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

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      But the men with whom this proceeding originates, the Elizabethan Men of Letters, were, in their own time, 'the Few.' They were the chosen men, not of an age only, but of a race, 'the noblest that ever lived in the tide of times;' men enriched with the choicest culture of their age, when that culture involved not the acquisition of the learning of the ancients only, but the most intimate acquaintance with all those recent and contemporaneous developments with which its restoration on the Continent had been attended. Was it strange that these men should find themselves without sympathy in an age like that? – an age in which the masses were still unlettered, callous with wrongs, manacled with blind traditions, or swaying hither and thither, with the breath of a common prejudice or passion, or swayed hither and thither by the changeful humours and passions, or the conflicting dogmas and conceits of their rulers. That is the reason why the development of that age comes to us as a Literature. That is why it is on the surface of it Elizabethan. That is the reason why the leadership of the modern ages, when it was already here in the persons of its chief interpreters and prophets, could get as yet no recognition of its right to teach and rule – could get as yet nothing but paper to print itself on, nothing but a pen to hew its way with, nor that, without death and danger dogging it at the heels, and threatening it, at every turn, so that it could only wave, in mute gesticulation, its signals to the future. It had to affect, in that time, bookishness and wiry scholasticism. It had to put on sedulously the harmless old monkish gown, or the jester's cap and bells, or any kind of a tatterdemalion robe that would hide, from head to heel, the waving of its purple. 'Motley's the only wear,' whispers the philosopher, peering through his privileged garb for a moment. King Charles II. had not more to do in reserving himself in an evil time, and getting safely over to the year of his dominion.

      Letters were the only ships that could pass those seas. But it makes a new style in literature, when such men as these, excluded from their natural sphere of activity, get driven into books, cornered into paragraphs, and compelled to unpack their hearts in letters. There is a new tone to the words spoken under such compression. It is a tone that the school and the cloister never rang with, – it is one that the fancy dealers in letters are not able to deal in. They are such words as Caesar speaks, when he puts his legions in battle array, – they are such words as were heard at Salamis one morning, when the breeze began to stiffen in the bay; and though they be many, never so many, and though they be musical, as is Apollo's lute, that Lacedemonian ring is in each one of them. There is great business to be done in them, and their haste looks through their eyes. In the sighing of the lover, in the jest of the fool, in the raving of the madman, and not in Horatio's philosophy only, you hear it.

      The founders of the new science of nature and practice were men unspeakably too far above and beyond their time, to take its bone and muscle with them. There was no language in which their doctrines could have been openly conveyed to an English public at that time without fatal misconception. The truth, which was to them arrayed with the force of a universal obligation, – the truth, which was to them religion, would have been, of course, in an age in which a single, narrow-minded, prejudiced Englishwoman's opinions were accepted as the ultimate rule of faith and practice, 'flat atheism.' What was with them loyalty to the supremacy of reason and conscience, would have been in their time madness and rebellion, and the majority would have started at it in amazement; and all men would have joined hands, in the name of truth and justice, to suppress it. The only thing that could be done in such circumstances was, to translate their doctrine into the language of their time. They must take the current terms – the vague popular terms – as they found them, and restrict and enlarge them, and inform them with their new meanings, with a hint to 'men of understanding' as to the sense in which they use them. That is the key to the language in which their books for the future were written.

      But who supposes that these men were so wholly super-human, so devoid of mortal affections and passions, so made up of 'dry light,' that they could retreat, with all those regal faculties, from the natural sphere of their activity to the scholar's cell, to make themselves over in books to a future in which their mortal natures could have no share, – a future which could not begin till all the breathers of their world were dead? Who supposes that the 'staff' of Prospero was the first choice of these chiefs? – these 'heads of the State,' appointed of nature to the Cure of the Common-Weal.

      The leading minds of that age are not minds which owed their intellectual superiority to a disproportionate development of certain intellectual tendencies, or to a dwarfed or inferior endowment of those natural affections and personal qualifications which tend to limit men to the sphere of their particular sensuous existence. The mind of this school is the representative mind, and all men recognise it as that, because, in its products, that nature which is in all men, which philosophy had, till then, scorned to recognise, which the abstractionists had missed in their abstractions, – that nature of will, and sense, and passion, and inanity, is brought out in its true historical proportions, not as it exists in books, not as it exists in speech, but as it exists in the actual human life. It is the mind in which this historical principle, this motivity which is not reason, is brought in contact with the opposing and controlling element as it had not been before. In all its earth-born Titanic strength and fulness, it is dragged up from its secret lurking-places, and confronted with its celestial antagonist. In all its self-contradiction and cowering unreason, it is set face to face with its celestial umpire, and subjected to her unrelenting criticism. There are depths in this microcosm which this torch only has entered, silences which this speaker only has broken, cries which he only knows how to articulate.

      'The soundest disclosing and expounding of men is by their natures and ends,' so the one who is best qualified to give us information on this question tells us, – by their natures and ends; 'the weaker sort by their natures, and the wisest by their ends'; and 'the distance' of this wisest sort 'from the ends to which they aspire,' is that 'from which one may take measure and scale of the rest of their actions and desires.'

      The first end which these Elizabethan Men of Letters grasped at, the thing which they pursued with all the intensity and concentration of a master passion, was —power, political power. They wanted to rule their own time, and not the future only. 'You are hurt, because you do not reign,' is the inuendo which they permit us to apply to them as the key to their proceedings. 'Such men as this are never at heart's ease,' Caesar remarks in confidence to a friend, 'whiles they behold a greater than themselves.' 'Come on my right hand, for this ear is deaf,' he adds, 'and tell me truly what thou think'st of him.' These are the kind of men that seek instinctively 'predominance,' not in a clique or neighbourhood only, – they are not content with a domestic reflection of their image, they seek to stamp it on the state and on the world. These Elizabethan Men of Letters were men who sought from the first, with inveterate determination, to rule their own time, and they never gave up that point entirely. In one way or another, directly or indirectly, they were determined to make their influence felt in that age, in spite of the want of encouragement which the conditions of that time offered to such an enterprise. But they sought that end not instinctively only, but with the stedfastness of a rational, scientifically enlightened purpose. It was an enterprise in which the intense motivity of that new and so 'conspicuous' development of the particular and private nature, which lies at the root of such a genius, was sustained by the determination of that not less superior development of the nobler nature in man, by the motivity of the intellect, by the sentiment which waits on that, by the motive of 'the larger whole,' which is, in this science of it, 'the worthier.'

      We do not need to apply the key of times to those indirectly historical remains in which the real history, the life and soul of a time, is always best found, and in which the history of such a time, if written at all, must necessarily be inclosed; we do not need to unlock these works to perceive the indications of suppressed movements in that age, in which the most illustrious men of the age were primarily concerned, the history of which has not yet fully transpired. We do not need to find the key to the cipher in which the history of that time is written, to perceive that there was to have been a change in the government here at one time, very different from the one which СКАЧАТЬ