The Philosophy of the Plays of Shakspere Unfolded Part 5

But there is another department of art and literature which is put down as a department of '_learning_,' and a most grave and momentous department of it too, in that new scheme of learning which this play is ill.u.s.trating,--one which will also have to be impersonated in this representation,--one which plays a most important part in the history of this School. It is that which gives it the _power_ it lacks and wants, and in one way or another will have. It is that which makes _an arm_ for it, and a _long_ one. It is that which supplies its hidden _arms_ and _armour_. But neither is this department of learning as it is extant,--as this School finds it prepared to its hands, going to be permitted to escape the searching of this comprehensive satire. There is a 'refined traveller of Spain' haunting the purlieus of this Court, who is just the bombastic kind of person that is wanted to act this part. For this impersonation, too, is historical. There are just such creatures in nature as this. We see them now and then; or, at least, he is not much overdone,--'this child of Fancy,--Don Armado hight.' It is the Old Romance, with his ballads and allegories,--with his old 'lies' and his new arts,--that this company are going to use for their new minstrelsy; but first they will laugh him out of his bombast and nonsense, and instruct him in the knowledge of 'common things,' and teach him how to make poetry out of them. They have him here now, to make sport of him with the rest. It is the fashionable literature,-- the literature that entertains _a court_,--the literature of _a tyranny_, with his gross servility, with his courtly affectations, with his arts of amus.e.m.e.nt, his 'vain delights,' with his euphuisms, his 'fire-new words,' it is the polite learning, the Elizabethan _Belles Lettres_, that is brought in here, along with that old Dryasdust Scholasticism, which the other two represent, to make up this company. These critics, who turn the laugh upon themselves, who caricature their own follies for the benefit of learning, who make themselves and their own failures the centre of the comedy of _Love's_ Labour's Lost, are not going to let this thing escape; with the heights of its ideal, and the grossness of its real, it is the very fuel for the mirth that is blazing and crackling here. For these are the woodmen that are at work here, making sport as they work; hewing down the old decaying trunks, gathering all the nonsense into heaps, and burning it up and and clearing the ground for the new.

'What is the end of study,' is the word of this Play. To get the old books shut, but _not_ till they have been examined, _not_ till all the good in them has been taken out, not till we have made a _stand_ on them; to get the old books in their places, under our feet, and '_then_ to make progression' after we see where we are, is the proposal here--_here_ also. It is the shutting up of the old books, and the opening of the new ones, which is the business here. But _that_--that is not the proposal of an ignorant man (as this Poet himself takes pains to observe); it is not the proposition of a man who does not know what there is in books--who does not know but there is every thing in them that they claim to have in them, every thing that is good for life, _magic_ and all. An ignorant man is in awe of books, on account of his ignorance. He thinks there are all sorts of things in them. He is very diffident when it comes to any question in regard to them. He tells you that he is not '_high learned_,' and defers to his betters. Neither is this the proposition of a man who has read _a little_, who has only a smattering in books, as the Poet himself observes. It is the proposition of _a scholar_, who has read them _all_, or had them read for him and examined, who knows what is in them _all_, and what they are good for, and what they are not good for. This is the man who laughs at learning, and borrows her own speech to laugh her down with. _This_, and _not the ignorant man_, it is who opens at last 'great nature's' gate to us, and tells us to come out and learn of her, _because_ that which old books did _not_ 'clasp in,' that which old philosophies have 'not _dreamt_ of,'--the lore of laws not written yet in books of man's devising, the lore of _that_ of which man's ordinary life consisteth is _here_, uncollected, waiting to be spelt out.

_King_. _How well he's read_ to reason _against reading_.

is the inference _here_.

_Dumain_. _Proceeded_ well to _stop_ all good _proceeding._

It is _progress_ that is proposed here also. After the survey of learning 'has been well taken, _then_ to make _progession_' is the word. It is not the doctrine of unlearning that is taught here in this satire. It is a learning that includes all the extant wisdom, and finds it insufficient. It is one that requires a new and n.o.bler study for its G.o.d-like _ends_. But, at the same time, the hindrances that a practical learning has to encounter are pointed at from the first. The fact, that the true ends of learning take us at once into the ground of the forbidden questions, is as plainly stated in the opening speech of the New Academy as the nature of the statement will permit. The fact, that the intellect is trained to _vain delights_ under such conditions, because there is no earnest legitimate occupation of it permitted, is a fact that is glanced at here, as it is in other places, though not in such a manner, of course, as to lead to a 'question' from the government in regard to the meaning of the pa.s.sages in which these grievances are referred to. Under these embarra.s.sments it is, we are given to understand, however, that the criticism on the old learning and the plot for the new is about to proceed.

Here it takes the form of comedy and broad farce. There is a touch of 'tart Aristophanes' in the representation here. This is the introductory performance of the school in which the student hopes for _high words howsoever low the matter_, emphasizing that hope with an allusion to the heights of learning, as he finds it, and the highest word of it, which seems irreverent, until we find from the whole purport of the play how far _he_ at least is from taking it _in vain_, whatever implication of that sort his criticism may be intended to leave on others, who use good words with so much iteration and to so little purpose. 'That is a _high hope_ for a low having' is the rejoinder of that a.s.sociate of his, whose views on this point agree with his own so entirely. It is the height of the _hope_ and the lowness of the _having_--it is the height of the _words_ and the lowness of the _matter_, that makes the incongruity here. That is the soul of all the mirth that is stirring here. It is the height of '_the style_' that '_gives us cause to climb in the merriment_' that makes the subject of this essay. It is literature in general that is laughed at here, and the branches of it in particular. It is the old books that are walking about under these trees, with their follies all ravelled out, making sport for us.

But this is not all. It is the _defect_ in learning which is represented here--that same 'defect' which a graver work of this Academy reports, in connection with a proposition for the Advancement of Learning--for its advancement into the fields not yet taken up, and which turn out, upon inquiry, to be the fields of human life and practice;--it is that main defect which is represented here. 'I find a kind of science of "_words_" but none of "_things_,"' says the reporter. 'What do you read, my lord?' 'Words, words, words,' echoes the Prince of Denmark. 'I find in these antique books, in these Philosophies and Poems, a certain resplendent or l.u.s.trous ma.s.s of matter chosen to give glory either to the subtilty of disputations, or to the eloquence of discourses,' says the other and graver reporter; 'but as to the ordinary and common matter of which life consisteth, I do _not_ find it erected into an art or science, or reduced to written inquiry.' 'How _low_ soever the matter, I hope in G.o.d for _high words_,' says a speaker, who comes out of that same palace of learning on to this stage with the secret badge of the new lore on him, which is the lore of practice--a speaker not less grave, though he comes in now in the garb of this pantomime, to make sport for us with his news of learning. For 'Seneca cannot be too heavy, nor Plautus too light for the law of writ and the liberty.'

It is the high _words_ and the low _having_ that make the incongruity.

But we cannot see the vanity of those heights of words, till the lowness of the matter which they profess to abstract has been brought into contrast with them, till the particulars which they do _not_ grasp, which they can _not_ compel, have been brought into studious contrast with them. The delicate graces of those flowery summits of speech which the ideal nature, when it energises in speech, creates, must overhang in this design the rude actuality which the untrained nature in man, forgotten of art, is always producing. And it is the might of nature in this opposition, it is the force of 'matter,' it is the unconquerable cause contrasted with the vanity of the words that have not comprehended the _cause_, it is the futility of these heights of words that are not '_forms_' that do not correspond to things which must be exhibited here also. It is the force of the _law_ in nature, that must be brought into opposition here with the height of the _word_, the _ideal_ word, the _higher_, but not yet scientifically abstracted word, that seeks in vain because it has no 'grappling-hook'

on the actuality, to bind it. There already are the _heights of learning_ as it is, as this school finds it, dramatically exhibited on the one hand; but this, too,--_life_ as it is,--as this school finds it, man's life as it is, unreduced to order by his philosophy, unreduced to melody by his verse, must also be dramatically exhibited on the other hand, must also be impersonated. It is life that we have here, the 'theoric' on the one side, the 'practic' on the other. The height of the books on the one side, the lowness, the unvisited, 'unlettered' lowness of the life on the other. That which exhibits the _defect_ in learning that the new learning is to remedy, the new uncultured, unbroken ground of science must be exhibited here also.

But _that_ is man's life. That is the world. And what if it be? There are diagrams in this theatre large enough for that. It is the theatre of the New Academy which deals also in IDEAS, but prefers the solidarities. The wardrobe and other properties of this theatre are specially adapted to exigencies of this kind. The art that put the extant learning with those few strokes into the grotesque forms you see there, will not be stopped on this side either, for any law of writ or want of s.p.a.ce and artistic comprehension. This is the learning that can be bounded in the nut-sh.e.l.l of an aphorism and include all in its bounds.

There are not many persons here, and they are ordinary looking persons enough. _But_ if you _lift_ those dominos a little, which that 'refined traveller of Spain' has brought in fashion, you will find that this rustic garb and these homely country features hide more than they promised; and the princess, with her train, who is keeping state in the tents yonder, though there is an historical portrait there too, is greater than she seems. This Antony _Dull_ is a poor rude fellow; but he is a great man in this play. This is the play in which one asks 'Which is the princess?' and the answer is, 'The tallest and the thickest.' Antony is the thickest, he is the acknowledged sovereign here in this school; for he is of that greater part that carries it, and though he hath never fed of the dainties bred in a book, these spectacles which the new 'book men' are getting up here are intended chiefly for him. And that unlettered small knowing soul 'Me'--'still _me_'--insignificant as you think him when you see him in the form of a country swain, is a person of most extensive domains and occupations, and of the very highest dignity, as this philosophy will demonstrate in various ways, under various symbols. You will have that same _me_ in the form of a _Mountain_, before you have read all the books of this school, and mastered all its '_tokens_' and '_symbols_.'

The dramatic representation here is meagre; but we shall find upon inquiry it is already the Globe Theatre, with all its new solidarities, new in philosophy, new in poetry, that the leaves of this park hide--this park that the doors and windows of the New Academe open into--these new grounds that it lets out its students to play and study in, and collect their specimens from--'still and contemplative in living art.' It was all the world that was going through that park that day haply, we shall find. It is all the world that we get in this narrow representation here, as we get it in a more limited representation still, in another place. 'All the world knows _me_ in my book and my book in _me_,' cries the Egotist of the Mountain. It is the first Canto of that great Epic, whose argument runs through so many books, that is chanted here. It is the war, the unsuccessful war of lore and nature, whose lost fields have made man's life, that is getting reviewed at last and reduced to speech and writing. It is the school itself that makes the centre of the plot in this case; these gay young philosophers with 'the ribands' yet floating in their 'cap of youth,' who oppose lore to love, who 'war against _their own affections_ and THE HUGE ARMY OF THE WORLD'S DESIRES,' ere they know what they are; who think to conquer nature's potencies, her universal powers and causes, with wordy ignorance, with resolutions that ignore them simply, and make a virtue of ignoring them, these are the chief actors here, who come out of that cla.s.sic tiring house where they have been shut up with the ancients so long, to celebrate on this green plot, which is life, their own defeat, and propose a better wisdom, the wisdom of the moderns. And Holofernes, the schoolmaster, who cultivates minds, and Sir Nathaniel, the curate, who cures them, and Don Armado or Don A_drama_dio, from the flowery heights of the new Belles Lettres, with the last refinement of Euphuism on his lips, and Antony Dull, and the country damsel and her swain, and the princess and her attendants, are all there to eke out and complete the philosophic design,--to exhibit the extant learning in its airy flights and gross descents, in its ludicrous attempt to escape from those particulars or to grapple, without loss of grandeur, those particulars of which man's life consisteth. It is the vain pretension and a.s.sumption of those faulty wordy abstractions, whose falseness and failure in practice this school is going to expose elsewhere; it is the defect of those abstractions and idealisms that the Novum Organum was invented to remedy, which is exhibited so grossly and palpably here. It is the height of those great swelling words of rhetoric and logic, in rude contrast with those actualities which the history of man is always exhibiting, which the universal nature in man is always imposing on the learned and unlearned, the profane and the reverend, the courtier and the clown, the 'king and the beggar,' the actualities which the natural history of man continues perseveringly to exhibit, in the face of those logical abstractions and those ideal schemes of man as he should be, which had been till this time the fruit of learning;--those actualities, those particulars, whose lowness the new philosophy would begin with, which the new philosophy would erect into an art or science.

The foundation of this ascent is natural history. There must be nothing omitted here, or the stairs would be unsafe. The rule in this School, as stated by the Interpreter in Chief, is, 'that there be _nothing in the globe of matter_, which should not be likewise in the globe of _crystal_ or _form_;' that is, he explains, 'that there should not be anything in _being_ and _action_, which should not be _drawn_ and _collected_ into _contemplation_ and _doctrine_.' The lowness of matter, all the capabilities and actualities of speech and action, not of the refined only, but of the vulgar and profane, are included in the science which contemplates an historical result, and which proposes the _reform_ of these actualities, the cure of these maladies,--which comprehends man as man in its intention,--which makes the _Common Weal_ its end.

Science is the word that unlocks the books of this School, its gravest and its lightest, its books of loquacious prose and stately allegory, and its Book of Sports and Riddles. Science is the clue that still threads them, that never breaks, in all their departures from the decorums of literature, in their lowest descents from the refinements of society. The vulgarity is not _the_ vulgarity of the vulgar--the inelegancy is not the spontaneous rudeness of the ill-bred--any more than its doctrine of nature is the doctrine of the unlearned. The loftiest refinements of letters, the courtliest breeding, the most exquisite conventionalities, the most regal dignities of nature, are always present in _these_ works, to measure these abysses, flowering to their brink. Man as he is, booked, surveyed,--surveyed from the continent of nature, put down as he is in her book of kinds, not as he is from his own interior isolated conceptions only,--the universal powers and causes as they are developed in him, in his untaught affections, in his utmost sensuous darkness,--the universal principle instanced whereit is most buried, the cause in nature found;--man as he is, in his heights and in his depths, 'from his lowest note to the top of his key,'--man in his possibilities, in his actualities, in his thought, in his speech, in his book language, and in his every-day words, in his loftiest lyric tongue, in his lowest pit of play-house degradation, searched out, explained, interpreted. That is the key to the books of this Academe, who carry always on their armour, visible to those who have learned their secret, but hid under the symbol of their double worship, the device of the Hunters,--the symbol of the twin-G.o.ds,--the silver bow, or the bow that finds all. 'Seeing that she beareth two persons ... I do also otherwise _shadow_ her.'

It is man's life, and the culture of it, erected into an art or science, that these books contain. In the lowness of the lowest, and in the aspiration of the n.o.blest, the powers whose entire history must make the basis of a successful morality and policy are found. It is all abstracted or drawn into contemplation, 'that the precepts of cure and culture may be more rightly concluded.' 'For that which in speculative philosophy corresponds to the cause, in practical philosophy becomes the rule.'

It is not necessary to ill.u.s.trate this criticism in this case, because in this case the design looks through the execution everywhere. The criticism of the Novum Organum, the criticism of the Advancement of Learning, and the criticism of Raleigh's History of the World, than which there is none finer, when once you penetrate its crust of profound erudition, is here on the surface. And the scholasticism is not more obtrusive here, the learned sock is not more ostentatiously paraded, than in some critical places in those performances; while the humour that underlies the erudition issues from a depth of learning not less profound.

As, for instance, in this burlesque of the descent of _Euphuism_ to the prosaic detail of the human conditions, not then accommodated with a style in literature, a defect in learning which this Academy proposed to remedy. A new department in literature which began with a series of papers issued from this establishment, has since undertaken to cover the ground here indicated, the _every-day_ human life, and reduce it to written inquiry, notwithstanding 'the lowness of the matter.'

LETTER FROM DON ARMADO TO THE KING.

_King_ [_reads_], 'Great deputy, the welkin's vicegerent, and sole dominator of Navarre, my soul's earth's G.o.d, and body's fostering patron.... So it is,--besieged with sable-coloured melancholy, I did commend the black, oppressing humour to the most wholesome physick of thy health-giving air, and, as I am a gentleman, betook myself to walk. The time when? About the sixth hour: when beasts most graze, birds best peck, and men sit down to that nourishment which is called supper.'

[No one who is much acquainted with the style of the author of this letter ought to have any difficulty in identifying him here. There was a method of dramatic composition in use then, and not in _this_ dramatic company only, which produced an amalgamation of styles. 'On a forgotten matter,' these a.s.sociated authors themselves, perhaps, could not always 'make distinction of their hands.' But there are places where Raleigh's share in this 'cry of players' shows through very palpably.]

'So much for the time _when_. Now for the ground _which_; which I mean I walked upon: it is ycleped thy park. Then for the place where; where I mean I did encounter that obscene and most preposterous event, that draweth from my snow-white pen the ebon-coloured ink, which here thou beholdest, surveyest, or seest, etc....

'Thine in all compliments of devoted and heart-burning heat of duty.

'DON ADRIANO DE ARMADO.'

And in another letter from the same source, the dramatic criticism on that style of literature which it was the intention of this School 'to reform altogether' is thus continued.

... 'The magnanimous and most ill.u.s.trate King _Cophetua_, set eye upon the pernicious and indubitate beggar _Zenelophon_. And it was he that might rightly say, _Veni, vidi, vici_; which to _anatomise_ in the vulgar, (_O base and obscure vulgar_!) _Videlicet_, he came, saw, and overcame... Who came? the king. Why did he come? to see. Why did he see? to overcome. To whom came he? to the beggar. What saw he? the beggar. Who overcame he? the beggar. The conclusion is victory. On whose side? etc.

'Thine in the dearest design of industry.'

[_Dramatic comment_.]

_Boyet. I am much deceived but I remember the style.

_Princess_. Else your memory is bad going o'er it erewhile._

_Jaquenetta_. Good Master Parson, be so good as to read me this letter--it was sent me from Don _Armatho_: I beseech you to read it.

_Holofernes_. [Speaking here, however, not in character but for 'the _Academe_.'] _Fauste precor gelida quando pecus omne sub umbra Ruminat_, and so forth. Ah, good old Mantuan! I may speak of thee as the traveller doth of Venice

--Vinegia, Vinegia, Chi non te vede, ei non te pregia.

Old Mantuan! Old Mantuan! Who understandeth thee not, _loves thee not.--Ut re sol la mi fa.--Under pardon_, Sir, what are THE CONTENTS?

or, rather, as Horace says in his--What, my soul, _verses_?

_Nath_. Ay, Sir, and _very learned_ [one would say so _upon examination_].

_Hol_. Let me have a _staff_, a stanza, a verse; _Lege Domine_.

_Nath_. [Reads the 'verses.']--'If love make me forsworn,' etc.

_Hol_. You _find not the apostrophe_, and _so--miss_ the _accent_--[criticising the reading. It is necessary to find the _apostrophe_ in the verses of this Academy, before you can give the accent correctly; there are other points which require to be noted also, in this refined courtier's writings, as this criticism will inform us]. Let me _supervise_ the canzonet. Here _are only numbers_ ratified, but for the elegancy, facility, and golden cadency of poesy, _caret_. _Ovidius Naso_ was the man. And _why_, indeed, Naso; but for _smelling out the odoriferous flowers of fancy_, the _jerks of invention_. _Imitari_ is nothing; so doth the hound his master, the ape his keeper, the tired horse his rider. [It was no such reading and writing as _that_ which this Academy was going to countenance, or teach.] But, Damosella, was this directed to you?

_Jaq_. Ay, Sir, from one Monsieur Biron, one of the strange queen's lords.

_Hol_. I will _over-glance_ the _super-script_. 'To the snow white hand of the most beauteous lady _Rosaline_.' I will look again _on the intellect_ of the letter for the _nomination_ of the party writing, _to the person written unto_ (_Rosaline_).--[_Look again_.--That is the rule for the reading of letters issued from this Academy, whether they come in Don Armado's name or another's, when the point is _not_ to 'miss the _accent_.'] 'Your ladyship's, in all desired employment, BIRON.' Sir Nathaniel, this Biron is one of the votaries with the king, and here he hath framed a _letter_ to a _sequent_ of the stranger queen's, which, _accidentally or by way of progression_, hath miscarried. Trip and go, my sweet; deliver this paper into the _royal hand of the king. It may concern much_. Stay not thy compliment, I forgive thy duty. _Adieu_.

_Nath_. Sir, you have done this in the fear of G.o.d, very religiously; and as a certain father saith--

_Hol_. Sir, tell me not of _the father_, I do fear colorable colors.

But to return to _the verses_. Did they please you, Sir Nathaniel?

_Nath_. Marvellous well _for the pen_.

_Hol_. I _dine_ to-day at the _father's _of a certain pupil of _mine_, where, if before repast, it shall please you to gratify the table with a grace, I will, on my privilege I have with the parent of the foresaid child, or pupil, undertake your _ben venuto, where I will prove_ those _verses to be very unlearned_, neither savouring of poetry, wit, nor invention. I beseech _your society_.

_Nath_. And thank you, too; for _society_ (saith the text) is _the happiness of_ LIFE.

_Hol_. And, _certes_, the text _most infallibly concludes it_.--Sir, [to Dull] I do _invite you too_, [to hear the verses ex-criticised]

you _shall not_ say me _nay: pauca verba. Away_; the _gentles are at their games_, and we will _to our recreation_.

Another part of the _same_. After dinner.

_Re-enter Holofernes, Sir Nathaniel, and Dull_.

_Hol. Satis quod sufficit_.