The Philosophy of the Plays of Shakspere Unfolded

by Delia Salter Bacon

First, then, it is 'the organ' and 'method' of tradition; and next, it is what he calls the illustration of it. First, the object is, to bring truth to the understanding in as clear and unobstructed a manner as the previous condition—as the diseases and pre-occupations of the mind addressed will admit of, and next to bring all the other helps and arts by which the sentiments are touched and the will mastered. First, he will speak true, or as true as they will let him; but it is not enough to speak true. He must be able to speak sharply too, perhaps—or humorously, or touchingly, or melodiously, or overwhelmingly, with words that burn. It is not enough, perhaps, to reach the ear of his auditor: 'peradventure' he too 'will also pierce it.' It is not enough to draw diagrams in chalk on a black board in this kind of mathematics, where the will and the affections are the pupils, and standing ready to defy axioms, prepared at any moment to demonstrate practically, that the part is greater than the whole, and face down the universe with it, 'murdering impossibility to make what cannot be, slight work.' It is not enough to have a tradition that is clear, or as clear a one as will pass muster with the government and with the preconceptions of the people themselves. He must have a pictured one—a pictorial, an illuminated one—a beautiful one,—he must have what he calls an ILLUSTRATED TRADITION.

'Why not,' he says. He runs his eye over the human instrumentalities, and this art which we call art—par excellence, which he sees setting up for itself, or ministering to ignorance and error, and feeding the diseased affections with 'the sweet that is their poison,' he seizes on at once, in behalf of his science, and declares that it is her lawful property, 'her slave, born in her house,' and fit for nothing in the world but to minister to her; and what is more, he suits the action to the word—he brings the truant home, and reforms her, and sets her about her proper business. That is what he proposes to have done in his theory of art, and it is what he tells us he has done himself; and he has: there is no mistake about it. That is what he means when he talks about his illustrated tradition of science—his illustrated tradition of the science of HUMAN NATURE and its differences, original and acquired, and the diseases to which it is liable, and the artificial growths which appertain to it. It is very curious, that no one has seen this tradition—this illustrated tradition, or anything else, indeed, that was at all worthy of this new interpreter of mysteries, who goes about to this day as the inventor of a method which he was not able himself to put to any practical use; an inventor who was obliged to leave his machine for men of a more quick and subtle genius, or to men of a more practical turn of mind to manage, men who had a closer acquaintance with nature.

That which is first to be noted in looking carefully at this draught of a new Art of Tradition which the plan of the Advancement of Learning includes,—that which the careful reader cannot fail to note, is the fact, that throughout all this most complete and radical exhibition of the subject (for brief and casual as that exhibition seems on the surface, the science and art from its root to its outermost branches, is there)—throughout all this exhibition, under all the superficial divisions and subdivisions of the subject, it is still the method of PROGRESSION which is set forth here: under all these divisions, there is still one point made; it is still the Art of a Tradition which is designed to reserve the secrets of science, and the nobler arts of it, for the minds and ages that are able to receive them. This new art of tradition, with its new organs and methods, and its living and beautiful illustration, when once we look through the network of it to the unity within, this new rhetoric of science, is in fact the instrument which the philosopher would substitute, if he could, for those more cruel weapons which the men of his time were ready to take in hand; and it is the instrument with which he would forestall those yet more fearful political convulsions that already seemed to his eye to threaten from afar the social structures of Christendom; it is the beautiful and bloodless instrumentality whereby the mind of the world is to be wrenched insensibly from its old place without 'breaking all.'

For neither does this author, any more than that other, who has been quoted here on this point, think it wise for the philosopher to rush madly out of his study with his EUREKA, and bawl to the first passer by in scientific terms the last result of his science, 'lording it over his ignorance' with what can be to him only a magisterial announcement. For what else but that can it be, for instance, to tell the poor peasant, on his way to market, with his butter and eggs in his basket, planting his feet on the firm earth without any qualms or misgivings, and measuring his day by the sun's great toil and rejoicing race in heaven, what but this same magisterial teaching is it, to stop him, and tell him to his bewildered face that the sun never rises or sets, and that the earth is but a revolving ball? Instead of giving him a truth you have given him a falsehood. You have brought him a truth out of a sphere with which he is not conversant, which he cannot ascend to—whose truths he cannot translate into his own, without jarring all. Either you have told him what must be to him a lie, or you have upset all his little world of beliefs with your magisterial doctrine, and confounded and troubled him to no purpose.

But the Method of Progression, as set forth by Lord Bacon, requires that the new scientific truth shall be, not nakedly and flatly, but artistically exhibited; because, as he tells us, 'the great labour is with the people, and this people who knoweth not the law are cursed.' He will not have it exhibited in bare propositions, but translated into the people's dialect. He would not begin if he could—if there were no political or social restriction to forbid it—by overthrowing on all points the popular belief, or wherever it differs from the scientific conclusion. It is a very different kind of philosophy that proceeds in that manner. This is one which comprehends and respects all actualities. The popular belief, even to its least absurdity 'is something more than nothing in nature'; and the popular belief with all its admixture of error, is better than the half-truths of a misunderstood, untranslated science; better than these would be in its place. That truth of nature which it contains for those who are able to receive it, and live by it, you would destroy for them, if you should attempt to make them read it prematurely, in your language. Any kind of organism which by means of those adjustments and compensations, with which nature is always ready to help out anything really hers,—any organism that is capable of serving as the means of an historical social continuance, is already some gain on chaos and social dissolution; and is, perhaps, better than a series of philosophical experiments. The difficulty is not to overthrow the popular errors, but to get something better in their place, he tells us; and that there are men who have succeeded in the first attempt, and very signally failed in the second. Beautiful and vigorous unions grew up under the classic mythologies, that dissolved and went down for ever, in the sunshine of the classic philosophies. For there were more things in heaven and earth than were included in those last, or dreamt of in them.

In your expurgation, of the popular errors, you must be sure that the truth they contain, is in some form as strongly, as effectively composed in your text, or the popular error is truer and better than the truth with which you would replace it. This is a master who will have no other kind of teaching in his school. His scholars must go so far in their learning as to be able to come back to this popular belief, and account for it and understand it; they must be as wise as the peasant again, and be able to start with him, from his starting point, before they can get any diploma in this School of Advancement, or leave to practise in it. But when the old is already ruinous and decaying, and oppressing and keeping back the new,—when the vitality is gone out of it, and it has become deadly instead, when the new is struggling for new forms, the man of science though never so conservative from inclination and principle, will not be wanting to himself and to the state in this emergency. He 'loves the fundamental part of state more' than in such a crisis he will 'doubt the change of it,' and will not 'fear to jump a body with a dangerous physic, that's sure of death without it.'

First of all then, the condition of this lamp of tradition, that is to burn on for ages, is, that it shall be able to adapt itself to the successive stages of the advancement it lights. It is the inevitable condition of this school which begins with the present, which begins with the people, which descends to the lowest stage of the contemporary popular belief, and takes in the many-headed monster himself, without any trimming at all, for its audience,—it is the first condition of such a school, conducted by a man of science, that it shall have its proper grades of courts and platforms, its selecter and selectest audiences. There must be landing places in the ascent, points of rendezvous agreed on, where 'the delicate collateral sounds' are heard, which only those who ascend can hear. There is no jar,—there is no forced advancement in this school; there is no upward step for any, who have not first been taught to see it, who have not, indeed, already taken it. For it is an artist's school, and not a pedant's, or a vague speculator's, who knows not how to converge his speculation, even upon his mode of tradition.

The founders of this school trust much in their general plan of instruction and relief, to the gradual advancement of a common intelligence, by means of a scientific, but concealed historical teaching. They will teach their lower classes, their 'beginners,' as great nature teaches—insensibly;—as great nature teaches—in the concrete, 'in easy instances.' For the secret of her method is that which they have studied; that is the learning which they have mastered; the spirit of it, which is the poet's gift, the quickest, subtlest, most searching, most analytic, most synthetic spirit of it, is that with which great nature has endowed them. They will speak, as they tell us, as the masters always have spoken from of old to them who are without; they will 'open their mouths in parables,' they will 'utter their dark sayings on the harp.' They know that men are already prepared by nature's own instruction, to feel in a fact,—to receive in historical representations—truths which would startle them in the abstract, truths which they are not yet prepared to disengage from the historical combinations in which they receive them; though with every repetition, and especially with the pointed, selected, prolonged repetition of the teacher, where the 'ILLUSTRIOUS INSTANCE' is selected and cleared of its extraneous incident, and made to enter the mind alone, and pierce it with its principle,—with every such repetition, the step to that generalization and axiom becomes insensibly shorter and more easy. They know that men are already wiser than their teachers, in some—in many things; that they have all of them a great stock of incommunicative wisdom which all their teachers have not been able to make them give up, which they never will give up, till the strong man, who is stronger, enters with his larger learning out of the same book, with his mightier weapons out of the same armory, and spoils their goods, or makes them old and worthless, by the side of the new, resplendent, magic wealth he brings with him.

The new philosophy of nature has truths to teach which nature herself has already been teaching all men, with more or less effect, miscellaneously, and at odd hours, ever since they were born; and this philosopher gives a large place in his history, to that vulgar, practical human wisdom, which all the books till his time had been of too high a strain to glance at. But 'art is a second nature, and imitateth that dextrously and compendiously, which nature performs by ambages and length of time.' The scientific interpreter of nature will select, and unite, and teach continuously, and pointedly, in grand, ideal, representative fact, in 'prerogative instances,' that which nature has but faintly and unconsciously impressed with her method; for he has a scientific organum, and what is more,—a great deal more, a thousand times more,—he has the scientific genius that invented it. His soul is a Novum Organum—his mind is a table of rejections that sifts the historic masses, and brings out the instances that are to his purpose, the bright, bold instances that flame forth the doubtful truth, that tell their own story and need no interpreter, the high ideal instances that talk in verse because it is their native tongue and they can no other. He has found,—or rather nature lent it to him, the universal historic solvent, and the dull, formless, miscellaneous facts of the common human experience, spring up in magic orders, in beautiful, transparent, scientific continuities, as they arrange themselves by the laws of his thinking.

For the truth is, and it must be said here, and not here only, but everywhere, wherever there is a chance to say it,—that Novum Organum was not made to examine the legs of spiders with, or the toes of 'the grandfather-long-legs,' or any of their kindred; though of course it is susceptible of such an application, when it falls into the hands of persons whose genius inclines them in those directions; and it is a use, that the inventor would not have disdained to put it to himself, if he had had time, and if his attention had not been so much distracted by the habits and history of that 'nobler kind of vermin,' which he found feeding on the human weal in his time, and eating out the heart of it. This man was not a fool, but a man. He was a naturalist indeed, of the newest and highest style, but that did not hinder his being a man at the same time. He and his company were the first that set the example of going, deliberately, and on principle, out of the human nature for knowledge; but it was that they might re-return with better axioms for the culture, and nobility, and sway of that form, which, 'though it be but a part in the continent of nature,' is as this one openly declares, 'the end and term of NATURAL PHILOSOPHY, in the intention of MAN.' His science included the humblest and least agreeable of nature's performances; his Novum Organum was able to take up the smallest conceivable atom of existence, whether animate or not, and make a study of it. He has no disrespect for caterpillars or any kind of worm or insect; but he is not a caterpillar himself, or an insect of any kind, or a Saurian, or an Icthyosaurian, but a man; and it was for the sake of building up from a new basis a practical doctrine of human life, that he invented that instrument, and put so much fine work upon it.