It is, indeed, no small gain in the rude ages of warring instincts and intuitions, when there is as yet no science to define them, and compare them, and pronounce from its calm height its eternal axioms here—when the world is a camp, and hostilities are deified, and mankind is in arms when all the moral terms are still wrapped in the confusion of the first outgoing of the perplexed, unanalysed human motivity—itisno small gain to get the word of the nobler intuitions outspoken, to get the word of the divine law of man's nature, hisessentiallaw pronounced—even in rudest ages overawing, commanding with its awful divinity the intenser motivity of the lesser nature—able to summon, in rudest ages, to its ideal heights, those colossal heroic forms, that cast their long shadows over the tracts of time, to tell us what type it is that humanity aspires to. It is no small gain to get these nobler intuitions outspoken in some voice that commands with its authority the world's ear, or illustrated in some exemplar that arrests the world's eye, and draws the human heart unto it.
It is no small advance in human history, to get the divine authority of those nobler intuitions, which, in man, anticipate speculation, and their right to command the particular motives, recognised in the common speech of men, incorporated in their speculative belief, incorporated in their books of learning, and embalmed in institutions that keep the divine exemplar of the human form for ever in our eyes. Itissomething. The warring nations war on. The world is in arms still. The rude instincts are not stayed in their intent. They pause, it may be; 'but a roused passion sets themnewa-work.' The speckled demons, that the degenerate _angelic _nature breeds, put on the new livery, and go abroad in it rejoicing. New rivers of blood, new seas of carnage, are opened in the new name of peace; new engines of torture, of fiendish wrong, are invented in the new name of love. But itissome gain. There is a new rallying-place on the earth for those who seek truly the higher good; at the foot of the new symbol they recognise each other, they join hand in hand, and the bands of those who wait and watch amid the earth's darkness for the promise, cheer us with their songs. Truths out of the Eternal Book, truths that all hearts lean on in their need, are spoken. Words that shall never pass away, sweet with the immortal hope and perennial joy of life, are always in our ears.
The nations that have contributed to this result in any degree, whether primarily or secondarily, whether they be Syrians or Assyrians, Arabs or Egyptians, wandering or settled, wild or tame; whether they belong to the inferior unanalysing Semitic races, or whether they come of the more richly endowed, but yet youthful, Indo-European stock; whether they be Hebrews or Persians, Greeks or Romans, will always have the world's gratitude. Those to whose intenser conceptions and bolder affirmations, in the rude ages of instinct and spontaneous allegation, it was given to pronounce and put on everlasting record, these primal truths of inspiration,—truths whose divinity all true hearts respond to, may be indeed by their natural intellectual characteristics,—ifSemiticmust be—totally disqualified by ethnological laws,—hopelessly disqualified—so hopelessly that it is to lose all to put it on them—for the task of commanding, in detail, our modern civilization;—a civilization which has made, already, the rude ethics of these youthful races, when it comes to details, so palpably and grossly inapplicable, that it is an offence to modern sensibility to name—to so much as name—decisions which stand unreversed, without comment, in our books of learning. But that is no reason why we should not take, and thankfully appropriate as the gift of God, all that it was their part to contribute to the great plot of human advancement. We cannot afford to dispense with any such gain. The movement which respects the larger whole, the divine intent incorporates it all.
'Japhet shall dwell in the tents of Shem,' for they are world wide; but woe to him if, in his day, he refuse to build the temple which, in his day, his God will also require of him. Woe to him, if he think to put upon another age and race the tasks which his Task-Master will require of him,—which, with his many gifts, with his chief gifts, with his ten talents, will surely be required of him. More than his fathers' woe upon him—more than that old-world woe, which he, too, remembers, if he think to lean on Asia, the youthful Asia, when his own great world noon-day has come.
'There was violence on the earth in those days, and it repented the Lord that he had made man on the earth.' 'Twill come,' says our own poet, prefacing his proposal for a scientific art in the attainment of the chief human ends, and giving his illustrated reasons for it,—
'Twill come [at this rate]Humanity must, perforce, prey on itself,Likemonstersof thedeep.
But what arethese?—these new orders,—these new species of nature, defying nature, that we are generating with our arts here now? What are these new varieties to which our kind is tending now? Look at this kind for instance. What are these? Define them. Destroyers, not of their own image in their fellow-man only, not of the image of their kind only,—sacred by natural universal laws,—but of the chosen image of it, the ideal of it, the one in whom the natural love of their kind was by the law of nature concentred,—the wife and the mother,— destroyed not as the wolf destroys its prey, but with ferocity, or with prolonged and studious harm, that it required the human brain to plan and perpetrate. Look at this pale lengthening widening train of their victims. We must look at it. It will never go by till we do. We shall have to look at it, and consider it well; it will lengthen, it willwidentill we do:—ghastly, bruised, bleeding, trampled,— trampled it may be, with nailed, booted heel, mother and child together into one grave. Buttheseare common drunkard's wives;—we are inured to this catastrophe, and do not think much of it. But who arethese, whom the grave cannot hold; that by God's edict break its bonds and come back, making day hideous, to tell us what the earth could not, would not keep,—to tell us of that other band who died and made no sign? But this is nothing. Here are more. Here are others. What are these? These are not spectres.Theircheeks are red enough. What loathsome thing is this, that we are bringing forth here now with the human face upon it, in whom the heart of the universal nature has expired. These are murderers,—count them—they are all murderers, wholesale murderers, perhaps,—but of what? Of their own helpless, tender, loving, trusting little ones. The wretched children ofour time,—alone in wretchedness,—alone in the universe of nature,—who found, where nature promised them a mother's love, the knife, or the more cruel agonizing drug of death. Was there any cause in nature for it? Yes. They did it for the 'burial fee,' perhaps, or for some other cause as good. They had a reason for it. Let our naturalists throw their learning 'to the dogs,' and come this way, and tell us what this means. Nay, let them bring their books with them, and example us with its meaning if they can. Let them tell us what 'depth' in which nature hides her failures, or yet unperfected hideous germinations,—what formation in which she buries the kinds she repents that she has made upon the earth, or what 'deep'—what ocean cave of 'monsters' we shall drag to find our kindred inthesespecies. Let our wise men tell us whether there be, or whether there ever was, any such thing as this in nature before. If 'such things are,' or have been in any other kind, let them produce the instances, and keep us in countenance and console us for our own.
Let them look at that murderer too, and interprethimfor us. For he too is waiting to be interpreted, and he will wait till we understand his signs. He is speaking mute nature's language to us; we must get her key. Look at him as he stands there in the dark, subordinating that faculty which comprehends the whole, which recognises the divinity of his neighbour's right, to his fiendish end: preparing with the judgment of a man his little piece of machinery, with which he will take, as he would take a salmon, or a rat, his fellow-man. Look at him as he stands there now, listening patiently for your steps, waiting to strangle you as you go by him unarmed to-night, confiding in your fellow-man; waiting to drag you down from all the hopes and joys of life, for the sake of the loose coin, gold or silver, which he thinks he may find about you,—perhaps. 'How to KILLverminand how to PREVENT thefiend,' was Tom's study. How to dispatch in the most agreeable and successful manner, creatures whose notions ofgoodare constitutionally and diametrically opposed to the good of the larger whole, who have no sensibility to that, and no faculty whereby they perceive it to be the worthier; that is no doubt one part of the problem. The scientific question is, whether this creature be really what it seems, a new and more horrid kind of beast—a demoralization and deterioration of the human species into that. If it be, let our naturalists come to our aid here also, and teach us how to hunt him down and despatch him, with as much respect to the natural decencies which the fact of the external human form would seem still to exact from us, as the circumstances will admit of. Is it the beast, or is it 'the fiend?'—that is the question. The fiend which tells us that the angelic or divine nature is there—there still—overborne, trampled on, 'as it were, annihilated,' but lighting that gleam of 'wickedness,'—making of it, not instinct, but crime. Ah! we need not ask which it is. This one has told his own story, if we could but read it. He has left—he is leaving all the time, contributions, richest contributions to our natural history of man,—that history which must make the basis of our arts of cure. He was a wolf when you took him; but in his cell you found something else in him—did you not?—something that troubled and appalled you, with its kindred and likeness, and its exaction on your sympathy. When you hung him as you wouldnothang a dog;—when you put him to a death which you would think it indecent and inhuman to award to a creature of another species, you did not find himthat. The law of the nobler nature lay in him as it were annihilated;hethought there was no such thing; but when nature's great voice was heard without also, and those 'bloody instructions he had taught returned to him'; when that voice of the people, which was the voice of God to him, echoed with its doom the voice within, and 'sweet religion,' with its divine appeals—'a rhapsody of words' no longer, came, to second that great argument,—the blind instincts were overpowered in him, the lesser usurping nature was dethroned,—the angelic nature arose, and hadherhour, and shed parting gleams of glory on those fleeting days and nights; and he came forth, to die at last, not dragged like a beast—with a manly step—with heroic grandeur, vindicating the heroic type in nature, of that form he wore,—vindicating the violated law, accepting his doom, bowing to its ignominy, a man, a member of society,—a reconciled and accepted member of the commonweal.
How topreventthe fiend?isthe question. Ah! what unlettered forces are these, unlearned still, with all our learning, that the dark, unaided wrestling hour 'in the little state of man,' leaves at the head of affairs there, seated in its chair of state, crowned, 'predominant,' to speak the word of doom for us all. 'He poisons him in the garden for his estate.' 'Lights, lights, lights!' is the word here. Thereisa cause in nature for these hard hearts, but it is not in the constitution of man. Thereisa cause; it is nature herself, crying out upon our learning, asking to be—interpreted.
Woe for the age whose universal learning is in forms that move and command no longer; that move and bind no longer withfear, orhope, orlove, 'the common people.' Woe for the people who think that the everlasting truths of being—the eternal laws of science—are things for saints, and schoolmasters, and preachers only,—the people who carry about with them in secret, for week-day purposes, Edmund's creed, to whom nature is already 'their goddess, and their law,' ere they know her or her law—ere the appointed teacher has instructed them in it,—ere they know what divinity she, too, holds to,—ere the interpreter has translated into her speech, and evolved from her books, the old truths which shall not—though their old 'garments' should 'be changed'—whichshall notpass away. Woe for the nations in whom that greater part that carries it, are godless, or whose vows are paid in secret to Edmund's goddess,—whose true faith is in appetite,—who have no secret laws imposed on that. 'Woe to the people who are in such a case,' no matter on which side of the ocean they may dwell, in the old world, or a new one; no matter under what political constitutions. No matter under what favourable external conditions, the national development that has that hollow in it, may proceed; no matter under what glorious and before unimagined conditions of a healthful, noble human development that development may proceed. Alas! for such a people. The rulers may cry 'Peace!' but there is none. And, alas! for the world in which such a power is growing up under new conditions, and waxing strong, and preparing for its leaps.
As a principle of social or political organisation, there is no religion,—there never has been any,—so fatal as none. That is a truth of which all history is an illustration. It is one which has been illustrated in the history of modern states, not less vividly than in the history of antiquity. And it will continue to be illustrated, on the same grand scale, in those terrific evils which the dissolution, or the dissoluteness of the larger whole creates, whenever the appointed teachers of a nation, the inductors of it into its highest learning, lag behind the common mind in their interpretations, and leave it to the people to construct their own rude 'tables of rejections'; whenever the practical axioms, which are the inevitable vintage of these undiscriminating and fatally false rejections, are suffered to become history.
'Woe to the land when itskingis a child'; but thrice woe to it, when its teacher is a child. Alas! for the world, when the pabulum of her youthful visions and anticipations of learning have become meat for men, the prescribed provision for that nature in which man must live, or 'cease to be,' amid the sober realities of western science.
'Thou shouldst not have been OLDbefore thy time.'
'The glow-worm shows the matin to be near,And 'gins to pale hisineffectualfire.'
Pyramus.—'Write me a prologue, and let the prologueseem to say, we will do no harmwith ourswords[spears]… and for the more better assurance, tell them that I, Pyramus, am not Pyramus, but Bottom the weaver. This will put them out of fear.'—Shake-spear.
'Truth and reason are common to every one, and are no more his who spoke them first, than his who spoke them after. Who follows another follows nothing, finds nothing, seeks nothing.'
'Authors have hitherto communicated themselves to the people by someparticularandforeignmark.I, the first of any, by myuniversal being. Every mancarries with himthe entire formof human condition.'
'And besides, though I had aparticulardistinctionby myself, what can it distinguish when I am no more? Can it point out and favorinanity?'
'Butwill thy manes such a gift bestowAs to make violets from thy ashes grow?'Michael de Montaigne.
Hamlet.—'To thine own self be true,And it doth follow as the night the dayThou canst not then be false to any man.''To know a man well, were to know him-self.'
The complaint of the practical men against the philosophers who make such an outcry upon the uses and customs of the world as they find it, that they do not undertake to give us anything better in the place of them; or if they do, with their terrible experiments they leave us worse than they find us, does not apply in this case. Because this is science, and not philosophy in the sense which that word still conveys, when applied to subjects of this nature. We all know that the scientific man is a safe and brilliant practitioner. The most unspeculative men of practice have learned to prefer him and his arts to the best empiricism. It is the philosophers we have had in this field, with their rash anticipations,—with their unscientific pre-conceptions,—with apre-conception, instead of a fore-knowledge of the power they deal with, commanding results which do not,—there is the point,—which do not follow.
Let no one say that this reformer is one of those who expose our miserable condition, without offering to improve it; or that he is one of those who take away our gold and jewels with their tests, and leave us no equivalent. This is no destroyer. He will help us to save all that we have. He is guarding us from the error of those who would let it alone till the masses have taken the work in hand for themselves, without science. 'Thatis the way to lay all flat.'
He is not one of those, 'who tomake clean, efface, and who cure diseases by death.' To found so great a thing as the state anew; to dissolve that so old and solid structure, and undertake to recompose it as a whole on the spot, is a piece of work which this chemist, after a survey of his apparatus, declines to take in; though he fairly admits, that if the question were of 'a new world,' and not 'a world already formed to certain customs,' science might have, perhaps, some important suggestions to make as to the original structure. And yet for all that, it is a scientific practice that is propounded here. It is a scientific innovation and renovation, that is propounded; the greatest that was ever propounded,—total, absolute, but not sudden. It is a remedy for the world as it is, that this reformer is propounding.
New constructions according to true definitions, scientific institutions,—institutions of culture and regimen and cure, based on the recognition of the actual human constitution and laws,—based on an observation as diligent and subtle, and precepts as severe as those which we apply to the culture of any other form in nature,—that is the proposition. 'It were a strangespeechwhich, spoken or spoken oft, should reclaim a man from a vice to which he is by nature subject.' 'Folly is not to be cured by bare admonition.' This plan of culture and cure involves not the knowledge of that nature which is in all men only, but a science, enriched with most careful collections of all the specific varieties of that nature. The fullest natural history of those forces that are operant in the hourly life of man, the most profound and subtle observation of the facts of this history, the most thoroughly scientific collection of them, make the beginning of this enterprise. The propounder of this cure will have to begin with the secret disposition of every man laid open, and the possibilities of human character exhausted, by means of a dissection of the entire form of that human nature, which every man carries with him, and a solar-microscopic exhibition of the several dispositions and tempers of men, in grand ideal portraits, conspicuous instances of them, where the particular disposition and temper is 'predominant,' as in the characterisation of Hamlet, where it takes all the persons of the drama to exhibit characteristics which are more or less developed in all men. Those natural peculiarities of disposition that work so incessantly and potently in this human business, those 'points of nature,' those predetermining forces of the human life, must come under observation here, and the whole nature of the passions also, and a science of 'the will,' very different from that philosophy of it which our metaphysicians have entertained us with so long. He will have all the light of science, all the power of the new method brought to bear on this study. And he will have a similar collection, not less scientific, of the history of the human fortunes and their necessary effects on character; for these are the points that we must deal with 'by way of application, and to these all our labour is limited and tied; for we cannot fit a garment except we take a measure of the form we would fit it to.' Nothing short of this can serve as the basis of a scientific system of human education.
But this is not all. It is the human nobility and greatness that is the end, and that 'craves,' as the noble who is found wanting in it tells us, 'a noble cunning.' It is no single instrumentality that makes the apparatus of this culture and cure. Skilful combinations of appliances based on the history of those forces whicharewithin our power, which 'wecandeal with by way of alteration,' forces 'from which themind suffereth,' which have operation on it, so potent that 'they can almost change the stamp of nature,'—that they can make indeed, 'another nature,'—these are the engines,—this is the machinery which the scientific state will employ for its ends. These are the engines, this is the machinery that is going to take the place of that apparatus which the state, as it is, finds such need of. This is the machinery to 'prevent the fiend,' which the scientific statesman is propounding.
'I would we were all of ONE MIND, and one mindgood' says our Poet. 'Otherewere desolation of gallowses and gaolers. I speak against my present profit,' [he adds,—he was speaking not as a judge or a lawyer, but as agaoler,] 'I speak against my present profit, but my wish hath aprefermentin it.'
(Apreferment?)—That is the solution propounded by science, of the problem that is pressing on us, and urging on us with such violent appeals, its solution. 'I would we were all of onemind, and one mindgood. My wish hath aprefermentin it.'
'Folly is not to be cured by bare admonition.' 'It were a strange speech which, spoken, or spoken oft, should cure a man ofa viceto which he isby nature subject,'—subject—bynature.—That is thePhilosopher. 'Whathe cannot help in his natureyou accounta vicein him,' says the poor citizen, putting in a word on thePoet'sbehalf for Coriolanus whose education, whatever Volumnia may think about it, was not scientific, or calculated to reduce that 'partliness,' that disorganizing social principle, whose subsequent demonstrations gave her so much offence. Not admonition, not preaching and scolding, and not books only, but institutions, laws, customs, habit, education in its more limited sense, 'association, emulation, praise, blame,' all the agencies 'from which the mind suffereth,'— which have power to change it, in skilfully compounded recipes and regimen scientifically adapted to cases, and not prescribed only, but enforced,—thesemake the state machinery—these are the engines that are going to 'prevent the fiend,' and educate the 'one mind,'—the one mind good, which is the sovereign of the common-WEAL,—'my wish hath a preferment in it,'—the one only man who will make when he is crowned, not Rome, butroomenough for us all,—who will make when he is crowned such desolation of gallowses and gaolers. These are the remedies for the diseases of the state, when the scientific practitioner is called in at last, and permitted to undertake his cure. But he will not wait for that. He will not wait to be asked. He has no delicacy about pushing himself forward in this business. The concentration of genius and science on it, henceforth,—thegradualadaptation of all these grand remedial agencies to this common end,— this end which all truly enlightened minds will conspire for,—find to betheir own,—this is the plan;—this is the sober day-dream of the Elizabethan Reformer; this is the plot of the Elizabethan Revolutionist. This is the radicalism that he is setting on foot. This is the cure of the state which he is undertaking.
We want to command effects, and the way to do that is to find causes; and we must find them according to the new method, and not by reasoning it thus and thus, for the result is just the same, this philosopher observes, as if we had not reasoned it thus and thus, but some other way. That is the difficulty with that method, which is in use here at present, which this philosopher calls 'common logic.' Life goes on, life as it is and was, in the face of our reasonings; but it goes on in the dark; the phenomena are on the surface in the form of EFFECTS, and all our weal and woe is in them; but the CAUSES are beneath unexplored. They are able to give us certain impressions of theirnatures; they strike us, and blast us, it may be, by way of teaching ussomethingof their powers; butwe do not know them; they are within our own souls and lives, and we do notknowthem; not because they lie without the range of a scientific enquiry, butbecausewe will not apply to themthe scientific method; because the old method of 'preconception' here is still considered the true one.
The plan of this great scientific enterprise was one which embraced, from the first, the whole body of the common-weal. It concerned itself immediately and directly with all the parts and members of the social state, from the king on his throne to the beggar in his straw. Its aim was to disclose ultimately, and educate in every member of society that entire and noble form of human nature which 'each man carries with him,' and whereby the individual man is naturally and constitutionally a member of the common-weal. Its proposition was to develop ultimately and educate—successfully educate—in each integer of the state, the integral principle—the principle whereby in man the true conservation and integrity of the part—the virtue, and felicity, and perfection, of the part, tend to the weal of the whole—tend to perfect and advance the whole.
'To thine own self be true,And it doth follow as the night the day,Thou canst not then be false to any MAN.''Know thy-SELF. Know thy-self.'
This enterprise was not the product of a single individual mind, and it is important that this fact should be fully and unmistakeably enunciated here; because the illustrious statesman, and man of letters, who assumed, in his own name and person, that part of it which could then be openly exhibited, the one on whom the great task of perfecting and openly propounding the new method of learning was devolved, is the one whose relation to this enterprise has been principally insisted on in this volume.
The history of this great philanthropic association—an association of genius, a combination of chief minds, from which the leadership and direction of the modern ages proceeds, the history of this 'society,' as it was called, when the term was still fresh in that special application; at least, when it was not yet qualified by its application to those very different kinds of voluntary individual combinations—'bodies of neighbourhood' within the larger whole, to which that movement has given rise; the history ofthissociety,—this first 'Shake-spear Society'—much as it is to our purpose, and much as it is to the particular purpose of this volume, can only be incidentally treated here. But as this work was originally prepared for publication in the HISTORICAL KEY to the Elizabethan Tradition which formed the FIRST BOOK of it, it was the part of that great Political and Military Chief, and not less illustrious Man of Letters, who was recognised, in his own time, as the beginner of this movement and the founder of English philosophy, which was chiefly developed.
And it is the history of that 'great unknown'—that great Elizabethan unknown, for whose designs there was needed then a veil of a closer texture—of a more cunning pattern than any which the exigencies of modern authorship tend to fabricate, which must make the key to this tradition;—it is the history of that great unknown, whose incognito was a closed vizor,—that it was death to open,—a vizor thatdidopen once, and—the sequel is in our history, and will leave 'a brand' upon the page which that age makes in it,—'the age thatdidit, andsufferedit,to the end of the world.' So saysthe Poetof that age, ('Age, thou are shamed.' 'And peep about to find ourselvesdishonourable graves'). It is the history of the Tacitus who could not wait for a better Caesar. It is the history of the man who was sent to the block,theytell us, who are able to give us those little secret historic motives that do not get woven always into the larger story; it is the history of the man who (if his family understood it) was sent to the block for the repetition, in his own name, of the words—the very words which he had written with his 'goose-pen,' as he calls it, years before—which he had written under cover of the 'spear' that was 'shaken' in sport, or that shook with fear,—under cover of 'the well turned and true filled lines in each of which he seems toshake a lance as brandishedin the eyes ofIgnorance,' without suspicion—without challenge, from the crowned Ignorance, or the Monster that crowned it. It is the history of this unknown, obscure, unhonoured Father of the Modern Age thatunlocksthis tradition.
It is the secret friend and 'brother' of the author of the Novum Organum, whose history unlocks this tradition. And when shall the friendship of such 'a twain' gladden our earth again, and build its 'eternal summer' in our common things? When shall a 'marriage of true minds' so even be celebrated on the lips and in the lives of men again? It is the friend and literary partner of our great recognised philosopher—his partner in his 'private and retired arts,' and in his cultivation of 'the principal and supreme sciences,' in whose history the key to this locked up learning is hidden.
It was an enterprise which originated in the Court of Queen Elizabeth, in that little company of wits, and poets, and philosophers, which was the first-fruit of the new development of the national genius, that followed the revival of the learning of antiquity in this island—the fruit which that old stock began manifestly to bud and blossom with, about the beginning of the latter half of that Queen's reign. For it was the old northern genius, under the influence, not of the revival of the learning of antiquity only, but of that accumulated influence which its previous revival on the Continent brought with it here; under the influence, too, of that insular nurture, which began so soon to colour and insulate English history;—'Britain is a world by itself,' says Prince Cloten, 'and we will nothing pay,' etc.—it was the old northern genius nurtured in the cradle of that 'bravery' which had written its page of fire in the Roman Caesar's story—which had arrested the old classic historian's pen, and fired it with a poet's prophecy, and taughthimtoo how to pronounce from the oldBritishhero's lip the burning speech ofEnglishfreedom;—it was that which began to show itself here, then, in that new tongue, which we call the 'Elizabethan.' It was that which could not fit its words to its mouth as it had a mind to do under those conditions, and was glad to know that 'the audience was deferred.' That was the thing which found itself so much embarrassed by the presence of 'a man of prodigious fortune at the table,' who had leave 'to change its arguments with a magisterial authority.' It was that which was expected to produce its speech to 'serve as the base matter to illuminate'—not theCaesar—but the Tudor—the Tudor and the Stuart: the last of the Tudors and the first of the Stuarts. 'AGE,thouart shamed.' It was the true indigenous product of the English nationality under that great stimulus, which made that age; and the practical determination of the English mind, and the spirit of the ancient English liberties, the recognition of the common dignity of that form of human nature which each man carries entire with him—the sentiment of a common human family and brotherhood, which this race had brought with it from the forests of the North, and which it had conserved through ages of oppression, went at once into the new speculation, and determined its practical bent, and shaped this enterprise.
It was an enterprise which included in its plan of operations an immediate influence upon the popular mind—the most direct, immediate, and radically reforming influences which could be brought to bear, under those conditions, upon the habits and sentiments of the ignorant, custom-bound masses of men;—those masses which are, in all their ignorance and unfitness for rule, as the philosopher of this age perceived, 'that greater part which carries it'—those wretched statesmen, under whose rule we are all groaning. 'Questions about clothes, and cookery, and law chicanery,' are the questions with which the new movement begins to attract attention—a universally favourable attention—towards its beneficent purposes, and to that new command of 'effects' which arms them. But this is only 'to show an abused people that they are not wholly forgotten.' To improve the external condition of men, to 'accommodate' man to those exterior natural forces, of which he had been, till then, the 'slave,'—to minister to the need and add to the comforts of the king in his palace, and 'Tom' in his hovel,—this was the first scientific move. This was a movement which required no concealment. Its far-reaching consequences, its elevating power on the masses, its educational power, its revolutionary power, did not lie within the range of any observation which the impersonated state was able to bring to bear at that time upon the New Organum and its reaches.
But this was not the only scientifically educational agency which this great Educational Association was able to include, even then, in its scheme for the culture and instruction of the masses—for the culture and instruction of that common social unit, which makes the masses and determines political predominance. Quite the most powerful instrumentality which it is possible to conceive of, for purposes of direct effect in the way of intellectual and moral stimulus, in that stage of a popular development, was then already in process of preparation here; the 'plant' of a wondrous and inestimable machinery of popular influence stood offering itself, at that very moment, to the politicians with whom this movement originated, urging itself on their notice, begging to be purchased, soliciting their monopoly, proposing itself to their designs.
A medium of direct communication between the philosophic mind, in its more chosen and noblest field of research, and the minds of those to whom the conventional signs of learning are not yet intelligible,—one in which the language of action and dumb show was, by the condition of the representation, predominant,—that language which is, as this philosophy observed, so much more powerful in its impression than words,—not on brutes only, but on those 'whose eyes are more learned than their ears,'—a medium of communication which was one tissue of that 'mute' language, whereby the direction, 'how tosustaina tyrannynewly usurped,' was conveyed once, stood prepared to their hands, waiting the dictation of the message of these new Chiefs and Teachers, who had taken their cue from Machiavel in exhibiting the arts of government, and who thought it well enough that the peopleshouldknow how topreservetyranniesnewly usurped.
Those 'amusements,' with which governments that are founded and sustained, 'by cutting off andkeeping lowthe grandees and nobility' of a nation, naturally seek to propitiate and divert the popular mind,—those amusements which the peoples who sustain tyrannies are apt to be fond of—'he loves no plays asthoudost,Antony,'—that 'pulpit,' from which the orator of Caesar stole and swayed the hearts of the people with his sugared words; and his dumb show of the stabs in Caesar's mantle became, in the hands of these new conspirators, an engine which those old experimenters lacked,—an engine which the lean and wrinkled Cassius, with his much reading and 'observation strange' and dangerous, looking through of the thoughts of men; and the grave, high-toned Brutus, with his logic and his stilted oratory, could not, on second thoughts, afford to lack. It was this which supplied the means of that 'volubility of application' which those 'Sir Oracles,' those 'grave sirs of note,' 'in observing their well-graced forms of speech,' it is intimated, 'might easily want.'
By means of that 'first use of the parable,' whereby (while for the present we drop 'the argument') it serves to illustrate, and bring first under the notice of the senses, the abstruser truths of a new learning,—truths which are as yet too far out of the road of common opinion to be conveyed in other forms,—these amusements became, in the hands of the new Teachers and Wise Men, with whom the Wisdom of the Moderns had its beginning, the means of an insidious, but most 'grave and exceedingly useful,' popular instruction.
But the immediate influence on the common mind was not the influence to which this association trusted for the fulfilment of its great plan of social renovation and advancement. That so aspiringsocialposition, and that not less commanding position in the world of letters, built up with so much labour, with such persistent purpose, with a pertinacity which accepted of no defeat,—built upexpresslyto this end,—that position from which a new method of learning could be openly propounded, in the face of the schools, in the face of the Universities, in the face and eyes of all the Doctors of Learning then, was, in itself, no unimportant part of the machinery which this political association was compelled to include in the plot of its far-reaching enterprise.
That trumpet-call which rang through Europe, which summoned the scholasticism and genius of the modern ages, from the endless battles of the human dogmas and conceits, into the field of true knowledge,—that summons which recalled, and disciplined, and gave the word of command to the genius of the modern ages, that was already tumultuously rushing thither,—that call which wasableto command the modern learning, and impose on it, for immediate use, the New Machine of Learning,—that Machine which, even in its employment in the humblest departments of observation, has already formed, ere we know it, the new mind, which has disciplined and trained the modern intelligence, and created insidiously new habits of judgment andbelief,—created, too, a new stock of truths, which are accepted as a part of the world's creed, and from which the whole must needs be evolved in time,—this, in itself, was no small step towards securing the great ends of this enterprise. It was a step which we are hardly in a position, as yet, to estimate. We cannot see what it was till the nobler applications of this Method begin to be made. It has cost us something while we have waited for these. The letter to Sir Henry Savile, on 'the Helps to the Intellectual Powers,' which is referred to with so much more iteration and emphasis than anything which the surface of the letter exhibits would seem to bear, in its brief hints, points also this way, though the effect of mental exercises, by means of other instrumentalities, on the habits of a larger class, is also comprehended in it. But the formation of new intellectual habits in men liberally educated, appeared to promise, ultimately, those larger fruits in the advancement and culture of learning which, in 'the hour-glass' of that first movement, could be, as yet, only prophecy and anticipation. The perfection of the Human Science, then first propounded, the filling up of 'the Anticipations' of Learning, which the Philosophy ofSciencealso included in its system,—not rash and premature, however, and not claimingthe placeofknowledge, but kept apart in a place by themselves,—put down as anticipations,not interpretations,—the filling up of this outline was what was expected as the ultimate result of this proceeding, in the department of speculative philosophy.
But in that great practical enterprise of a social and political renovation—that enterprise of 'constructions' according to true definitions, which this science fastens its eye on, and never ceases to contemplate—it was not the immediate effect on the popular mind, neither was it the gradual effect on the speculative habits of men of learning and men of intelligence in general, that was chiefly relied on. It was the secret tradition, the living tradition of that intention; it was the tradition whereby that association undertook to continue itself across whatever gulfs and chasms in social history 'the fortunes of our state' might make. It was thatseconduse of the fable, which is 'to wrap up and conceal'; it was that 'enigmatic' method, which reserves the secrets of learning for those 'who by the aid of an instructor, or by their own research, are able to pierce the veil,' which was relied on for this result. It was thepowerof that tradition, its generative power, its power to reproduce 'in a better hour' the mind and will of that 'company'—it was its power to develop and frame thatidentitywhich was the secret of this association, and its new principle of UNION—that identity of the 'one mind, and one mind good,' which is the human principle of union—that identity which made a common name, a common personality, for those who worked together for that end, and whose WILL in it was 'one.' A name, a personality, a philosophic unity, in whose great radiance we have basked so long—a name, a personality whose secret lies heavy on all our learning—whose secret of power, whose secret of inclusiveness and inexhaustible wealth of knowledge, has paralysed all our criticism, 'made marble'—as Milton himself confesses—'made marble withtoo much conceiving.' 'Write me a prologue, and let the prologueseemto say [in dumb action], we will do no harm with our swords.' 'They all flourish their swords.' 'There is butone mindin all these men, and that is bent against Caesar'—Julius Caesar.
'Even so the raceOf SHAKE-SPEAR's mind andmanners brightly shines,In hiswell turnedandtrue filed—lines;In each of which he seems to SHAKE a LANCE,Asbrandishedat the eyes of—Ignorance,'
[We will dono harm, with our—WORDS [itseemsto say.]—Prologue.]
It was the power of the Elizabethan Art of Tradition that was relied on here, that 'living Art'; it was its power to reproduce this Institution, through whatever fatal eventualities the movement which these men were seeking then to anticipate, and organize, and control, might involve; and though the Parent Unionshould beoverborne in those disastrous, not unforeseen, results—overborne and forgotten—and though other means employed for securing that end should fail.
It is to that posthumous effect that all the hope points here. It is theLeonatus Posthumuswho must fulfil this oracle.
'Now with the drops of this most balmy timeMy love looks fresh, and death to me subscribes;Since, spite of him, I'LL live in this poor rhyme,While he insults o'er dull and speechless tribes;Andthouin this shall find thy monument,Whentyrants' crests and tombs of brassare spent.'
'Not marble, nor the gilded monuments [ElizabethanAGE.]OfPrincesshall outlive thispower-ful rhyme.'
[This is our unconscious Poet, who does not know that his poems are worth printing, or that they are going to get printed—who does not know or care whether they are or not.]
'But you shall shine more bright in these contents,Than unswept stone besmear'd with sluttish time.When wasteful warshall statuesoverturn [iconoclasm],Andbroils[civil war] root out the work of masonry,Nor Mars his sword, nor war's quick fire shall burnTheliving recordofyour memory.'
[What is it, then, that this prophet is relying on? Is it a manuscript? Is it the recent invention of goose-quills which he is celebrating here with so much lyrical pomp, in so many, many lyrics? Here, for instance:—]
'Hisbeautyshall inthese black linesbe seen,Andtheyshall live, and he in them still green.'
And here—
'O where, alack!Shalltime's best jewelfromtime's chestlie hid?Or whatstrong handcan hold his swift foot back?Orwhohis spoil of beauty can forbid?O none, unlessthismiracle [thismiracle] have might,that inblack ink—'
Is this printer's ink? Or is it the ink of the prompter's book? or the fading ink of those loose papers, so soon to be 'yellowed with age,' scattered about no one knew where, that some busy-body, who had nothing else to do, might perhaps take it into his head to save?
'O none, unless this miracle'—THIS MIRACLE, the rejoicing scholar and man of letters, who was not for an age, but for all time, cries—defying tyranny, laughing at princes' edicts, reaching into his own great assured futurity across the gulfs of civil war, planting his feet upon that sure ground, and singing songs of triumph over the spent tombs of brass and tyrants' crests; like that orator who was to make an orationin public, and found himself a little straitened intimeto fit his words to his mouthas he had a mind to do, whenEros, one of hisslaves, brought him word that the audience was deferred till the next day; at which he was soravished with joy, that heenfranchised him. 'This miracle.' He knows what miracles are, for he has told us; but none other knewwhatmiracle this was that he is celebrating here with all this wealth of symphonies.
'Onone, unless this miracle have might,That in black inkmylove may stillshine bright.'
['My love,'—wait till you know what it is, and do not think to know with the first or second reading of poems, that are on the surface of them scholastic, academic, mystical, obtrusively enigmatical. Perhaps, after all, it isthatEros who wasenfranchised, emancipated.]
'But thy eternal summer shall not fade,Nor lose possession of thatfairthouowest[thouowes!],Nor shall death brag thou wanderest in his shade,When ineternal linesto time thou growest.So long as men can breathe, or eyes can see,Solonglivesthis, and thisgives lifeto—thee!
But here is our prophecy, which we have undertaken to read with the aid of this collation:—
'When wasteful war shall statues overturn,And broils root out the work of masonry;Nor Mars his sword, nor war's quick fire shall burnThelivingrecord of your memory.'Gainst death,andalloblivious enmity,ShallYOUpace forth.Yourpraise shall still find room,Evenin the eyes[collateral sounds]of all posterity,That wear this world out to the ending doom.So, tilltheJUDGMENT that YOURSELFarise[tillthen],You live inthis, and dwell inlovers' eyes.'
See the passages at the commencement of this chapter, if there be any doubt as to this reading.
'In lover'seyes.'
Leonatus Posthumus. Shall's have a Play ofthis? Thou scornful Page, There liethy part. [ToImogendisguised asFidele.]
The consideration which qualified, in the mind of the Author of the Advancement of Learning, the great difficulty which the question of civil government presented at that time, is the key to this 'plot.' For men, and not 'Romans' only, 'are like sheep;' and if you can but get somefewto go right, therest will follow. That was the plan. To create a better leadership of men,—to form a new order and union of men,—a new nobility of men, acquainted with the doctrine of their own nature, and in league for its advancement, to seizethe 'thoughts' of those whose law is the law of the larger activity, and 'informthem with nobleness,'—was the plan.
For these the inner school was opened; for these its ascending platforms were erected. For these that 'closet' and 'cabinet,' where the 'simples' of the Shake-spear philosophy are all locked and labelled, was built. For these that secret 'cabinet of the Muses,' where the Delphic motto is cut anew, throws out its secret lures,—its gay, many-coloured, deceiving lures,—its secret labyrinthine clues,—for all lines in this building meet in that centre. All clues here unwind to that. For these—for the minds on whom the continuation of this enterprise was by will devolved, the key to that cabinet—the historical key to its inmost compartment of philosophic mysteries, was carefully laboured and left,—pointed to—pointed to with immortal gesticulations, and left ('What I cannot speak, I point out with my finger'); the key to that 'Verulamiancabinet,' which we shall hear of when thefictitiouscorrespondence in which the more secret history of this time was written, comes to be opened. That cabinet where the subtle argument that was inserted in the Poem or the Play, but buried there in its gorgeous drapery, is laid bare in prose as subtle ('I here scatter it up and down indifferently for verse'); where the new truth that was spoken in jest, as well as in parables, to those who were without, is unfolded,—that truth which moved unseen amid the gambols of the masque,—preferring to raise questions rather thanobjections,—which stalked in, without suspicion, in 'the hobby-horse' of the clown,—which the laugh of the groundlings was so often in requisition to cover,—that 'tobeguilethe time lookedlike the time,'—that 'looked likethe flower, andwasthe serpent under it.'
For these that secret place of confidential communication was provided, where 'the argument' of all these Plays is opened without respect to the 'offence in it,'—to its utmost reach of abstruseness and subtlety—in its utmost reach of departure from 'the road of common opinion,'—where the Elizabethan secrets of Morality, and Policy and Religion, which made the Parables of the New Doctrine, are unrolled, at last, in all the new, artistic glories of that 'wrapped up' intention. This is the second use of the Fable in which we resume that dropped argument,—dropped for that time, while Caesar still commanded his thirty legions; and when the question, 'How long to philosophise?' being started in the schools again, the answer returned still was, 'Until our armies cease to be commanded by fools.' This is that second use of the Fable where we find the moral of it at last,—that moral which our moralists have missed in it,—that moral which is not 'vulgar and common-place,' but abstruse, and out of the road of common opinion,—that moral in which the Moral Science, which isthe Wisdom of the Moderns, lurks.
It is to these that the Wise Man of our ages speaks (for we have him,—we do not wait for him), in the act of displaying a little, and folding up for the future, his plan of a Scientific Human Culture; it is to these that he speaks when he says, with a little of that obscurity which 'he mortally hates, and would avoid if he could': 'As Philocrates sported with Demosthenes,' you may not marvel, Athenians, that Demosthenes and I do differ, forhedrinketh water, andIdrink wine; and like as we read of an ancient parable of the two gates of sleep '… so if we put onsobrietyandattention, we shall find ita sure maxim in knowledge, that the pleasant liquor of wine is the more vaporous, and the braver gate of ivory sendeth forth the falser dreams.' ['I,' says 'Michael,' who is also in favour of 'sobriety,' and critical upon excesses of all kinds, 'Ihave ever observed, thatsuper-celestial theories andsub-terraneanmannersare in singular accordance.']
And in his general proposal to lay open 'those parts of learning which lie fresh and waste, and not improved and converted by the industry of man, to the end that sucha plot, made and committed to memory, may both minister light to any public designation, and also serve to excitevoluntaryendeavours,' he says, 'I do foresee that of those things which I shall enter and register as deficiencies and omissions, many will conceive and censure that some of them are already done, and extant,others to be but curiositiesand things of nogreat use' [such as the question of style, for instance, and those 'particular' arts of tradition to which this remark is afterwards applied]—and others to be of too great difficulty—and almost impossibility—to be compassed and effected; but forthe two first, I refer myself to particulars; for the last,—touching impossibility,—I take it those things are to be held possible, which may be done bysome person, though notby every one; and which may be done bymany, though not byanyone; and which may be done in succession of ages, thoughnotwithin the hour-glass of one man's life; and which may be done bypublic designation, though not by private endeavour.
That was 'the plot'—that was the plan of the Elizabethan Innovation.
'When as a lion's whelp shall, to himself unknown, without seeking find, and be embraced by a piece of tender air; and when from a stately cedar shall be lopped branches, which, being dead many years, shall after revive, be jointed to the old stock, and freshly grow; then shall Posthumus end his miseries, Britain befortunate, and flourish in peace and plenty.'
Here, for instance, is a specimen of the manner in which scholars who write about these times, allude to the reserved parts of this philosophy, and to those 'richer and bolder meanings,' which could not then be inserted in the acknowledged writings of so great a person. This is a specimen of the manner in which a posthumous collection and reintegration of this philosophy, and a posthumous emancipation of it, is referred to, by scholars who write from the Continent somewhere about these days. Whether the date of the writing be a little earlier or a little later,—some fifty years or so,—it does not seem to make much difference as to the general intent and purport of it.
Here is a scholar, for instance, whose main idea of life on this planet it appears to be, to collect the philosophy, and protect the posthumous fame of the Lord Bacon. For this purpose, he has established a literary intimacy, quite the most remarkable one on record—at least, between scholars of different and remote nationalities—between himself and two English gentlemen, a Mr. Smith, and the Rev. Dr. Rawley. He writes fromthe Haguebut he appears to have acquired in some way a most extraordinary insight into this business.
'Though I thought that I had alreadysufficiently showedwhat veneration I had for the illustrious Lord Verulam, yet I shall take such care forthe future, that it may not possibly be denied, that I endeavoured most zealously to make this thing known tothe learned world. But neither shall this design of setting forthin one volume all the Lord Bacon's works, proceed without consulting you'—[This letter is addressed to the Rev. Dr.Rawley, and is dated a number of years after Lord Bacon's death]—'without consulting you, and without invitingyouto cast inyour symbol, worthy such an excellent edition: that so theappetiteof the reader'—[It was a time when symbols of various kinds—large and small—were much in use in the learned world]—'that so theappetiteof the reader, provoked already by hispublishedworks, may be further gratifiedby the pure novelty of so considerable an appendage.
'For theFrench interpreter, who patched together his things I know not whence, and tacked that motley piece to him; they shall not have place in this great collection. ButyetI hope to obtain your leave to publish a-part, asan appendixtothe Natural History,—that exotic work,—gathered togetherfromthis and the other place(of his lordship's writings), [that is the true account of it] and by me translated into—Latin.
'For seeing the genuine pieces of the Lord Bacon are already extant, and in many hands, it is necessary thatthe foreign readerbe given to understandof what threads the texture of that book consists, and how much of truth there is in that which that shameless person does, in his preface to the reader, so stupidly write of you.
'My brother, of blessed memory, turned his wordsinto Latin, in the First Edition of the Natural History, having some suspicion of the fidelity of an unknown author. I will, in the Second Edition, repeat them, and with just severity animadvert upon them: that they, into whose hands that work comes, may know it to be rather patched up of many distinct pieces; how much soever the authorbears himself upon the specious title of Verulam. Unless, perhaps, I should particularly suggestin your name, that these words werethere inserted, by way ofcaution; and lest malignity and rashness should any way blemish the fame of so eminent a person.
'If my fate would permit me to live according to my wishes, I would fly over into England, that I might behold whatsoever remaineth in your Cabinet of the Verulamian workmanship, and at least make my eyes witnesses of it, if the possession of the merchandise be yet denied to the public. At present I will support the wishes of my impatient desire,with hope of seeing, one day, those(issues) whichbeing committed to faithful privacy, wait the time till they may safely see the light, and not bestifledin their birth.
'I wish,in the mean time, I could have a sight of the copy of the Epistle to Sir Henry Savil, concerning the Helps of the Intellectual Powers: for I am persuaded, as to theother Latinremains, that I shall not obtain,for present use, the removal ofthemfrom the place in which they now are.'
Extract of a letter from Mr. Isaac Gruter. Here is the beginning of it:—
'Isaac Gruter wisheth much health.
'Reverend Sir,—It is not just to complain of the slowness of your answer, seeing thatthe difficulty of the passage, in the season in which you wrote,which was towards winter, mighteasilycause it to comeno faster; seeinglikewisethere is so much to be found in it which may gratify desire, andperhaps so much the more, the longer it was ere it came to my hands. And although I had little to send back, besides my thanks forthe little Index, yetthat seemed to me of such momentthat I would no longersuppressthem: especially because I accounted it a crime to have sufferedMr. Smithto have been without an answer: Mr. Smith, my most kind friend, and to whose care, in my matters, I oweall regardand affection, yet without diminution of that (part and that no small one neither) in which Dr. Rawley hath place. So that the souls of us three, so throughly agreeing, may be aptly said to have united in atriga.'
It is not necessary, of course, to deny the historical claims of the Rev. Dr. Rawley, who is sufficiently authenticated; or even of Mr. Smith himself, who would no doubt be able to substantiate himself, in case a particular inquiry were made for him; and it would involve a serious departure from the method of invention usually employed in this association, which did not deal with shadows when contemporary instrumentalities were in requisition, if the solidarity of Mr. Isaac Gruter himself should admit of a moment's question. The precautions of this secret, but so powerful league,—the skill with which its instrumentalities were selected and adapted to its ends, is characterised by that same matchless dramatic power, which betrays 'the source from which it springs' even when it 'only plays at working.'
But if any one is anxious to know who thethird personof this triga really was, or is, a glance at the Directory would enable such a one to arrive at a truer conclusion than the first reading of this letter would naturally suggest. For this is none other than the person whom the principle of this triga, and its enlightened sentiment and bond of union, alreadysymbolicallycomprehended, whom it was intended to comprehend ultimately in all the multiplicity and variety of his historical manifestations, though it involved a deliberate plan for reducing and suppressing his many-headedness, and restoring him to the use of his one only mind. For though the name of this person is often spelt in three letters, and oftener in one, it takes all the names in the Directory to spell it in full. For this is none other than the person that 'Michael' refers to so often and with so much emphasis, glancing always at his own private name, and the singular largeness and comprehensiveness of his particular and private constitution. 'All the world knows me in my book, and my book in me.' 'I, the first of any, by my universal being. Every man carries with him the entire form of human condition.'
But the name of Mr.Isaac Gruterwas not less comprehensive, and could be made to represent the wholetrigain an emergency, as well as another; ['I take so great pleasure in being judged and known that it is almost indifferent to me inwhich of the two formsI am so'] though that does not hinder him from inviting Dr. Eawley to cast inhis symbol, which was 'soconsiderable an appendage.' For though the very smallest circle sometimes represents it, it was none other than the symbol that gave name to the theatre in which the illustrated works of this school were first exhibited; the theatre which hung out for its sign on the outer wall, 'Hercules and his load too.' At a time when 'conceits' and 'devices in letters,' when anagrams and monograms, and charades, and all kinds of 'racking of orthography' were so much in use, not as curiosities merely, but to avoid another kind of 'racking,' a cipher referred to in this philosophy as the 'wheel cipher,' which required the letters of the alphabet to be written in a circle to serve as a key to the reading, supplies a clue to some of these symbols.The first three lettersof the alphabet representing the wholeinthe circle, formed a character or symbol which was often made to stand as a 'token' for a proper name, easily spelt in that way, when phonography and anagrams were in such lively and constant use,—while it made, at the same time, a symbolical representation of the radical doctrine of the new school in philosophy,—a school thensonew, that its 'Doctors' were compelled to 'pray in the aid of simile,' even in affixing their names to their own works, in some cases. And that same letter which was capable of representing in this secret language either themicrocosm, or 'the larger whole,' as the case required (either with, or without theeyeorIin it, sending rays to the circumference) sufficed also to spell the name of the Grand Master of this lodge,—'who also was aman, take him forall in all,'—the man who took two hemispheres for 'his symbol.' That was the so considerable appendage which his friend alludes to,—though 'the natural gaiety of disposition,' of which we have so much experience in other places, and which the gravity of these pursuits happily does not cloud, suggests a glance in passing at another signification, which we find alluded to also in another place in Mrs. Quickly's 'Latin.' Mere frivolities as these conceits and private and retired arts seem now, the Author of the Advancement of Learning tells us, that to those who have spent their labours and studies in them, they seem great matters, referring particularly to that cipher in which it is possible to writeomnia per omnia, and stopping to fasten the key of it to his 'index' of 'the principal and supreme sciences,'—those sciences 'which being committed tofaithfulprivacy, wait the time when they may safely see the light, and not be stifled in their birth.'
New constructions, according to true definitions, wasthe plan,—thistrigawas the initiative.
'For as they were men of the best composition in the state of Rome, which, either being consuls,inclined to the people' ['If he would butincline to the people, there never was a worthier man'], 'or being tribunes, inclined to the senate, so, in the matter which we handle now [doctrine ofCure], they be the best physicians which, being learned, incline to the traditions of experience; or, being empirics, incline to the methods of learning.'Advancement of Learning.
But while the Man of Science was yet planning these vast scientific changes—vast, but noiseless and beautiful as the movements of God in nature—there was another kind of revolution brewing. All that time there was a cloud on his political horizon—'a huge one, a black one'—slowly and steadfastly accumulating, and rolling up from it, which he had always an eye on. He knew there was that in it which no scientific apparatus that could be put in operation then, on so short a notice, and when science was so feebly aided, would be able to divert or conduct entirely. He knew that so fearful a war-cloud would have to burst, and get overblown, before any chance for those peace operations, those operations of a solid and lasting peace, which he was bent on, could be had—before any space on the earth could be found broad enough for his Novum Organum to get to work on, before the central levers of it could begin to stir.
That revolution which 'was singing in the wind' then to his ear, was one which would have to come first in the chronological order; but it was easy enough to see that it was not going to be such a one, in all respects, as a man of his turn of genius would care to be out in with his works.
He knew well enough what there was in it. He had not been so long in such sharp daily collision with the elements of it—he had not been so long trying conclusions with them under such delicate conditions, conditions requiring so nice an observation—without arriving at some degree of assurance in regard to their main properties, without attaining, indeed, to what he callsknowledgeon that subject—knowledge as distinguished from opinion—so as to be able to predict 'with a near aim' the results of the possible combinations. The conclusion of this observation was, that the revolutionary movements then at hand werenot, on the whole, likely to be conducted throughout on rigidly scientific principles.
The spectacle of a people violently 'revokingtheirignorant election,' and empirically seeking to better their state under such leaders as such a movement was likely to throw up, and that, too, when theoldmilitary government was still so strong in moral forces, so sure of a faction in the state—of a faction of the best, which would cleave the state to the centre, which would resist with the zealot's fire unto blood and desperation theunholyinnovation—that would stand on the last plank of the wrecked order, and wade through seas of slaughter to restore it; the prospect of untried political innovation, under such circumstances, didnotpresent itself to this Poet's imagination in a form so absolutely alluring, as it might have done to a philosopher of a less rigidlyinductive, turn of mind.
His canvas, with its magic draught of the coming event, includes already some contingencies which the programme of the theoretical speculator in revolutions would have been far enough from includingthen, when such movements were yet untried in modern history, and the philosopher had to go back to mythical Rome to borrow an historical frame of one that would contain his piece. The conviction that the crash was, perhaps, inevitable, that the overthrow of the existing usurpation, and the restoration of the English subject to his rights,—a movement then already determined on,—would perhaps involve these so tragic consequences—the conviction that the revolution was at hand, was the conviction with which he made his arrangements for the future.
But if any one would like to see now for himself what vigorous grasp of particulars this inductive science of state involves, what a clear, comprehensive, and masterly basis of history it rests on, and how totally unlike the philosophy of prenotions it is in this respect—if one would see what breadth of revolutionary surges this Artist of the peace principles was able to span with his arches and sleepers, what upheavings from the then unsounded depths of political contingencies, what upliftings from the last depths of the revolutionary abysses, this science ofstability, this science of the future STATE, is settled on,—such a one must explore this work yet further, and be able to find and unroll in it that revolutionary picture which it contains—that scientific exhibition which the Elizabethan statesman has contrived to fold in it of a state in which the elements are already cleaving and separating, one in which the historical solidities are already in solution, or struggling towards it—prematurely, perhaps, and in danger of being surprised and overtaken by new combinations, not less oppressive and unscientific than the old.
'Unless philosophy can make a Juliet,Displant a town, reverse a prince's doom,Hang up philosophy'—
wrote this Poet's fire of old.
'Canst thou not minister to aminddiseased?'
it writes again. No?
'Throw physic to the dogs, I'll none of it.'
'See now whatlearningis,' says the practical-minded nurse, quite dazzled and overawed with that exhibition of it which has just been brought within her reach, and expressing, in the readiest and largest terms which her vocabulary supplies to her, her admiration of the practical bent of Friar Laurence's genius; who seems to be doing his best to illustrate the idea which another student, who was nota Friarexactly, was undertaking to demonstrate from his cell about that time—the idea of the possibility of converging a large and studious observation of nature in general,—and it is a very large and curious one whichthis Friarbetrays,—upon any of those ordinary questions of domestic life, which are constantly recurring for private solution. And thoughthisknowledge might seem to be 'so variable as it falleth not underprecept,' the prose philosopher is of the opinion that 'a universal insight, and a wisdom of council and advice, gathered by general observation of cases oflike nature,' is available for the particular instances which occur in this department. And the philosophic poet appears to be of his opinion; for there is no end to the precepts which he inducts from this 'variable knowledge' when he gets it on his table of review, in the form of natural history, in 'prerogative cases' and 'illustrious instances,' cases cleared from their accidental and extraneous adjuncts—ideal cases. And though this poor Friar does not appear to have been very successful in this particular instance; if we take into account the fact that 'the Tragedy was the thing,' and that nothing but a tragedy would serve his purpose, and that all his learning was converged on thateffect; if we take into account the fact that this is a scientific experiment, and that the characters are sacrificed for the sake of the useful conclusions, the success will not perhaps appear so questionable as to throw any discredit upon this new theory of the applicability oflearningto questions of this nature.
'Unless philosophy can make a Juliet.' But this is the philosophy that did that very thing, and the one that made a Hamlet also, besides 'reversing a prince's doom'; for this is the one that takes into account those very things in heaven and earth which Horatio had omitted in his abstractions; and this is the philosopher who speaks from his philosophic chair of 'menof good composition,' and who gives a recipe for composingthem. 'Unless philosophy can make a Juliet,' is Romeo's word. 'See now what learningis,' is the Nurse's commentary; for that sameFriar, demure as he looks now under his hood, talking of 'simples' and great nature's latent virtues, is the one that will cog the nurse's hearts from them, and come back beloved of all the trades in Rome. With his new art of 'composition' he will compose, not Juliets nor Hamlets only; mastering the radicals, he will compose, he will dissolve and recompose ultimately the greater congregation; for the powers in nature are always one, and they are not many.