The Philosophy of the Plays of Shakspere Unfolded. Bacon Delia Salter

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СКАЧАТЬ this case it is the comical aspect of the subject that is seized on.

      Our diagrams are still coarse here, but they have already the good scientific quality of exhausting the subject. It is the New School that occupies the centre of the piece. Their quarters are in that palace, but the king of it is the Royalty (Raleigh) that founded and endowed this School – that was one of his secret titles, – and under that name he may sometimes be recognized in descriptions and dedications that persons who were not in the secret of the School naturally applied in another quarter, or appropriated to themselves. 'Rex was a surname among the Romans,' says the Interpreter of this School, in a very explanatory passage, 'as well as King is with us.' It is the New School that is under these boughs here, but hardly that as yet.

      It is rather the representation of the new classical learning, – the old learning newly revived, – in which the new is germinating. It is that learning in its first effect on the young, enthusiastic, but earnest practical English mind. It is that revival of the old learning, arrested, daguerréotyped at the moment in which the new begins to stir in it, in minds which are going to be the master-minds of ages.

      'Common sense' is the word here already. 'Common sense' is the word that this new Academe is convulsed with when the curtain rises. And though it is laughter that you hear there now, sending its merry English peals through those musty, antique walls, as the first ray of that new beam enters them; the muse of the new mysteries has also another mask, and if you will wait a little, you shall hear that tone too. Cries that the old mysteries never caught, lamentations for Adonis not heard before, griefs that Dionysus never knew, shall yet ring out from those walls.

      Under that classic dome which still calls itself Platonic, the questions and experiments of the new learning are beginning. These youths are here to represent the new philosophy, which is science, in the act of taking its first step. The subject is presented here in large masses. But this central group, at least, is composed of living men, and not dramatic shadows merely. There are good historical features peering through those masks a little. These youths are full of youthful enthusiasm, and aspiring to the ideal heights of learning in their enthusiasm. But already the practical bias of their genius betrays itself. They are making a practical experiment with the classics, and to their surprise do not find them 'good for life.'

      Here is the School, then, – with the classics on trial in the persons of these new school-men. That is the central group. What more do we want? Here is the new and the old already. But this is the old revived– newly revived; – this is the revival of learning in whose stimulus the new is beginning. There is something in the field besides that. There is a 'school-master abroad' yet, that has not been examined. These young men who have resolved themselves in their secret sittings into a committee of the whole, are going to have him up. He will be obliged to come into this park here, and speak his speech in the ear of that English 'common sense,' which is meddling here, for the first time, in a comprehensive manner with things in general; he will have to 'speak out loud and plain,' that these English parents who are sitting here in the theatre, some of 'the wiser sort' of them, at least, may get some hint of what it is that this pedagogue is beating into their children's brains, taking so much of their glorious youth from them – that priceless wealth of nature which none can restore to them, – as the purchase. But this is not all. There is a man who teaches the grown-up children of the parish in which this Park is situated, who happens to live hard by, – a man who professes the care and cure of minds. He, too, has had a summons sent him; there will be no excuse taken; and his examination will proceed at the same time. These two will come into the Park together; and perhaps we shall not be able to detect any very marked difference in their modes of expressing themselves. They are two ordinary, quiet-looking personages enough. There is nothing remarkable in their appearance; their coming here is not forced. There are deer in this Park; and 'book-men' as they are, they have a taste for sport also it seems. Unless you should get a glimpse of the type, – of the unit in their faces – and that shadowy train that the cipher points to, – unless you should observe that their speech is somewhat strongly pronounced for an individual representation – merely glancing at them in passing – you would not, perhaps, suspect who they are. And yet the hints are not wanting; they are very thickly strewn, – the hints which tell you that in these two men all the extant learning, which is in places of trust and authority, is represented; all that is not included in that elegant learning which those students are making sport of in those 'golden books' of theirs, under the trees here now.

      But there is another department of art and literature which is put down as a department of 'learning,' and a most grave and momentous department of it too, in that new scheme of learning which this play is illustrating, – one which will also have to be impersonated in this representation, – one which plays a most important part in the history of this School. It is that which gives it the power it lacks and wants, and in one way or another will have. It is that which makes an arm for it, and a long one. It is that which supplies its hidden arms and armour. But neither is this department of learning as it is extant, – as this School finds it prepared to its hands, going to be permitted to escape the searching of this comprehensive satire. There is a 'refined traveller of Spain' haunting the purlieus of this Court, who is just the bombastic kind of person that is wanted to act this part. For this impersonation, too, is historical. There are just such creatures in nature as this. We see them now and then; or, at least, he is not much overdone, – 'this child of Fancy, – Don Armado hight.' It is the Old Romance, with his ballads and allegories, – with his old 'lies' and his new arts, – that this company are going to use for their new minstrelsy; but first they will laugh him out of his bombast and nonsense, and instruct him in the knowledge of 'common things,' and teach him how to make poetry out of them. They have him here now, to make sport of him with the rest. It is the fashionable literature, – the literature that entertains a court, – the literature of a tyranny, with his gross servility, with his courtly affectations, with his arts of amusement, his 'vain delights,' with his euphuisms, his 'fire-new words,' it is the polite learning, the Elizabethan Belles Lettres, that is brought in here, along with that old Dryasdust Scholasticism, which the other two represent, to make up this company. These critics, who turn the laugh upon themselves, who caricature their own follies for the benefit of learning, who make themselves and their own failures the centre of the comedy of Love's Labour's Lost, are not going to let this thing escape; with the heights of its ideal, and the grossness of its real, it is the very fuel for the mirth that is blazing and crackling here. For these are the woodmen that are at work here, making sport as they work; hewing down the old decaying trunks, gathering all the nonsense into heaps, and burning it up and and clearing the ground for the new.

      'What is the end of study,' is the word of this Play. To get the old books shut, but not till they have been examined, not till all the good in them has been taken out, not till we have made a stand on them; to get the old books in their places, under our feet, and 'then to make progression' after we see where we are, is the proposal here —here also. It is the shutting up of the old books, and the opening of the new ones, which is the business here. But that– that is not the proposal of an ignorant man (as this Poet himself takes pains to observe); it is not the proposition of a man who does not know what there is in books – who does not know but there is every thing in them that they claim to have in them, every thing that is good for life, magic and all. An ignorant man is in awe of books, on account of his ignorance. He thinks there are all sorts of things in them. He is very diffident when it comes to any question in regard to them. He tells you that he is not 'high learned,' and defers to his betters. Neither is this the proposition of a man who has read a little, who has only a smattering in books, as the Poet himself observes. It is the proposition of a scholar, who has read them all, or had them read for him and examined, who knows what is in them all, and what they are good for, and what they are not good for. This is the man who laughs at learning, and borrows her own speech to laugh her down with. This, and not the ignorant man, it is who opens at last 'great nature's' gate to us, and tells us to come out and learn of her, because that which old books СКАЧАТЬ