once, though the world has not yet begun to _appreciate_ them. It was a difference that was expected to tell on the common mind, for a time, principally in its ‘_effects_.’ Everybody, the learned and the unlearned, understands now, that after the modern survey was taken, new practical directions were issued at once. Orders came down for an immediate suspension of those former rules of philosophy, and the ship was laid on a new course. ‘Plato,’ says the new philosopher, ‘as one that had a wit of elevation _situate upon a cliff_, did descry that _forms_ are the true object of knowledge,’ that was his discovery,–‘_but_ lost the fruit of that opinion by’–shutting himself up, in short, in his own abstract contemplations, in his little world of man, and getting out his theory of the universe, before hand, from these; instead of applying himself practically and modestly to the observation of that universe, in which man’s part is _so_ humble. ‘Vain man,’ says our oldest Poet, ‘vain man would be wise, who is born like a wild ass’s colt.’

But let us take a specimen of the manner in which the propounder of the New Ideal Philosophy ‘comes to particulars,’ with this quite new kind of IDEAS, and we shall find that they were designed to take in some of those things in heaven and earth that were omitted, or not dreampt of in the others,–which were not included in the ‘idols.’ He tells us plainly that these are the ideas with which he is going to unravel the most delicate questions; but he is willing to entertain his immediate audience, and propitiate the world generally, by trying them, or rather giving orders to have them tried, on other things first. He does not pride himself very much on anything which he has done, or is able to do in these departments of inquiry from which his instances are here taken, and he says, in this connection:–‘We do not, however, deny that other instances _can perhaps be added_.’ In order to arrive at his doctrine of practice in general, he begins after the scientific method, not with the study of any one kind of actions only, he begins by collecting the rules of action in general. By observation of species he seeks to ascend to the principles common to them. And he comes to us with a carefully prepared scheme of the ‘elementary motions,’–outlined, and enriched with such observations as he and his school have been able to make under the disadvantages of that beginning. ‘The motions of bodies,’ he observes, ‘are compounded, decomposed and combined, no less than the bodies themselves,’ and he directs the attention of the student, who has his eye on practice, with great emphasis, to those instances which he calls ‘instances of predominance,’–‘instances which point out the predominance and submission of powers, compared’ [not in abstract contemplation but in action,] ‘compared with each other, and which,’ [not in books but in action,]–‘which is the more _energetic_ and _superior_, or more weak and inferior.’

‘These “elementary notions” direct and are directed by each other, according to their strength,–quantity, _excitement, concussion_, or the assistance, or impediments they meet with. For instance, _some magnets_ support iron sixty times their own weight; _so far_ does the motion of _lesser congregation_ predominate over _the greater_, but if the weight be increased _it yields_.’

[We must observe, that he is speaking here of ‘the motions, tendencies, and active powers which are most universal in nature,’ for the purpose of suggesting rules of practice which apply _as widely_; though he keeps, with the intimation above quoted, principally to this class of instances.] ‘A lever of a certain strength will raise a given weight, and _so far_ the notion of _liberty_ predominates over that of _the greater congregation_; but if the weight be _greater_, the former motion _yields_. A piece of leather, stretched _to a certain point_, does not break, and _so far_ the motion of continuity _predominates_’ [for it is the question of predominance, and dominance, and domineering, and lordships, and liberties, of one kind and another, that he is handling]–‘_so far_ the motion of continuity _predominates_ over that of tension; but if the tension be _greater_, the leather breaks, and the motion of continuity _yields_. _A certain quantity_ of water flows through a chink, and _so far_ the motion of greater congregation _predominates_ over that of continuity; but if