The Philosophy of the Plays of Shakspere Unfolded. Bacon Delia Salter
hands! That which I myself adore in kings, is [note it] the crowd of the adorers. All reverence and submission is due to them, except that of the understanding; my reason is not to bow and bend, 'tis my knees' 'I will not do't' says another, who is in this one's counsels,
I will not do't
Lest I surcease to honour mine own truth,
And by my body's action, teach my mind
A most inherent baseness.
'Antisthenes one day entreated the Athenians to give orders that their asses might be employed in tilling the ground, – to which it was answered, "that those animals were not destined to such a service." "That's all one," replied he; "it only sticks at your command; for the most ignorant and incapable men you employ in your commands of war, immediately become worthy enough because– YOU EMPLOY THEM."'
There mightst thou behold the great image of authority. A dog's obeyed in office. – Lear.
For thou dost know, oh Damon dear,
This realm dismantled was
Of Jove himself; and now reigns here,
A very – very —Peacock.
Horatio. You might have rhymed. Hamlet.
'to which,' continues this political philosopher, – that is, to which preceding anecdote – containing such unflattering intimations with regard to the obstinacy of nature, in the limits she has set to the practical abilities of those animals, not enlarging their natural gifts out of respect to the Athenian selection (an anecdote which supplies a rhyme to Hamlet's verse, and to many others from the same source) – 'to which the custom of so many people, who canonize the KINGS they have chosen out of their own body, and are not content only to honour, but adore them, comes very near. Those of Mexico [for instance, it would not of course do to take any nearer home], after the ceremonies of their king's coronation are finished, dare no more look him in the face; but, as if they deified him by his royalty, among the oaths they make him take to maintain their religion and laws, to be valiant, just and mild; he moreover swears, —to make the sun run his course in his wonted light, – to drain the clouds at a fit season, – to confine rivers within their channels, – and to cause all things necessary for his people to be borne by the earth.' '(They told me I was everything. But when the rain came to wet me once, when the wind would not peace at my bidding,' says Lear, 'there I found them, there I smelt them out.)' This, in connection with the preceding anecdote, to which, in the opinion of this author, it comes properly so very near, may be classed of itself among the suggestive stories above referred to; but the bearing of these quotations upon the particular question of style, which must determine the selection here, is set forth in that which follows.
It should be stated, however, that in a preceding paragraph, the author has just very pointedly expressed it as his opinion, that men who are supposed, by common consent, to be so far above the rest of mankind in their single virtue and judgment, that they are permitted to govern them at their discretion, should by no means undertake to maintain that view, by exhibiting that supposed kingly and divine faculty in the way of speech or argument; thus putting themselves on a level with their subjects, and by meeting them on their own ground, with their own weapons, giving occasion for comparisons, perhaps not altogether favourable to that theory of a superlative and divine difference which the doctrine of a divine right to rule naturally presupposes. 'For,' he says, 'neither is it enough for those who govern and command us, and have all the world in their hand, to have a common understanding, and to be able to do what the rest can' [their faculty of judgment must match their position, for if it be only a common one, the difference will make it despised]: 'they are very much below us, if they be not infinitely above us. And, therefore, silence is to them not only a countenance of respect and gravity, but very often of good profit and policy too; for, Megabysus going to see Apelles in his painting room, stood a great while without speaking a word, and at last began to talk of his paintings, for which he received this rude reproof. 'Whilst thou wast silent, thou seemedst to be something great, by reason of thy chains and pomp; but now that we have heard thee speak, there is not the meanest boy in my shop that does not despise thee.' But after the author's subsequent reference to 'those animals' that were to be made competent by a vote of the Athenian people for the work of their superiors, to which he adds the custom of people who canonize the kings they have chosen out of their own body, which comes so near, he goes on thus: —I differ from this common fashion, and am more apt to suspect capacity when I see it accompanied with grandeur of fortune and public applause. We are to consider of what advantage it is, to speak when one pleases, to choose the subject one will speak of– [an advantage not common with authors then] – TO INTERRUPT OR CHANGE OTHER MEN'S ARGUMENTS, WITH A MAGISTERIAL AUTHORITY, to protect oneself from the opposition of others, by a nod, a smile, or silence, in the presence of an assembly that trembles with reverence and respect. A man of a prodigious fortune, coming to give his judgment upon some slight dispute that was foolishly set on foot at his table, began in these words: – 'It can only be a liar or a fool that will say otherwise than so and so.' 'Pursue this philosophical point with a dagger in your hand.'
Here is an author who does contrive to pursue his philosophical points, however, dagger or no dagger, wherever they take him. By putting himself into the trick of singularity, and affecting to be a mere compound of eccentricities and oddities, neither knowing nor caring what it is that he is writing about, and dashing at haphazard into anything as the fit takes him, – 'Let us e'en fly at anything,' says Hamlet, – by assuming, in short, the disguise of the elder Brutus; and, on account of a similar necessity, there is no saying what he cannot be allowed to utter with impunity. Under such a cover it is, that he inserts the passages already quoted, which have lain to this hour without attracting the attention of critics, unpractised happily, and unlearned also, in the subtleties which tyrannies – such tyrannies – at least generate; and under this cover it is, that he can venture now on those astounding political disquisitions, which he connects with the complaint of the restrictions and embarrassments which the presence of a man of prodigious fortune at the table occasions, when an argument, trivial or otherwise, happens to be going on there. Under this cover, he can venture to bring in here, in this very connection, and to the very table, even of this man of prodigious fortune, pages of the freest political discussion, containing already the finest analysis of the existing political 'situation,' so full of dark and lurid portent, to the eye of the scientific statesman, to whom, even then, already under the most intolerable restrictions of despotism, of the two extremes of social evil, that which appeared to be the most terrible, and the most to be guarded against, in the inevitable political changes then at hand, was – not the consolidation but the dissolution of the state.
For already the horizon of that political oversight included, not the eventualities of the English Revolutions only, but the darker contingencies of those later political and social convulsions, from whose soundless whirlpools, men spring with joy to the hardest sharpest ledge of tyranny; or hail with joy and national thanksgiving the straw that offers to land them on it. Already the scientific statesman of the Elizabethan age could say, casting an eye over Christendom as it stood then, 'That which most threatens us is, not an alteration in the entire and solid mass, but its dissipation and divulsion.'
It is after pages of the freest philosophical discussion, that he arrives at this conclusion – discussion, in which the historical elements and powers are for the first time scientifically recognized and treated throughout with the hand of the new master. For this is a philosopher, who is able to receive into his philosophy the fact, that out of the most depraved and vicious social materials, by the inevitable operation of the universal natural laws, there will, perhaps, result a social adhesion and predominance of powers – a social 'whole,' more capable of maintaining itself than any that Plato or Aristotle, from the heights of their abstractions, could have invented for them. He ridicules, indeed, those ideal politics of antiquity as totally unfit for practical realisation, and admits that though the question as to that which is absolutely the best form of government might be of some value in a new world, the basis