Читать книгу The Philosophy of the Plays of Shakspere Unfolded - Bacon Delia Salter - Страница 10

THE POSSIBILITY OF GREAT ANONYMOUS WORKS, – OR WORKS PUBLISHED UNDER AN ASSUMED NAME, – CONVEYING, UNDER RHETORICAL DISGUISES, THE PRINCIPAL SCIENCES, – RE-SUGGESTED, AND ILLUSTRATED

Is the storm overblown? I hid me under the dead moon-calf's gaberdine for fear of the storm.

– Tempest.

BUT as to this love of glory which the stoics, whom this philosopher quotes so approvingly, have measured at its true worth; as to this love of literary fame, this hankering after an earthly immortality, which he treats so scornfully in the Roman statesman, let us hear him again in another chapter, and see if we can find any thing whereby his nature and designs will more manifestly be laid open to us. 'Of all the foolish dreams in the world,' he says, that which is most universally received, is the solicitude of reputation and glory, which we are fond of to that degree as to abandon riches, peace, life, and health, which are effectual and substantial good, to pursue this vain phantom. And of all the irrational humours of men, it should seem that the philosophers themselves have the most ado, and do the least disengage themselves from this the most restive and obstinate of all the follies. There is not any one view of which reason does so clearly accuse the vanity, as that; but it is so deeply rooted in us, that I doubt whether any one ever clearly freed himself from it, or no. After you have said all, and believed all that has been said to its prejudice, it creates so intestine an inclination in opposition to your best arguments, that you have little power and firmness to resist it; for (as Cicero says) even those who controvert it, would yet that the books they write should appear before the world with their names in the title page, and seek to derive glory from seeming to despise it. All other things are communicable and fall into commerce; we lend our goods —

[It irks me not that men my garments wear.]

and stake our lives for the necessities and service of our friends; but to communicate one's honour, and to robe another with one's own glory, is very rarely seen. And yet we have some examples of that kind. Catulus Luctatius, in the Cymbrian war, having done all that in him lay to make his flying soldiers face about upon the enemy, ran himself at last away with the rest, and counterfeited the coward, to the end that his men might rather seem to follow their captain, than to fly from the enemy; and after several anecdotes full of that inner significance of which he speaks elsewhere, in which he appears, but only appears, to lose sight of this question of literary honour, for they relate to military conflicts, he ventures to approach, somewhat cautiously and delicately, the latent point of his essay again, by adducing the example of persons, not connected with the military profession, who have found themselves called upon in various ways, and by means of various weapons, to take part in these wars; who have yet, in consequence of certain 'subtleties of conscience,' relinquished the honour of their successes; and though there is no instance adduced of that particular kind of disinterestedness, in which an author relinquishes to another the honour of his title page, as the beginning might have led one to anticipate; on the whole, the not indiligent reader of this author's performances here and elsewhere, will feel that the subject which is announced as the subject of this chapter, 'Not to communicate a man's honour or glory,' has been, considering the circumstance, sufficiently illustrated.

'As women succeeding to peerages had, notwithstanding their sex, the right to assist and give their votes in the causes that appertain to the jurisdiction of peers; so the ecclesiastical peers, notwithstanding their profession, were obliged to assist our kings in their wars, not only with their friends and servants, but in their own persons. And he instances the Bishop of Beauvais, who took a gallant share in the battle of Bouvines, but did not think it fit for him to participate in the fruit and glory of that violent and bloody trade. He, with his own hand, reduced several of the enemy that day to his mercy, whom he delivered to the first gentleman he met, either to kill or to receive them to quarter, referring that part to another hand. As also did William, Earl of Salisbury, to Messire John de Neale, with a like subtlety of conscience to the other, he would KILL, but NOT WOUND him, and for that reason, fought only with a mace. And a certain person in my time, being reproached by the king that he had laid hands on a priest, stiffly and positively denied it. The case was, he had cudgelled and kicked him.' And there the author abruptly, for that time, leaves the matter without any allusion to the case of still another kind of combatants, who, fighting with another kind of weapon, might also, from similar subtleties of conscience, perhaps think fit to devolve on others the glory of their successes.

But in a chapter on names, in which, if he has not told, he has designed to tell all; and what he could not express, he has at least pointed out with his finger, this subject is more fully developed. In this chapter, he regrets that such as write chronicles in Latin do not leave our names as they find them, for in making of Vaudemont VALLE-MONTANUS, and metamorphosing names to dress them out in Greek or Latin, we know not where we are, and with the persons of the men, lose the benefit of the story: but one who tracks the inner thread of this apparently miscellaneous collection of items, need be at no such loss in this case. But at the conclusion of this apparently very trivial talk about names, he resumes his philosophic humour again, and the subsequent discourse on this subject, recalls once more, the considerations with which philosophy sets at nought the loss of fame, and forgets in the warmth that prompts to worthy deeds, the glory that should follow them.

'But this consideration – that is the consideration "that it is the custom in France, to call every man, even a stranger, by the name of any manor or seigneury, he may chance to come in possession of, tends to the total confusion of descents, so that surnames are no security," – "for," he says, "a younger brother of a good family, having a manor left him by his father, by the name of which he has been known and honoured, cannot handsomely leave it; ten years after his decease, it falls into the hand of a stranger, who does the same." Do but judge whereabouts we shall be concerning the knowledge of these men. This consideration leads me therefore into another subject. Let us look a little more narrowly into, and examine upon what foundation we erect this glory and reputation, for which the world is turned topsy-turvy. Wherein do we place this renown, that we hunt after with such infinite anxiety and trouble. It is in the end PIERRE or WILLIAM that bears it, takes it into his possession, and whom only it concerns. Oh what a valiant faculty is HOPE, that in a mortal subject, and in a moment, makes nothing of usurping infinity, immensity, eternity, and of supplying her master's indigence, at her pleasure, with all things that he can imagine or desire. And this Pierre or William, what is it but a sound, when all is done, ("What's in a name?") or three or four dashes with a pen?'

And he has already written two paragraphs to show, that the name of William, at least, is not excepted from the general remarks he is making here on the vanity of names; while that of Pierre is five times repeated, apparently with the same general intention, and another combination of sounds is not wanting which serves with that free translation the author himself takes pains to suggest and defend, to complete what was lacking to that combination, in order to give these remarks their true point and significance, in order to redeem them from that appearance of flatness which is not a characteristic of this author's intentions, and in his style merely serves as an intimation to the reader that there is something worth looking for beneath it.

As to the name of William, and the amount of personal distinction which that confers upon its owners, he begins by telling us, that the name of Guienne is said to be derived from the Williams of our ancient Aquitaine, 'which would seem,' he says, rather far fetched, were there not as crude derivations in Plato himself, to whom he refers in other places for similar precedents; and when he wishes to excuse his enigmatical style – the titles of his chapters for instance. And by way of emphasizing this particular still further, he mentions, that on the occasion when Henry, the Duke of Normandy, the son of Henry the Second, of England, made a feast in France, the concourse of nobility and gentry was so great, that for sport's sake he divided them into troops, according to their names, and in the first troop, which consisted of Williams, there were found a hundred and ten knights sitting at the table of that name, without reckoning the simple gentlemen and servants.

And here he apparently digresses from his subject for the sake of mentioning the Emperor Geta, 'who distributed the several courses of his meats by the first letters of the meats themselves, where those that began with B were served up together; as brawn, beef, beccaficos, and so of the others.' This appears to be a little out of the way; but it is not impossible that there may be an allusion in it to the author's own family name of Eyquem, though that would be rather farfetched, as he says; but then there is Plato at hand, still to keep us in countenance.

But to return to the point of digression. 'And this Pierre, or William, what is it but a sound when all is done? Or three or four dashes with a pen, so easy to be varied, that I would fain know to whom is to be attributed the glory of so many victories, to Guesquin, to Glesquin, or to Gueaguin. And yet there would be something more in the case than in Lucian that Sigma should serve Tau with a process, for "He seeks no mean rewards." The quere is here in good earnest. The point is, which of these letters is to be rewarded for so many sieges, battles, wounds, imprisonment, and services done to the crown of France by this famous constable. Nicholas Denisot never concerned himself further than the letters of his name, of which he has altered the whole contexture, to build up by anagram the Count d'Alsinois whom he has endowed with the glory of his poetry and painting. [A good precedent – but here is a better one.] And the historian Suetonius looked only to the meaning of his; and so, cashiering his fathers surname, Lenis left Tranquillus successor to the reputation of his writings. Who would believe that the Captain Bayard should have no honour but what he derives from the great deeds of Peter (Pierre) Terrail, [the name of Bayard – "the meaning"] and that Antonio Escalin should suffer himself, to his face, to be robbed of the honour of so many navigations, and commands at sea and land, by Captain Poulin and the Baron de la Garde. [The name of Poulin was taken from the place where he was born, De la Garde from a person who took him in his boyhood into his service.] Who hinders my groom from calling himself Pompey the Great? But, after all, what virtue, what springs are there that convey to my deceased groom, or the other Pompey (who had his head cut off in Egypt), this glorious renown, and these so much honoured flourishes of the pen?' Instructive suggestions, especially when taken in connection with the preceding items contained in this chapter, apparently so casually introduced, yet all with a stedfast bearing on this question of names, and all pointing by means of a thread of delicate sounds, and not less delicate suggestions, to another instance, in which the possibility of circumstances tending to countervail the so natural desire to appropriate to the name derived from one's ancestors, the lustre of one's deeds, is clearly demonstrated.

''Tis with good reason that men decry the hypocrisy that is in war; for what is more easy to an old soldier than to shift in time of danger, and to counterfeit bravely, when he has no more heart than a chicken. There are so many ways to avoid hazarding a man's own person' – 'and had we the use of the Platonic ring, which renders those invisible that wear it, if turned inwards towards the palm of the hand, it is to be feared that a great many would often hide themselves, when they ought to appear.' 'It seems that to be known, is in some sort to a man's life and its duration in another's keeping. I for my part, hold that I am wholly in myself, and that other life of mine which lies in the knowledge of my friends, considering it nakedly and simply in itself, I know very well that I am sensible of no fruit or enjoyment of it but by the vanity of a fantastic opinion; and, when I shall be dead, I shall be much less sensible of it, and shall withal absolutely lose the use of those real advantages that sometimes accidentally follow it. [That was Lord Bacon's view, too, exactly.] I shall have no more handle whereby to take hold of reputation, or whereby it may take hold of me: for to expect that my name should receive it, in the first place, I have no name that is enough my own. Of two that I have, one is common to all my race, and even to others also: there is one family at Paris, and another at Montpelier, whose surname is Montaigne; another in Brittany, and Xaintonge called De la Montaigne. The transposition of one syllable only is enough to ravel our affairs, so that I shall peradventure share in their glory, and they shall partake of my shame; and, moreover, my ancestors were formerly surnamed Eyquem, a name wherein a family well known in England at this day is concerned. As to my other name, any one can take it that will, and so, perhaps, I may honour a porter in my own stead. And, besides, though I had a particular distinction myself, what can it distinguish when I am no more. Can it point out and favour inanity?

'But of this I have spoken elsewhere.' He has – and to purpose.

But as to the authority for these readings, Lord Bacon himself will give us that; for this is the style which he discriminates so sharply as 'the enigmatical,' a style which he, too, finds to have been in use among the ancients, and which he tells us has some affinity with that new method of making over knowledge from the mind of the teacher to that of the pupil, which he terms the method of progression– (which is the method of essaie) – in opposition to the received method, the only method he finds in use, which he, too, calls the magisterial. And this method of progression, with which the enigmatical has some affinity, is to be used, he tells us, in cases where knowledge is delivered as a thread to be spun on, where science is to be removed from one mind to another to grow from the root, and not delivered as trees for the use of the carpenter, where the root is of no consequence. In this case, he tells us it is necessary for the teacher to descend to the foundations of knowledge and consent, and so to transplant it into another as it grew in his own mind, 'whereas as knowledge is now delivered, there is a kind of contract of error between the deliverer and the receiver, for he that delivereth knowledge desireth to deliver it in such a form as may best be believed, and not as may best be examined: and he that receiveth knowledge desireth rather present satisfaction than expectant inquiry, and so rather not to doubt than not to err, glory making the author not to lay open his weakness, and sloth making the disciple not to know his strength.' Now, so very grave a defect as this, in the method of the delivery and tradition of Learning, would of course be one of the first things that would require to be remedied in any plan in which 'the Advancement' of it was seriously contemplated. And this method of the delivery and tradition of knowledge which transfers the root with them, that they may grow in the mind of the learner, is the method which this philosopher professes to find wanting, and the one which he seems disposed to invent. He has made a very thorough survey of the stores of the ancients, and is not unacquainted with the more recent history of learning; he knows exactly what kinds of methods have been made use of by the learned in all ages, for the purpose of putting themselves into some tolerable and possible relations with the physical majority; he knows what devices they have always been compelled to resort to, for the purpose of establishing some more or less effective communication between themselves and that world to which they instinctively seek to transfer their doctrine. But this method, which he suggests here as the essential condition of the growth and advancement of learning, he does not find invented. He refers to a method which he calls the enigmatical, which has an affinity with it, 'used in some cases by the discretion of the ancients,' but disgraced since, 'by the impostures of persons, who have made it as a false light for their counterfeit merchandises.' The purpose of this latter style is, as he defines it, 'to remove the secrets of knowledge from the penetration of the more vulgar capacities, and to reserve them to selected auditors, or to wits of such sharpness as can pierce the veil.' And that is a method, he tells us, which philosophy can by no means dispense with in his time, and 'whoever would let in new light upon the human understanding must still have recourse to it.' But the method of delivery and tradition in those ancient schools, appears to have been too much of the dictatorial kind to suit this proposer of advancement; its tendency was to arrest knowledge instead of promoting its growth. He is not pleased with the ambition of those old masters, and thinks they aimed too much at a personal impression, and that they sometimes undertook to impose their own particular and often very partial grasp of those universal doctrines and principles, which are and must be true for all men, in too dogmatical and magisterial a manner, without making sufficient allowance for the growth of the mind of the world, the difference of races, etc.

But if any doubt in regard to the use of the method described, in the composition of the work now first produced as AN EXAMPLE of the use of it, should still remain in any mind; or if this method of unravelling it should seem too studious, perhaps the author's own word for it in one more quotation may be thought worth taking.

'I can give no account of my life by MY ACTIONS, fortune has placed them too low; I must do it BY MY FANCIES. And when shall I have done representing the continual agitation and change of my thoughts as they come into my head, seeing that Diomedes filled six thousand books upon the subject of grammar.' [The commentators undertake to set him right here, but the philosopher only glances in his intention at the voluminousness of the science of words, in opposition to the science of things, which he came to establish.] 'What must prating produce, since prating itself, and the first beginning to speak, stuffed the world with such a horrible load of volumes. So many words about words only. They accused one Galba, of old, of living idly; he made answer that every one ought to give account of his actions, but not of his leisure. He was mistaken, for justice– [the civil authority] – has cognizance and jurisdiction over those that do nothing, or only PLAY at WORKING… Scribbling appears to be the sign of a disordered age. Every man applies himself negligently to the duty of his vocation at such a time and debauches in it.' From that central wrong of an evil government, an infectious depravity spreads and corrupts all particulars. Everything turns from its true and natural course. Thus scribbling is the sign of a disordered age. Men write in such times instead of acting; and scribble, or seem to perhaps, instead of writing openly to purpose.

And yet, again, that central, and so divergent, wrong is the result of each man's particular contribution, as he goes on to assert. 'The corruption of this age is made up by the particular contributions of every individual man,' —

He were no lion, were not Romans hinds. —Cassius.

'Some contribute treachery, others injustice, irreligion, tyranny, avarice and cruelty, according as they have power; the WEAKER SORT CONTRIBUTE FOLLY, VANITY, and IDLENESS, and of these I am one.'

Caesar loves no plays as thou dost, Antony. Such men are dangerous.

Or, as the same poet expresses it in another Roman play: —

And that is made the plea for an attempt to overthrow the popular power, and to replace it with a government containing the true head of the state, its nobility, its learning, its gentleness, its wisdom.

But the essayist continues: – 'It seems as if it were the season for vain things when the hurtful oppress us; in a time when doing ill is common, to do nothing but what signifies nothing is a kind of commendation. 'Tis my comfort that I shall be one of the last that shall be called in question, – for it would be against reason to punish the less troublesome while we are infested with the greater. As the physician said to one who presented him his finger to dress, and who, as he perceived, had an ulcer in his lungs, "Friend, it is not now time to concern yourself about your finger's ends." And yet I saw some years ago, a person, whose name and memory I have in very great esteem, in the very height of our great disorders, when there was neither law nor justice put in execution, nor magistrate that performed his office, —no more than there is now, – publish I know not what pitiful reformations about clothes, cookery and law chicanery. These are amusements wherewith to feed a people that are ill used, to show that they are not totally forgotten. These others do the same, who insist upon stoutly defending the forms of speaking, dances and games to a people totally abandoned to all sorts of execrable vices – it is for the Spartans only to fall to combing and curling themselves, when they are just upon the point of running headlong into some extreme danger of their lives.

'For my part, I have yet a worse custom. I scorn to mend myself by halves. If my shoe go awry, I let my shirt and my cloak do so too: when I am out of order I feed on mischief. I abandon myself through despair, and let myself go towards the precipice, and as the saying is, throw the helve after the hatchet.' We should not need, perhaps, the aid of the explanations already quoted, to show us that the author does not confess this custom of his for the sake of commending it to the sense or judgment of the reader, – who sees it here for the first time it may be put into words or put on paper, who looks at it here, perhaps, for the first time objectively, from the critical stand-point which the review of another's confession creates; and though it may have been latent in the dim consciousness of his own experience, or practically developed, finds it now for the first time, collected from the phenomena of the blind, instinctive, human motivity, and put down on the page of science, as a principle in nature, in human nature also.

But this is indeed a Spartan combing and curling, that the author is falling to, in the introductory flourishes ('diversions' as he calls them) of this great adventure, that his pen is out for now: he is indeed upon the point of running headlong into the fiercest dangers; – it is the state, the wretched, discased, vicious state, dying apparently, yet full of teeth and mischief, that he is about to handle in his argument with these fine, lightsome, frolicsome preparations of his, without any perceptible 'mittens'; it is the heart of that political evil that his time groans with, and begins to find insufferable, that he is going to probe to the quick with that so delicate weapon. It is a tilt against the block and the rack, and all the instruments of torture, that he is going to manage, as handsomely, and with as many sacrifices to the graces, as the circumstances will admit of. But the political situation which he describes so boldly (and we have already seen what it is) affects us here in its relation to the question of style only, and as the author himself connects it with the point of our inquiry.

'A man may regret,' he says, 'the better times, but cannot fly from the present, we may wish for other magistrates, but we must, notwithstanding, obey those we have; and, peradventure, it is more laudable to obey the bad than the good, so long as the image of the ancient and received laws of this monarchy shall shine in any corner of the kingdom. If they happen, unfortunately, to thwart and contradict one another, so as to produce two factions of doubtful choice,' —

– 'in this contingency will willingly choose,' continues the other, 'to withdraw from the tempest, and in the meantime, nature or the hazards of war may lend me a helping hand. Betwixt Cæsar and Pompey, I should soon and frankly have declared myself, but amongst the three robbers that came after, a man must needs have either hid himself, or have gone along with the current of the time, which I think a man may lawfully do, when reason no longer rules.' 'Whither dost thou wandering go?'

'This medley is a little from my subject, I go out of my way but 'tis rather by licence than oversight. My fancies follow one another, but sometimes at a great distance, and look towards one another, but 'tis with an oblique glance. I have read a DIALOGUE of PLATO of such a motley and fantastic composition. The beginning was about love, and all the rest ABOUT RHETORIC. They stick not (that is, the ancients) at these variations, and have a marvellous grace in letting themselves to be carried away at the pleasure of the winds; or at least to seem as if they were. The titles of my chapters do not always comprehend the whole matter, they often denote it by some mark only, as those other titles Andria Eunuchus, or these, Sylla, Cicero, Torquatus. I love a poetic march, by leaps and skips, 'tis an art, as Plato says, light, nimble; and a little demoniacal. There are places in Plutarch where he forgets his theme, where the proposition of his argument is only found incidentally, and stuffed throughout with foreign matter. Do but observe his meanders in the Demon of Socrates. How beautiful are his variations and digressions; and then most of all, when they seem to be fortuitous, [hear] and introduced for want of heed. 'Tis the indiligent reader that loses my subject —not I. There will always be found some words or other in a corner that are to the purpose, though it lie very close [that is the unfailing rule]. I ramble about indiscreetly and tumultously: my style and my wit wander at the same rate, [he wanders wittingly]. A little folly is desirable in him that will not be guilty of stupidity, say the precepts, and much more the examples of our masters. A thousand poets flag and languish after a prosaic manner; but the best old prose, and I strew it here up and down indifferently for verse, shines throughout with the vigor and boldness of poetry, and represents some air of its fury. Certainly, prose must yield the pre-eminence in speaking. "The poet," says Plato, "when set upon the muse's tripod, pours out with fury, whatever comes into his mouth, like the pipe of a fountain, without considering and pausing upon what he says, and things come from him of various colors, of contrary substance, and with an irregular torrent": he himself (Plato) is all over poetical, and all the old theology (as the learned inform us) is poetry, and the first philosophy, is the origiual language of the gods.

'I would have the matter distinguish itself; it sufficiently shows where it changes, where it concludes, where it begins, and where it resumes, without interlacing it with words of connection, introduced for the relief of weak or negligent ears, and without commenting myself. Who is he that had not rather not be read at all, than after a drowsy or cursory manner? Seeing I cannot fix the reader's attention by the weight of what I write, maneo male, if I should chance to do it by my intricacies. [Hear]. I mortally hate obscurity and would avoid it if I could. In such an employment, to whom you will not give an hour you will give nothing; and you do nothing for him for whom you only do, whilst you are doing something else. To which may be added, that I have, perhaps, some particular obligation to speak only by halves, to speak confusedly and discordantly.'

But this is, perhaps, enough to show, in the way of direct assertion, that we have here, at least, a philosophical work composed in that style which Lord Bacon calls 'the enigmatical,' in which he tells us the secrets of knowledge are reserved for selected auditors, or wits of such sharpness as can pierce the veil; a style which he, too, tells us was sometimes used by the discretion of the ancients, though he does not specify either Plutarch or Plato; in that place, and one which he introduces in connection with his new method of progression, in consequence of its having, as he tells us, some affinity with it, and that we have here also a specimen of that new method itself, by means of which knowledge is to be delivered as a thread to be spun on.

But let us leave, for the present, this wondrous Gascon, though it is not very easy to do so, so long as we have our present subject in hand, – this philosopher, whose fancies look towards one another at such long, such very long distances, sometimes, though not always, with an oblique glance, who dares to depend so much upon the eye of his reader, and especially upon the reader of that 'far-off' age he writes to. It would have been indeed irrelevant to introduce the subject of this foreign work and its style in this connection without further explanation, but for the identity of political situation already referred to, and but for those subtle, interior, incessant connections with the higher writings of the great Elizabethan school, which form the main characteristic of this production. The fact, that this work was composed in the country in which the chief Elizabethan men attained their maturity, that it dates from the time in which Bacon was completing his education there, that it covers ostensibly not the period only, but the scenes and events of Raleigh's six years campaigning there, as well as the fact alluded to by this author himself, in a passage already quoted, – the fact that there was a family then in England, very well known, who bore the surname of his ancestors, a family of the name of Eyquem, he tells us with whom, perhaps, he still kept up some secret correspondence and relations, the fact, too, which he mentions in his chapter on Names, that a surname in France is very easily acquired, and is not necessarily derived from one's ancestors, – that same chapter in which he adduces so many instances of men who, notwithstanding that inveterate innate love of the honour of one's own proper name, which is in men of genius still more inveterate, – have for one reason or another been willing to put upon anagrams, or synonyms, or borrowed names, all their honours, so that in the end it is William or Pierre who takes them into his possession, and bears them, or it's the name of 'an African slave' perhaps, or the name of a 'groom' (promoted, it may be, to the rank of a jester, or even to that of a player,) that gets all the glory. All these facts, taken in connection with the conclusions already established, though insignificant in themselves, will be found anything but that for the philosophical student who has leisure to pursue the inquiry.