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

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СКАЧАТЬ bodies, that shuffled together without order, find of themselves means to unite and settle. King Philip mustered up a rabble of the most wicked and incorrigible rascals he could pick out, and put them altogether in a city which he had built for that purpose, which bore their name; I believe that they, even from vices, erected a government among them, and a commodious and just society.'

      'Nothing presses so hard upon a state as innovation'; and let the reader note here, how the principle which has predominated historically in the English Revolution, the principle which the fine Frankish, half Gallic genius, with all its fire and artistic faculty, could not strike instinctively or empirically, in its political experiments – it is well to note, how this distinctive element of the English Revolution – that revolution which is still in progress, with its remedial vitalities – already speaks beforehand, from the lips of this foreign Elizabethan Revolutionist. 'Nothing presses so hard upon a state as innovation; change only gives form to injustice and tyranny. WHEN ANY PIECE IS OUT OF ORDER IT MAY BE PROPPED, one may prevent and take care that the decay and corruption NATURAL TO ALL THINGS, do not carry us too far from our beginnings and principles; but to undertake to found so great a mass anew, and to change the foundations of so vast a building, is for them to do who to make clean, efface, who would reform particular defects by a universal confusion, and cure diseases by death.' Surely, one may read in good Elizabethan English passages which savor somewhat of this policy. One would say that the principle was in fact identical, as, for instance, in this case. 'Sir Francis Bacon (who was always for moderate counsels), when one was speaking of such a reformation of the Church of England, as would in effect make it no church, said thus to him: – 'Sir, the subject we talk of is the eye of England, and if there be a speck or two in the eye, we endeavour to take them off; but he were a strange oculist who would pull out the eye.' [And here is another writer who seems to be taking, on this point and others, very much the same view of the constitution and vitality of states, about these times: —

      He's a disease that must be cut away.

      Oh, he's a limb that has but a disease;

      Mortal to cut it off; to cure it, easy.]

      But our Gascon philosopher goes on thus, with his Gascon inspirations: and these sportive notions, struck off at a heat, these careless intuitions, these fine new practical axioms of scientific politics, appear to be every whit as good as if they had been sifted through the scientific tables of the Novum Organum. They are, in fact, the identical truth which the last vintage of the Novum Organum yields on this point. 'The world is unapt for curing itself; it is so impatient of any thing that presses it, that it thinks of nothing but disengaging itself, at what price soever. We see, by a thousand examples, that it generally cures itself to its cost. The discharge of a present evil is no cure, if a general amendment of condition does not follow; the surgeon's end is not only to cut away the dead flesh, – that is but the progress of his cure; – he has a care over and above, to fill up the wound with better and more natural flesh, and to restore the member to its due state. Whoever only proposes to himself to remove that which offends him, falls short; for good does not necessarily succeed evil; another evil may succeed, and a worse, as it happened in Caesar's killers, who brought the republic to such a pass, that they had reason to repent their meddling with it.' 'I fear there will a worse one come in his place,' says a fellow in Shakespear's crowd, at the first Caesar's funeral; and that his speech made the moral of the piece, we shall see in the course of this study.

      But though the frantic absolutisms and irregularities of that 'old riotous form of military government,' which the long civil wars had generated, seemed of themselves to threaten speedy dissolution, this old Gascon prophet, with his inexhaustible fund of English shrewdness, and sound English sense, underlying all his Gasconading, by no means considers the state as past the statesman's care: 'after all, we are not, perhaps, at the last gasp,' he says. 'The conservation of states is a thing that in all likelihood surpasses our understanding: a civil government is, as Plato says, "a mighty and powerful thing, and hard to be dissolved." "States, as great engines, move slowly," says Lord Bacon; "and are not so soon put out of frame"; – that is, so soon as "the resolution of particular persons," which is his reason for producing his moral philosophy, or rather his moral science, as his engine for attack upon the state, a science which concerns the government of every man over himself; "for, as in Egypt, the seven good years sustained the seven bad; so governments, for a time well-grounded, do bear out errors following."' But this is the way that this Gascon philosopher records his conclusions on the same subject. 'Every thing that totters does not fall. The contexture of so great a body holds by more nails than one. It holds even by its antiquity, like old buildings from which the foundations are worn away by time, without rough cast or cement, which yet live or support themselves by their own weight. Moreover, it is not rightly to go to work to reconnoitre only the flank and the fosse, to judge of the security of a place; it must be examined which way approaches can be made to it, AND IN WHAT CONDITION THE ASSAILANT IS – that is the question. 'Few vessels sink with their own weight, and without some exterior violence. Let us every way cast our eyes. Every thing about us totters. In all the great states, both of Christendom and elsewhere, that are known to us, if you will but look, you will there see evident threats of alteration and ruin. Astrologers need not go to heaven to foretell, as they do, GREAT REVOLUTIONS' [this is the speech of the Elizabethan age – 'great revolutions'] 'and imminent mutations.' [This is the new kind of learning and prophecy; there was but one source of it open then, that could yield axioms of this kind; for this is the kind that Lord Bacon tells us the head-spring of sciences must be visited for.] 'But conformity is a quality antagonist to DISSOLUTION. For my part, I despair not, and fancy I perceive ways to save us.'

      And surely this is one of the inserted private articles, before mentioned, which may, or may not be, 'designed to spend their use among the men now living'; but 'which concern the particular knowledge of some who will see further into them than the common reader.' If there had been a 'London Times' going then, and this old outlandish Gascon Antic had been an English statesman preparing this article as a leader for it, the question of the Times could hardly have been more roundly dealt with, or with a clearer northern accent.

      But it is high time for him to bethink himself, and 'draw his old cloak about him'; for, after all, this so just and profound a view of so grave a subject, proceeds from one who has no aims, no plan, no learning, no memory; – a vain, fantastic egotist, who writes only because he will be talking, and talking of himself above all; who is not ashamed to attribute to himself all sorts of mad inconsistent humours, and to contradict himself on every page, if thereby he can only win your eye, or startle your curiosity, and induce you to follow him. After so long and grave a discussion, suddenly it occurs to him that it is time for a little miscellaneous confidential chat about himself, and those certain oddities of his which he does not wish you to lose sight of altogether; and it is time, too, for another of those stories, which serve to divert the attention when it threatens to become too fixed, and break up and enliven the dull passages, besides having that other purpose which he speaks of so frankly. And although this whole discussion is not without a direct bearing upon that particular topic, with which it is here connected, inasmuch as the political situation, which is so clearly exhibited, is precisely that of the Elizabethan scholar, it is chiefly this little piece of confidential chat with which it closes, and its significance in that connection, which gives the rest its insertion here.

      For suddenly he recollects himself, and stops short to express the fear that he may have written something similar to this elsewhere; and he gives you to understand – not all at once – but by a series of strokes, that too bold a repetition here, of what he has said elsewhere might be attended, to him, with serious consequences; and he begs you to note, as he does in twenty other passages and stories here and elsewhere, that his style is all hampered with considerations such as these – that instead of merely thinking of making a good book, and presenting his subjects in their clearest and most effective form for the reader; – a thing in itself sufficiently laborious, as other authors find to their cost, he is all the time compelled to weigh his words with СКАЧАТЬ