The Philosophy of the Plays of Shakspere Unfolded. Bacon Delia Salter
flourishes ('diversions' as he calls them) of this great adventure, that his pen is out for now: he is indeed upon the point of running headlong into the fiercest dangers; – it is the state, the wretched, discased, vicious state, dying apparently, yet full of teeth and mischief, that he is about to handle in his argument with these fine, lightsome, frolicsome preparations of his, without any perceptible 'mittens'; it is the heart of that political evil that his time groans with, and begins to find insufferable, that he is going to probe to the quick with that so delicate weapon. It is a tilt against the block and the rack, and all the instruments of torture, that he is going to manage, as handsomely, and with as many sacrifices to the graces, as the circumstances will admit of. But the political situation which he describes so boldly (and we have already seen what it is) affects us here in its relation to the question of style only, and as the author himself connects it with the point of our inquiry.
'A man may regret,' he says, 'the better times, but cannot fly from the present, we may wish for other magistrates, but we must, notwithstanding, obey those we have; and, peradventure, it is more laudable to obey the bad than the good, so long as the image of the ancient and received laws of this monarchy shall shine in any corner of the kingdom. If they happen, unfortunately, to thwart and contradict one another, so as to produce two factions of doubtful choice,' —
And my soul aches
To know, [says Coriolanus] when two authorities are up,
Neither supreme, how soon confusion
May enter 'twixt the gap of both, and take
The one by the other.
– 'in this contingency will willingly choose,' continues the other, 'to withdraw from the tempest, and in the meantime, nature or the hazards of war may lend me a helping hand. Betwixt Cæsar and Pompey, I should soon and frankly have declared myself, but amongst the three robbers that came after, a man must needs have either hid himself, or have gone along with the current of the time, which I think a man may lawfully do, when reason no longer rules.' 'Whither dost thou wandering go?'
'This medley is a little from my subject, I go out of my way but 'tis rather by licence than oversight. My fancies follow one another, but sometimes at a great distance, and look towards one another, but 'tis with an oblique glance. I have read a DIALOGUE of PLATO of such a motley and fantastic composition. The beginning was about love, and all the rest ABOUT RHETORIC. They stick not (that is, the ancients) at these variations, and have a marvellous grace in letting themselves to be carried away at the pleasure of the winds; or at least to seem as if they were. The titles of my chapters do not always comprehend the whole matter, they often denote it by some mark only, as those other titles Andria Eunuchus, or these, Sylla, Cicero, Torquatus. I love a poetic march, by leaps and skips, 'tis an art, as Plato says, light, nimble; and a little demoniacal. There are places in Plutarch where he forgets his theme, where the proposition of his argument is only found incidentally, and stuffed throughout with foreign matter. Do but observe his meanders in the Demon of Socrates. How beautiful are his variations and digressions; and then most of all, when they seem to be fortuitous, [hear] and introduced for want of heed. 'Tis the indiligent reader that loses my subject —not I. There will always be found some words or other in a corner that are to the purpose, though it lie very close [that is the unfailing rule]. I ramble about indiscreetly and tumultously: my style and my wit wander at the same rate, [he wanders wittingly]. A little folly is desirable in him that will not be guilty of stupidity, say the precepts, and much more the examples of our masters. A thousand poets flag and languish after a prosaic manner; but the best old prose, and I strew it here up and down indifferently for verse, shines throughout with the vigor and boldness of poetry, and represents some air of its fury. Certainly, prose must yield the pre-eminence in speaking. "The poet," says Plato, "when set upon the muse's tripod, pours out with fury, whatever comes into his mouth, like the pipe of a fountain, without considering and pausing upon what he says, and things come from him of various colors, of contrary substance, and with an irregular torrent": he himself (Plato) is all over poetical, and all the old theology (as the learned inform us) is poetry, and the first philosophy, is the origiual language of the gods.
'I would have the matter distinguish itself; it sufficiently shows where it changes, where it concludes, where it begins, and where it resumes, without interlacing it with words of connection, introduced for the relief of weak or negligent ears, and without commenting myself. Who is he that had not rather not be read at all, than after a drowsy or cursory manner? Seeing I cannot fix the reader's attention by the weight of what I write, maneo male, if I should chance to do it by my intricacies. [Hear]. I mortally hate obscurity and would avoid it if I could. In such an employment, to whom you will not give an hour you will give nothing; and you do nothing for him for whom you only do, whilst you are doing something else. To which may be added, that I have, perhaps, some particular obligation to speak only by halves, to speak confusedly and discordantly.'
But this is, perhaps, enough to show, in the way of direct assertion, that we have here, at least, a philosophical work composed in that style which Lord Bacon calls 'the enigmatical,' in which he tells us the secrets of knowledge are reserved for selected auditors, or wits of such sharpness as can pierce the veil; a style which he, too, tells us was sometimes used by the discretion of the ancients, though he does not specify either Plutarch or Plato; in that place, and one which he introduces in connection with his new method of progression, in consequence of its having, as he tells us, some affinity with it, and that we have here also a specimen of that new method itself, by means of which knowledge is to be delivered as a thread to be spun on.
But let us leave, for the present, this wondrous Gascon, though it is not very easy to do so, so long as we have our present subject in hand, – this philosopher, whose fancies look towards one another at such long, such very long distances, sometimes, though not always, with an oblique glance, who dares to depend so much upon the eye of his reader, and especially upon the reader of that 'far-off' age he writes to. It would have been indeed irrelevant to introduce the subject of this foreign work and its style in this connection without further explanation, but for the identity of political situation already referred to, and but for those subtle, interior, incessant connections with the higher writings of the great Elizabethan school, which form the main characteristic of this production. The fact, that this work was composed in the country in which the chief Elizabethan men attained their maturity, that it dates from the time in which Bacon was completing his education there, that it covers ostensibly not the period only, but the scenes and events of Raleigh's six years campaigning there, as well as the fact alluded to by this author himself, in a passage already quoted, – the fact that there was a family then in England, very well known, who bore the surname of his ancestors, a family of the name of Eyquem, he tells us with whom, perhaps, he still kept up some secret correspondence and relations, the fact, too, which he mentions in his chapter on Names, that a surname in France is very easily acquired, and is not necessarily derived from one's ancestors, – that same chapter in which he adduces so many instances of men who, notwithstanding that inveterate innate love of the honour of one's own proper name, which is in men of genius still more inveterate, – have for one reason or another been willing to put upon anagrams, or synonyms, or borrowed names, all their honours, so that in the end it is William or Pierre who takes them into his possession, and bears them, or it's the name of 'an African slave' perhaps, or the name of a 'groom' (promoted, it may be, to the rank of a jester, or even to that of a player,) that gets all the glory. All these facts, taken in connection with the conclusions already established, though insignificant in themselves, will be found anything but that for the philosophical student who has leisure to pursue the inquiry.
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