Rather, when the whole matter is duly weighed, charitable minds may be inclined to lend an ear to rare Ben Jonson, who says: "In his adversity, I ever prayed that God would give him strength, for greatness he could not want; neither could I condole in a word or syllable for him, as knowing no accident could do harm to virtue, but rather help to make it manifest: "O mighty love! Man is one world All men see the world without, after a certain fashion; but each man only can see his own world within. We are accustomed (safely enough in general) to judge the soul of another by the relations which it may seem to sustain to the moving world of things without. But inasmuch as the best soul has to swim on the bosom of the stream, it may, in spite of itself, fall into the strangest apparent relations to the whirl of things that float together upon the surface: it is still possible for a pure soul to swim unstained in very guilty looking company. What if it were possible for a great soul to be able to administer justice to a school of bribers! A certain other, for doing the like of this, was nailed up between two thieves as if he had been no better than they; for to the nailors he appeared to steal corn on Sunday. Temples of Jerusalem, and Ephesus, and St. Peter, and St. Paul! What sums have not been expended in attempting to bribe the Supreme Judge to pass in goats among the sheep! So much may be permitted, and justice be administered, nevertheless, at "the top of judgment." § 2. PHILOSOPHER AND Poet. Shakespeare has long been considered by all that speak the English tongue, and by the learned of other nations likewise, as the greatest of dramatic poets. The ancients had but one Homer: the moderns have but one Shakespeare. And these two have been fitly styled "the Twin Stars of Poesy" in all the world. These plays have kept the stage better than any other for nearly three centuries. They have been translated into several foreign languages; a vast amount of critical erudition has been expended upon them; and numerous editions have been printed, and countless numbers of copies have been distributed, generation after generation, increasing in a kind of geometrical progression, through all ranks and classes of society from the metropolitan palace to the frontier cabin, until it may almost be said, that if there be anywhere a family possessing but two only books, the one may be the Bible, but the other is sure to be Shakespeare. Nevertheless, the plays have been understood and appreciated rather according to existing standards of judgment than according to all that was really in them. In general, our English minds seem to have been aware that their poet was more or less philosophical, or rather that he was a kind of universal genius; but that he was a Platonic thinker, a transcendental metaphysician and philosopher, an idealist and a realist all in one, not many seem to have discovered. Coleridge certainly had some inkling of this fact, and to Carlyle, it stood perfectly clear, that Shakespeare “does not look at a thing, but into it, through it; so that he constructively comprehends it, can take it asunder, and put it together again; the thing melts, as it were, into light under his eye, and anew creates itself before him. That is to say, he is a Thinker in the highest of all senses: he is a Poet. For Goethe, as for Shakespeare, the world lies all translucent, all fusible we might call it, encircled with WONDER; the Natural in reality the Supernatural, for to the seer's eyes both become one.' And so also Gervinus concludes upon the question of " the realistic or ideal treatment," that "he is sometimes the one, sometimes the other, but in reality neither, because he is both at once."2 Deep searching criticism, on this side of the sea, has been able to sound the depths and scale the heights of the Higher 1 Essays, III. 209. 2 Shakespeare Comm. (London, 1863), II. 569. "1 Philosophy of Bacon, and it is almost equally clear that it has discovered in it the world-streaming providence of Shakespeare. "The English shrink from a generalization," says Emerson. "They do not look abroad into universality, or they draw only a bucket-full at the fountain of the First Philosophy for their occasion, and do not go to the springhead. Bacon, who said this, is almost unique among his countrymen in that faculty, at least among the prose-writers. Milton, who was the stair or high table-land to let down the English genius from the summits of Shakespeare, used this privilege sometimes in poetry, more rarely in prose. For a long interval afterwards, it is not found." 1 We know how Bacon attained to these heights; but it is not explained how the unlearned William Shakespeare reached these same "summits" of all philosophy, otherwise than by a suggestion of "the specific gravity" of inborn genius. Have we any evidence outside of these plays, that this "dry light" of nature was greater in William Shakespeare than in Francis Bacon? In Bacon, as in the plays, we have not only the inborn genius, but a life of study, knowledge, science, philosophy, art, and the wealth of all learning. Are these things to be counted as nothing? Then we may as well abolish the universities, burn the libraries, and shut up the schools, as of no use: — "Hang up philosophy: Unless philosophy can make a Juliet, It helps not, it prevails not: talk no more." Romeo and Juliet, Act III. Sc. 3. For the most part, all that has been seen in Shakespeare has been considered as the product of some kind of natural genius or spontaneous inspiration. The reason has been nearly this, that since Bacon, if Berkeley be excepted, England, or the English language, has never had a philosophy at all: we have had nothing but a few sciences and a theology. Bacon's Summary Philosophy, or Philosophy 1 English Traits, 244. itself, seems to have fallen still-born from his delivery, a dead letter to our English mind. It was not grasped, and the existence of it in his works seems to have been forgotten. No English, or American, philosopher has yet appeared to review, expound, and complete it, in any systematic manner: this work has been left to those who are said to hold dominion of the air. Some there have been, doubtless, as capable as any of undertaking to give a complete systematic statement of all philosophy; but they probably knew too well what kind of an undertaking that would be, when a perfect work might require not only a divine man, but a book as large as the Book of God's Works. The men that are called philosophers among us are occupied with physical science only. What Bacon endeavored to re-organize, and constitute anew, as methods and instruments for obtaining a broader and surer “foundation" for a higher metaphysical philosophy, they appear to have mistaken for the whole of science and the sum total of all certain knowledge, excepting only a fantastical kind of traditional supernatural knowledge, for the most part, completely ignoring metaphysics; and, as a matter of course, they have given us as little conception of a philosophy of the universe, and, with all their physical science, have had as little to give, as a Humboldt's Cosmos, or that prodigious Frenchman, M. Auguste Comte. Besides a physical science we have had only a theology, taking old Hebrew and some later Greek literature for all divine revelation; the Mosaic cosmogony for the constitution of the universe; Usher's chronology for an account of all time on this earth; Adamic genealogy for an ethnology of the human race; Jesus of Nazareth for the creator of the whole world and sole saviour of mankind; and some five or six fantastic miracles for all the boundless and eternal wonders of the creation. These old ones are nearly worn out, and are fast becoming obsolete: indeed, they are already well-nigh extinct. It is high time they were laid up on a shelf, and labelled to be studied hereafter as fossils of the theological kingdom; and preachers, opening their eyes, should cast about for a new set, at least, out of all the universe of miracles that surround them, and henceforth The found the preaching on them. There would then be much less trouble about faith, and infidelity to myths and superstitions might become fidelity to God and his truth. And so, having no philosophy, and no conception of the possibility of any, and nothing to give the name to, our English mind has appropriated the word as a superfluous synonym for physical science, and scarcely allowed free scope to that; and among us, the Newtons, Franklins, Faradays, Brewsters, and Darwins, are called philosophers, as Hegel said. These men are certainly to be ranked among the master minds of the world as original inventors and discoverers in physics, as philosophical observers and excellent writers on physical science, with the addition, in some instances, of a considerable sprinkling of orthodox theology, and in some others, as in Newton, the younger Herschel, Agassiz, Peirce, with the addition of not a few remarkable deep-soundings into the fundamental depths of things and the hidden mysteries of creation; as it were, some prophetic flashes of the most exalted intellect across the darkness of their own age and time in dim anticipation of a coming century; as when Newton says, " Only whatever light be, I would suppose it consists of successive rays differing from one another in contingent circumstances, as bigness, force, or vigor, like as the sands of the shore, the waves of the sea, the faces of men, and all other natural things of the same kind differ, it being almost impossible for any sort of things to be formed without some contingent variety." And again, "Every soul that has perception is, though in different times and in different organs of sense and motion, still the same indivisible person. There are given successive parts in duration, co-existent parts in space, but neither the one nor the other in the person of a man, 66 |