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