benignity with noble daring belong to some of his favourite characters. In the beautiful writings of Heywood Charles Lamb considers that generosity, courtesy, sweetness, gentleness and Christianism shine more conspicuous than in those of Shakespeare; an opinion which Mr J. A. Symonds endorses as "in many points a just one. Mr Symonds adds, Heywood has a sincerity, a tenderness of pathos and an instinctive perception of nobility. Dekker we are told was "a man whose inborn sweetness and gleefulness of soul carried him through vexations and miseries which would have crushed a spirit less hopeful, cheerful and humane. " 1 When we compare these characteristics with those of Francis Bacon we perceive the remarkable identity of temperament. "His mildness, says Spedding, "was the effect of the sweetness, thoughtfulness, nobleness and modesty of his nature. From his youth upwards his health was in a ticklish unsettled state. While he and his brother and Anthony were poor and working for bread Francis suffered from "a long and languishing infirmity." In 1595 we find Lady Anne Bacon fretting over her son and writing to Anthony, "I am sorry your brother with inward secret grief hindereth his health." In later life the storms that passed over his head left him physically, and almost mentally a wreck. Among his letters is one endorsed "To my Lord of Bucking"I thank God, ham after my troubles, says, "I have overcome the bitterness of this cup by Christian resolution, so that worldly matters are but mint and cumin. 1 (Memoir of Thomas Dekker. Works 1873). he "Superhuman man of spirit," writes Brandes, "he embodied nature within and overcame the bitterness caused by his wrongs in the harmony of his own richly spiritual life." These extraordinarily apt words are applied by Brandes, not to Francis Bacon, but to Prospero in whom, as all critics are agreed, Shakespeare delineated himself. In the Tragedy of The Broken Heart1 Ford writes, My fame.... I bequeath To Memory and Time's old daughter Truth; a hope which rings like a pathetic echo of the words in Bacon's draft Will and Testament, "For my name and memory, I leave it to men's charitable speeches and to foreign nations and the next ages; and to mine own countrymen after some time be past. I (III. 1.) 1633. CHAPTER XV CONCLUSION My imperfect outline is now finished, leaving me with the discouraged consciousness of how much I have left unsaid. So far, however, as regards the unity of a large section of the Elizabethan Drama, the proof of this by parallelisms could be indefinitely extended. Hardly a week passes without some writer discovering and pointing out fresh and inexplicable plagiarisms and "coincidences," and this field is quite exhaustless. As It now merely remains to consider the leading facts and to seek some logical solution for them; but before proceeding to this I shall venture to adduce a few more reminders of the intellectual barbarism of the Elizabethan era. Shakespeare has so gilded and refined this epoch that almost necessarily we judge it by his greatness. I have already said the truer compliment to Elizabethan Literature is to measure its proportions by the infamy and meanness of its cradle. Shakespeare's aerolites are so skyey, that to the detriment of true appreciation, in following them one is unconsciously lifted from the soggy earth and grows forgetful of the squalor into which they fell. Buckle, in his History of Civilisation in England, observes, "It is difficult for an ordinary reader, to living in the middle of the nineteenth century, understand that only three hundred years before he was born, the public mind was in the benighted state disclosed in the preceding chapter. It is still more difficult for him to understand that the darkness was shared not merely by men of an average education, but by men of considerable ability, men in every respect among the foremost of their age. A reader of this sort may satisfy himself that the evidence is indisputable; he may verify the statements I have brought forward, and admit that there is no possible doubt about them; but even then he will find it hard to conceive that there ever was a state of society in which such miserable absurdities were welcomed as sober and important truths, and were supposed to form an essential part of the general stock of European knowledge. "But a more careful examination will do much to dissipate this natural astonishment. In point of fact, so far from wondering that such things were believed, the wonder would have been if they were rejected. For in those times, as in all others, everything was of a piece. Not only in historical literature, but in all kinds of literature, on every subject-in Science, in Religion, in Legislationthe presiding principle was a blind and unhesitating credulity. The more the history of Europe anterior to the seventeenth century is studied, the more completely will this fact be verified. Now and then a great man arose, who had his doubts respecting the universal belief; who whispered a suspicion as to the existence of giants thirty feet high, of dragons with wings, and of armies flying through the air; who thought that astrology might be a cheat, and necromancy a bubble; and who even went so far as to raise a question respecting the propriety of drowning every witch and burning every heretic. A few such men there undoubtedly were; but they were despised as mere theorists, idle visionaries, who, unacquainted with the practice of life, arrogantly opposed their own reason to the wisdom of their ancestors. In the state of society in which they were born, it was impossible that they should make any permanent impression. Indeed, they had enough to do to look to themselves, and provide for their own security; for, until the latter part of the sixteenth century, there was no country in which a man. was not in great personal peril if he expressed open doubts respecting the belief of his contemporaries. " 1 In the time of Shakespeare the so-called "civilisation" of Europe was for the most part a whirlpool of brute force. Englishmen were little, if anything, behind the rest of the world in the folly and ferocity of their minds. Life, as Burton somewhere expresses it, was but little better than "a snarling fit; the more closely studied the more beastlike are the existing conditions seen to have been. To the discerning eyes of Robert Burton our English towns were but mean, basebuilt, unglorious, poor, small, rare in sight, ruinous, thin of inhabitants, vile and ugly to behold. "Amongst them," says he, "there is only London that bears the face of a city, the rest in mean estate, ruinous most part, poor and full of beggars ready to starve rather than work, I Vol 1. pp. 269-270. London 1903. |