The times in which great political struggles are actually going on are not the most favourable for production in the fields of literature and art. These flourish best in the preceding or following ages, during which the impulse attending those movements begins or continues to be felt. Just such an epoch was the period of thirty or forty years between the defeat of the Armada and the outbreak of the Parliamentary troubles, a period comprising the later years of Queen Elizabeth and the earlier years of King James I. This was the epoch in which the English nation attained to a position of influence on the world at large, and in which at the same time those far-reaching differences about the most important questions of the inner life of the nation arose. The antagonism of ideas which stirred men's minds generally could not but reproduce itself in literature. But we also see other grand products of the age far transcending the limits of the present struggle. Our survey of the history will gain in completeness if we cast even but a transient glance, first at the former and then at the latter class of these products. In Scotland the studies connected with classical antiquity were prosecuted with as much zeal as anywhere else in Europe; not however in order to imitate its forms in the native idiom, which no one at that time even in Germany thought of doing, but in order to use it in learned theological controversies, and to maintain connexion with brother Protestants of other tongues. S. Andrew's was at one time a centre for Protestant learning: Poles and Danes, Germans and French visited this university in order to study under Melville. Even Latin verse was written with a certain elegance. It might perhaps be said that it was in Scotland that the two systems arose which since that time, although in various shapes, have divided Britain and Europe. In the historians just mentioned we might see the types of two schools, whose opposite conceptions of universal and especially of English history, set forth by writers of brilliant ability, have exercised the greatest influence upon prevailing ideas. What a remarkable work would it have been, had Walter Ralegh himself recorded the history of his time. But the opposition between parties was not so outspoken in England as in Scotland; it had not to justify itself by general principles, to which men could give their adhesion; it contained too much personal ill-feeling and hatred for any one who was involved in the strife to have been able to find satisfaction in expressing himself on this head. The history of the world which Walter Ralegh had leisure to write in his prison, is an endeavour to put together the materials of Universal History as they lay before him from ancient times, and so make them more intelligible. He touches on the events of his age only in allusions, which excited attention at the time, but remain obscure to posterity. In direct opposition to the Scots, especially to Buchanan, Camden, who wrote in Latin like the former, composed his Annals of the Reign of Queen Elizabeth. His contemporary, De Thou, borrowed much from Buchanan. Camden reproaches him with this, partly because in Scotland men preached atrocious principles with regard to the authority of the people and their right of keeping their kings in When we read Camden's letters we become acquainted with a circle of scholars engaged in the severest studies. In his Britannia, which gives a more complete and instructive picture of the country than any other work, they all took a lively interest. Their works are clumsy and old-fashioned, but they breathe a spirit of thoroughness and breadth which does honour to the age. With what zeal were ecclesiastical antiquities studied in Cambridge, after Whitaker had pointed the way! Men sought to weed out what was spurious, and in what was genuine to set aside the part due to the accidental forms of the time, and to penetrate to the bottom of the sentiments, the belief, and activity of the writers. The constitution of the Church naturally led them to devote special study to the old provincial councils. For the history of the country they referred to the monuments of Anglo-Saxon times, and began even in treating of other subjects to bring the original sources to light. Everywhere men advanced beyond the old limits which had been drawn by the tradition Francis Bacon was attracted by the task of depicting at length a modern epoch, the history of the Tudors, with the various changes which it presented and the great results it had introduced, in which he saw the unity of a connected series of events. Yet he has only treated the history of the first of that line. He furnishes one of the first examples of exact investigation of details combined with reflective treatment of history, and has exercised a controlling influence on the manner and style of writing English history, especially by the introduction of considerations of law, which play a great part in his work. The political points of view which are present to the author are almost more those of the beginning of the seventeenth than those of the beginning of the sixteenth century. But these epochs are closely connected with each other. For what Henry VII established is just what James I, who loved to connect himself immediately with the former monarch, wished to continue. Bacon was a staunch defender of the prerogative. The dispute which arose between Bacon as a lawyer and Edward Coke deserves notice. Coke also has a place in literature. His reports are, even at the present day, known without his name simply as 'The Reports,' and his 'Institutes' is one of the most learned works which this age produced. It is rather a collection provided with notes, but is instructive and suggestive from the variety of and the contrast of its contents. Coke traced the English laws to the remotest antiquity; he considered them as the common production of the wisest men of earlier ages, and at the same time as the great inheritance of the English people, and its best protection against every kind of tyranny, spiritual or temporal. Even the old Norman French, in which they were to a great extent composed, he would not part with, for a peculiar meaning attached itself, in his view, to every word. On the other hand Bacon as Attorney-General formed the plan of comprising the common law in a code, by which a limit should be set to the caprice of the judges, Bacon's purpose coincided with the idea of a general system of legislation entertained by the King: he would have preferred the Roman law to the statute law of England. Coke was a man devoted to the letter of the law, and was inclined to offer that resistance to the sovereign which was implied in a strict adherence to the law as it was. In the conflict that arose the judges, influenced by his example, appealed to the laws as they were laid down, according to the verbal meaning of which they thought themselves bound to decide. Bacon maintained that the Judges' oath was meant to include obedience to the King also, to whom application must be made in every matter affecting his prerogative. This is probably what Queen Elizabeth also thought, and it was the decided opinion of King James. He made the man who cherished similar views his Lord Chancellor, and dismissed Coke from his service. Bacon when in office was responsible for a catastrophe which, as we shall see, not only ruined himself, but reacted upon the monarchy. The English, contemporaries and posterity alike, have taken the side of Coke. Yet Bacon's industry in business is not therefore altogether to be despised. He urged the King, who was disposed to judge hastily, to take time and to weigh the reasons of both parties. He gave the judges who went on circuit through the country the most pertinent advice. The directions which he drew up for the Court of Chancery have laid the foundations of the practice of that court, and are still an authority for it. His scheme of collecting and reforming the English laws still, even at the present day, appears to statesmen learned in the law to be an unavoidable necessity; and the opinion is spreading that steps must be taken in this matter in the direction already pointed out by Bacon. Bacon was one of the last men who identified the welfare of England with the development of the monarchical element in the constitution, or at all events with But it cannot be denied that he brought his ideas into a connexion with his interests, which was fatal to the acceptance of the former. His is just a case in which we feel relieved when we turn from the disputes of the day to the free domain of scientific activity, in which his true life was spent. He has indeed said himself that he was better fitted to hold a book in his hands than to shine upon the stage of the world. In his studies he had only science itself and the whole of the world before his eyes. The scholastic system founded on Aristotle, the inheritance of centuries of ecclesiastical supremacy, had been assailed some time before he took up the subject; and the inductive method which he opposed to that system was not anything quite new. But the idea of Bacon had the most comprehensive tendency: it tended to free the thoughts and enquiries of men of science from the assumptions of a speculative theology which regulated their spiritual horizon. The most renowned adversaries of scholasticism he had to encounter in turn, because they covered things with a new web of words and theories which he could not accept. He thought to free men from the deceptive notions by which their minds are prepossessed, from the fascination of words which throw a veil over things, and of tradition consecrated by great names, and to open to them the sphere of the certain knowledge of experience. Nature is in his eyes God's book, which man must study directly for His glory and for the relief of man's estate; he thought that men must start from sense and experience, in order that by intercourse with things they might discover the cause of phenomena. In these speculations the philosopher became aware that there was a risk lest men should imagine that by this means they could also discover the nature of God. Bacon lays down a complete separation of these two provinces; for he thinks that men can only attain to second causes, not to the first cause, which is God; and that the human mind can only cope with natural things; that divine things on the contrary confuse it. He will not even investigate the nature of the human soul, for it does not owe its origin to the productive powers of nature, but to the breath of God. It had been from the beginning the tendency of those schools of philosophy erected on the basis of ancient systems, in which Latin and Teutonic elements were blended, to transfuse faith with scientific knowledge; but Bacon renounces this attempt from the beginning. He puts forward with almost repulsive abruptness the paradoxes which the Christian must believe: he declares it an Icarian flight to wish to penetrate these secrets: but so much stronger is the impulse he seeks to give the human mind in the direction of enquiry Among these he ranks the state of human society, to which all his life long he devoted a careful and searching observation. His Essays are not at all sceptical, like the French essays, from which he may have borrowed this appellation: they are thoroughly dogmatic. They consist of remarks on the relations of life as they then presented themselves, especially upon the points of contact between private and public life, and of counsels drawn from the perception of the conflicting qualities of things. They are extremely instructive for the internal relations of English society. They show wide observation and calm wisdom, and, like his philosophical works, are a treasure for the English nation, whose views of life have been built upon them. What better legacy can one generation leave to another than the sum of its experiences which have an importance extending beyond the fleeting moment, when they are couched in a form which makes them useful for all time? Herein consists the earthly immortality of the soul. But another possession of still richer contents and of incomparable value was secured to the English nation by the development of the drama, which falls just within this epoch. In former times there had been theatrical representations in the palaces of the kings and of great men, in the universities, and among judicial and civic societies. They formed part of the enjoyments of the Carnival or contributed to the brilliancy of other festivities; but they did not come into full existence until Elizabeth allowed them to the people by a general permission. In earlier times the scholars of the higher schools or the members of learned fraternities, the artisans in the towns, and the members of the household of great men and princes, had themselves conducted the representation. Actors by profession now arose, who received pay and performed the whole year round. While the town theatres and their productions were thus struggling to rise in mutual rivalry, the genius of William Shakspeare developed itself: at that time he was lost among the crowd of rivals, but his fame has increased from age to age among posterity. It especially concerns us to notice that he brought on the stage a number of events taken from English history itself. In the praise which has been lavishly bestowed on him, of having rendered them with historical truth, we cannot entirely agree. For who could affirm that his King John and Henry VIII, his Gloucester and Winchester, or even his Maid of Orleans, resemble the originals whose names they bear? The author forms his own conception of the great questions at issue. While he follows the chronicle as closely as possible, and adopts its characteristic traits, he yet assigns to each of the personages a part corresponding to the peculiar view he adopts: he gives life to the action by introducing motives which the historian cannot find or accept: characters which stand close together in tradition, as they probably did in fact, are set apart in his pages, each of them in a separately developed homogeneous existence of its own: natural human motives, which elsewhere appe Shakspeare depicts the popular storms which are wont to accompany a free constitution in the plots of some of his Roman dramas: of these Plutarch instead of Holinshed furnishes the basis. He is right in taking them from a foreign country: for events nearer to his audience would have roused an interest of a different kind, and yet would not have had so universal a meaning. What could be more dramatic, for example, and at the same time more widely applicable than the contrast between the two speeches, by the first of which Caesar's murder is justified, while by the second the memory of his services is revived? The conception of freedom which the first brings to life is set in opposition to the thought of the virtues and services of the possessor of absolute power, and thrust by them into the background; but these same feelings are the deepest and most active in all ages and among all nations. But the attested traditions of ancient and modern times do not satisfy the poet in his wish to lay bare the depths of human existence. He takes us into the cloudy regions of British and Northern antiquity only known to fable, in which other contrasts between persons and in public affairs make their appearance. A king comes on the stage who in the plenitude of enjoyment and power is brought by overhasty confidence in his nearest kin to the extremest wretchedness into which men can fall. We see the heir to a throne who, dispossessed of his rights by his own mother and his father's murderer, is directed by mysterious influences to take revenge. We have before us a great nobleman, who by atrocious murders has gained possession of the throne, and is slain in fighting for it: the poet brings us into immediate proximity with the crime, its execution, and its recoil: it seems like an inspiration of hell and of its deceitful prophecies: we wander on the confines of the visible world and of that other world which lies on the other side, but extends over into this, where it forms the border-land between conscious sense and unconscious madness: the abysses of the human breast are opened to view, in which men are chained down and brought to destruction by powers of nature that dwell there unknown to them: all questions about existence and non-existence; about heaven, hell, and earth; about We do not here enter upon a discussion of Shakspeare's art and characteristics, of their merits and defects: they were no doubt of a piece with the needs, habits, and mode of thought of his audience; for in what case could there be a stronger reciprocal action between an author and his public, than in that of a young stage depending upon voluntary support? The very absence of conventional rule made it easier to put on the stage a drama by which all that is grandest and mightiest is brought before the eyes as if actually present in that medley of great and small things which is characteristic of human life. Genius is an independent gift of God: whether it is allowed to expand or not depends on the receptivity and taste of its contemporaries. It is certainly no unimportant circumstance that Shakspeare brought out King Lear soon after the accession of James I, who, like his predecessor, loved the theatre; and that Francis Bacon dedicated to the King his work on the Advancement of Learning in the same year 1605. Of these two great minds the first bodied forth in imperishable forms the tradition, the poetry, and the view of the world that belonged to the past: the second banished from the domain of science the analogies which they offered, and made a new path for the activity displayed by succeeding centuries in the conquest of nature, and for a new view of the world. Many others laboured side by side with them. The investigation of nature had already entered on the path indicated by Bacon, and was welcomed with lively interest, especially among the upper classes. Together wit These were the days of calm between the storms; halcyon days, as they have well been named, in which genius had sufficient freedom in determining its own direction to devote itself with all its strength to great creations. As the German spirit at the epoch of the Reformation, so the English spirit at the beginning of the seventeenth century, took its place among the rival nationalities which stood apart from one another on the domain of Western Christendom, and on whose exertions the advance of the human race depends. NOTES: |