“Ah, Richard,” replied Harrington, “you must outlive these notions. Art cannot thrive sequestered from life. It may live in the cell, but it will narrow and spire, and it can only branch and broaden into Shakspearean greatness when planted among the ways and walks of men. No man can be a great painter, sculptor, composer, poet, whose heart is not deeply and warmly engaged in the life of his own time. It is the lack of interest and participation in human affairs which makes our modern artists mere imitators and colorists, and so much of modern art weak and pallid—a mere watery reflection of old models and forms of beauty.”
“Come, now, that’s heresy?” said Wentworth, laughing. “Talk of poets—look at Shakspeare. What interest did he take in human affairs? He kept the Globe Theatre, studied his part by day, played it at night, and wrote his dramas between whiles. That’s the way his years were occupied. What participation had he in Elizabethan politics? What in the life of his own time? Why, Ulrici says, in substance, that Shakspeare didn’t care enough about the politics of his age to have his mind even colored by them. The critics agree that a more thorough aristocrat or conservative never breathed. Jupiter! according to the critics, he was a perfect despiser of the common people, and a man utterly without patriotism and philanthropy. Your Verulam there, now,” pursued Wentworth, looking at the statue, “was patriot and philanthrope. He toiled for his country and wrought for ‘the relief of the human estate,’ as he phrases it. But the most powerful microscope couldn’t detect anything of that sort in William.”
Harrington laughed amusedly.
“Now, look here, Richard,” he replied. “In the first place, I flatly deny that there is contempt for any sort of people, common or uncommon, in the Shakspearean pages. But let that pass, for what I am going to say will cover it fully. I want to call your attention to the distinctive peculiarity—the uniqueness—of the Shakspearean creations. In the Shakspearean mind you have an unexampled union of the subtlest observation and the profoundest reason. This author observed far more closely than even Thackeray, and philosophized far more greatly than even Plato. But this is not all. He constructed a series of works which show the principles of human action as they lie in the nature of man, and all the complex operation of the human passions. And more, he created a number of figures, which are not characters, but types. That is the grand distinctive Shakspearean peculiarity. Nobody has done that but he. The Don Quixote of Cervantes is a great figure, but it is not Shakspearean. The Greek Prometheus, the German Mephistopheles are immense allegorical creations, but they are not Shakspearean. He alone has made figures which are types—representative men and women standing for classes. In a word, he alone has given us in a series of models or images, the Science of Human Nature. This it is that makes him solitary, as the power with which it is done makes him supreme, in literature.”
“I understand,” said Wentworth, “and I agree; but I don’t see what you’re driving at, mine ancient.”
“Wait a minute, and you shall see,” returned Harrington. “Bacon wanted this very thing done. Nothing that you can do for the elevation of the world, he says substantially, is of any value, unless this is done. The radical defect in all science is, he says, that it has not been done, and he rates Aristotle sharply for not doing it. He wants a work which will give us the Science of Man, as he is, in order that we may make him what he ought to be—a work, he says, which is to contain the descriptions of the several characters and tempers of men’s natures and dispositions to the end that the precepts concerning the culture and cure of the mind may be concluded upon—a work which is also to contain examples in moral and civil life. This is what Bacon wanted done, and the author of the Shakspeare Drama did it. Bacon’s requirement is fulfilled exactly in the Shakspeare Drama. Even our critics have got hold of the idea that the Science of Human Nature which Bacon wanted is in the Shakspeare Drama, and the purpose which Bacon intended such a work to accomplish, is in daily process of accomplishment through the agency of those plays. And what is more, Bacon wanted that work to be in the form of poetry—the Georgics of the Mind, he calls it, with a reminiscence of Virgil. The poets, he says elsewhere, are the best doctors of this knowledge; and again, for the expression of such a purpose, reason is not so perspicuous, nor examples so apt, as the dramatic or poetic presentation. Very good. Bacon wanted it in poetry, and in poetry you have it.”
Wentworth looked at Harrington steadily, with so curious an amazement on his countenance, that Harrington smiled.
“Now, Richard, observe,” he pursued. “The Shakspeare Drama contains the Science of Man. A Science of Man cannot be formed accidentally, or by the mere spontaneity of genius; it involves design. The author of the Shakspeare Drama knew, therefore, what he was about; and the fact that his figures have the peculiarity of being types, sufficiently proves it. Now, science is preparatory to art, and a Science of Man is a preparation for an Art of Human Life. This makes of your ‘aristocrat’ and ‘conservative’ Shakspeare a Socialist of the most daring order—the largest innovator the world has ever known.”
“By Jupiter!” exclaimed Wentworth, “it’s precious odd that nobody has noticed all this before.”