The Philosophy of the Plays of Shakspere Unfolded

by Delia Salter Bacon

THE 'BEGINNERS.'

'PROSPERO.—Go bring THE RABBLE,

O'er whom I give thee power, here, to this place.'

Tempest.

But though a foreign philosopher may venture to give us the clue to it, perhaps, in the first instance, a little more roundly, it is not necessary that we should go the Mayor of Bordeaux, in order to ascertain on the highest possible authority, what kind of an art of communication, what kind of an art of delivery and tradition, men, in such circumstances, find themselves compelled to invent;—that is, if they would not be utterly foiled for the want of it, in their noblest purposes;—we need not go across the channel to find the men themselves, to whom this art is a necessity,—men so convinced that they have a mission of instruction to their kind, that they will permit no temporary disabilities to divert them from their end,—men who must needs open their school, no matter what oppositions there may be, to be encountered, no matter what imposing exhibitions of military weapons may be going on just then, in their vicinity; and though they should find themselves straitened in time, and not able to fit their words to their mouths as they have a mind to, though they should be obliged to accept the hint from the master in the Greek school, and take their tone from the ear of those to whom they speak, though many speeches which would spend their use among the men then living would have to be inserted in their most enduring works with a private hint concerning that necessity, and a private reading of them for those whom it concerned; though the audience they are prepared to address should be deferred, though the benches of the inner school should stand empty for ages. We need not go abroad at all to discover men of this stamp, and their works and pastimes, and their arts of tradition;—men so filled with that which impels men to speak, that speak they must, and speak they will, in one form or another, by word or gesture, by word or deed, though they speak to the void waste, though they must speak till they reach old ocean in his unsunned caves, and bring him up with the music of their complainings, though the marble Themis fling back their last appeal, though they speak to the tempest in his wrath, to the wind and the rain, and the fire and the thunder,—men so impregnated with that which makes the human speech, that speak they will, though they have but a rusty nail, wherewith to etch their story, on their dungeon wall; though they dig in the earth and bury their secret, as one buried his of old—that same secret still; for it is still those EARS—those 'ears' that 'Midas hath' which makes the mystery.

They know that the days are coming when the light will enter their prison house, and flash in its dimmest recess; when the light they sought in vain, will be there to search out the secrets they are forbid. They know that the day is coming, when the disciple himself, all tutored in the art of their tradition, bringing with him the key of its delivery, shall be there to unlock those locked-up meanings, to spell out those anagrams, to read those hieroglyphics, to unwind with patient loving research to its minutest point, that text, that with such tools as the most watchful tyranny would give them, they will yet contrive to leave there. They know that their buried words are seeds, and though they lie long in the earth, they will yet spring up with their 'richer and bolder meanings,' and publish on every breeze, their boldest mystery.

For let not men of narrower natures fancy that such action is not proper to the larger one, and cannot be historical. For there are different kinds of men, our science of men tells us, and that is an unscientific judgment which omits 'the particular addition, that bounteous nature hath closed in each,'—her 'addition to the bill that writes them all alike.' For there is a kind of men 'whose minds are proportioned to that which may be dispatched at once, or within a short return of time, and there is another kind, whose minds are proportioned to that which begins afar off, and is to be won with length of pursuit,'—so the Coryphæus of those choir that the latter kind compose, informs us, 'so that there may be fitly said to be a longanimity, which is commonly also ascribed to God as a magnanimity.'

And our English philosophers had to light what this one calls a new 'Lamp of Tradition,' before they could make sure of transmitting their new science, through such mediums as those that their time gave them; and a very gorgeous many-branched lamp it is, that the great English philosopher brings out from that 'secret school of living Learning and living Art' to which he secretly belongs, for the admiration of the professionally learned of his time, and a very lustrous one too, as it will yet prove to be, when once it enters the scholar's apprehension that it was ever meant be lighted, when once the little movement that turns on the dazzling jet is ordered.

For we have all been so taken up with the Baconian Logic hitherto and its wonderful effects in the relief of the human estate, that the Baconian RHETORIC has all this time escaped our notice; and nobody appears to have suspected that there was anything in that worth looking at; any more than they suspect that there is anything in some of those other divisions which the philosopher himself lays so much stress on his proposal for the Advancement of Learning,—in his proposal for the advancement of it into all the fields of human activity. But we read this proposition still, as James the First was expected to read it, and all these departments which are brought into that general view in such a dry and formal and studiously scholastic manner, appear to be put there merely to fill up a space; and because the general plan of this so erudite performance happened to include them.

For inasmuch as the real scope and main bearing of this proposition, though it is in fact there, is of course not there, in any such form as to attract the particular attention of the monarch to whose eye the work is commended; and inasmuch as the new art of a scientific Rhetoric is already put to its most masterly use in reserving that main design, for such as may find themselves able to receive it, of course, the need of any such invention is not apparent on the surface of the work, and the real significance of this new doctrine of Art and its radical relation to the new science, is also reserved for that class of readers who are able to adopt the rules of interpretation which the work itself lays down. Because the real applications of the New Logic could not yet be openly discussed, no one sees as yet, that there was, and had to be, a Rhetoric to match it.