The Philosophy of the Plays of Shakspere Unfolded

by Delia Salter Bacon

'How I have thought of this, and of these times, I shall recount hereafter, . . . . . . . . and find a time Both meet to hear and answer such high things. Till then, my noble friend, chew upon this; Brutus had rather he a villager, Than to repute himself a son of Rome, Under these hard conditions as this time Is like to lay upon us.

Inasmuch as the demonstration contained in this volume has laboured throughout under this disadvantage, that however welcome that new view of the character and aims of the great English philosopher, which is involved in it, as welcome it must be to all true lovers of learning, it presents itself to the mind of the reader as a view directly opposed, not merely to what may possibly be his own erroneous preconceptions of the case; but to facts which are among the most notable in the history of this country; and not only to facts sustained by unquestionable contemporary authority, and attested by public documents,—facts which history has graven with her pen of iron in the rock for ever, but with other exhibitions of this man's character, not less, but more painful, for which he is himself singly responsible;—not the forced exhibition of a confession wrung from him by authority,—not the craven self-blasting defamation of a glorious name that was not his to blast,—that was the property of men of learning in all coming ages, precious and venerable in their eyes for ever, at the bidding of power,—not that only, but the voluntary exhibition of those qualities with which he stands charged,—which he has gone out of his way to leave to us,—memorials of them which he has collected with his own hands, and sealed up, and sent down to posterity 'this side up,' with the most urgent directions to have them read, and examined, and considered deeply,—that posterity, too, to which he commends, with so much assurance, the care of his honor, the cure of his fame.

The demonstrated fact must stand. The true mind must receive it. Because our criticism or our learning is not equal to the task of reconciling it with that which we know already, or with that which we believed, and thought we knew, we must not on that account reject it. That is to hurt ourselves. That is to destroy the principle of integrity at its source. We must take our facts and reconcile them, if we can; and let them take care of themselves, if we can not. God is greater than we are, and whatever other sacrifices he may require of us, painful to our human sensibilities, to make way with facts, for the sake of advancing truths, or for any other reason never so plausible, is a thing which he never does, and never did require of any mind. The conclusion that requires facts to be dispensed with, or shorn, on either side to make it tenable, is not going to stand, let it come in what name, or with what authority it will; because the truth of history is, in its least particular, of a universal quality, and is much more potent than anything that the opinion and will of man can oppose to it.

To the mind which is able to receive under all conditions the demonstrated truth, and give to it its full weight,—to the mind to which truth is religion, this book is dedicated. The facts which it contains are able to assert themselves,—will be, at least, hereafter. They will not be dependent ultimately upon the mode of their exhibition here. For they have the large quality, they have the solidity and dimensions of historical truth, and are accessible on more sides than one.

But to those to whom they are already able to commend themselves in the form in which they are here set forth, the author begs leave to say, in conclusion, though it must stand for the present in the form of a simple statement, but a statement which challenges investigation, that so far from coming into any real collision with the evidence which we have on this subject from other sources, those very facts, and those very historical materials on which our views on this subject have been based hitherto, are, that which is wanting to the complete development of the views contained here.

It is the true history of these great events in which the hidden great men of this age played so deep a part; it is the true history of that great crisis in which the life-long plots of these hidden actors began to show themselves on the historic surface in scenic grandeur,—in those large tableaux which history takes and keeps,—which history waits for,—it is the very evidence which has supplied the principal basis of the received views on this subject,—it is the history of the initiation of that great popular movement,—that movement of new ages, with which the chief of popular development, and the leader of these ages, has been hitherto so painfully connected in our impressions; it is that very evidence,—that blasting evidence which the Learning of the Modern Ages has always carried in its stricken heart,—it is that which is wanting here. That also is a part of the story which has begun to be related here.

And those very letters which have furnished 'confirmations strong as proofs of holy writ' of the impressions which the other historical evidence, as it stands at present, inevitably creates,—those very letters which have been collected by the party whose character was concerned in them, and preserved with so much diligence and caution,—which we have been asked with so much emphasis to read and ponder,—which have been recommended to our attention as the very best means, when all is done, of putting ourselves into sympathetic relations with the writer, and attaining at last to a complete understanding of his position, and to a complete acquaintance with his character and aims,—with his natural dispositions, as well as his deliberate scientific aims,—these letters, long as we have turned from them,—often as we have turned from them,—chilled, confounded, sick at heart,—unable, in spite of those recommendations, to find in them any gleam of the soul of these proceedings,—these very letters will have to be read, after all, and with that very diligence which the directions enjoin upon us; they will have, when all is done, to take just that place in the development of this plot which the author, who always knows what he is about when he is giving directions, designed them to take. There is one very obvious reason why they should be studied—why they would have to be studied in the end. They have on the face of them a claim to the attention of the learned. There is nothing like them in the history of mankind. For, however mean and disreputable the acts of men may be, when it comes to words,—that medium of understanding and sympathy, in which the identity of the common nature is perpetually declared, even in the most private conferences,—there is usually an attempt to clothe the forlorn and shrinking actuality with the common human dignity, or to make it, at least, passably respectable, if the claim to the heroic is dispensed with,—even in oral speech. But in writing, in letters, destined to never so brief and limited an existence, who puts on paper for the eye of another, for the review of that criticism which in the lowest, basest of mankind, stands in unimpeachable dignity, prepared to detect and pass sentence, and cry out as one aggrieved, on the least failure, or shadow of failure in the best—who puts in writing,—what tenant of Newgate will put on paper, when it comes to that, a deliberate display of meanness,—what convicted felon, but will undertake in that case to give some sort of heroic colour to his proceedings—some air of suffering virtue to his durance?

But a great man, consciously great, who knows that his most trifling letter is liable to publication; a great man, writing on subjects and occasions which insure publicity to his writing; a man of fame, writing letters expressly for publication, and dedicating them to the far-off times; a man of poetic sensibilities, alive to the finest shades of moral differences; one of unparalleled dignity and grandeur of aims—aims pursued from youth to age, without wavering, under the most difficult conditions, pursued to their successful issue; a man whose aim in life it was to advance, and ennoble, and enrich his kind; in whose life-success the race of men are made glad; such a one sending down along with the works, in which the nobility and the deliberate worth and grandeur of his ends are set forth and proved, memorials of himself which exhibit studiously on the surface of them, by universal consent, the most odious character in history; this is the phenomenon which our men of learning have found themselves called upon to encounter here. To separate the man and the philosopher—to fly out upon the man, to throw him overboard with every expression of animosity and disgust, to make him out as bad as possible, to collect diligently every scrap of evidence against him, and set it forth with every conceivable aggravation—this has been the resource of an indignant scholarship in this case, bent on uttering its protest in some form; this has been the defence of learning, cast down from its excellency, and debased in all men's eyes, as it seemed for ever, in the person of its high-priest.

The objection to the work here presented to the public is, that it does not go far enough. From the point of review that the research of which it is the fruit has now attained, this is the criticism to which it appears to be liable. From this point of view, the complaint to be made against it is, that at the place where it stops it leaves, for want of that part of the evidence which contains it, the historical grandeur of our great men unrevealed or still obscured. For we have had them, in the sober day-light of our occidental learning, in the actualities of history, and not in the mists of a poetic past only—monstrous idealisms, outstretched shadows of man's divinity, demi-gods and heroes, impersonations of ages and peoples, stalking through the twilight of the ante-historic dawn, or in the twilight of a national popular ignorance, embalmed in the traditions of those who are always 'beginners.' We have had them; we need not look to a foreign and younger race for them; we have them, fruit of our own stock; we have had them, not cloaked with falseness, but exposed in the searching noonday glare of our western science. We have had them, we have them still, with all their mortal frailty and littleness and ignorance confessed, with all their 'weaved-up follies ravelled out,' with all the illimitable capacity of affection and passion and will in man, with all his illimitable capacity for folly and wrong-doing, assumed and acknowledged in their own persons, symbolically, vicariously, assumed and confessed. 'I am very proud, revengeful, ambitious; with more offences at my beck than I have thoughts to put them in, imagination to give them shape, or time to act them in.' We have them, our Interpreters, our Poets, our Reformers, who start from the actualities—from the actualities of nature in general, and of the human nature in particular—who make the most careful study of man as he is, in themselves and in all men, the basis of their innovation, the beginning of their advancement to the ideal or divine. We have them; and they, too, they also come to us, with that old garland of glory on their brows, with that same 'crown' of victory, which the world has given from of old to those who have taken her affairs to be their business.

That the historical evidence which lies on the surface of an age, like that age from which our modern philosophy proceeds, is of a kind to require, for its unravelling, a different species of criticism from that which suffices for the historical evidence which our own times and institutions produce, is a fact which would hardly seem to require any illustration in the present state of our historical knowledge, in the present state of our knowledge in regard to the history of this age in particular; when not the professed scholar only, but every reader, knows what age in the constitutional history of England, at least, that age was; when we have here, not the erudite historian only, with his rich harvests for the scholar, that are caviare to the multitude, but the Poets of history also, wresting from dull prose and scholasticism its usurped domains, and giving back to the peoples their own, to tell us what age this was. The inner history of this time is indeed still wanting to us; and the reason is, that we have not yet applied to the reading of its principal documents that key of times which our contemporary historians have already put into our hands—that key which, we are told on good authority, is, in certain cases, indispensable to the true interpretation.