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The Philosophy of the Plays of Shakspere Unfolded

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Title: The Philosophy of the Plays of Shakspere Unfolded

Author: Delia Salter Bacon

Author of introduction, etc.: Nathaniel Hawthorne


        
Release date: June 1, 2005 [eBook #8207]
                Most recently updated: October 13, 2012

Language: English

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THE

PHILOSOPHY

OF

THE PLAYS OF SHAKSPERE

UNFOLDED.


BY DELIA BACON.


WITH

A PREFACE

BY

NATHANIAL HAWTHORNE
AUTHOR OF 'THE SCARLET LETTER,' ETC


  Aphorisms representing A KNOWLEDGE _broken_ do invite men to
     inquire further                                       LORD BACON

You find not the apostophes, and so miss the accent.
                                              LOVE'S LABOUR'S LOST

Untie the spell.--PROSPERO


LONDON:
GROOMBRIDGE AND SONS
PATERNOSTER ROW.
1857

AMES PRESS
NEW YORK





HARVARD
UNIVERSITY
LIBRARY
DEC 6, 1972

Reprinted from a copy in the collection
of the Harvard College Library
Reprinted from the edition of 1857, London
First AMS EDITION published 1970
Manufactured in the United States of America

International Standard Book Number: 0-404-00443-1

Library of Congress Card Catalog Number: 73-113547

AMS PRESS, INC.
NEW YORK, N.Y. 10003

TABLE OF CONTENTS.


PREFACE

INTRODUCTION.

I. The Proposition

II. The Age of Elizabeth, and the Elizabethan Men of Letters

III. Extracts from the Life of Raleigh.--Raleigh's School

IV. Raleigh's School, continued.--The New Academy

       *       *       *       *       *

BOOK I

[The HISTORICAL KEY to the ELIZABETHAN ART of TRADITION, which formed
the FIRST BOOK of this Work as it was originally prepared for the
Press, is reserved for separate publication.]

THE ELIZABETHAN ART OF DELIVERY AND TRADITION.

PART I.

MICHAEL DE MONTAIGNE'S 'PRIVATE AND RETIRED ARTS.'

I. Ascent from Particulars to the 'Highest Parts of Sciences,' by the
Enigmatic Method illustrated

II. Further Illustration of 'Particular Methods of
Tradition.'--Embarrassments of Literary Statesmen

III. The Possibility of great anonymous Works,--or Works published
under an _assumed name_,--conveying under rhetorical Disguises the
Principal Sciences,--re-suggested and illustrated

PART II.

THE BACONIAN RHETORIC, OR THE METHOD OF PROGRESSION.

I. THE 'BEGINNERS.'--['Particular Methods of Tradition.'--
   The Double Method of 'Illustration' and 'Concealment']

II. INDEX to the 'Illustrated' and 'Concealed Tradition' of
    the Principal and Supreme Sciences.--THE SCIENCE OF
    POLICY

III. THE SCIENCE OF MORALITY. Section I. The Exemplar of Good

IV.  THE SCIENCE OF MORALITY. Section II. The Husbandry thereunto,
                                       or the Cure and Culture of
                                          the Mind.--APPLICATION

V.   THE SCIENCE OF MORALITY.--ALTERATION

VI. Method of Convoying the Wisdom of the Moderns

       *       *       *       *       *

BOOK II.

ELIZABETHAN 'SECRETS OF MORALITY AND POLICY'; OR, THE FABLES OF THE
NEW LEARNING.

INTRODUCTORY.

I. The Design
II. The Missing Books of the Great Instauration or 'Philosophy
     itself'

PART I.

LEAR'S PHILOSOPHER;

[OR, THE LAW OF THE 'SPECIAL AND RESPECTIVE DUTIES,' DEFINED AND
'ILLUSTRATED' IN TABLES OF 'PRESENCE' AND 'ABSENCE.']

I. Philosophy in the Palace
II. Unaccommodated Man
III. The King and the Beggar
IV. The Use of Eyes
V. The Statesman's Note-Book--and the Play

PART II.

JULIUS CAESAR AND CORIOLANUS.

THE SCIENTIFIC CURE OF THE COMMON-WEAL;

OR,

'THE COMMON DUTY OF EVERY MAN AS A MAN, OR MEMBER OF A STATE,' DEFINED
AND ILLUSTRATED IN 'NEGATIVE INSTANCES' AND 'INSTANCES OF PRESENCE.'

JULIUS CAESAR;

OR, THE EMPIRICAL TREATMENT IN DISEASES OF THE COMMON-WEAL EXAMINED.

I. The Death of Tyranny; or, the Question of the Prerogative
II. Caesar's Spirit

CORIOLANUS.

THE QUESTION OF THE CONSULSHIP; OR, THE SCIENTIFIC CURE OF THE
COMMON-WEAL PROPOUNDED.

I.    The Elizabethan Heroism
II.   Criticism of the Martial Government
III.  'Insurrections Arguing'
IV.   Political Retrospect
V.    The Popular Election
VI.   The Scientific Method in Politics
VII.  Volumnia and her Boy
VIII. Metaphysical Aid
IX.   The Cure.--Plan of Innovation.--New Definitions.
X.    The Cure.--Plan of Innovation.--New Constructions.
XI.   The Cure.--Plan of Innovation.--'The Initiative'
XII.  The Ignorant Election revoked.--A 'Wrestling Instance'.
XIII. Conclusion

PREFACE.

This Volume contains the argument, drawn from the Plays usually
attributed to Shakspere, in support of a theory which the author of it
has demonstrated by historical evidences in another work. Having never
read this historical demonstration (which remains still in manuscript,
with the exception of a preliminary chapter, published long ago in an
American periodical), I deem it necessary to cite the author's own
account of it:--

'The Historical Part of this work (which was originally the principal
part, and designed to furnish the historical key to the great
Elizabethan writings), though now for a long time completed and ready
for the press, and though repeated reference is made to it in this
volume, is, for the most part, omitted here. It contains a true and
before unwritten history, and it will yet, perhaps, be published as it
stands; but the vivid and accumulating historic detail, with which
more recent research tends to enrich the earlier statement, and
disclosures which no invention could anticipate, are waiting now to be
subjoined to it.

'The INTERNAL EVIDENCE of the assumptions made at the outset is that
which is chiefly relied on in the work now first presented on this
subject to the public. The demonstration will be found complete on
that ground; and on that ground alone the author is willing, and
deliberately prefers, for the present, to rest it.

'External evidence, of course, will not be wanting; there will be
enough and to spare, if the demonstration here be correct. But the
author of the discovery was not willing to rob the world of this great
question; but wished rather to share with it the benefit which the
true solution of the Problem offers--the solution prescribed by those
who propounded it to the future. It seemed better to save to the world
the power and beauty of this demonstration, its intellectual stimulus,
its demand on the judgment. It seemed better, that the world should
acquire it also in the form of criticism, instead of being stupified
and overpowered with the mere force of an irresistible, external,
historical proof. Persons incapable of appreciating any other kind of
proof,--those who are capable of nothing that does not 'directly fall
under and strike _the senses_' as Lord Bacon expresses it,--will have
their time also; but it was proposed to present the subject first to
minds of another order.'

In the present volume, accordingly, the author applies herself to the
demonstration and development of a system of philosophy, which has
presented itself to her as underlying the superficial and ostensible
text of Shakspere's plays. Traces of the same philosophy, too, she
conceives herself to have found in the acknowledged works of Lord
Bacon, and in those of other writers contemporary with him. All agree
in one system; all these traces indicate a common understanding and
unity of purpose in men among whom no brotherhood has hitherto been
suspected, except as representatives of a grand and brilliant age,
when the human intellect made a marked step in advance.

The author did not (as her own consciousness assures her) either
construct or originally seek this new philosophy. In many respects, if
I have rightly understood her, it was at variance with her
pre-conceived opinions, whether ethical, religious, or political. She
had been for years a student of Shakspere, looking for nothing in his
plays beyond what the world has agreed to find in them, when she began
to see, under the surface, the gleam of this hidden treasure. It was
carefully hidden, indeed, yet not less carefully indicated, as with a
pointed finger, by such marks and references as could not ultimately
escape the notice of a subsequent age, which should be capable of
profiting by the rich inheritance. So, too, in regard to Lord Bacon.
The author of this volume had not sought to put any but the ordinary
and obvious interpretation upon his works, nor to take any other view
of his character than what accorded with the unanimous judgment upon
it of all the generations since his epoch. But, as she penetrated more
and more deeply into the plays, and became aware of those inner
readings, she found herself compelled to turn back to the 'Advancement
of Learning' for information as to their plan and purport; and Lord
Bacon's Treatise failed not to give her what she sought; thus adding
to the immortal dramas, in her idea, a far higher value than their
warmest admirers had heretofore claimed for them. They filled out the
scientific scheme which Bacon had planned, and which needed only these
profound and vivid illustrations of human life and character to make
it perfect. Finally, the author's researches led her to a point where
she found the plays claimed for Lord Bacon and his associates,--not in
a way that was meant to be intelligible in their own perilous
times,--but in characters that only became legible, and illuminated,
as it were, in the light of a subsequent period.

The reader will soon perceive that the new philosophy, as here
demonstrated, was of a kind that no professor could have ventured
openly to teach in the days of Elizabeth and James. The concluding
chapter of the present work makes a powerful statement of the position
which a man, conscious of great and noble aims, would then have
occupied; and shows, too, how familiar the age was with all methods of
secret communication, and of hiding thought beneath a masque of
conceit or folly. Applicably to this subject, I quote a paragraph from
a manuscript of the author's, not intended for present publication:--

'It was a time when authors, who treated of a scientific politics and
of a scientific ethics internally connected with it, naturally
preferred this more philosophic, symbolic method of indicating their
connection with their writings, which would limit the indication to
those who could pierce within the veil of a philosophic symbolism. It
was the time when the cipher, in which one could write '_omnia per
omnia_,' was in such request, and when 'wheel ciphers' and 'doubles'
were thought not unworthy of philosophic notice. It was a time, too,
when the phonographic art was cultivated, and put to other uses than
at present, and when a '_nom de plume_' was required for other
purposes than to serve as the refuge of an author's modesty, or
vanity, or caprice. It was a time when puns, and charades, and
enigmas, and anagrams, and monograms, and ciphers, and puzzles, were
not good for sport and child's play merely; when they had need to be
close; when they had need to be solvable, at least, only to those who
_should_ solve them. It was a time when all the latent capacities of
the English language were put in requisition, and it was flashing and
crackling, through all its lengths and breadths, with puns and quips,
and conceits, and jokes, and satires, and inlined with philosophic
secrets that opened down "into the bottom of a tomb"--that opened into
the Tower--that opened on the scaffold and the block.'

I quote, likewise, another passage, because I think the reader will
see in it the noble earnestness of the author's character, and may
partly imagine the sacrifices which this research has cost her:--

'The great secret of the Elizabethan age did not lie where any
superficial research could ever have discovered it. It was not left
within the range of any accidental disclosure. It did not lie on the
surface of any Elizabethan document. The most diligent explorers of
these documents, in two centuries and a quarter, had not found it. No
faintest suspicion of it had ever crossed the mind of the most recent,
and clear-sighted, and able investigator of the Baconian remains. It
was buried in the lowest depths of the lowest deeps of the deep
Elizabethan Art; that Art which no plummet, till now, has ever
sounded. It was locked with its utmost reach of traditionary cunning.
It was buried in the inmost recesses of the esoteric Elizabethan
learning. It was tied with a knot that had passed the scrutiny and
baffled the sword of an old, suspicious, dying, military government--a
knot that none could cut--a knot that must be untied.

'The great secret of the Elizabethan Age was inextricably reserved by
the founders of a new learning, the prophetic and more nobly gifted
minds of a new and nobler race of men, for a research that should test
the mind of the discoverer, and frame and subordinate it to that so
sleepless and indomitable purpose of the prophetic aspiration. It was
"the device" by which they undertook to live again in the ages in
which their achievements and triumphs were forecast, and to come forth
and rule again, not in one mind, not in the few, not in the many, but
in all. "For there is no throne like that throne in the thoughts of
men," which the ambition of these men climbed and compassed.

'The principal works of the Elizabethan Philosophy, those in which the
new method of learning was practically applied to the noblest
subjects, were presented to the world in the form of AN ENIGMA. It was
a form well fitted to divert inquiry, and baffle even the research of
the scholar for a time; but one calculated to provoke the philosophic
curiosity, and one which would inevitably command a research that
could end only with the true solution. That solution was reserved for
one who would recognise, at last, in the disguise of the great
impersonal teacher, the disguise of a new learning. It waited for the
reader who would observe, at last, those thick-strewn scientific
clues, those thick-crowding enigmas, those perpetual beckonings from
the "theatre" into the judicial palace of the mind. It was reserved
for the student who would recognise, at last, the mind that was
seeking so perseveringly to whisper its tale of outrage, and "the
secrets it was forbid." It waited for one who would answer, at last,
that philosophic challenge, and say, "Go on, I'll follow thee!" It was
reserved for one who would count years as days, for the love of the
truth it hid; who would never turn back on the long road of
initiation, though all "THE IDOLS" must be left behind in its stages;
who would never stop until it stopped in that new cave of Apollo,
where the handwriting on the wall spells anew the old Delphic motto,
and publishes the word that "_unties_ the spell."

On this object, which she conceives so loftily, the author has
bestowed the solitary and self-sustained toil of many years. The
volume now before the reader, together with the historical
demonstration which it pre-supposes, is the product of a most faithful
and conscientious labour, and a truly heroic devotion of intellect and
heart. No man or woman has ever thought or written more sincerely than
the author of this book. She has given nothing less than her life to
the work. And, as if for the greater trial of her constancy, her
theory was divulged, some time ago, in so partial and unsatisfactory a
manner--with so exceedingly imperfect a statement of its claims--as to
put her at great disadvantage before the world. A single article from
her pen, purporting to be the first of a series, appeared in an
American Magazine; but unexpected obstacles prevented the further
publication in that form, after enough had been done to assail the
prejudices of the public, but far too little to gain its sympathy.
Another evil followed. An English writer (in a 'Letter to the Earl of
Ellesmere,' published within a few months past) has thought it not
inconsistent with the fair-play, on which his country prides itself,
to take to himself this lady's theory, and favour the public with it
as his own original conception, without allusion to the author's prior
claim. In reference to this pamphlet, she generously says:--

'This has not been a selfish enterprise. It is not a personal concern.
It is a discovery which belongs not to an individual, and not to a
people. Its fields are wide enough and rich enough for us all; and he
that has no work, and whoso will, let him come and labour in them. The
field is the world's; and the world's work henceforth is in it. So
that it be known in its real comprehension, in its true relations to
the weal of the world, what matters it? So that the truth, which is
dearer than all the rest--which abides with us when all others leave
us, dearest then--so that the truth, which is neither yours nor mine,
but yours _and_ mine, be known, loved, honoured, emancipated, mitred,
crowned, adored--_who_ loses anything, that does not find it.' 'And
what matters it,' says the philosophic wisdom, speaking in the
abstract, 'what name it is proclaimed in, and what letters of the
alphabet we know it by?--what matter is it, so that they _spell_ the
name that is _good_ for ALL, and _good_ for _each_,'--for that is the
REAL name here?

Speaking on the author's behalf, however, I am not entitled to imitate
her magnanimity; and, therefore, hope that the writer of the pamphlet
will disclaim any purpose of assuming to himself, on the ground of a
slight and superficial performance, the result which she has attained
at the cost of many toils and sacrifices.

And now, at length, after many delays and discouragements, the work
comes forth. It had been the author's original purpose to publish it
in America; for she wished her own country to have the glory of
solving the enigma of those mighty dramas, and thus adding a new and
higher value to the loftiest productions of the English mind. It
seemed to her most fit and desirable, that America--having received so
much from England, and returned so little--should do what remained to
be done towards rendering this great legacy available, as its authors
meant it to be, to all future time. This purpose was frustrated; and
it will be seen in what spirit she acquiesces.

'The author was forced to bring it back, and contribute it to the
literature of the country from which it was derived, and to which it
essentially and inseparably belongs. It was written, every word of it,
on English ground, in the midst of the old familiar scenes and
household names, that even in our nursery songs revive the dear
ancestral memories; those "royal pursuivants" with which our
mother-land still follows and retakes her own. It was written in the
land of our old kings and queens, and in the land of _our own_
PHILOSOPHERS and POETS also. It was written on the spot where the
works it unlocks were written, and in the perpetual presence of the
English mind; the mind that spoke before in the cultured few, and that
speaks to-day in the cultured many. And it is now at last, after so
long a time--after all, as it should be--the English press that prints
it. It is the scientific English press, with those old gags (wherewith
our kings and queens sought to stop it, ere they knew what it was)
champed asunder, ground to powder, and with its last Elizabethan
shackle shaken off, that restores, "in a better hour," the torn and
garbled science committed to it, and gives back "the bread cast on its
sure waters."'

There remains little more for me to say. I am not the editor of this
work; nor can I consider myself fairly entitled to the honor (which,
if I deserved it, I should feel to be a very high as well as a
perilous one) of seeing my name associated with the author's on the
title-page. My object has been merely to speak a few words, which
might, perhaps, serve the purpose of placing my countrywoman upon a
ground of amicable understanding with the public. She has a vast
preliminary difficulty to encounter. The first feeling of every reader
must be one of absolute repugnance towards a person who seeks to tear
out of the Anglo-Saxon heart the name which for ages it has held
dearest, and to substitute another name, or names, to which the
settled belief of the world has long assigned a very different
position. What I claim for this work is, that the ability employed in
its composition has been worthy of its great subject, and well
employed for our intellectual interests, whatever judgment the public
may pass upon the questions discussed. And, after listening to the
author's interpretation of the Plays, and seeing how wide a scope she
assigns to them, how high a purpose, and what richness of inner
meaning, the thoughtful reader will hardly return again--not wholly,
at all events--to the common view of them and of their author. It is
for the public to say whether my countrywoman has proved her theory.
In the worst event, if she has failed, her failure will be more
honorable than most people's triumphs; since it must fling upon the
old tombstone, at Stratford-on-Avon, the noblest tributary wreath that
has ever lain there.

NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE.


THE PHILOSOPHY OF THE PLAYS OF SHAKSPERE.

       *       *       *       *       *

INTRODUCTION.

CHAPTER I.

THE PROPOSITION.


'One time will owe another.'--_Coriolanus_.

This work is designed to propose to the consideration, not of the
learned world only, but of all ingenuous and practical minds, a new
development of that system of practical philosophy from which THE
SCIENTIFIC ARTS of the Modern Ages proceed, and which has already
become, just to the extent to which it has been hitherto opened, the
wisdom,--the universally approved, and practically adopted, Wisdom of
the _Moderns_.

It is a development of this philosophy, which was deliberately
postponed by the great Scientific Discoverers and Reformers, in whose
Scientific Discoveries and Reformations our organised advancements in
speculation and practice have their origin;--Reformers, whose
scientific acquaintance with historic laws forbade the idea of any
immediate and sudden cures of the political and social evils which
their science searches to the root, and which it was designed to
eradicate.

The proposition to be demonstrated in the ensuing pages is this: That
the new philosophy which strikes out from the Court--from _the Court_
of that despotism that names and gives form to the Modern
Learning,--which comes to us from the Court of the last of the Tudors
and the first of the Stuarts,--that new philosophy which we have
received, and accepted, and adopted as a practical philosophy, not
merely in that grave department of learning in which it comes to us
professionally _as_ philosophy, but in that not less important
department of learning in which it comes to us in the disguise of
amusement,--in the form of fable and allegory and parable,--the
proposition is, that this Elizabethan philosophy is, in these two
forms of it,--not two philosophies,--not two Elizabethan philosophies,
not two new and wondrous philosophies of nature and practice, not two
new Inductive philosophies, but one,--one and the same: that it is
philosophy in both these forms, with its veil of allegory and parable,
and without it; that it is philosophy applied to much more important
subjects in the disguise of the parable, than it is in the open
statement; that it is philosophy in both these cases, and not
philosophy in one of them, and a brutish, low-lived, illiterate,
unconscious spontaneity in the other.

The proposition is that it proceeds, in both cases, from a reflective
deliberative, eminently deliberative, eminently conscious, _designing_
mind; and that the coincidence which is manifest not in the design
only, and in the structure, but in the detail to the minutest points
of execution, is _not_ accidental.

It is a proposition which is demonstrated in this volume by means of
evidence derived principally from the books of this philosophy--books
in which the safe delivery and tradition of it to the future was
artistically contrived and triumphantly achieved:--the books of a new
'school' in philosophy; books in which the connection with the school
is not always openly asserted; books in which the true names of the
authors are not always found on the title-page;--the books of a
school, too, which was compelled to have recourse to translations in
some cases, for the safe delivery and tradition of its new learning.

The facts which lie on the surface of this question, which are
involved in the bare statement of it, are sufficient of themselves to
justify and command this inquiry.

The fact that these two great branches of the philosophy of
observation and practice, both already _virtually_ recognised as
that,--the one openly, subordinating the physical forces of nature to
the wants of man, changing the face of the earth under our eyes,
leaving behind it, with its new magic, the miracles of Oriental dreams
and fables;--the other, under its veil of wildness and spontaneity,
under its thick-woven veil of mirth and beauty, with its inducted
precepts and dispersed directions, insinuating itself into all our
practice, winding itself into every department of human affairs;
speaking from the legislator's lips, at the bar, from the
pulpit,--putting in its word every where, always at hand, always
sufficient, constituting itself, in virtue of its own irresistible
claims and in the face of what we are told of it, the oracle, the
great practical, mysterious, but universally acknowledged, oracle of
our modern life; the fact that these two great branches of the modern
philosophy make their appearance in history at the same moment, that
they make their appearance in the same company of men--in that same
little courtly company of Elizabethan Wits and Men of Letters that the
revival of the ancient learning brought out here--this is the fact
that strikes the eye at the first glance at this inquiry.

But that this is none other than that same little clique of
disappointed and defeated politicians who undertook to head and
organize a popular opposition against the government, and were
compelled to retreat from that enterprise, the best of of them
effecting their retreat with some difficulty, others failing entirely
to accomplish it, is the next notable fact which the surface of the
inquiry exhibits. That these two so illustrious branches of the modern
learning were produced for the ostensible purpose of illustrating and
adorning the tyrannies which the men, under whose countenance and
protection they are produced, were vainly attempting, or had vainly
attempted to set bounds to or overthrow, is a fact which might seem of
itself to suggest inquiry. When insurrections are suppressed, when
'the monstrous enterprises of rebellious subjects are overthrown, then
FAME, who is _the posthumous sister of the giants_,--the sister of
_defeated_ giants springs up'; so a man who had made some political
experiments himself that were not very successful, tells us.

The fact that the men under whose patronage and in whose service 'Will
the Jester' first showed himself, were men who were secretly
endeavouring to make political capital of that new and immense motive
power, that not yet available, and not very easily organised political
power which was already beginning to move the masses here then, and
already threatening, to the observant eye, with its portentous
movement, the foundations of tyranny, the fact, too, that these men
were understood to have made use of the stage unsuccessfully as a
means of immediate political effect, are facts which lie on the
surface of the history of these works, and unimportant as it may seem
to the superficial enquirer, it will be found to be anything but
irrelevant as this inquiry proceeds. The man who is said to have
contributed a thousand pounds towards the purchase of the theatre and
wardrobe and machinery, in which these philosophical plays were first
exhibited, was obliged to stay away from the first appearance of
Hamlet, in the perfected excellence of the poetic philosophic design,
in consequence of being immured in the Tower at that time for an
attempt to overthrow the government. This was the ostensible patron
and friend of the Poet; the partner of his treason was the ostensible
friend and patron of the Philosopher. So nearly did these philosophic
minds, that were 'not for an age but for all time,' approach each
other in _this_ point. But the _protégé_ and friend and well-nigh
adoring admirer of the _Poet_, was also the _protégé_ and friend and
well-nigh adoring admirer of the Philosopher. The fact that these two
philosophies, in this so close juxta-position, always in contact,
playing always into each other's hands, never once heard of each
other, know nothing of each other, is a fact which would seem at the
first blush to point to the secret of these 'Know-Nothings,' who are
men of science in an age of popular ignorance, and therefore have a
'secret'; who are men of science in an age in which the questions of
science are 'forbidden questions,' and are therefore of necessity
'Know-Nothings.'

As to Ben Jonson, and the evidence of his avowed admiration for the
author of these plays, from the point of view here taken, it is
sufficient to say in passing, that this man, whose natural abilities
sufficed to raise him from a position hardly less mean and obscure
than that of his great rival, was so fortunate as to attract the
attention of some of the most illustrious personages of that time; men
whose observation of natures was quickened by their necessities; men
who were compelled to employ 'living instruments' in the
accomplishment of their designs; who were skilful in detecting the
qualities they had need of, and skilful in adapting means to ends.
This dramatist's connection with the stage of course belongs to this
history. His connection with the author of these Plays, and with the
player himself, are points not to be overlooked. But the literary
history of this age is not yet fully developed. It is enough to say
here, that he chanced to be honored with the patronage of _three_ of
the most illustrious personages of the age in which he lived. He had
_three_ patrons. One was Sir Walter Raleigh, in whose service he was;
one was the Lord Bacon, whose well nigh idolatrous admirer he appears
also to have been; the other was _Shakspere_, to whose favor he
appears to have owed so much. With his passionate admiration of these
last two, stopping only 'this side of idolatry' in his admiration for
them both, and being under such deep personal obligations to them
both, why could he not have mentioned some day to the author of the
Advancement of Learning, the author of Hamlet--Hamlet who also 'lacked
advancement?' What more natural than to suppose that these two
philosophers, these men of a learning so exactly equal, might have
some sympathy with each other, might like to meet each other. Till he
has answered that question, any evidence which he may have to produce
in apparent opposition to the conclusions here stated will not be of
the least value.

These are questions which any one might properly ask, who had only
glanced at the most superficial or easily accessible facts in this
case, and without any evidence from any other source to stimulate the
inquiry. These are facts which lie on the surface of this history,
which obtrude themselves on our notice, and demand inquiry.

That which lies immediately below this surface, accessible to any
research worthy of the name is, that these two so new extraordinary
developments of the modern philosophy which come to us without any
_superficially_ avowed connexion, which come to us as _branches_ of
learning merely, do in fact meet and unite in one stem, 'which has a
quality of entireness and continuance throughout,' even to the most
delicate fibre of them both, even to the 'roots' of their trunk, 'and
the strings of those roots,' which trunk lies below the surface of
that age, buried, carefully buried, for reasons assigned; and that it
is the sap of this concealed trunk, this new trunk of sciences, which
makes both these branches so vigorous, which makes the flowers and the
fruit both so fine, and so unlike anything that we have had from any
other source in the way of literature or art.

The question of the authorship of the great philosophic poems which
are the legacy of the Elizabethan Age to us, is an incidental question
in this inquiry, and is incidentally treated here. The discovery of
the authorship of these works was the necessary incident to that more
thorough inquiry into their nature and design, of which the views
contained in this volume are the result. At a certain stage of this
inquiry,--in the later stages of it,--that discovery became
inevitable. The primary question here is one of universal immediate
practical concern and interest. The solution of this literary problem,
happens to be involved in it. It was the necessary prescribed,
pre-ordered incident of the reproduction and reintegration of the
Inductive Philosophy in its application to its 'principal' and
'noblest subjects,' its 'more chosen subjects.'

The HISTORICAL KEY to the Elizabethan Art of Tradition, which formed
the first book of this work as it was originally prepared for the
press, is not included in the present publication. It was the part of
the work first written, and the results of more recent research
require to be incorporated in it, in order that it should represent
adequately, in that particular aspect of it, the historical discovery
which it is the object of this work to produce. Moreover, the
demonstration which is contained in this volume appeared to constitute
properly a volume of itself.

Those who examine the subject from this ground, will find the external
collateral evidence, the ample historical confirmation which is at
hand, not necessary for the support of the propositions advanced here,
though it will, of course, be inquired for, when once this ground is
made.

The embarrassing circumstances under which this great system of
scientific practice makes its appearance in history, have not yet been
taken into the account in our interpretation of it. We have already
the documents which contain the theory and rule of the modern
civilisation, which is the civilisation of science in our hands. We
have in our hands also, newly lit, newly trimmed, lustrous with the
genius of our own time, that very lamp with which we are instructed to
make this inquiry, that very light which we are told we must bring to
bear upon the obscurities of these documents, that very light in which
we are told, we must unroll them; for they come to us, as the
interpreter takes pains to tell us, with an 'infolded' science in
them. That light of '_times_,' that knowledge of the conditions under
which these works were published, which is essential to the true
interpretation of them, thanks to our contemporary historians, is
already in our hands. What we need now is to explore the secrets of
this philosophy with it,--necessarily secrets at the time it was
issued--what we need now is to open these books of a new learning in
it, and read them by it.

In that part of the work above referred to, from which some extracts
are subjoined for the purpose of introducing intelligibly the
demonstration contained in this volume, it was the position of the
Elizabethan Men of Letters that was exhibited, and the conditions
which prescribed to the founders of a new school in philosophy, which
was none other than the philosophy of practice, the form of their
works and the concealment of their connection with them--conditions
which made the secret of an Association of 'Naturalists' applying
science in that age to the noblest subjects of speculative inquiry,
and to the highest departments of practice, a life and death secret.
The _physical_ impossibility of publishing at that time, anything
openly relating to the questions in which the weal of men is most
concerned, and which are the primary questions of the science of man's
relief, the opposition which stood at that time prepared to crush any
enterprise proposing openly for its end, the common interests of man
as man, is the point which it was the object of that part of the work
to exhibit. It was presented, not in the form of general statement
merely, but in those memorable particulars which the falsified,
suppressed, garbled history of the great founder of this school
betrays to us; not as it is exhibited in contemporary documents
merely, but as it is carefully collected from these, and from the
_traditions_ of 'the next ages.'

That the suppressed Elizabethan Reformers and Innovators were men so
far in advance of their time, that they were compelled to have
recourse to literature for the purpose of instituting a gradual
encroachment on popular opinions, a gradual encroachment on the
prejudices, the ignorance, the stupidity of the oppressed and
suffering masses of the human kind, and for the purpose of making over
the practical development of the higher parts of their science, to
ages in which the advancements they instituted had brought the common
mind within hearing of these higher truths; that these were men whose
aims were so opposed to the power that was still predominant
then,--though the 'wrestling' that would shake that predominance, was
already on foot,--that it became necessary for them to conceal their
lives as well as their works,--to veil the true worth and nobility of
them, to suffer those ends which they sought as means, means which
they subordinated to the noblest uses, to be regarded in their own age
as their _ends_; that they were compelled to play this great game in
secret, in their own time, referring themselves to posthumous effects
for the explanation of their designs; postponing their honour to ages
able to discover their worth; this is the proposition which is derived
here from the works in which the tradition of this learning is
conveyed to us.

But in the part of this work referred to, from which the ensuing
extracts are made, it was the life, and not merely the writings of the
founders of this school which was produced in evidence of this claim.
It was the life in which these disguised ulterior aims show themselves
from the first on the historic surface, in the form of great
contemporaneous events, events which have determined and shaped the
course of the world's history since then; it was the life in which
these intents show themselves too boldly on the surface, in which they
penetrate the artistic disguise, and betray themselves to the
antagonisms which were waiting to crush them; it was the life which
combined these antagonisms for its suppression; it was the life and
death of the projector and founder of the liberties of the New World,
and the obnoxious historian and critic of the tyrannies of the Old, it
was the life and death of Sir Walter Raleigh that was produced as the
Historical Key to the Elizabethan Art of Tradition. It was the Man of
the Globe Theatre, it was the Man in the Tower with his two
Hemispheres, it was the modern 'Hercules and his load too,' that made
in the original design of it, the Frontispiece of this volume.

  'But stay I see thee in the hemisphere
  Advanced and made a _constellation_ there.
  Shine forth, thou Star of Poets, and with _rage
  Or influence_, chide or cheer the drooping stage,
  Which since thy flight from hence hath mourned like night,
  And despairs day, but for thy Volume's light.

  ['To draw no envy _Shake-spear_ on thy name,
  Am I _thus ample_ to thy book and fame.'--BEN JONSON.]

The machinery that was necessarily put in operation for the purpose of
conducting successfully, under those conditions, any honourable or
decent enterprise, presupposes a forethought and skill, a faculty for
dramatic arrangement and successful plotting in historic materials,
happily so remote from anything which the exigencies of our time have
ever suggested to us, that we are not in a position to read at a
glance the history of such an age; the history which lies on the
surface of such an age when such men--men who are men--are at work in
it. These are the _Elizabethan_ men that we have to interpret here,
because, though they rest from their labours, their works do follow
them--the Elizabethan _Men_ of _Letters_; and we must know what that
title means before we can read them or their works, before we can
'_untie_ their _spell_.'



CHAPTER II.

THE AGE OF ELIZABETH, AND THE ELIZABETHAN MEN OF LETTERS.


  'The times, in many cases, give great light to _true_
  interpretations.'
  _Advancement of Learning_.

  'On fair ground
  I could beat forty of them.'

  'I could myself
  Take up a brace of the best of them, yea _the two tribunes_.'

  'But now 'tis odds beyond arithmetic,
  And _manhood_ is called _foolery_ when it stands
  Against a falling fabric.'--_Coriolanus_.

The fact that the immemorial liberties of the English PEOPLE, and that
idea of human government and society which they brought with them to
this island, had been a second time violently overborne and suppressed
by a military chieftainship,--one for which the unorganised popular
resistance was no match,--that the English People had been a second
time 'conquered'--for that is the word which the Elizabethan historian
suggests--less than a hundred years before the beginning of the
Elizabethan Age, is a fact in history which the great Elizabethan
philosopher has contrived to send down to us, along with his
philosophical works, as the key to the reading of them. It is a fact
with which we are all now more or less familiar, but it is one which
the Elizabethan Poet and Philosopher became acquainted with under
circumstances calculated to make a much more vivid impression on the
sensibilities than the most accurate and vivacious narratives and
expositions of it which our time can furnish us.

That this second conquest was unspeakably more degrading than the
first had been, inasmuch as it was the conquest of a chartered,
constitutional liberty, recovered and established in acts that had
made the English history, recovered on battle-fields that were fresh,
not in oral tradition only; inasmuch as it was effected in violation
of that which made the name of Englishmen, that which made the
universally recognised principle of the national life; inasmuch, too,
as it was an _undivided_ conquest, the conquest of _the single
will_--the will of the 'one only man'--not unchecked of commons only,
unchecked by barons, unchecked by the church, unchecked by _council_
of any kind, the pure arbitrary absolute will, the pure idiosyncrasy,
the crowned demon of the _lawless_, irrational will, unchained and
armed with the sword of the common might, and clothed with the
divinity of the common right; that _this_ was a conquest unspeakably
more debasing than the conquest 'commonly so called,'--this, which
left no nobility,--which clasped its collar in open day on the
proudest Norman neck, and not on the Saxon only, which left only one
nation of slaves and bondmen--that _this_ was a _subjugation_--that
this was a government which the English nation had not before been
familiar with, the men whose great life-acts were performed under it
did not lack the sensibility and the judgment to perceive.

A more _hopeless_ conquest than the Norman conquest had been, it might
also have seemed, regarded in some of the aspects which it presented
to the eye of the statesman then; for it was in the division of the
former that the element of freedom stole in, it was in the parliaments
of that division that the limitation of the feudal monarchy had begun.

But still more fatal was the aspect of it which its effects on the
national character were continually obtruding then on the observant
eye,--that debasing, deteriorating, demoralising effect which such a
government must needs exert on _such_ a nation, a nation of
Englishmen, a nation with such memories. The Poet who writes under
this government, with an appreciation of the subject quite as lively
as that of any more recent historian, speaks of 'the face of men' as a
'motive'--a _motive_ power, a revolutionary force, which ought to be
sufficient of itself to raise, if need be, an armed opposition to such
a government, and sustain it, too, without the compulsion of an oath
to reinforce it; at least, this is one of the three motives which he
produces in his conspiracy as motives that ought to suffice to supply
the power wanting to effect a change in such a government.

  'If not _the face_ of _men_,
  The sufferance of our _souls, the time's abuse_,--
  _If these be motives weak, break of betimes._'

There is no use in attempting a change where such motives are weak.

  'Break off _betimes_,
  And every man hence to his idle bed.'

That this political degradation, and its deteriorating and corrupting
influence on the national character, was that which presented itself
to the politician's eye at that time as the most fatal aspect of the
question, or as the thing most to be deprecated in the continuance of
such a state of things, no one who studies carefully the best writings
of that time can doubt.

And it must be confessed, that this is an influence which shows itself
very palpably, not in the degrading hourly detail only of which the
noble mind is, in such circumstances, the suffering witness, and the
secretly protesting suffering participator, but in those large events
which make the historic record. The England of the Plantagenets, that
sturdy England which Henry the Seventh had to conquer, and not its
pertinacious choice of colours only, not its fixed determination to
have the choosing of the colour of its own 'Roses' merely, but its
inveterate idea of the sanctity of '_law_' permeating all the
masses--that was a very different England from the England which Henry
the Seventh willed to his children; it was a very different England,
at least, from the England which Henry the Eighth willed to _his_.

That some sparks of the old fire were not wanting, however,--that the
nation which had kept alive in the common mind through so many
generations, without the aid of books, the memory of that 'ancestor'
that 'made its laws,' was not after all, perhaps, without a
future--began to be evident about the time that the history of 'that
last king of England who was the ancestor' of the English Stuart, was
dedicated by the author of the Novum Organum to the Prince of Wales,
afterwards Charles I., not without a glance at these portents.

Circumstances tending to throw doubt upon the durability of this
institution--circumstances which seemed to portend that this monstrous
innovation was destined on the whole to be a much shorter-lived one
than the usurpation it had displaced--had not been wanting, indeed,
from the first, in spite of those discouraging aspects of the question
which were more immediately urged upon the contemporary observer.

It was in the eleventh century; it was in the middle of the Dark Ages,
that the Norman and his followers effected their successful landing
and lodgement here; it was in the later years of the fifteenth
century,--it was when the bell that tolled through Europe for a
century and a half the closing hour of the Middle Ages, had already
begun its peals, that the Tudor 'came in by battle.'

That magnificent chain of events which begins in the middle of the
fifteenth century to rear the dividing line between the Middle Ages
and the Modern, had been slow in reaching England with its
convulsions: it had originated on the continent. The great work of the
restoration of the learning of antiquity had been accomplished there:
Italy, Germany, and France had taken the lead in it by turns; Spain
had contributed to it. The scientific discoveries which the genius of
Modern Europe had already effected under that stimulus, without
waiting for the New Organum, had all originated on the continent. The
criticism on the institutions which the decaying Roman Empire had
given to its Northern conquerors,--that criticism which necessarily
accompanied the revival of _learning_ began there. Not yet recovered
from the disastrous wars of the fifteenth century, suffering from the
diabolical tyranny that had overtaken her at that fatal crisis,
England could make but a feeble response as yet to these movements.
They had been going on for a century before the influence of them
began to be visible here. But they were at work here, notwithstanding:
they were germinating and taking root here, in that frozen winter of a
nation's discontent; and when they did begin to show themselves on the
historic surface,--here in this ancient soil of freedom,--in this
natural retreat of it, from the extending, absorbing, consolidating
feudal tyrannies,--here in this 'little world by itself'--this nursery
of the genius of the North--with its chief races, with its union of
races, its 'happy breed of men,' as our Poet has it, who notes all
these points, and defines its position, regarding it, not with a
narrow English partiality, but looking at it on his Map of the World,
which he always carries with him,--looking at it from his 'Globe,'
which has the Old World and the New on it, and the Past and the
Future,--'a precious stone set in the silver sea,' he calls it, 'in a
great pool, a _swan's nest_':--when that seed of all ages did at last
show itself above the ground here, here in this nursery of hope for
man, it would be with quite another kind of fruit on its boughs, from
any that the continent had been able to mature from it.

It was in the later years of the sixteenth century, in the latter half
of the reign of Elizabeth, that the Printing press, and the revived
Learning of Antiquity, and the Reformation, and the discovery of
America, the new revival of the genius of the North in art and
literature, and the Scientific Discoveries which accompanied this
movement on the continent, began to combine their effects here; and it
was about that time that the political horizon began to exhibit to the
statesman's eye, those portents which both the poet and the
philosopher of that time, have described with so much iteration and
amplitude. These new social elements did not appear to promise in
their combination here, stability to the institutions which Henry the
Seventh, and Henry the Eighth had established in this island.

The genius of Elizabeth conspired with the anomaly of her position to
make her the steadfast patron and promoter of these movements,--worthy
grand-daughter of Henry the seventh as she was, and opposed on
principle, as she was, to the ultimatum to which they were visibly and
stedfastly tending; but, at the same time, her sagacity and prudence
enabled her to ward off the immediate result. She secured her
throne,--she was able to maintain, in the rocking of those movements,
her own political and spiritual supremacy,--she made gain and capital
for absolutism out of them,--the inevitable reformation she herself
assumed, and set bounds to: whatever new freedom there was, was still
the freedom of her will; she could even secure the throne of her
successor: it was mischief for Charles I. that she was nursing. The
consequence of _all_ this was--_the Age of Elisabeth_.

That was what this Queen meant it should be literally, and that was
what it was apparently. But it so happened, that her will and humours
on some great questions jumped with the time, and her dire necessities
compelled her to lead the nation on its own track; or else it would
have been too late, perhaps, for that exhibition of the monarchical
institution,--that revival of the heroic, and _ante_-heroic ages,
which her reign exhibits, to come off here as it did at that time.

It is this that makes the point in this literary history. This is the
key that unlocks the secret of the Elizabethan Art of Delivery and
Tradition. Without any material resources to sustain it--strong in the
national sentiments,--strong in the moral forces with which the past
controls the present,--strong in that natural abhorrence of change
with which nature protects her larger growths,--that principle which
tyranny can test so long with impunity--which it can test with
impunity, till it forgets that this also has in nature its
limits,--strong in the absence of any combination of opposition, to
the young awakening England of that age, that now hollow image of the
past, that phantom of the military force that had been, which seemed
to be waiting only the first breath of the popular will to dissolve
it, was as yet an armed and terrific reality; its iron was on every
neck, its fetter was on every step, and all the new forces, and
world-grasping aims and aspirations which that age was generating were
held down and cramped, and tortured in its chains, dashing their eagle
wings in vain against its iron limits.

As yet all England cowered and crouched, in blind servility, at the
foot of that terrible, but unrecognised embodiment of its own power,
armed out of its own armoury, with the weapons that were turned
against it. So long as any yet extant national sentiment, or
prejudice, was not yet directly assailed--so long as that arbitrary
power was yet wise, or fortunate enough to withhold the blow which
should make the individual sense of outrage, or the feeling of a class
the common one--so long as those peaceful, social elements, yet waited
the spark that was wanting to unite them--so long 'the laws of
England' might be, indeed, at a Falstaff's or a Nym's or a Bardolph's
'commandment,' for the Poet has but put into 'honest Jack's' mouth, a
boast that worse men than he, made good in his time--so long, the
faith, the lives, the liberties, the dearest earthly hopes, of
England's proudest subjects, her noblest, her bravest, her best, her
most learned, her most accomplished, her most inspired, might be at
the mercy of a woman's caprices, or the sport of a fool's sheer will
and obstinacy, or conditioned on some low-lived 'favorites' whims. _So
long_: And how long was that?--who does not know how long it
was?--that was long enough for the whole Elizabethan Age to happen in.
In the reign of Elizabeth, and in the reign of her successor, and
longer still, that was the condition of it--till its last act was
finished--till its last word was spoken and penned--till its last mute
sign was made--till all its celestial inspiration had returned to the
God who gave it--till all its Promethean clay was cold again.

This was the combination of conditions of which the Elizabethan
Literature was the result. The Elizabethan Men of Letters, the
organisers and chiefs of the modern civilization were the result of
it.

These were men in whom the genius of the North in its happiest union
of developments, under its choicest and most favourable conditions of
culture, in its yet fresh, untamed, unbroken, northern vigour, was at
last subjected to the stimulus and provocation which the ancient
learning brings with it to the northern mind--to the now unimaginable
stimulus which, the revival of the ancient art and learning brought
with it to the mind of Europe in that age,--already secure, in its own
indigenous development, already advancing to its own great maturity
under the scholastic culture--the meagre Scholastic, and the rich
Romantic culture--of the Mediaeval Era. The Elizabethan Men of Letters
are men who found in those new and dazzling stores of art and
literature which the movements of their age brought in all their
freshly restored perfection to them, only the summons to their own
slumbering intellectual activities,--fed with fires that old Eastern
and Southern civilizations never knew, nurtured in the depths of a
nature whose depths the northern antiquity had made; they were men who
found in the learning of the South and the East--in the art and
speculation that had satisfied the classic antiquity--only the
definition of their own nobler want.

The first result of the revival of the ancient learning in this island
was, a report of its 'defects.' The first result of that revival here
was a map--a universal map of the learning and the arts which the
conditions of man's life require--a new map or globe of learning on
which lands and worlds, undreamed of by the ancients, are traced. 'A
map or globe' on which 'the principal and supreme sciences,' the
sciences that are _essential_ to the human kind, are put down among
'the parts that lie fresh and waste, and not converted by the industry
of man.' The first result of the revival of learning here was 'a plot'
for the supply of these deficiencies.

The Elizabethan Men of Letters were men, in whom the revival of 'the
Wisdom of the Ancients,' which in its last results, in its most select
and boasted conservations had combined in vain to save antiquity,
found the genius of a happier race, able to point out at a glance the
defect in it; men who saw with a glance at those old books what was
the matter with them; men prepared already to overlook from the new
height of criticism which this sturdy insular development of the
practical genius of the North created, the remains of that lost
civilization--the splendours rescued from the wreck of empires,--the
wisdom which had failed so fatally in practice that it must needs
cross from a lost world of learning to the barbarian's new one, to
find pupils--that it must needs cross the gulf of a thousand years in
learning--such work had it made of it--ere it could revive,--the
wisdom rescued from the wreck it had piloted to ruin, _not_ to
enslave, and ensnare, and doom new ages, and better races, with its
futilities, but to be hung up with its immortal beacon-light, to shew
the track of a new learning, to shew to the contrivers of the chart of
new ages, the breakers of that old ignorance, that old arrogant wordy
barren speculation. For these men were men who would not fish up the
chart of a drowned world for the purpose of seeing how nearly they
could conduct another under different conditions of time and races to
the same conclusion. And they were men of a different turn of mind
entirely from those who lay themselves out on enterprises having that
tendency. The result of this English survey of learning was the
sanctioned and organised determination of the modern speculation to
those new fields which it has already occupied, and its organised, but
secret determination, to that end of a true learning which the need of
man, in its whole comprehension in _this_ theory of it, constitutes.

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 afterwards occurred, if the original plans of these men
had succeeded. It is not the Plays only that are full of that
frustrated enterprise.

These were the kind of men who are not easily baffled. They changed
their tactics, but not their ends; and the enterprises which were
conducted with so much secresy under the surveillance of the Tudor,
began already to crown themselves as certainties, and compare their
'olives of endless age' with the spent tombs of brass' and 'tyrant's
crests,' at that sure prospect which, a change of dynasties at that
moment seemed to open,--at least, to men who were in a position then
to estimate its consequences.

That _this_, at all events, was a state of things that was not going
to endure, became palpable about that time to the philosophic mind.
The transition from the rule of a sovereign who was mistress of 'the
situation,' who understood that it was a popular power which she was
wielding--the transition from the rule of a Queen instructed in the
policy of a tyranny, inducted by nature into its arts, to the policy
of that monarch who had succeeded to her throne, and whose 'CREST'
began to be reared here then in the face of the insulted reviving
English nationality,--this transition appeared upon the whole, upon
calmer reflection, at least to the more patient minds of that age, all
that could reasonably at that time be asked for. No better instrument
for stimulating and strengthening the growing popular sentiment, and
rousing the latent spirit of the nation, could have been desired by
the Elizabethan politicians at that crisis, 'for the great labour was
with the people'--that uninstructed power, which makes the sure basis
of tyrannies--that power which Mark Antony takes with him so
easily--the ignorant, tyrannical, humour-led masses--the masses that
still roar their Elizabethan stupidities from the immortal groups of
Coriolanus and Julius Caesar. We ourselves have not yet overtaken the
chief minds of this age; and the gulf that separated them from those
overpowering numbers in their own time, to whose edicts they were
compelled to pay an external submission, was broad indeed. The
difficulty of establishing an understanding with this power was the
difficulty. They wanted that 'pulpit' from which Brutus and Mark
Antony swayed it by turns so easily--that pulpit from which Mark
Antony showed it Caesar's mantle. They wanted some organ of
communication with these so potent and resistless rulers--some 'chair'
from which they could repeat to them in their own tongue the story of
their lost institutions, and revive in them the memory of '_the kings_
their ancestors'--some school in which they could collect them and
instruct them in the scientific doctrine of the _commons_, the
doctrine of the common-_weal_ and its divine supremacy. They wanted a
school in which they could tell them stories--stories of various
kinds--such stories as they loved best to hear--Midsummer stories, or
Winter's tales, and stories of their own battle-fields--they wanted a
school in which they could teach the common people _History_ (and not
English history only), with illustrations, large as life, and a magic
lantern to aid them,--'visible history.'

But to wait till these slow methods had taken effect, would be,
perhaps, to wait, not merely till their estate in the earth was done,
but till the mischief they wished to avert was accomplished. And thus
it was, that the proposal 'to go the beaten track of getting arms into
their hands under colour of Caesar's designs, and _because the people
understood them not_,' came to be considered. To permit the new
dynasty to come in without making any terms with it, without insisting
upon a definition of that indefinite power which the Tudors had
wielded with impunity, and without challenge, would be to make
needless work for the future, and to ignore criminally the
responsibilities of their own position, so at least some English
statesmen of that time, fatally for their favour with the new monarch,
were known to have thought. 'To proceed by process,' to check by
gradual constitutional measures that overgrown and monstrous power in
the state, was the project which these statesmen had most at heart.
But that was a movement which required a firm and enlightened popular
support. Charters and statutes were dead letters till that could be
had. It was fatal to attempt it till that was secured. Failing in that
popular support, if the statesman who had attempted that movement, if
the illustrious chief, and chief man of his time, who headed it, did
secretly meditate other means for accomplishing the same end--which
was to limit the prerogative--such means as the time offered, and if
the evidence which was wanting on his trial _had been_ produced in
proof of it, who that knows what that crisis was would undertake to
convict him on it now? He was arrested on suspicion. He was a man who
had undertaken to set bounds to the absolute will of the monarch, and
therefore he was a dangerous man. [He (Sir Walter Raleigh), together
with the Lord Chobham, Sir J. Fortescue, and _others_, would have
obliged the king to _articles_ before he was admitted to the throne,
and thought the number of his countrymen should be
limited.--_Osborne's Memorials of King James_.] The charges that were
made against him on that shameless trial were indignantly repelled.
'Do you mix, me up with these spiders?' (alluding, perhaps, more
particularly to the Jesuit associated with him in this charge). 'Do
you think I am a Jack Cade or a Robin Hood?' he said. But though the
evidence on this trial is not only in itself illegal, and by
confession perjured, but the _report_ of it comes to us with a
falsehood on the face of it, and is therefore not to be taken without
criticism; that there was a movement of some kind meditated about that
time, by persons occupying chief places of trust and responsibility in
the nation--a movement not favourable to the continuance of 'the
standing departments' in the precise form in which they then
stood--that the project of an administrative reform had not, at least,
been wholly laid aside--that there was something which did not fully
come out on that trial, any one who looks at this report of it will be
apt to infer.

It was a project which had not yet proceeded to any overt act; there
was no legal evidence of its existence produced on the trial; but
suppose there were here, then, already, men 'who loved the
_fundamental part of state_,' more than in such a crisis 'they
_doubted_ the change of it'--men 'who preferred a noble life before a
long'--men, too, '_who were more discreet_' than they were
'_fearful_,' who thought it good practice to 'jump a body with a
dangerous medicine _that was sure of death_ without it;' suppose there
_was_ a movement of that kind arrested here then, and the evidence of
it were produced, what Englishman, or who that boasts the English
lineage to-day, can have a word to say about it? Who had a better
right than those men themselves, those statesmen, those heroes, who
had waked and watched for their country's weal so long, who had fought
her battles on land and sea, and planned them too, not in the tented
field and on the rocking deck only, but in the more 'deadly breach' of
civil office, whose _scaling_-ladders had entered even the tyrant's
council chamber,--who had a better right than those men themselves to
say whether they would be governed by a government of laws, or by the
will of the most despicable 'one-only-man power,' armed with sword and
lash, that ever a nation of Oriental slaves in their political
imbecility cowered under? Who were better qualified than those men
themselves, instructed in detail in all the peril of that crisis,--men
who had comprehended and weighed with a judgment which has left no
successor to its seat, all the conflicting considerations and claims
which that crisis brought with it,--who better qualified than these to
decide on the measures by which the hideous nuisances of that time
should be abated; by which that axe, that sword, that rack, that
stake, and all those burglar's tools, and highwayman's weapons, should
be taken out of the hands of the mad licentious crew with which an
evil time had armed them against the common-weal--those weapons of
lawless power, which the people had vainly, for want of leaders,
refused before-hand to put into their hands. Who better qualified than
these natural chiefs and elected leaders of the nation, to decide on
the dangerous measures for suppressing the innovation, which the Tudor
and his descendants had accomplished in that ancient sovereignty of
laws, which was the sovereignty of this people, which even the Norman
and the Plantagenet had been taught to acknowledge? Who better
qualified than they to call to an account--'the thief,' the 'cut-purse
of the empire and the rule,' who 'found the precious diadem _on a
shelf_, and stole and put it in his pocket'?

['Shall the blessed _Sun_ of _Heaven_ prove a micher, and _eat
blackberries_'? A question _not_ to be asked! Shall the blessed 'Son
of England' prove a thief, and take purses? A question _to be asked_.
'The _poor_ abuses of the time want _countenance_.'

  _Lear_. Take that from me, my friend,
  who have the power to _seal the accuser's_ lips.]

Who better qualified could be found to head the dangerous enterprise
for the deliverance of England from that shame, than the chief in whom
her Alfred arose again to break from her neck a baser than the Danish
yoke, to restore her kingdom and found her new empire, to give her
domains, that the sun never sets on,--her Poet, her Philosopher, her
Soldier, her Legislator, the builder of her Empire of the Sea, her
founder of new 'States.'

But then, of course, it is only by the rarest conjunction of
circumstances, that the movements and plans which such a state of
things gives rise to, can get any other than the most opprobrious name
and place in history. Success is their only certificate of legitimacy.
To attempt to overthrow a government still so strongly planted in the
endurance and passivity of the people, might seem, perhaps, to some
minds in these circumstances, a hopeless, and, _therefore_, a criminal
undertaking.

'That _opportunity_ which then they had to take from us, to resume, we
have again,' might well have seemed a sufficient plea, so it could
have been made good. But it is not strange that some few, even then,
should find it difficult to believe that the national ruin was yet so
entire, that the ashes of the ancient nobility and commons of England
were yet so cold, as that a system of despotism like that which was
exercised here then, could be permanently and securely fastened over
them. It is not strange that it should seem to these impossible that
there should not be enough of that old English spirit which, only a
hundred years before, had ranged the people in armed thousands, in
defence of LAW, against absolutism, enough of it, at least, to welcome
and sustain the overthrow of tyranny, when once it should present
itself as a fact accomplished, instead of appealing beforehand to a
courage, which so many instances of vain and disastrous resistance had
at last subdued, and to a spirit which seemed reduced at last, to the
mere quality of the master's will.

That was a narrow dominion apparently to which King James consigned
his great rival in the arts of government, but that rival of his
contrived to rear a 'crest' there which will outlast 'the tyrants,'
and 'look fresh still' when tombs that artists were at work on then
'are spent.' 'And when a soldier was his theme, my name--my _name_
[namme de plume] was nor far off.' King James forgot how many weapons
this man carried. He took one sword from him, he did not know that
that pen, that harmless goose-quill, carried in its sheath another. He
did not know what strategical operations the scholar, who was 'an old
soldier' and a politician also, was capable of conducting under such
conditions. Those were narrow quarters for 'the Shepherd of the
Ocean,' for the hero of the two hemispheres, to occupy so long; but it
proved no bad retreat for the chief of this movement, as he managed
it. It was in that school of Elizabethan statesmanship which had its
centre in the Tower, that many a scholarly English gentleman came
forth prepared to play his part in the political movements that
succeeded. It was out of that school of statesmanship that John
Hampden came, accomplished for his part in them.

The papers that the chief of the Protestant cause prepared in that
literary retreat to which the Monarch had consigned him, by means of
those secret channels of communication among the better minds which he
had established in the reign of Elizabeth, became the secret manual of
the revolutionary chiefs; they made the first blast of the trumpet
that summoned at last the nation to its feet. 'The famous Mr. Hamden'
(says an author, who writes in those 'next ages' in which so many
traditions of this time are still rife) '_a little before_ the civil
wars was at the charge of transcribing three thousand four hundred and
fifty-two sheets of Sir Walter Raleigh's MSS., as the amanuensis
himself _told me_, who had his _close chamber_, his fire and _candle_,
with an _attendant to deliver him the originals_ and _take his copies
as fast as he could write them_.' That of itself is a pretty little
glimpse of the kind of machinery which the Elizabethan literature
required for its 'delivery and tradition' at the time, or near the
times, in which it was produced. That is a view of 'an Interior'
'before the civil wars.' It was John Milton who concluded, on looking
over, a long time afterwards, one of the unpublished papers of this
statesman, that it was his duty to give it to the public. 'Having
had,' he says, 'the MS. of this treatise ["The Cabinet Council"]
written by Sir Walter Raleigh, many years in my hands, and finding it
lately by chance among other books and papers, upon reading thereof, I
thought it _a kind of injury to withhold longer_ the work of so
eminent an author from the public; it being both answerable in style
to other works of his already extant, as far as _the subject_ would
permit, and given me for a true copy by a learned man at his death,
who had collected several such pieces.'

'_A kind of injury_.'--That is the thought which would naturally take
possession of any mind, charged with the responsibility of keeping
back for years this man's writings, especially his choicest
ones--papers that could not be published then on account of the
subject, or that came out with the leaves uncut, labouring with the
restrictions which the press opposed then to the issues of such a
mind.

That great result which the chief minds of the Modern Ages, under the
influence of the new culture, in that secret association of them were
able to achieve, that new and all comprehending science of life and
practice which they made it their business to perfect and transmit,
could not, indeed, as yet be communicated directly to the many. The
scientific doctrines of the new time were necessarily limited in that
age to the few. But another movement corresponding to that,
simultaneous in its origin, related to it in its source, was also in
progress here then, proceeding hand in hand with this, playing its
game for it, opening the way to its future triumph. This was that
movement of the new time,--this was that consequence, not of the
revival of learning only, but of the growth of the northern mind which
touched everywhere and directly the springs of government, and made
'bold power look pale,' for this was the movement in 'the many.'

This was the movement which had already convulsed the continent; this
was the movement of which Raleigh was from the first the soldier; this
was 'the cause' of which he became the chief. It was as a youth of
seventeen, bursting from those old fastnesses of the Middle Ages that
could not hold him any longer, shaking off the films of Aristotle and
his commentators, that he girded on his sword for the great
world-battle that was raging already in Europe then. It was into the
thickest of it, that his first step plunged him. For he was one of
that company of a hundred English gentlemen who were waiting but for
the first word of permission from Elizabeth to go as volunteers to the
aid of the Huguenots. This was the movement which had at last reached
England. And like these other continental events which were so slow in
taking effect in England when it did begin to unfold here at last;
there was a taste of 'the island' in it, in this also.

It was not on the continent only, that Raleigh and other English
statesmen were disposed to sustain this movement. It was not possible
as yet to bring the common mind openly to the heights of those great
doctrines of life and practice which the Wisdom of the Moderns also
embodies, but the new teachers of that age knew how to appreciate, as
the man of science only can fully appreciate, the worth of those
motives that were then beginning to agitate so portentously so large a
portion of the English people. The Elizabethan politicians nourished
and patronised in secret that growing faction. The scientific
politician hailed with secret delight, hailed as the partner of his
own enterprise, that new element of political power which the changing
time began to reveal here then, that power which was already beginning
to unclasp on the necks of the masses, the collar of the absolute
will--that was already proclaiming, in the stifled undertones of 'that
greater part which carries it,' another supremacy. They gave in secret
the right hand of a joyful fellowship to it. At home and abroad the
great soldier and statesman, who was the first founder of the Modern
Science, headed that faction. He fought its battles by land and sea;
he opened the New World to it, and sent it there to work out its
problem.

It was the first stage of an advancement that would not rest till it
found its true consummation. That infinity which was speaking in its
confused tones, as with the voice of many waters, was resolved into
music and triumphal marches in the ear of the Interpreter. It gave
token that the nobler nature had not died out under the rod of
tyranny; it gave token of the earnestness that would not be appeased
until the ends that were declared in it were found.

But at the same time, this was a power which the wise men of that age
were far from being willing to let loose upon society then in that
stage of its development; very far were they from being willing to put
the reins into its hands. To balance the dangers that were threatening
the world at that crisis was always the problem. It was a very narrow
line that the policy which was to save the state had to keep to then.
There were evils on both sides. But to the scientific mind there
appeared to be a choice in them. The measure on one side had been
taken, and it was in all men's hearts, but the abysses on the other no
man had sounded. 'The danger of stirring things,'--the dangers, too,
of that unscanned swiftness that too late _ties leaden pounds to his
heels_ were the dangers that were always threatening the Elizabethan
movement, and defining and curbing it. The wisest men of that time
leaned towards the monarchy, the monarchy that was, rather than the
anarchy that was threatening them. The _will_ of the one rather than
the _wills_ of the many, the head of the one rather than 'the
many-headed.' To effect the change which the time required without
'wrenching all'--without undoing the work of ages--without setting at
large from the restraints of reverence and custom the chained tiger of
an unenlightened popular will, this was the problem. The wisest
statesmen, the most judicious that the world has ever known were here,
with their new science, weighing in exactest scales those issues. We
must not quarrel with their concessions to tyranny on the one hand,
nor with their determination to effect changes on the other, until we
are able to command entirely the position they occupied, and the
opposing dangers they had always to consider. We must not judge them
till they have had their hearing. What freedom and what hope there is
of it upon the earth to-day, is the legacy of their perseverance and
endurance.

They experienced many defeats. The hopes of youth, the hopes of
manhood in turn grew cold. That the 'glorious day' which 'flattered
the mountain tops' of their immortal morning with its sovereign eye
would never shine on them; that their own, with all its unimagined
splendours obscured so long, would go down hid in those same 'base
clouds,' that for them the consummation was to 'peep about to find
themselves dishonourable graves' was the conviction under which their
later tasks were achieved. It did not abate their ardour. They did not
strain one nerve the less for that.

Driven from one field, they showed themselves in another. Driven from
the open field, they fought in secret. 'I will bandy with thee in
faction, I will o'errun thee with policy, I will kill thee a hundred
and fifty ways,' the Jester who brought their challenge said. The
Elizabethan England rejected the Elizabethan Man. She would have none
of his meddling with her affairs. She sent him to the Tower, and to
the block, if ever she caught him meddling with them. She buried him
alive in the heart of his time. She took the seals of office, she took
the sword, from his hands and put a pen in it. She would have of him a
Man of Letters. And a Man of Letters he became. A Man of Runes. He
invented new letters in his need, letters that would go farther than
the sword, that carried more execution in them than the great seal.
Banished from the state in that isle to which he was banished, he
found not the base-born Caliban only, to _instruct_, and train, and
subdue to his ends, but an Ariel, an imprisoned Ariel, waiting to be
released, able to conduct his masques, able to put his girdles round
the earth, and to 'perform and point' to his Tempest.

'Go bring the RABBLE, o'er whom I give thee _power_, here to this
place,' was the New Magician's word.

[Here is another version of it.

'When Sir Nicholas Bacon, the Lord Keeper, lived, every room in
Gorhambury was served with a pipe of water from the pond distant about
a mile off. In the lifetime of Mr. Anthony Bacon the water ceased, and
his lordship coming to the inheritance could not recover the water
without infinite charge. When he was Lord Chancellor, he built Verulam
House _close by the pond yard, for a place of privacy_ when he was
called upon to dispatch any urgent business. And being asked why he
built there, his lordship answered that, seeing _he could not carry
the water to_ his House, he _would carry his House_ to the water.]

This is not the place for the particulars of this history or for the
barest outline of them. They make a volume of themselves. But this
glimpse of the circumstances under which the works were composed which
it is the object of this volume to open, appeared at the last moment
to be required, in the absence of the Historical Key which the proper
development of them makes, to that Art of Delivery and Tradition by
means of which the secrets of the Elizabethan Age have been conveyed
to us.



CHAPTER III.

EXTRACTS FROM THE LIFE OF RALEIGH.--RALEIGH'S SCHOOL


  'Our court shall be a little Academe,
  Still and contemplative in _living_ Art.'
  'What is the _end_ of study? let me know.'

  _Love's Labour's Lost_.

But it was not on the New World wholly, that this man of many toils
could afford to lavish the revenues which the Queen's favour brought
him. It was not to that enterprise alone that he was willing to
dedicate the _eclat_ and influence of his rising name. There was work
at home which concerned him more nearly, not less deeply, to which
that new influence was made at once subservient; and in that there
were enemies to be encountered more formidable than the Spaniard on
his own deck, or on his own coast, with all his war-weapons and
defences. It was an enemy which required a strategy more subtle than
any which the exigencies of camp and field had called for.

The fact that this hero throughout all his great public career--so
full of all kinds of excitement and action--enough, one would say, to
absorb the energies of a mind of any ordinary human capacity--that
this soldier whose name had become, on the Spanish coasts, what the
name of '_Coeur de Lion_' was in the Saracen nursery, that this
foreign adventurer who had a fleet of twenty-three ships sailing at
one time on his errands--this legislator, for he sat in Parliament as
representative of his native shire--this magnificent courtier, who had
raised himself, without any vantage-ground at all, from a position
wholly obscure, by his personal achievements and merits, to a place in
the social ranks so exalted; to a place in the state so _near_
that--which was chief and absolute--the fact that this many-sided man
of deeds, was all the time a literary man, not a scholar merely, but
himself an Originator, a Teacher, the Founder of a School--this is the
explanatory point in this history--this is the point in it which
throws light on all the rest of it, and imparts to it its true
dignity.

For he was not a mere blind historical agent, driven by fierce
instincts, intending only their own narrow ends, without any faculty
of comprehensive survey and choice of intentions; impelled by thirst
of adventure, or thirst of power, or thirst of gold, to the execution
of his part in the great human struggle for conservation and
advancement; working like other useful agencies in the Providential
Scheme--like 'the stormy wind fulfilling his pleasure.'

There is, indeed, no lack of the instinctive element in this heroic
'composition;' there is no stronger and more various and complete
development of it. That '_lumen siccum_' which his great contemporary
is so fond of referring to in his philosophy, that _dry light_ which
is so apt, he tells us, in most men's minds, to get 'drenched' a
little sometimes, in 'the humours and affections,' and distorted and
refracted in their mediums, did not always, perhaps, in its practical
determinations, escape from that accident even in the philosopher's
own; but in this stormy, world-hero, there was a latent volcano of
will and passion; there was, in his constitution, 'a complexion' which
might even seem to the bystanders to threaten at times, by its
'o'ergrowth,' the 'very pales and forts of reason'; but the intellect
was, notwithstanding, in its due proportion in him; and it was the
majestic intellect that triumphed in the end. It was the large and
manly comprehension, 'the large discourse looking before and after,'
it was the overseeing and active principle of 'the larger whole,' that
predominated and had the steering of his course. It is the common
human form which shines out in him and makes that manly demonstration,
which commands our common respect, in spite of those particular
defects and o'ergrowths which are apt to mar its outline in the best
historical types and patterns of it, we have been able to get as yet.
It was the intellect, and the sense which belongs to _that_ in its
integrity--it was the truth and the feeling of its obligation, which
was sovereign with him. For this is a man who appears to have been
occupied with the care of the common-weal more than with anything
else; and that, too, under great disadvantages and impediments, and
when there was no honour in caring for it truly, but that kind of
honour which he had so much of; for this was the time precisely which
the poet speaks of in that play in which he tells us that the end of
playing is 'to give to the very age and body of the time _its form and
pressure_.' This was the time when 'virtue of vice _must pardon beg_,
and curb and beck for leave to do it good.' It was the relief of man's
estate, or the Creator's glory, that he busied himself about; that was
the end of his ends; or if not, then was he, indeed, no hero at all.
For it was the doctrine of his own school, and 'the first human
principle' taught in it, that men who act without reference to that
distinctly _human_ aim, without that _manly_ consideration and
_kind_-liness of purpose, can lay no claim either to divine or human
honours; that they are not, in fact, men, but failures; specimens of
an unsuccessful attempt in nature, at an advancement; or, as his great
contemporary states it more clearly, 'only a nobler kind of vermin.'

During all the vicissitudes of his long and eventful public life,
Raleigh was still persistently a scholar. He carried his books--his
'trunk of books' with him in all his adventurous voyages; and they
were his 'companions' in the toil and excitement of his campaigns on
land. He studied them in the ocean-storm; he studied them in his tent,
as Brutus studied in his. He studied them year after year, in the dim
light which pierced the deep embrasure of those walls with which
tyranny had thought to shut in at last his world-grasping energies.

He had had some chance to study 'men and manners' in that strange and
various life of his, and he did not lack the skill to make the most of
it; but he was not content with that narrow, one-sided aspect of life
and human nature, to which his own individual personal experience,
however varied, must necessarily limit him. He would see it under
greater varieties, under all varieties of conditions. He would know
the history of it; he would 'delve it to the root.' He would know how
that particular form of it, which he found on the surface in his time,
had come to be the thing he found it. He would know what it had been
in other times, in the beginning, or in that stage of its development
in which the historic light first finds it. He was a man who wished
even to know what it had been in _the Assyrian_, in _the Phenician_,
in _the Hebrew_, in _the Egyptian_; he would see what it had been in
_the Greek_, and in _the Roman_. He was, indeed, one of that clique of
Elizabethan Naturalists, who thought that there was no more curious
thing in nature; and instead of taking a Jack Cade view of the
subject, and inferring that an adequate knowledge of it comes by
nature, as reading and writing do in that worthy's theory of
education, it was the private opinion of this school, that there was
no department of learning which a scholar could turn his attention to,
that required a more severe and thorough study and experiment, and
none that a man of a truly _scientific_ turn of mind would find better
worth his leisure. And the study of antiquity had not yet come to be
then what it is now; at least, with men of this stamp. Such men did
not study it to discipline their minds, or to get a classic finish to
their style. The books that such a man as this could take the trouble
to carry about with him on such errands as those that he travelled on,
were books that had in them, for the eager eyes that then o'er-ran
them, the world's 'news'--the world's story. They were full of the
fresh living data of his conclusions. They were notes that the master
minds of all the ages had made for him; invaluable aid and sympathy
they had contrived to send to him. The man who had been arrested in
his career, more ignominiously than the magnificent Tully had been in
_his_,--in a career, too, a thousand times more noble,--by a Caesar,
indeed, but _such_ a Caesar;--the man who had sat for years with the
executioner's block in his yard, waiting only for a scratch of the
royal pen, to bring down upon him that same edge which the poor
Cicero, with all his truckling, must feel at last,--such a one would
look over the old philosopher's papers with an apprehension of their
meaning, somewhat more lively than that of the boy who reads them for
a prize, or to get, perhaps, some classic elegancies transfused into
his mind.

During the ten years which intervene between the date of Raleigh's
first departure for the Continent and that of his beginning favour at
home, already he had found means for ekeing out and perfecting that
liberal education which Oxford had only begun for him, so that it was
as a man of rarest literary accomplishments that he made his brilliant
_debût_ at the English Court, where the new Elizabethan Age of Letters
was just then beginning.

He became at once the centre of that little circle of highborn wits
and poets, the elder wits and poets of the Elizabethan age, that were
then in their meridian there. Sir Philip Sidney, Thomas Lord
Buckhurst, Henry Lord Paget, Edward Earl of Oxford, and some others,
are included in the contemporary list of this courtly company, whose
doings are somewhat mysteriously adverted to by a critic, who refers
to the condition of 'the Art of Poesy' at that time. '_The gentleman
who wrote the late Shepherds' Calendar_' was beginning then to attract
considerable attention in this literary aristocracy.

The brave, bold genius of Raleigh flashed new life into that little
nucleus of the Elizabethan development. The new '_Round Table_,' which
that newly-beginning age of chivalry, with its new weapons and
devices, and its new and more heroic adventure had created, was not
yet 'full' till he came in. The Round Table grew rounder with this
knight's presence. Over those dainty stores of the classic ages, over
those quaint memorials of the elder chivalry, that were spread out on
it, over the dead letter of the past, the brave Atlantic breeze came
in, the breath of the great future blew, when the turn came for this
knight's adventure; whether opened in the prose of its statistics, or
set to its native music in the mystic melodies of the bard who was
there to sing it. The Round Table grew spheral, as he sat talking by
it; the Round Table dissolved, as he brought forth his lore, and
unrolled his maps upon it; and instead of it,--with all its fresh yet
living interests, tracked out by land and sea, with the great
battle-ground of the future outlined on it,--revolved the round world.
'_Universality_' was still the motto of these Paladins; but 'THE
GLOBE'--the Globe, with its TWO hemispheres, became henceforth their
device.

The promotion of Raleigh at Court was all that was needed to make him
the centre and organiser of that new intellectual movement which was
then just beginning there. He addressed himself to the task as if he
had been a man of literary tastes and occupations merely, or as if
that particular crisis had been a time of literary leisure with him,
and there were nothing else to be thought of just then. The relation
of those illustrious literary partners of his, whom he found already
in the field when he first came to it, to that grand development of
the English genius in art and philosophy which follows, ought not
indeed to be overlooked or slightly treated in any thorough history of
it. For it has its first beginning here in this brilliant assemblage
of courtiers, and soldiers, and scholars,--this company of Poets, and
Patrons and Encouragers of Art and Learning. Least of all should the
relation which the illustrious founder of this order sustains to the
later development be omitted in any such history,--'the prince and
mirror of all chivalry,' the patron of the young English Muse, whose
untimely fate keeps its date for ever green, and fills the air of this
new 'Helicon' with immortal lamentations. The shining foundations of
that so splendid monument of the later Elizabethan genius, which has
paralyzed and confounded all our criticism, were laid here. The
extraordinary facilities which certain departments of literature
appeared to offer, for evading the restrictions which this new poetic
and philosophic development had to encounter from the first, already
began to attract the attention of men acquainted with the uses to
which it had been put in antiquity, and who knew what gravity of aim,
what height of execution, that then rude and childish English Play had
been made to exhibit under other conditions;--men fresh from the study
of those living and perpetual monuments of learning, which the genius
of antiquity has left in this department. But the first essays of the
new English scholarship in this untried field,--the first attempts at
original composition here, derive, it must be confessed, their chief
interest and value from that memorable association in which we find
them. It was the first essay, which had to be made before those
finished monuments of art, which command our admiration on their own
account wholly, could begin to appear. It was 'the tuning of the
instruments, that those who came afterwards might play the better.' We
see, of course, the stiff, cramped hand of the beginner here, instead
of the grand touch of the master, who never comes till his art has
been prepared to his hands,--till the details of its execution have
been mastered for him by others. In some arts there must be
generations of essays before he can get his tools in a condition for
use. Ages of prophetic genius, generations of artists, who dimly saw
afar off, and struggled after his perfections, must patiently chip and
daub their lives away, before ever the star of his nativity can begin
to shine.

Considering what a barbaric age it was that the English mind was
emerging from then; and the difficulties attending the first attempt
to create in the English literature, anything which should bear any
proportion to those finished models of skill which were then dazzling
the imagination of the English scholar in the unworn gloss of their
fresh revival here, and discouraging, rather than stimulating, the
rude poetic experiment;--considering what weary lengths of essay there
are always to be encountered, where the standard of excellence is so
far beyond the power of execution; we have no occasion to despise the
first bold attempts to overcome these difficulties which the good
taste of this company has preserved to us. They are just such works as
we might expect under those circumstances;--yet full of the pedantries
of the new acquisition, overflowing on the surface with the learning
of the school, sparkling with classic allusions, seizing boldly on the
classic original sometimes, and working their new fancies into it;
but, full already of the riant vigour and originality of the
Elizabethan inspiration; and never servilely copying a foreign
original. The English genius is already triumphant in them. Their very
crudeness is not without its historic charm, when once their true
place in the structure we find them in, is recognised. In the later
works, this crust of scholarship has disappeared, and gone below the
surface. It is all dissolved, and gone into the clear intelligence;--
it has all gone to feed the majestic current of that new, all-subduing,
all-grasping originality. It is in these earlier performances that the
stumbling-blocks of our present criticism are strewn so thickly.
Nobody can write any kind of criticism of the 'Comedy of Errors,'
for instance, without recognizing the Poet's acquaintance with the
classic model, [See a recent criticism in 'The Times.']--without
recognizing the classic treatment. 'Love's Labour's Lost,' 'The
Taming of the Shrew,' the condemned parts of 'Henry the VI.,' and
generally the Poems which are put down in our criticism as doubtful,
or as the earlier Poems, are just those Poems in which the Poet's
studies are so flatly betrayed on the surface. Among these are plays
which were anonymously produced by the company performing at the
Rose Theatre, and other companies which English noblemen found
occasion to employ in their service then. These were not so much as
produced at the theatre which has had the honor of giving its name to
other productions, bound up with them. We shall find nothing to object
to in that somewhat heterogeneous collection of styles, which even a
single Play sometimes exhibits, when once the history of this
phenomenon accompanies it. The Cathedrals that were built, or re-built
throughout, just at the moment in which the Cathedral Architecture had
attained its ultimate perfection, are more beautiful to the eye,
perhaps, than those in which the story of its growth is told from the
rude, massive Anglo-Saxon of the crypt or the chancel, to the last
refinement of the mullion, and groin, and tracery. But the antiquary,
at least, does not regret the preservation. And these crude beginnings
here have only to be put in their place, to command from the critic,
at least, a similar respect. For here, too, the history reports itself
to the eye, and not less palpably.

It may seem surprising, and even incredible, to the modern critic,
that men in this position should find any occasion to conceal their
relation to those quite respectable contributions to the literature of
the time, which they found themselves impelled to make. The fact that
they did so, is one that we must accept, however, on uncontradicted
cotemporary testimony, and account for it as we can. The critic who
published his criticisms when 'the gentleman who wrote the late
Shepherd's Calendar' was just coming into notice, however inferior to
our modern critics in other respects, had certainly a better
opportunity of informing himself on this point, than they can have at
present. 'They have writ excellently well,' _he_ says of this company
of Poets,--this 'courtly company,' as he calls them,--' they have writ
excellently well, _if their doings could be found out and made public
with the rest_.' _Sir Philip Sidney, Raleigh,_ and the gentleman who
wrote the late Shepherd's Calendar, are included in the list of Poets
to whom this remark is applied. It is Raleigh's verse which is
distinguished, however, in this commendation as the most 'lofty,
insolent, and passionate;' a description which applies to the
anonymous poems alluded to, but is not particularly applicable to
those artificial and tame performances which he was willing to
acknowledge. And this so commanding Poet, who was at the same time an
aspiring courtier and meddler in affairs of state, and who chose, for
some mysterious reason or other, to forego the honours which those who
were in the secret of his literary abilities and successes,--the very
best judges of poetry in that time, too, were disposed to accord
him,--and we are not without references to cases in antiquity
corresponding very nearly to this; and which seemed to furnish, at
least, a sufficient precedent for this proceeding;--this so successful
poet, and courtier, and great man of his time, was already in a
position to succeed at once to that chair of literary patronage which
the death of Sir Philip Sidney had left vacant. Instinctively
generous, he was ready to serve the literary friends whom he attracted
to him, not less lavishly than he had served the proud Queen herself,
when he threw his gay cloak in her obstructed path,--at least, he was
not afraid of risking those sudden splendours which her favour was
then showering upon him, by wearying her with petitions on their
behalf. He would have risked his new favour, at least with his
'Cynthia,'--that twin sister of Phoebus Apollo,--to make her the
patron, if not the inspirer of the Elizabethan genius. 'When will you
cease to be a beggar, Raleigh?' she said to him one day, on one of
these not infrequent occasions. 'When your Majesty ceases to be a most
gracious mistress,' was this courtier's reply. It is recorded of her,
that 'she loved to hear his reasons to her demands.'

But though, with all his wit and eloquence, he could not contrive to
make of the grand-daughter of Henry the Seventh, a Pericles, or an
Alexander, or a Ptolemy, or an Augustus, or an encourager of anything
that did not appear to be directly connected with her own particular
ends, he did succeed in making her indirectly a patron of the literary
and scientific development which was then beginning to add to her
reign its new lustre,--which was then suing for leave to lay at her
feet its new crowns and garlands. Indirectly, he did convert her into
a patron,--a second-hand patron of those deeper and more subtle
movements of the new spirit of the time, whose bolder demonstrations
she herself had been forced openly to head. Seated on the throne of
Henry the Seventh, she was already the armed advocate of European
freedom;--Raleigh had contrived to make her the legal sponsor for the
New World's liberties; it only needed that her patronage should be
systematically extended to that new enterprise for the emancipation of
the human life from the bondage of ignorance, from the tyranny of
unlearning,--that enterprise which the gay, insidious Elizabethan
literature was already beginning to flower over and cover with its
devices,--it only needed _that_, to complete the anomaly of her
position. And that through Raleigh's means was accomplished.

He became himself the head of a little _Alexandrian_ establishment.
His house was a home for men of learning. He employed men in literary
and scientific researches on his account, whose business it was to
report to him their results. He had salaried scholars at his table, to
impart to him their acquisitions, Antiquities, History, Poetry,
Chemistry, Mathematics, scientific research of all kinds, came under
his active and persevering patronage. Returning from one of his visits
to Ireland, whither he had gone on this occasion to inspect a
_seignorie_ which his 'sovereign goddess' had then lately conferred
upon him, he makes his re-appearance at court with that so obscure
personage, the poet of the 'Faery Queene,' under his wing;--that same
gentleman, as the court is informed, whose bucolics had already
attracted so much attention in that brilliant circle. By a happy
coincidence, Raleigh, it seems, had discovered this Author in the
obscurity of his clerkship in Ireland, and had determined to make use
of his own influence at court to push his brother poet's fortunes
there; but his efforts to benefit this poor bard _personally_, do not
appear to have been attended at any time with much success. The
mysterious literary partnership between these two, however, which
dates apparently from an earlier period, continues to bring forth
fruit of the most successful kind; and the 'Faery Queene' is not the
only product of it.

All kinds of books began now to be dedicated to this new and so
munificent patron of arts and letters. His biographers collect his
public history, not from political records only, but from the eulogies
of these manifold dedications. _Ladonnier_, the artist, publishes his
Sketches of the New World through his aid. Hooker dedicates his
History of Ireland to him; Hakluyt, his Voyages to Florida. A work 'On
_Friendship_' is dedicated to him; another 'On Music,' in which art he
had found leisure, it seems, to make himself a proficient; and as to
the poetic tributes to him,--some of them at least are familiar to us
already. In that gay court, where Raleigh and his haughty rivals were
then playing their deep games,--where there was no room for Spenser's
muse, and the worth of his 'Old Song' was grudgingly reckoned,--the
'rustling in silks' is long since over, but the courtier's place in
the pageant of the 'Faery Queene' remains, and grows clearer with the
lapse of ages. That time, against which he built so perseveringly, and
fortified himself on so many sides, will not be able to diminish there
'one dowle that's in his plume.' [He was also a patron of Plays and
Players in this stage of his career, and entertained private parties
at his house with very _recherché_ performances of that kind
sometimes.]

In the Lord Timon of the Shakspere piece, which was rewritten from an
_Academic_ original after Raleigh's consignment to the Tower,--in that
fierce satire into which so much Elizabethan bitterness is condensed,
under the difference of the reckless prodigality which is stereotyped
in the fable, we get, in the earlier scenes, some glimpses of this
'Athenian' also, in this stage of his career.

But it was not as a _Patron_ only, or chiefly, that he aided the new
literary development. A scholar, a scholar so earnest, so
indefatigable, it followed of course that he must be, in one form or
another, an Instructor also; for that is still, under all conditions,
the scholar's destiny--it is still, in one form or another, his
business on the earth. But with that temperament which was included
among the particular conditions of his genius, and with those special
and particular endowments of his for another kind of intellectual
mastery, he could not be content with the pen--with the Poet's, or the
Historian's, or the Philosopher's pen--as the instrument of his mental
dictation. A Teacher thus furnished and ordained, seeks, indeed,
naturally and instinctively, a more direct and living and effective
medium of communication with the audience which his time is able to
furnish him, whether 'few' or many, whether 'fit' or unfit, than the
book can give him. He must have another means of 'delivery and
tradition,' when the delivery or tradition is addressed to those whom
he would associate with him in his age, to work with him as one man,
or those to whom he would transmit it in other ages, to carry it on to
its perfection--those to whom he would communicate his own highest
view, those whom he would inform with his patiently-gathered lore,
those whom he would _instruct_ and move with his new inspirations. For
the truth has become a personality with him--it is his nobler self. He
will live on with it. He will live or die with it.

For such a one there is, perhaps, no institution ready in his time to
accept his ministry. No chair at Oxford or Cambridge is waiting for
him. For they are, of course, and must needs be, the strong-holds of
the past--those ancient and venerable seats of learning, 'the
fountains and nurseries of all the humanities,' as a Cambridge
Professor calls them, in a letter addressed to Raleigh. The principle
of these larger wholes is, of course, instinctively conservative.
Their business is to know nothing of the new. The new intellectual
movement must fight its battles through without, and come off
conqueror there, or ever those old Gothic doors will creak on their
reluctant hinges to give it ever so pinched an entrance. When it has
once fought its way, and forced itself within--when it has got at last
some marks of age and custom on its brow--then, indeed, it will stand
as the last outwork of that fortuitous conglomeration, to be defended
in its turn against all comers. Already the revived classics had been
able to push from their chairs, and drive into corners, and shut up
finally and put to silence, the old Aristotelian Doctors--the Seraphic
and Cherubic Doctors of their day--in their own ancient halls. It
would be sometime yet, perhaps, however, before that study of the dead
languages, which was of course one prominent incident of the first
revival of a dead learning, would come to take precisely the same
place in those institutions, with their one instinct of conservation
and 'abhorrence of change,' which the old monastic philosophy had
taken in its day; but that change once accomplished, the old monastic
philosophy itself, religious as it was, was never held more sacred
than this profane innovation would come to be. It would be some time
before those new observations and experiments, which Raleigh and his
school were then beginning to institute, experiments and inquiries
which the universities would have laughed to scorn in their day, would
come to be promoted to the Professor's chair; but when they did, it
would perhaps be difficult to convince a young gentleman liberally
educated, at least, under the wings of one of those 'ancient and
venerable' seats of learning, now gray in Raleigh's youthful
West--ambitious, perhaps, to lead off in this popular innovation,
where Saurians, and Icthyosaurians, and Entomologists, and
Chonchologists are already hustling the poor Greek and Latin Teachers
into corners, and putting them to silence with their growing
terminologies--it would perhaps be difficult to convince one who had
gone through the prescribed course of treatment in one of these
'nurseries of humanity,' that the knowledge of the domestic habits and
social and political organisations of insects and shell-fish, or even
the experiments of the laboratory, though never so useful and proper
in their place, are not, after all, the beginning and end of a human
learning. It was no such place as that that this department of the
science of nature took in the systems or notions of its Elizabethan
Founders. They were 'Naturalists,' indeed; but that did not imply,
with _their_ use of the term, the absence of the natural common human
sense in the selection of the objects of their pursuits. 'It is a part
of science to make _judicious_ inquiries and wishes,' says the speaker
in chief for this new doctrine of nature; speaking of the particular
and special applications of it which he is forbidden to make openly,
but which he instructs, and prepares, and charges his followers to
make for themselves.

One of those innovations, one of those movements in which the new
ground of ages of future culture is first chalked out--a movement
whose end is not yet, whose beginning we have scarce yet seen--was
made in England, not very far from the time in which Sir Walter
Raleigh, began first to convert the eclat of his rising fortunes at
home, and the splendour of his heroic achievements abroad, and all
those new means of influence which his great position gave him, to the
advancement of those deeper, dearer ambitions, which the predominance
of the nobler elements in his constitution made inevitable with him.
Even then he was ready to endanger those golden opinions, waiting to
be worn in their newest gloss, not cast aside so soon, and new-won
rank, and liberty and life itself, for the sake of putting himself
into his true intellectual relations with his time, as a philosopher
and a beginner of a new age in the human advancement. For 'spirits are
not finely touched but to fine issues.'

If there was no Professor's Chair, if there was no Pulpit or Bishop's
Stall waiting for him, and begging his acceptance of its perquisites,
he must needs institute a chair of his own, and pay for leave to
occupy it. If there was no university with its appliances within his
reach, he must make a university of his own. The germ of a new
'universality' would not be wanting in it. His library, or his
drawing-room, or his 'banquet,' will be Oxford enough for him. He will
begin it as the old monks began theirs, with their readings. Where the
teacher is, there must the school be gathered together. And a school
in the end there will be: a school in the end the true teacher will
have, though he begin it, as the barefoot Athenian began his, in the
stall of the artisan, or in the chat of the Gymnasium, amid the
compliments of the morning levee, or in the woodland stroll, or in the
midnight revel of the banquet.

When the hour and the man are indeed met, when the time is ripe, and
one _truly sent_, ordained of that Power which _chooses_, not one
only--what uncloaked atheism is that, to promulgate in an age like
this!--_not_ the Teachers and Rabbis of _one race_ only, but _all the
successful_ agents of human advancement, the initiators of new eras of
man's progress, the inaugurators of new ages of the relief of the
human estate and the Creator's glory--when such an one indeed appears,
there will be no lack of instrumentalities. With some verdant
hill-side, it may be, some blossoming knoll or 'mount' for his
'chair,' with a daisy or a lily in his hand, or in a fisherman's boat,
it may be, pushed a little way from the strand, he will begin new
ages.

The influence of Raleigh upon his time cannot yet be fully estimated;
because, in the first place, it was primarily of that kind which
escapes, from its subtlety, the ordinary historical record; and, in
the second place, it was an influence at the time _necessarily
covert_, studiously disguised. His relation to the new intellectual
development of his age might, perhaps, be characterised as _Socratic_;
though certainly not because he lacked the use, and the most masterly
use, of that same weapon with which his younger contemporary brought
out at last, in the face of his time, the plan of the Great
Instauration. In the heart of the new establishment which the
magnificent courtier, who was a 'Queen's delight,' must now maintain,
there soon came to be a little 'Academe.' The choicest youth of the
time, 'the Spirits of the Morning Sort,' gathered about him. It was
the new philosophic and poetic genius of the age that he attracted to
him; it was on that philosophic and poetic genius that he left his
mark for ever.

He taught them, as the masters taught of old, in dialogues--in words
that could not then be written, in words that needed the master's
modulation to give them their significance. For the new doctrine had
need to be clothed in a language of its own, whose inner meaning only
those who had found their way to its inmost shrine were able to
interpret.

We find some contemporary and traditional references to this school,
which are not without their interest and historical value, as tending
to show the amount of influence which it was supposed to have exerted
on the time, as well as the acknowledged necessity for concealment in
the studies pursued in it. The fact that such an Association
_existed_, that it _began with Raleigh_, that young men of distinction
were attracted to it, and that in such numbers, and under such
conditions, that it came to be considered ultimately as a '_School_,'
of which he was the head-master--the fact that the new experimental
science was supposed to have had its origin in this association,--that
opinions, differing from the received ones, were also secretly
discussed in it,--that _anagrams_ and other devices were made use of
for the purpose of infolding the _esoteric_ doctrines of the school in
popular language, so that it was possible to write in this language
acceptably to the vulgar, and without violating preconceived opinions,
and at the same time instructively to the initiated,--all this
remains, even on the surface of statements already accessible to any
scholar,--all this remains, either in the form of contemporary
documents, or in the recollections of persons who have apparently had
it from the most authentic sources, from persons who profess to know,
and who were at least in a position to know, that such was the
impression at the time.

But when the instinctive dread of innovation was already so keenly on
the alert, when Elizabeth was surrounded with courtiers still in their
first wrath at the promotion of the new 'favourite,' indignant at
finding themselves so suddenly overshadowed with the growing honours
of one who had risen from a rank beneath their own, and eagerly
watching for an occasion against him, it was not likely that such an
affair as this was going to escape notice altogether. And though the
secrecy with which it was conducted, might have sufficed to elude a
scrutiny such as theirs, there was _another_, and more eager and
subtle enemy,--an enemy which the founder of this school had always to
contend with, that had already, day and night, at home and abroad, its
Argus watch upon him. That vast and secret foe, which he had arrayed
against him on foreign battle fields, knew already what kind of
embodiment of power this was that was rising into such sudden favour
here at home, and would have crushed him in the germ--that foe which
would never rest till it had pursued him to the block, which was ready
to join hands with his personal enemies in its machinations, in the
court of Elizabeth, as well as in the court of her successor, that
vast, malignant, indefatigable foe, in which the spirit of the old
ages lurked, was already at his threshold, and penetrating to the most
secret chamber of his councils. It was on the showing of _a Jesuit_
that these friendly gatherings of young men at Raleigh's table came to
be branded as 'a school of Atheism.' And it was through such agencies,
that his enemies at court were able to sow suspicions in Elizabeth's
mind in regard to the entire orthodoxy of his mode of explaining
certain radical points in human belief, and in regard to the absolute
'conformity' of his views on these points with those which she had
herself divinely authorised, suspicions which he himself confesses he
was never afterwards able to eradicate. The matter was represented to
her, we are told, 'as if he had set up for a doctor in the faculty and
invited young gentlemen into his school, where the Bible was jeered
at,' and the use of profane anagrams was inculcated. The fact that he
associated with him in his chemical and mathematical studies, and
entertained in his house, a scholar labouring at that time under the
heavy charge of getting up 'a philosophical theology,' was also made
use of greatly to his discredit.

And from another uncontradicted statement, which dates from a later
period, but which comes to us worded in terms as cautious as if it had
issued directly from the school itself, we obtain another glimpse of
these new social agencies, with which the bold, creative, social
genius that was then seeking to penetrate on all sides the
custom-bound time, would have roused and organised a new social life
in it. It is still the second-hand hearsay testimony which is quoted
here. '_He is said_ to have set up an Office of Address, and it is
_supposed_ that the office _might_ respect a _more liberal
intercourse_--_a nobler mutuality of advertisement_, than would
perhaps admit of _all sorts of persons_.' 'Raleigh set up a kind of
Office of Address,' says another, 'in the capacity of an agency for
all sorts of persons.' John Evelyn, refers also to that long dried
fountain of communication which _Montaigne_ first proposed, Sir Walter
Raleigh put in practice, and Mr. Hartlib endeavoured to renew.

'This is the scheme described by Sir W. Pellis, which is referred
traditionally to Raleigh and Montaigne (see Book I. chap. xxxiv.) An
Office of _Address_ whereby the wants of _all_ may be made known to
ALL (that painful and great instrument of this design), _where men may
know what is already done in the business of learning, what is at
present in doing, and what is intended to be done_, to the end that,
by such a _general communication of design and mutual assistance, the
wits and endeavours of the world_ may no longer be _as so many
scattered coals_, which, for want of _union_, are soon quenched,
whereas being laid together they would have yielded _a comfortable_
light and heat. [This is evidently _traditional_ language] ... such as
advanced rather to the _improvement_ of _men_ themselves than their
means.'--OLDYS.

_This_ then is the association of which Raleigh was the chief; _this_
was the state, within the state which he was founding. ('See the reach
of this man,' says Lord Coke on his Trial.) It is true that the honour
is also ascribed to Montaigne; but we shall find, as we proceed with
this inquiry, that _all_ the works and inventions of this new English
school, of which Raleigh was chief, all its new and vast designs for
man's relief, are also claimed by that same aspiring gentleman, as
they were, too, by another of these Egotists, who came out in his own
name with this identical project.

It was only within the walls of a school that the great principle of
the new philosophy of fact and practice, which had to pretend to be
profoundly absorbed in chemical experiments, or in physical
observations, and inductions of some kind--though not without an
occasional hint of a broader intention,--it was only in _esoteric_
language that the great principles of this philosophy could begin to
be set forth _in their true comprehension_. The very trunk of it, the
primal science itself, must needs be mystified and hidden in a shower
of metaphysical dust, and piled and heaped about with the old dead
branches of scholasticism, lest men should see for themselves _how_
broad and comprehensive _must_ be the ultimate sweep of its
determinations; lest men should see for themselves, how a science
which begins in fact, and returns to it again, which begins in
observation and experiment, and returns in scientific practice, in
scientific arts, in scientific re-formation, might have to do, ere all
was done, with facts not then inviting scientific investigation--with
arts not then inviting scientific reform.

In consequence of a sudden and common advancement of intelligence
among the leading men of that age, which left the standard of
intelligence represented in more than one of its existing
institutions, very considerably in the rear of its advancement, there
followed, as the inevitable result, a tendency to the formation of
some medium of expression,--whether that tendency was artistically
developed or not, in which the new and nobler thoughts of men, in
which their dearest beliefs, could find some vent and limited
interchange and circulation, without startling the _ear_. Eventually
there came to be a number of men in England at this time,--and who
shall say that there were none on the continent of this
school,--occupying prominent positions in the state, heading, it might
be, or ranged in opposite factions at Court, who could speak and write
in such a manner, upon topics of common interest, as to make
themselves entirely intelligible to each other, without exposing
themselves to any of the risks, which confidential communications
under such circumstances involved.

For there existed a certain mode of expression, originating in some of
its more special forms with this particular school, yet not altogether
conventional, which enabled those who made use of it to steer clear of
the Star Chamber and its sister institution; inasmuch as the terms
employed in this mode of communication were not in the more obvious
interpretation of them actionable, and to a vulgar, unlearned, or
stupid conceit, could hardly be made to appear so. There must be a
High Court of Wit, and a Bench of Peers in that estate of the realm,
or ever these treasons could be brought to trial. For it was a mode of
communication which involved in its more obvious construction the
necessary submission to power. It was the instructed ear,--the ear of
a school,--which was required to lend to it its more recondite
meanings;--it was the ear of that new school in philosophy which had
made History the basis of its learning,--which, dealing with
_principles_ instead of _words_, had glanced, not without some nice
observation in passing, at their more '_conspicuous_' historical
'INSTANCES';--it was the ear of a school which had everywhere the
great historical representations and diagrams at its control, and
could substitute, without much hindrance, particulars for generals, or
generals for particulars, as the case might be; it was the ear of a
school intrusted with discretionary power, but trained and practised
in the art of using it.

Originally an art of necessity, with practice, in the skilful hands of
those who employed it, it came at length to have a charm of its own.
In such hands, it became an instrument of literary power, which had
not before been conceived of; a medium too of densest ornament, of
thick crowding conceits, and nestling beauties, which no style before
had ever had depth enough to harbour. It established a new, and more
intimate and living relation between the author and his
reader,--between the speaker and his audience. There was ever the
charm of that secret understanding lending itself to all the effects.
It made the reader, or the hearer, participator in the artist's skill,
and joint proprietor in the result. The author's own glow must be on
his cheek, the author's own flash in his eye, ere that result was
possible. The nice point of the skilful pen, the depth of the lurking
tone was lost, unless an eye as skilful, or an ear as fine, tracked or
waited on it. It gave to the work of the artist, nature's own
style;--it gave to works which had the earnest of life and death in
them the sport of the 'enigma.'

It is not too much to say, that the works of Raleigh and Bacon, and
others whose connection with it is not necessary to specify just here,
are written throughout in the language of this school. 'Our glorious
Willy'--(it is the gentleman who wrote the 'Faery Queene' who claims
him, and his glories, as 'ours'),--'our glorious Willy' was born in
it, and knew no other speech. It was that 'Round Table' at which Sir
Philip Sydney presided then, that his lurking meanings, his
unspeakable audacities first 'set in a roar.' It was there, in the
keen encounters of those flashing 'wit combats,' that the weapons of
great genius grew so fine. It was there, where the young wits and
scholars, fresh from their continental tours, full of the gallant
young England of their day,--the Mercutios, the Benedicts, the Birons,
the Longuevilles, came together fresh from the Court of Navarre, and
smelling of the lore of their foreign 'Academe,' or hot from the
battles of continental freedom,--it was _there_, in those _réunions_,
that our Poet caught those gracious airs of his--those delicate,
thick-flowering refinements--those fine impalpable points of courtly
breeding--those aristocratic notions that haunt him everywhere. It was
there that he picked up his various knowledge of men and manners, his
acquaintance with foreign life, his bits of travelled wit, that flash
through all. It was there that he heard the clash of arms, and the
ocean-storm. And it was there that he learned 'his old ward.' It was
there, in the social collisions of that gay young time, with its bold
over-flowing humours, that would not be shut in, that he first armed
himself with those quips and puns, and lurking conceits, that crowd
his earlier style so thickly,--those double, and triple, and quadruple
meanings, that stud so closely the lines of his dialogue in the plays
which are clearly dated from that era,--the natural artifices of a
time like that, when all those new volumes of utterance which the lips
were ready to issue, were forbidden on pain of death to be 'extended,'
must needs 'be crushed together, infolded within themselves.'

Of course it would be absurd, or it would involve the most profound
ignorance of the history of literature in general, to claim that the
principle of this invention had its origin here. It had already been
in use, in recent and systematic use, in the intercourse of the
scholars of the Middle Ages; and its origin is coeval with the origin
of letters. The free-masonry of learning is old indeed. It runs its
mountain chain of signals through all the ages, and men whom times and
kindreds have separated ascend from their week-day toil, and hold
their Sabbaths and synods on those heights. They whisper, and listen,
and smile, and shake the head at one another; they laugh, and weep,
and complain together; they sing their songs of victory in one key.
That machinery is so fine, that the scholar can catch across the ages,
the smile, or the whisper, which the contemporary tyranny had no
instrument firm enough to suppress, or fine enough to detect.

  'But for her father sitting still on hie,
  Did warily still watch the way she went,
  And eke from far observed with jealous eye,
  Which way his course the wanton Bregog bent.

  Him to deceive, for all his watchful ward,
  The wily lover did devise this slight.
  First, into many parts, his stream he shared,
  That whilst the one was watch'd, the other might

  Pass unespide, to meet her by the way.
  And then besides, those little streams, so broken,
  He under ground so closely did convey,
  That of their passage doth appear no token.'

It was the author of the 'Faery Queene,' indeed, his fine, elaborate,
fertile genius burthened with its rich treasure, and stimulated to new
activity by his poetical alliance with Raleigh, whose splendid
invention first made apparent the latent facilities which certain
departments of popular literature then offered, for a new and hitherto
unparalleled application of this principle. In that prose description
of his great Poem which he addresses to Raleigh, the distinct avowal
of a double intention in it, the distinction between a particular and
general one, the emphasis with which the elements of the ideal name,
are discriminated and blended, furnish to the careful reader already
some superficial hints, as to the capabilities of such a plan to one
at all predisposed to avail himself of them. And, indeed, this Poet's
manifest philosophical and historical tendencies, and his avowed view
of the comprehension of the Poet's business would have seemed
beforehand to require some elbow-room,--some chance for poetic curves
and sweeps,--some space for the line of beauty to take its course in,
which the sharp angularities, the crooked lines, the blunt bringing up
everywhere, of the new philosophic tendency to history would scarcely
admit of. There was no breathing space for him, unless he could
contrive to fix his poetic platform so high, as to be able to override
these restrictions without hindrance.

'For the Poet thrusteth into the midst, even where it most concerneth
him, and then recoursing to the things fore-past, and _divining of
things to come_, he maketh a pleasing _analysis_ of ALL.'

And it so happened that his Prince Arthur had dreamed the poet's
dream, the hero's dream, the philosopher's dream, the dream that was
dreamed of old under the Olive shades, the dream that all our Poets
and inspired anticipators of man's perfection and felicity have always
been dreaming; but this one '_awakening_,' determined that it should
be a dream no longer. It was the hour in which the genius of antiquity
was reviving; it was the hour in which the poetic inspiration of all
the ages was reviving, and _arming_ itself with the knowledge of
'things not dreamt of' by old reformers--that knowledge of nature
which is _power_, which is the true _magic_. For this new Poet had
seen in a vision that same 'excellent beauty' which 'the divine' ones
saw of old, and 'the New Atlantis,' the celestial vision of _her_
kingdom; and being also 'ravished with that excellence, and
_awakening_, he determined to _seek her out_. And so being by _Merlin
armed_, and by _Timon thoroughly instructed_, he went forth to seek
her in _Fairy Land_.' There was a little band of heroes in that age, a
little band of philosophers and poets, secretly bent on that same
adventure, sworn to the service of that same Gloriana, though they
were fain to wear then the scarf and the device of another Queen on
_their_ armour. It is to the prince of this little band--'the prince
and mirror of all chivalry'--that this Poet dedicates his poem. But it
is Raleigh's device which he adopts in the names he uses, and it is
Raleigh who thus shares with Sydney the honour of his dedication.

'In that Faery Queene, I mean,' he says, in his prose description of
the Poem addressed to Raleigh, 'in that Faery Queene, I mean Glory in
my general intention; but, in my particular, I conceive the most
glorious person of our sovereign the Queen, and _her_ kingdom--in
_Fairy Land_.

'And yet, in some places, I do otherwise shadow her. For considering
she beareth _two persons, one_ of a most Royal _Queen_ or _Empress_,
the other of a most VIRTUOUS and BEAUTIFUL lady--the _latter part_ I
do express in BEL-PHEBE, fashioning her name according to your own
_most excellent conceit_ of "_Cynthia_," Phebe and Cynthia being both
names of _Diana_.' And thus he sings his poetic dedication:--

  'To thee, that art the Summer's Nightingale,
  Thy sovereign goddess's most dear delight,
  Why do I send this rustic madrigal,
  That may thy tuneful ear unseason quite?
  _Thou, only fit this argument to write_,
  In whose high thoughts _pleasure hath built her bower_,
  And dainty love learn'd sweetly to indite.
  My rhymes, I know, unsavoury are and soure
  To taste the streams, which _like a golden showre_,
  Flow from thy fruitful head of thy love's praise.
  Fitter, perhaps, _to thunder martial stowre_,[Footnote]
  When thee so list thy _tuneful_ thoughts to raise,
  Yet _till that thou thy poem wilt make known_,
  Let thy fair Cynthia's praises be thus rudely shown.'

[Footnote:
'Shine forth, thou Star of Poets, and with _rage_
_Or influence chide_, or _cheer_ the drooping stage.'

BEN JONSON.]

'Of me,' says Raleigh, in a response to this obscure partner of his
works and arts,--a response not less mysterious, till we have found
the solution of it, for it is an enigma.

  'Of me _no lines_ are loved, _no letters_ are of price,
  Of all that speak the English tongue, but those of _thy device_.'

[It was a '_device_' that symbolised _all_. It was a _circle_
containing the alphabet, or the _A B C_, and the esoteric meaning of
it was '_all_ in _each_,' or _all_ in _all_, the new doctrine of the
_unity_ of science (the '_Ideas_' of the New '_Academe_'). That was
the token-name under which a great Book of this Academy was issued.]

It is to Sidney, Raleigh, and the Poet of the 'Faery-Queene,' and the
rest of that courtly company of Poets, that the contemporary author in
the Art of Poetry alludes, with a special commendation of Raleigh's
vein, as the 'most lofty, insolent, and passionate,' when he says,'
they have _writ_ excellently well, if their _doings_ could be found
out and made public with the rest.'



CHAPTER IV.

RALEIGH'S SCHOOL, CONTINUED.--THE NEW ACADEMY.

EXTRACT FROM A LATER CHAPTER OF RALEIGH'S LIFE.


_Oliver_. Where will the old Duke live?

_Charles_. They say _he is already_ in the forest of _Arden_, and a
many merry men with him; and there they live like the old Robin Hood
of England: they say many young gentlemen flock to him every day, and
fleet the time carelessly as they did in the golden world.

As You Like It.

  _Stephano_ [sings].
  Flout 'em and skout'em; and skout'em and flout 'em,
  _Thought_ is free.

  _Cal_. That's not the tune.

  [Ariel _plays the tune on a tabor and pipe_.]

  _Ste_. What is this _same?_

  _Trin_. This is the tune of our catch, played by--the picture
  of--_Nobody_.

But all was not over with him in the old England yet--the present had
still its chief tasks for him.

The man who had 'achieved' his greatness, the chief who had made his
way through such angry hosts of rivals, and through such formidable
social barriers, from his little seat in the Devonshire corner to a
place in the state, so commanding, that even the jester, who was the
'Mr. Punch' of that day, conceived it to be within the limits of his
prerogative to call attention to it, and that too in 'the presence'
itself [See 'the knave' _commands_ 'the queen.'--_Tarleton_]--a place
of command so acknowledged, that even the poet could call him in the
ear of England 'her _most_ dear delight'--such a one was not going to
give up so easily the game he had been playing here so long. He was
not to be foiled with this great flaw in his fortunes even here; and
though all his work appeared for the time to be undone, and though the
eye that he had fastened on him was 'the eye' that had in it 'twenty
thousand deaths.'

It is this patient piecing and renewing of his broken webs, it is this
second building up of his position rather than the first, that shows
us what he is. One must see what he contrived to make of those
'apartments' in the Tower while he occupied them; what before
unimagined conveniencies, and elegancies, and facilities of
communication, and means of operation, they began to develop under the
searching of his genius: what means of reaching and moving the public
mind; what wires that reached to the most secret councils of state
appeared to be inlaid in those old walls while he was within them;
what springs that commanded even there movements not less striking and
anomalous than those which had arrested the critical and admiring
attention of Tarleton under the Tudor administration,--movements on
that same royal board which Ferdinand and Miranda were seen to be
playing on in Prospero's cell when all was done,--one must see what
this logician, who was the magician also, contrived to make of the
lodging which was at first only 'the cell' of a condemned criminal;
what power there was there to foil his antagonists, and crush them
too,--if nothing but throwing themselves under the wheels of his
advancement would serve their purpose; one must look at all this to
see 'what manner of man' this was, what stuff this genius was made of,
in whose hearts ideas that had been parted from all antiquities were
getting welded here then--welded so firmly that all futurities would
not disjoin them, so firmly that thrones, and dominions, and
principalities, and powers, and the rulers of the darkness of this
world might combine in vain to disjoin them--the ideas whose union was
the new 'birth of time.' It is this life in 'the cell'--this game,
these masques, this tempest, that the magician will command
there--which show us, when all is done, what new stuff of Nature's own
this was, in which the new idea of combining 'the part operative' and
the part speculative of human life--this new thought of making 'the
art and practic part of life _the mistress_ to its theoric' was
understood in this scholar's own time (as we learn from the secret
traditions of the school) to have had its first germination: this idea
which is the idea of the modern learning--the idea of connecting
knowledge generally and in a systematic manner with the human
conduct--knowledge as distinguished from pre-supposition--the idea
which came out afterwards so systematically and comprehensively
developed in the works of his great contemporary and partner in arts
and learning.

We must look at this, as well as at some other demonstrations of which
this time was the witness, to see what new mastership this is that was
coming out here so signally in this age in various forms, and in more
minds than one; what soul of a new era it was that had laughed, even
in the boyhood of its heroes, at old Aristotle on his throne; that had
made its youthful games with dramatic impersonations, and caricatures,
and travesties of that old book-learning; that in the glory of those
youthful spirits--'the spirits of youths, that meant to be of note and
began betimes'--it thought itself already competent to laugh down and
dethrone with its 'jests'; that had laughed all its days in secret;
that had never once lost a chance for a jibe at the philosophy it
found in possession of the philosophic chairs--a philosophy which had
left so many things in heaven and earth uncompassed in its old futile
dreamy abstractions.

  Unless philosophy can make a Juliet,
  Displant a town, reverse a prince's doom,
  Hang up philosophy,

was the word of the poet of this new school in one of his 'lofty and
passionate' moods, at a much earlier stage of this philosophic
development. 'See what learning is!' exclaims the Nurse, speaking at
that same date from the same dictation, for there is a Friar 'abroad'
there already in the action of that play, who is undertaking to bring
his learning to bear upon practice, and opening his cell for
scientific consultation and ghostly advice on the questions of the
play as they happen to arise; and it is his apparent capacity for
smoothing, and reconciling, and versifying, not words only, but facts,
which commands the Nurse's admiration.

This doctrine of a practical learning, this part operative of the new
learning for which the founders of it beg leave to reintegrate the
abused term of Natural Magic, referring to the Persians in particular,
to indicate the extent of the field which their magical operations are
intended ultimately to occupy; this idea, which the master of this
school was illustrating now in the Tower so happily, did not originate
in the Tower, as we shall see.

The first heirs of this new invention, were full of it. The babbling
infancy of this great union of art and learning, whose speech flows in
its later works so clear, babbled of nothing else: its Elizabethan
savageness, with its first taste of learning on its lips, with its new
classic lore yet stumbling in its speech, already, knew nothing else.
The very rudest play in all this collection of the school,--left to
show us the march of that 'time-bettering age,' the play which offends
us most--belongs properly to this collection; contains _this_ secret,
which is the Elizabethan secret, and the secret of that art of
delivery and tradition which this from the first inevitably
created,--yet rude and undeveloped, but _there_.

We need not go so far, however, as that, in this not pleasant
retrospect; for these early plays are not the ones to which the
interpreter of this school would choose to refer the reader, for the
proof of its claims at present;--these which the faults of youth and
the faults of the time conspire to mar: in which the overdoing of the
first attempt to hide under a cover suited to the tastes of the Court,
or to the yet more faulty tastes of the rabble of an Elizabethan
play-house,--the boldest scientific treatment of 'the forbidden
questions,' still leaves so much upon the surface of the play that
repels the ordinary criticism;--these that were first sent out to
bring in the rabble of that age to the scholar's cell, these in which
the new science was first brought in, in its slave's costume, with all
its native glories shorn, and its eyes put out 'to make sport' for the
Tudor--perilous sport!--these first rude essays of a learning not yet
master of its unwonted tools, not yet taught how to wear its fetters
gracefully, and wreathe them over and make immortal glories of
them--still clanking its irons. There is nothing here to detain any
criticism not yet instructed in the secret of this Art Union. But the
faults are faults of execution merely; _the design_ of the Novura
Organum is not more noble, not more clear.

For these works are the works of that same 'school' which the Jesuit
thought so dangerous, and calculated to affect unfavourably the
morality of the English nation--the school which the Jesuit contrived
to bring under suspicion as a school in which doctrines that differed
from opinions received on essential points were secretly
taught,--contriving to infect with his views on that point the lady
who was understood, at that time, to be the only person qualified to
reflect on questions of this nature; the school in which Raleigh was
asserted to be perverting the minds of young men by teaching them the
use of profane anagrams; and it cannot be denied, that anagrams, as
well as other 'devices in letters,' _were_ made use of, in involving
'the bolder meanings' contained in writings issued from this school,
especially when the scorn with which science regarded the things it
found set up for its worship had to be conveyed sometimes in a point
or a word. It is a school, whose language might often seem obnoxious
to the charge of profanity and other charges of that nature to those
who do not understand its aims, to those who do not know that it is
from the first a school of Natural Science, whose chief department was
that history which makes the basis of the '_living_ art,' the art of
_man's_ living, the _essential_ art of it,--a school in which the use
of words was, in fact, more rigorous and scrupulous than it had ever
been in any other, in which the use of words is for the first time
scientific, and yet, in some respects, more bold and free than in
those in which mere words, as words, are supposed to have some
inherent virtue and efficacy, some mystic worth and sanctity in them.

This was the learning in which the art of a new age and race first
spoke, and many an old foolish, childish, borrowed notion went off
like vapour in it at its first word, without any one's ever so much as
stopping to observe it, any one whose place was within. It is the
school of a criticism much more severe than the criticism which calls
its freedom in question. It is a school in which the taking of names
in vain in general is strictly forbidden. That is the first
commandment of it, and it is a commandment with promise.

The man who sits there in the Tower, now, driving that same
'goose-pen' which he speaks of as such a safe instrument for unfolding
practical doctrines, with such patient energy, is not now occupied
with the statistics of Noah's Ark, grave as he looks; though that,
too, is a subject which his nautical experience and the indomitable
bias of his genius as a western man towards calculation in general,
together with his notion that the affairs of the world generally, past
as well as future, belong properly to his _sphere_ as a _man_, will
require him to take up and examine and report upon, before he will
think that his work is done. It is not a chapter in the History of the
World which he is composing at present, though that work is there at
this moment on the table, and forms the ostensible state-prison work
of this convict.

This is the man who made one so long ago in those brilliant 'Round
Table' reunions, in which the idea of converting the new _belles
lettres_ of that new time, to such grave and politic uses was first
suggested; he is the genius of that company, that even in such frolic
mad-cap games as Love's Labour's Lost, and the Taming of the Shrew,
and Midsummer Night's Dream, could contrive to insert, not the broad
farce and burlesque on the old pretentious wordy philosophy and
pompous rhetoric it was meant to dethrone only, and not the most
perilous secret of the new philosophy, only, but the secret of its
organ of delivery and tradition, the secret of its use of letters, the
secret of its '_cipher in letters_,' and not its 'cipher in words'
only, the cipher in which the secret of the authorship of these works
was infolded, and in which it was _found_, but not found in these
earlier plays,--plays in which these so perilous secrets are still
conveyed in so many involutions, in passages so intricate with quips
and puns and worthless trivialities, so uninviting or so marred with
their superficial meanings, that no one would think of looking in them
for anything of any value. For it is always when some necessary, but
not superficial, question of the play is to be considered, that the
Clown and the Fool are most in request, for 'there be of them that
will themselves laugh to set on some _barren spectators_ to laugh
too'; and under cover of that mirth it is, that the grave or witty
undertone reaches the ear of the judicious.

It is in the later and more finished works of this school that the key
to the secret doctrines of it, which it is the object of this work to
furnish, is best found. But the fact, that in the very rudest and most
faulty plays in this collection of plays, which form so important a
department of the works of this school, which make indeed the noblest
tradition, the only adequate tradition, the 'illustrated tradition' of
its noblest doctrine--the fact that in the very earliest germ of this
new union of 'practic and theoric,' of art and learning, from which we
pluck at last Advancements of Learning, and Hamlets, and Lears, and
Tempests, and the Novum Organum, already the perilous secret of this
union is infolded, already the entire organism that these great fruits
and flowers will unfold in such perfection is contained, and clearly
traceable,--this is a fact which appeared to require insertion in this
history, and not, perhaps, without some illustration.

'It is not amiss to observe,' says the Author of the Advancement of
Learning, when at last his great exordium to the science of nature in
man, and the art of culture and cure that is based on that science is
finished--pausing to observe it, pausing ere he will produce his index
to that science, to observe it: 'It is _not_ amiss to observe', he
says--(speaking of the operation of culture in general on young minds,
so forcible, though unseen, as hardly any length of time, or
contention of labour, can countervail it afterwards)--'how small and
mean faculties gotten by education, yet when they fall into _great
men, or great matters_, do work _great and important effects_; whereof
we see a notable example in _Tacitus_, of _two stage-players_,
Percennius and Vibulenus, who, _by their faculty of playing_, put the
_Pannonian_ armies _into an extreme tumult and combustion_; for,
_there arising a mutiny_ among them, upon the death of _Augustus_
Caesar, _Blaesus_ the lieutenant had committed some of the mutineers,
_which were suddenly rescued_; whereupon Vibulenus _got to be heard
speak_ [being a stage-player], which he did _in this manner_.

'"These poor _innocent_ wretches _appointed to cruel death_, you have
restored to behold the light: but who shall restore _my brother_ to
me, or life to my brother, _that was sent hither in message from the
legions of Germany_ to treat of--THE COMMON CAUSE? And he hath
murdered him this last night by _some of his fencers and ruffians,
that he hath about him for his executioners_ upon soldiers. The
mortalest enemies do not deny burial; _when I have performed my last
duties to the corpse with kisses, with tears, command me to be slain
besides him_, so that these, my fellows, _for our good meaning_ and
our _true hearts_ to THE LEGION, _may have leave to bury us_."

'With which speech he put the army into an infinite fury and uproar;
whereas, truth was, he had no brother, neither was there any _such_
matter [in that case], but he played it merely _as if_ he had been
upon the stage.'

This is the philosopher and stage critic who expresses a decided
opinion elsewhere, that 'the play's the thing,' though he finds this
kind of writing, too, useful in its way, and for certain purposes; but
he is the one who, in speaking of the original differences in the
natures and gifts of men, suggests that 'there _are_ a kind of men who
can, as it were, divide themselves;' and he does not hesitate to
propound it as his deliberate opinion, that a man of wit should have
at command a number of styles adapted to different auditors and
exigencies; that is, if he expects to accomplish anything with his
rhetoric. That is what he makes himself responsible for from his
professional chair of learning; but it is the Prince of Denmark, with
his remarkable natural faculty of speaking to the point, who says,
'_Seneca_ can not be _too heavy_, nor _Plautus_ too light,
for--[what?]--the _law of writ_--and--the _liberty_.' '_These_ are the
only _men_,' he adds, referring apparently to that tinselled gauded
group of servants that stand there awaiting his orders.

'My lord--you played once _in the university_, you say,' he observes
afterwards, addressing himself to that so politic statesmen whose
overreaching court plots and performances end for himself so
disastrously. 'That did I, my lord,' replies Polonius, '_and was
accounted a good actor_.' 'And what did you enact?' 'I did enact
_Julius Caesar_. I--was killed i' the Capitol [I]. Brutus killed me.'
'It was a _brute_ part of him [collateral sounds--Elizabethan
phonography] to kill so _capitol a calf_ there.--Be the players
ready?'(?). [That is the question.]

'While watching the progress of the action at Sadlers' Wells,' says
the dramatic critic of the 'Times,' in the criticism of the Comedy of
Errors before referred to, directing attention to the juvenile air of
the piece, to 'the classic severity in the form of the play,' and
'that _baldness_ of treatment which is a peculiarity of antique
comedy'--'while watching the progress of the action at Sadlers' Wells,
_we may almost fancy we are at St. Peter's College_, witnessing the
annual performance of _the Queen's scholars_.' That is not surprising
to one acquainted with the history of these plays, though the
criticism which involves this kind of observation is not exactly the
criticism to which we have been accustomed here. But any one who
wishes to see, as a matter of antiquarian curiosity, or for any other
purpose, how far from being hampered in the first efforts of his
genius with _this_ class of educational associations, that particular
individual would naturally have been, in whose unconscious brains this
department of the modern learning is supposed to have had its
accidental origin,--any one who wishes to see in what direction the
antecedents of a person in that station in life would naturally have
biased, _at that time_, his first literary efforts, if, indeed, he had
ever so far escaped from the control of circumstances as to master the
art of the collocation of letters--any person who has any curiosity
whatever on this point is recommended to read in this connection a
letter from a professional contemporary of this individual--one who
comes to us with unquestionable claims to our respect, inasmuch as he
appears to have had some care for _the future_, and some object in
living beyond that of promoting his own immediate private interests
and sensuous gratification.

It is a letter of Mr. Edward Alleyn (the founder of Dulwich College),
published by the Shakspere Society, to which we are compelled to have
recourse for information on this interesting question; inasmuch as
that distinguished contemporary and professional rival of his referred
to, who occupies at present so large a space in the public eye, as it
is believed for the best of reasons, has failed to leave us any
specimens of his method of reducing his own personal history to
writing, or indeed any demonstration of his appreciation of the art of
chirography, in general. He is a person who appears to have given a
decided preference to the method of oral communication as a means of
effecting his objects. But in reading this truly interesting document
from the pen of an Elizabethan player, who _has_ left us a specimen of
his use of that instrument usually so much in esteem with men of
letters, we must take into account the fact, that _this_ is an
exceptional case of culture. It is the case of a player who aspired to
distinction, and who had raised himself by the force of his genius
above his original social level; it is the case of a player who has
been referred to recently as a proof of the position which it was
possible for 'a stage player' to attain to under those particular
social conditions.

But as this letter is of a specially private and confidential nature,
and as this poor player who _did_ care for the future, and who founded
with his talents, such as they were, a noble charity, instead of
living and dying to himself, is not to blame for his defects of
education,--since his _acts_ command our respect, however faulty his
attempts at literary expression,--this letter will not be produced
here. But whoever has read it, or whoever may chance to read it, in
the course of an antiquarian research, will be apt to infer, that
whatever educational bias the first efforts of genius subjected to
influences of the same kind would naturally betray, the faults charged
upon the Comedy of Errors, the leaning to the classics, the taint of
St. Peter's College, the tone of the Queen's scholars, are hardly the
faults that the instructed critic would look for.

But to ascertain the fact, that the controlling idea of that new
learning which the Man in the Tower is illustrating now in so grand
and mature a manner, not with his pen only, but with his 'living art,'
and with such an entire independence of classic models, is already
organically contained in those earlier works on which the classic
shell is still visible, it is not necessary to go back to the
Westminster play of these new classics, or to the performances of the
Queen's Scholars. Plays having a considerable air of maturity, in
which the internal freedom of judgment and taste is already absolute,
still exhibit on the surface of them this remarkable submission to the
ancient forms which are afterwards rejected on principle, and by a
rule in the new rhetoric--a rule which the author of the Advancement
of Learning is at pains to state very clearly. The _wildness_ of which
we hear so much, works itself out upon the surface, and determines the
form at length, as these players proceed and grow bolder with their
work. A play, second to none in historical interest, invaluable when
regarded simply in its relation to the history of this school, one
which may be considered, in fact, the Introductory Play of the New
School of Learning, is one which exhibits very vividly these striking
characteristics of the earlier period. It is one in which the
vulgarities of the Play-house are still the cloak of the philosophic
subtleties, and incorporated, too, into the philosophic design; and it
is one in which the unity of design, that one design which makes the
works of this school, from first to last, as the work of one man, is
still cramped with those other unities which the doctrines of Dionysus
and the mysteries of Eleusis prescribed of old to _their_
interpreters. 'What is the _end_ of _study_? What is the _end_ of it?'
was the word of the New School of Learning. _That_ was its first
speech. It was a speech produced with dramatic illustrations, for the
purpose of bringing out its significance more fully, for the purpose
of pointing the inquiry unmistakeably to those ends of learning which
the study of the learned then had not yet comprehended. It is a speech
on behalf of a new learning, in which the extant learning is produced
on the stage, in its actual historical relation to those '_ends_'
which the new school conceived to be the true ends of it, which are
brought on to the stage in palpable, visible representation, not in
allegorical forms, but in instances, 'conspicuous instances,' living
specimens, after the manner of this school.

'What is the end of study?' cried the setter forth of this new
doctrine, as long before as when lore and love were debating it
together in that 'little Academe' that was yet, indeed, to be 'the
wonder of the world, still and contemplative in _living_ art.' 'What
is the end of study?' cries already the voice of one pacing under
these new olives. _That_ was the word of the new school; that was the
word of new ages, and these new minds taught of nature--her priests
and prophets knew it then, already, 'Let fame that all hunt after _in
their lives_,' _they_ cry--

  _Live_ registered upon our brazen _tombs_,
  And then _grace us in the disgrace of death_;
  When spite of cormorant devouring time,
  The endeavour of _this present breath_ may buy
  _That honour_ which shall bate his scythe's keen edge,
  And make us HEIRS of _all eternity_--[of ALL].
       *       *       *       *       *
  _Navarre_ shall be the wonder of the world,
  Our Court shall be _a little Academe_,
  _Still and contemplative in_--LIVING _art_.

This is the Poet of the Woods who is beginning his 'recreations' for
us here--the poet who loves so well to take his court gallants in
their silks and velvets, and perfumes, and fine court ladies with all
their courtly airs and graces, and all the stale conventionalitites
that he is sick of, out from under the low roofs of princes into that
great palace in which the Queen, whose service he is sworn to, keeps
the State. This is the school-master who takes his school all out on
holiday excursions into green fields, and woods, and treats them to
country merry-makings, and not in sport merely. This is the one that
breaks open the cloister, and the close walls that learning had dwelt
in till then, and shuts up the musty books, and bids that old droning
cease. This is the one that stretches the long drawn aisle and lifts
the fretted vault into a grander temple. The Court with all its pomp
and retinue, the school with all its pedantries and brazen ignorance,
'High Art' with its new graces, divinity, Mar-texts and all, must
'come hither, come hither,' and 'under the green-wood tree lie with
me,' the ding-dong of this philosopher's new learning says, calling
his new school together. This is the linguist that will find
'_tongues_ in trees,' and crowd out from the halls of learning the
lore of ancient parchments with their verdant classics, their 'truth
in beauty dyed.' This is the teacher with whose new alphabet you can
find 'sermons in stones, _books_ in the running brooks,' and
good,--good--his '_good_' the good of the New School, that broader
'_good_' in every _thing_. 'The roof of _this_ court is too high to be
_yours_,' says the princess of this out-door scene to the sovereignty
that claimed it then.

This is 'great Nature's' Poet and Interpreter, and he takes us always
into 'the continent of nature'; but man is his chief end, and that
island which his life makes in the universal being is the point to
which that Naturalist brings home all his new collections. This is the
Poet of the Woods, but man,--man at the summit of his arts, in the
perfection of his refinements, is always the creature that he is
'collecting' in them. In his wildest glades, this is still the species
that he is busied with. He has brought him there to experiment on him,
and that we may see the better what he is. He has brought him there to
improve his arts, to reduce his conventional savageness, to re-refine
his coarse refinements, not to make a wild-man of him. This is the
Poet of the Woods; but he is a woodman, he carries an axe on his
shoulder. He will wake a continental forest with it and subdue it, and
fill it with his music.

For this is the Poet who cries 'Westward Ho!' But he has not got into
the woods yet in this play. He is only on the edge of them as yet. It
is under the blue roof of that same dome which is 'too high,' the
princess here says, to belong to the pygmy that this Philosopher likes
so well to bring out and to measure under that canopy--it is 'out of
doors' that this new speech on behalf of a new learning is spoken. But
there is a close rim of conventionalities about us still. It is _a
Park_ that this audacious proposal is uttered in. But nothing can be
more orderly, for it is 'a Park with a Palace in it.' There it is, in
the background. If it were the Attic proscenium itself hollowed into
the south-east corner of the Acropolis, what more could one ask. But
it is the palace of the King of--_Navarre_, who is the prince of good
fellows and the prince of good learning at one and the same time,
which makes, in this case, the novelty. 'A Park with a Palace in it'
makes the first scene. 'Another part of the same' with the pavilion of
a princess and the tents of _her_ Court seen in the distance, makes
the second; and the change from one part of this park to another,
though we get into the heart of it sometimes, is the utmost license
that the rigours of the Greek Drama permit the Poet to think of at
present. This criticism on the old learning, this audacious proposal
for the new, with all the bold dramatic illustration with which it is
enforced, must be managed here under these restrictions. Whatever
'persons' the plot of this drama may require for its evolutions,
whatever witnesses and reporters the trial and conviction of the old
learning, and the definition of the ground of the new, may require,
will have to be induced to cross this park at this particular time,
because the form of the new art is not yet emancipated, and the Muse
of the Inductive Science cannot stir from the spot to search them out.

However, that does not impair the representation as it is managed.
There is a very bold artist here already, with all his deference for
the antique. We shall be sure to have _all_ when he is the plotter.
The action of this drama is not complicated. The persons of it are
few; the characterization is feeble, compared with that of some of the
later plays; but that does not hinder or limit the design, and it is
all the more apparent for this artistic poverty, anatomically clear;
while as yet that perfection of art in which all trace of the
structure came so soon to be lost in the beauty of the illustration,
is yet wanting; while as yet that art which made of its living
instance an intenser life, or which made with its _living_ art a life
more living than life itself, was only germinating.

The illustration here, indeed, approaches the allegorical form, in the
obtrusive, untempered predominance of the qualities represented, so
overdone as to wear the air of a caricature, though the historical
combination is still here. These diagrams are alive evidently; they
are men, and not allegorical spectres, or toys, though they are
'painted in character.'

The entire representation of the extant learning is dramatically
produced on this stage; the germ of the 'new' is here also; and the
unoccupied ground of it is marked out here as, in the Advancement of
Learning, by the criticism on the deficiences of that which has the
field. Here, too, the line of the extant culture,--the narrow indented
boundary of the _culture_ that professed to take all is always
defining the new,--cutting out the wild not yet visited by the art of
man;--only here the criticism is much more lively, because here 'we
come _to particulars_,' a thing which the new philosophy--much insists
on; and though this want in learning, and the wildness it leaves, is
that which makes tragedies in this method of exhibition; it has its
comical aspect also; and this is the laughing and weeping philosopher
in one who manages these representations; and in 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 did _not_ 'clasp
in,' that which old philosophies have 'not _dreamt_ of,'--the lore of
laws not written yet in books of man's devising, the lore of _that_ of
which man's ordinary life consisteth is _here_, uncollected, waiting
to be spelt out.

  _King_. _How well he's read_ to reason _against reading_.

is the inference _here_.

  _Dumain_. _Proceeded_ well to _stop_ all good _proceeding._

It is _progress_ that is proposed here also. After the survey of
learning 'has been well taken, _then_ to make _progession_' is the
word. It is not the doctrine of unlearning that is taught here in this
satire. It is a learning that includes all the extant wisdom, and
finds it insufficient. It is one that requires a new and nobler study
for its god-like _ends_. But, at the same time, the hindrances that a
practical learning has to encounter are pointed at from the first. The
fact, that the true ends of learning take us at once into the ground
of the forbidden questions, is as plainly stated in the opening speech
of the New Academy as the nature of the statement will permit. The
fact, that the intellect is trained to _vain delights_ under such
conditions, because there is no earnest legitimate occupation of it
permitted, is a fact that is glanced at here, as it is in other
places, though not in such a manner, of course, as to lead to a
'question' from the government in regard to the meaning of the
passages in which these grievances are referred to. Under these
embarrassments it is, we are given to understand, however, that the
criticism on the old learning and the plot for the new is about to
proceed.

Here it takes the form of comedy and broad farce. There is a touch of
'tart Aristophanes' in the representation here. This is the
introductory performance of the school in which the student hopes for
_high words howsoever low the matter_, emphasizing that hope with an
allusion to the heights of learning, as he finds it, and the highest
word of it, which seems irreverent, until we find from the whole
purport of the play how far _he_ at least is from taking it _in vain_,
whatever implication of that sort his criticism may be intended to
leave on others, who use good words with so much iteration and to so
little purpose. 'That is a _high hope_ for a low having' is the
rejoinder of that associate of his, whose views on this point agree
with his own so entirely. It is the height of the _hope_ and the
lowness of the _having_--it is the height of the _words_ and the
lowness of the _matter_, that makes the incongruity here. That is the
soul of all the mirth that is stirring here. It is the height of '_the
style_' that '_gives us cause to climb in the merriment_' that makes
the subject of this essay. It is literature in general that is laughed
at here, and the branches of it in particular. It is the old books
that are walking about under these trees, with their follies all
ravelled out, making sport for us.

But this is not all. It is the _defect_ in learning which is
represented here--that same 'defect' which a graver work of this
Academy reports, in connection with a proposition for the Advancement
of Learning--for its advancement into the fields not yet taken up, and
which turn out, upon inquiry, to be the fields of human life and
practice;--it is that main defect which is represented here. 'I find a
kind of science of "_words_" but none of "_things_,"' says the
reporter. 'What do you read, my lord?' 'Words, words, words,' echoes
the Prince of Denmark. 'I find in these antique books, in these
Philosophies and Poems, a certain resplendent or lustrous mass of
matter chosen to give glory either to the subtilty of disputations, or
to the eloquence of discourses,' says the other and graver reporter;
'but as to the ordinary and common matter of which life consisteth, I
do _not_ find it erected into an art or science, or reduced to written
inquiry.' 'How _low_ soever the matter, I hope in God for _high
words_,' says a speaker, who comes out of that same palace of learning
on to this stage with the secret badge of the new lore on him, which
is the lore of practice--a speaker not less grave, though he comes in
now in the garb of this pantomime, to make sport for us with his news
of learning. For 'Seneca cannot be too heavy, nor Plautus too light
for the law of writ and the liberty.'

It is the high _words_ and the low _having_ that make the incongruity.
But we cannot see the vanity of those heights of words, till the
lowness of the matter which they profess to abstract has been brought
into contrast with them, till the particulars which they do _not_
grasp, which they can _not_ compel, have been brought into studious
contrast with them. The delicate graces of those flowery summits of
speech which the ideal nature, when it energises in speech, creates,
must overhang in this design the rude actuality which the untrained
nature in man, forgotten of art, is always producing. And it is the
might of nature in this opposition, it is the force of 'matter,' it is
the unconquerable cause contrasted with the vanity of the words that
have not comprehended the _cause_, it is the futility of these heights
of words that are not '_forms_' that do not correspond to things which
must be exhibited here also. It is the force of the _law_ in nature,
that must be brought into opposition here with the height of the
_word_, the _ideal_ word, the _higher_, but not yet scientifically
abstracted word, that seeks in vain because it has no 'grappling-hook'
on the actuality, to bind it. There already are the _heights of
learning_ as it is, as this school finds it, dramatically exhibited on
the one hand; but this, too,--_life_ as it is,--as this school finds
it, man's life as it is, unreduced to order by his philosophy,
unreduced to melody by his verse, must also be dramatically exhibited
on the other hand, must also be impersonated. It is life that we have
here, the 'theoric' on the one side, the 'practic' on the other. The
height of the books on the one side, the lowness, the unvisited,
'unlettered' lowness of the life on the other. That which exhibits the
_defect_ in learning that the new learning is to remedy, the new
uncultured, unbroken ground of science must be exhibited here also.
But _that_ is man's life. That is the world. And what if it be? There
are diagrams in this theatre large enough for that. It is the theatre
of the New Academy which deals also in IDEAS, but prefers the
solidarities. The wardrobe and other properties of this theatre are
specially adapted to exigencies of this kind. The art that put the
extant learning with those few strokes into the grotesque forms you
see there, will not be stopped on this side either, for any law of
writ or want of space and artistic comprehension. This is the learning
that can be bounded in the nut-shell of an aphorism and include all in
its bounds.

There are not many persons here, and they are ordinary looking persons
enough. _But_ if you _lift_ those dominos a little, which that
'refined traveller of Spain' has brought in fashion, you will find
that this rustic garb and these homely country features hide more than
they promised; and the princess, with her train, who is keeping state
in the tents yonder, though there is an historical portrait there too,
is greater than she seems. This Antony _Dull_ is a poor rude fellow;
but he is a great man in this play. This is the play in which one asks
'Which is the princess?' and the answer is, 'The tallest and the
thickest.' Antony is the thickest, he is the acknowledged sovereign
here in this school; for he is of that greater part that carries it,
and though he hath never fed of the dainties bred in a book, these
spectacles which the new 'book men' are getting up here are intended
chiefly for him. And that unlettered small knowing soul 'Me'--'still
_me_'--insignificant as you think him when you see him in the form of
a country swain, is a person of most extensive domains and
occupations, and of the very highest dignity, as this philosophy will
demonstrate in various ways, under various symbols. You will have that
same _me_ in the form of a _Mountain_, before you have read all the
books of this school, and mastered all its '_tokens_' and '_symbols_.'

The dramatic representation here is meagre; but we shall find upon
inquiry it is already the Globe Theatre, with all its new
solidarities, new in philosophy, new in poetry, that the leaves of
this park hide--this park that the doors and windows of the New
Academe open into--these new grounds that it lets out its students to
play and study in, and collect their specimens from--'still and
contemplative in living art.' It was all the world that was going
through that park that day haply, we shall find. It is all the world
that we get in this narrow representation here, as we get it in a more
limited representation still, in another place. 'All the world knows
_me_ in my book and my book in _me_,' cries the Egotist of the
Mountain. It is the first Canto of that great Epic, whose argument
runs through so many books, that is chanted here. It is the war, the
unsuccessful war of lore and nature, whose lost fields have made man's
life, that is getting reviewed at last and reduced to speech and
writing. It is the school itself that makes the centre of the plot in
this case; these gay young philosophers with 'the ribands' yet
floating in their 'cap of youth,' who oppose lore to love, who 'war
against _their own affections_ and THE HUGE ARMY OF THE WORLD'S
DESIRES,' ere they know what they are; who think to conquer nature's
potencies, her universal powers and causes, with wordy ignorance, with
resolutions that ignore them simply, and make a virtue of ignoring
them, these are the chief actors here, who come out of that classic
tiring house where they have been shut up with the ancients so long,
to celebrate on this green plot, which is life, their own defeat, and
propose a better wisdom, the wisdom of the moderns. And Holofernes,
the schoolmaster, who cultivates minds, and Sir Nathaniel, the curate,
who cures them, and Don Armado or Don A_drama_dio, from the flowery
heights of the new Belles Lettres, with the last refinement of
Euphuism on his lips, and Antony Dull, and the country damsel and her
swain, and the princess and her attendants, are all there to eke out
and complete the philosophic design,--to exhibit the extant learning
in its airy flights and gross descents, in its ludicrous attempt to
escape from those particulars or to grapple, without loss of grandeur,
those particulars of which man's life consisteth. It is the vain
pretension and assumption of those faulty wordy abstractions, whose
falseness and failure in practice this school is going to expose
elsewhere; it is the defect of those abstractions and idealisms that
the Novum Organum was invented to remedy, which is exhibited so
grossly and palpably here. It is the height of those great swelling
words of rhetoric and logic, in rude contrast with those actualities
which the history of man is always exhibiting, which the universal
nature in man is always imposing on the learned and unlearned, the
profane and the reverend, the courtier and the clown, the 'king and
the beggar,' the actualities which the natural history of man
continues perseveringly to exhibit, in the face of those logical
abstractions and those ideal schemes of man as he should be, which had
been till this time the fruit of learning;--those actualities, those
particulars, whose lowness the new philosophy would begin with, which
the new philosophy would erect into an art or science.

The foundation of this ascent is natural history. There must be
nothing omitted here, or the stairs would be unsafe. The rule in this
School, as stated by the Interpreter in Chief, is, 'that there be
_nothing in the globe of matter_, which should not be likewise in the
globe of _crystal_ or _form_;' that is, he explains, 'that there
should not be anything in _being_ and _action_, which should not be
_drawn_ and _collected_ into _contemplation_ and _doctrine_.' The
lowness of matter, all the capabilities and actualities of speech and
action, not of the refined only, but of the vulgar and profane, are
included in the science which contemplates an historical result, and
which proposes the _reform_ of these actualities, the cure of these
maladies,--which comprehends man as man in its intention,--which makes
the _Common Weal_ its end.

Science is the word that unlocks the books of this School, its gravest
and its lightest, its books of loquacious prose and stately allegory,
and its Book of Sports and Riddles. Science is the clue that still
threads them, that never breaks, in all their departures from the
decorums of literature, in their lowest descents from the refinements
of society. The vulgarity is not _the_ vulgarity of the vulgar--the
inelegancy is not the spontaneous rudeness of the ill-bred--any more
than its doctrine of nature is the doctrine of the unlearned. The
loftiest refinements of letters, the courtliest breeding, the most
exquisite conventionalities, the most regal dignities of na

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