It was easy, for instance, in defining the position of the favourite in the Court of Queen Elizabeth, in recommending a civil rather than a military greatness as the one least likely to provoke the animosity and suspicion of government under those conditions, in recommending that so far from taking umbrage at the advancement of a rival – the policy of the position prescribed, the deliberate putting forward and sustaining of another favourite to avert the jealousy and fatal suspicion with which, under such conditions, the government regards its favourite, when popularity and the qualities of a military chieftain are combined in him; it was easy in marking out those grand points in the conditions of the chief courtiers' policy at that time, to glance at the position of other men in that same court, seeking for power under those same conditions – men whose position, inasmuch as the immediate welfare of society and the destinies of mankind in future ages were concerned in it, was infinitely more important than that of the person whose affairs were agitated on the surface of the letter.
It was easy, too, in setting forth the conflicting claims of the 'New Company and the Old' to the monopoly of the manufacture and dying of woollens, for instance, to glance at the New Company and the Old whose claims to the monopoly of another public interest, not less important, were coming forward for adjustment just about that time, and urging their respective rights upon the attention of the chief men in the nation.
Or in the discussion of a plan for reforming the king's household, and for reducing its wanton waste and extravagance – in exhibiting the detail of a plan for relieving the embarrassments of the palace just then, which, with the aid of the favourite and his friends, and their measures for relief, were fast urging on the revolution – it was easy to indicate a more extensive reform; it was impossible to avoid a glance, in passing, at the pitifulness of the position of the man who held all men in awe and bondage then; it was impossible to avoid a touch of that same pen which writes elsewhere, 'Beggar and Madman,' too, so freely, – consoling the Monarch with the suggestion that Essex was also greatly in debt at a time when he was much sought after and caressed, and instancing the case of other courtiers who had been in the same position, and yet contrived to hold their heads up.
Under the easy artistic disguise of courtly rivalries and opposing ambitions – under cover, it might be, of an outrageous personal mutual hostility – it was easy for public men belonging to the same side in politics, who were obliged to conduct, not only the business of the state, but their own private affairs, and to protect their own most sacred interests under such conditions, – it was easy for politicians trained in such a school, by the skilful use of such artifices, to play into each other's hands, and to attain ends which in open league they would have been sure to lose; to avert evils, it might be, which it would have been vain and fatal for those most concerned in them openly to resist. To give to a courtier seeking advancement, with certain ulterior aims always in view, the character of a speculator, a scholastic dreamer, unable for practice, unfit to be trusted with state affairs, was not, after all, however pointedly it might be complained of at the time, so fatal a blow as it would have been to direct attention, already sufficiently on the alert, to the remarkable practical gifts with which this same speculator happened, as we all know, to be also endowed. This courtier's chief enemy, if he had been in his great rival's secrets, or if he had reflected at all, might have done him a worse turn than that. The hostilities of that time are no more to be taken on trust than its friendships, and the exaggerated expressions of them, – the over-doing sometimes points to another meaning.
While indicating the legal method of proceeding in conducting the show of a trial, to which 'the man whose fame did indeed fold in the orb o' the world' was to be subjected – a trial in which the decision was known beforehand – 'though,' says our Poet —
'Though well, we may not pass upon his life,
Without the form of justice;' —
it was easy for the mean, sycophantic, truckling tool of a Stuart – for the tool of a Stuart's favourite – to insert in such a paper, if not private articles, private readings of passages, interlinings, pointing to a history in that case which has not yet transpired; it was easy for such a one to do it, when the partner of his treasons would have had no chance to criticise his case, or meddle with it.
In this collection of the apparently miscellaneous remains of our great philosopher, there are included many important state papers, and much authentic correspondence with the chief personages and actors of that age, which performed their part at the time as letters and state papers, though they were every one of them written with an inner reference to the position of the writer, and intended to be unfolded eventually with the key of that position. But along with this authentic historical matter, cunningly intermingled with it, much that is 'supposititious,' to borrow a term which this writer found particularly to his purpose – supposititious in the same sense in which the speeches of Thucydides and those of his imitators are suppositious – is also introduced. There is a great deal of fictitious correspondence here, designed to eke out that view of this author's life and times which the authentic letters left unfinished, and which he was anxious, for certain reasons, to transmit to posterity, – which he was forbidden to transmit in a more direct manner. There is a good deal of miscellaneous letter-writing here, and there will be found whole series of letters, in which the correspondence is sustained on both sides in a tolerably lively manner, by this Master of Arts; but under a very meagre dramatic cover in this case, designedly thin, never meant to serve as a cover with 'men of understanding.' Read which side of the correspondence you will in these cases, 'here is his dry hand up and down.'
These fictitious supposititious letters are written in his own name, as often as in another's; for of all the impersonations, ancient and modern, historical and poetic, which the impersonated genius of the modern arts had to borrow to speak and act his part in, there is no such mask, no so deep, thick-woven, impenetrable disguise, as that historical figure to which his own name and person is attached; – the man whom the Tudor and the Stuart admitted to their secrets, – the man whom the Tudor tolerated, whom the Stuart delighted to honor. In his rules of policy, he has left us the most careful directions for the interpretations of the lives of men whose 'impediments' are such, and whose 'natures and ends' are so 'differing and dissonant from the general state of the times in which they live,' that it is necessary for them to avoid 'disclosing themselves,' 'to be in the whole course of their lives close, retired, reserved, as we see in Tiberius, who was never seen at a play,' men who are compelled, as it were, 'to act their lives as in a theatre.' 'The soundest disclosing,' he says, 'and expounding of MEN is by their NATURES and ENDS. The weaker sort of men are best interpreted by their natures, the wisest by their ends.' 'Princes are best interpreted by their natures, private persons by their ends, because princes being at the top of human desires, they have, for the most part, no particular ends whereto they aspire, by distance from which a man might take measure and scale of the rest of their actions and desires' 'Distance from which,' – that is the key for the interpretation of the lives of private persons of certain unusual endowments, who propound to themselves under such conditions 'good and reasonable ends, and such as are within their power to attain.' As to the worthiness of these ends, we have some acquaintance with them already in our own experience. The great leaders of the new movements which make the modern ages – the discoverers of its science of sciences, the inventors of its art of arts, found themselves in an enemy's camp, and the policy of war was the only means by which they could preserve and transmit to us the benefits we have already received at their hands, – the benefits we have yet to receive from them. The story of this Interpreter is sent down to us, not by accident, but by his own design. But it is sent down to us with the works in which the nobility of his nature is all laid open, – in which the end of his ends is constantly declared, and constantly pursued, – it is sent down to us along with the works in which his ends are accomplished, to the times that have found in their experience what they were. He did not think it too much to ask of ages experimentally acquainted with the virtue of the aims for which he made these sacrifices, – aims which he constantly propounded as the end of his large activity, to note the 'dissonance' between that life which the surface of these documents exhibits, – between that historic form, too, which the surface of that time's history exhibits, – and the nature which is revealed in this life-act, – the soul, the never-shaken soul of this proceeding.
'The god of soldiers,
With the consent of supreme Jove, inform
Thy thoughts with nobleness; that thou may'st prove
The shame UNVULNERABLE, and stick i' the war
Like a great sea-mark, standing every flaw,
And saving those that eye thee.'
'I would not, as I often hear dead men spoken of, that men should say of me, he judged, and lived so and so; I knew him better than any. Now, as much as decency permits, I here discover my inclinations and affections. If any observe, he will find that I have either told, or designed to tell all. What I cannot speak, I point out with my finger.' 'There was never greater circumspection and military prudence than is sometimes seen among us' ['Naturalists']. 'Can it be that men are afraid to lose themselves by the way, that they reserve themselves to the end of the game?'
'I mortally hate to be mistaken by those who happen to come across my name. He that does all things for honor and glory, what can he think to gain by showing himself to the world in a mask, and by concealing his true being from the people? If you are a coward, and men commend you for your valour, is it of you that they speak? They take you for another. Archelaus, king of Macedon, walking along the street, somebody threw water on his head, which they who were with him said he ought to punish: "Ay, but," said the other, "he did not throw the water upon me, but upon him whom he took me to be." Socrates being told by the people, that people spoke ill of him, "Not at all," said he; "there is nothing in me of what they say. I am content to be less commended, provided I am better known. I may be reputed a wise man, in such a sort of wisdom as I take to be folly."' – ['The French Interpreter.']
This is the man who never in all his life came into the theatre, content to work behind the scenes, scientifically enlightened as to the true ends of living, and the means of attaining those ends, propounding deliberately his duty as a man, his duty to his kind, his obedience to the law of his higher nature, as his predominant end, – but not to the harm or oppression of his particular and private nature, but to its most felicitous conservation and advancement, – at large in its new Epicurean emancipations, rejoicing in its great fruition, happy in its untiring activities, triumphing over all impediments, celebrating in secret lyrics, its immortal triumphs over 'death and all oblivious enmity,' and finding, 'in the consciousness of good intentions, a more continual joy to nature than all the provision that can be made for security and repose,' – not reconciled to the part he was compelled to play in his own time, – his fine, keen sensibilities perpetually at war with it, – always balancing and reviewing the nice ethical questions it involved, and seeking always the 'nobler' solution. 'The one part have I suffered, the other will I do,' – demonstrating the possibility of making, even under such conditions, a 'life sublime.'
'All places that the eye of heaven visits
Are, to a wise man, ports and happy havens.'
There is no room here for details; but this is the account of this so irreconcileable difference between the Man of these Works and the Man in the Mask, in which he triumphantly achieved them; – this is the account, in the general, which will be found to be, upon investigation, the true one. And the more the subject is studied, even by the light which this work brings to bear upon it, the more the truth of this statement will become apparent.
But though the details are, by the limits of this volume, excluded here, it cannot well close, without one word as to the points in this part of the evidence, which have made the deepest impression on us.
No man suffered death, or mutilation, or torture, or outrage of any kind, under the two tyrannies of this age of learning, that it was possible for this scientific propounder of the law of human kind-ness to avert and protect him from – this anticipator and propounder of a human civilization. He was far in advance of our times in his criticism of the barbarisms which the rudest ages of social experiment have transmitted to us. He could not tread upon a beetle, without feeling through all that exquisite organization which was great nature's gift to her Interpreter in chief, great nature's pang. To anticipate the sovereign's wishes, seeking to divert them first 'with a merry conceit' perhaps; for, so light as that were, the motives on which such consequences might depend then – to forestall the inevitable decision was to arm himself with the powers he needed. The men who were protected and relieved by that secret combination against tyranny, which required, as the first condition of its existence, that its chiefs should occupy places of trust and authority, ought to come out of their graves to testify against the calumnies that blast our modern learning, and the virtue – the virtue of it, at its source. Does any one think that a universal slavery could be fastened on the inhabitants of this island, when wit and manliness are at their height here, without so much as the project of an 'underground railway' being suggested for the relief of its victims? 'I will seek him and privily relieve him. Go you and maintain talk with the Duke that my charity be not of him perceived. If he ask for me, I am ill and gone to bed. Go to; say you nothing. There is division between the Dukes – [between the Dukes] – and a worse matter than that. I have received a letter this night. It is dangerous to be spoken. I have locked the letter in my closet. There is part of a power already FOOTED. We must incline to THE KING. If I die for it, as no less is threatened me, the king, my old master, must be relieved.' That when all is done will be found to contain some hints as to the manner in which 'charities' of this kind have need to be managed, under a government armed with powers so indefinable.
Cassius. And let us awear our resolution.
Brutus. No, not an oath: If not the face of men,
The sufferance of our souls, THE TIMES ABUSE, —
If these be motives weak, break off betimes,
And every man hence to his idle bed;
So let high-sighted tyranny range on,
Till each man drop by lottery. But if THESE, —
As I am sure they do, – bear fire enough
To kindle cowards, and to steel with valour
The melting spirits of women, then, countrymen,
What need we any spur but OUR OWN CAUSE
To prick us to redress? what other bond
Than secret Romans, that have spoken the word,
And will not falter…
Swear priests and cowards, and men cautelous,
Old feeble carrions, and such suffering souls
That welcome wrongs; unto bad causes swear
Such creatures as men doubt; but do not stain
The even virtue of our enterprise,
Nor the insuppressive mettle of our spirits,
To think that, or our cause, or our performance,
Did need an oath.'
[Doctrine of the 'secret Romans.']
As to the rest, it was this man – this man of a scientific 'prudence' with the abhorrence of change, which is the instinct of the larger whole, confirmed by a scientific forethought – it was this man who gave at last the signal for change; not for war. 'Proceed by process' was his word. Constitutional remedies for the evils which appeared to have attained at last the unendurable point, were the remedies which he proposed – this was the move which he was willing, for his part, to initiate. – 'We are not, perhaps, at the last gasp. I think I see ways to save us.' – The proceedings of the Parliament which condemned him were studiously arranged beforehand by himself, – he wrote the programme of it, and the part he undertook to perform in it was the greatest in history. [''Tis the indiligent reader that loses my subject, not I,' says the 'foreign interpreter' of this style of writing. 'There will always be found some word or other, in a corner, though it lie very close.' That is the rule for the reading of the evidence in this case. The word is there, though it lies very close, as it had need to, to be available.]
It was as a baffled, disgraced statesman, that he found leisure to complete and put in final order for posterity, those noble works, through which we have already learned to love and honour him, in the face of this calumny. It was as a disgraced and baffled statesman and courtier – all lurking jealousies and suspicions at last put to rest – all possibility of a political future precluded; but as a courtier still hanging on the king and on the power that controlled the king, for life and liberty; and careful still not to assert any independence of those same ends, which had always been taken to be his ends; it was in this character that he brought out at last the Novum Organum; it was in this character that he ventured to collect and republish his avowed philosophical works; it was in this character too that he ventured at last to produce that little piece of history which comes down to us loosely appended to these philosophical writings. A history of the Second Conquest of the Children of Alfred, a Conquest which they resisted, in heroic wars, but vainly, for want of leaders and organization – overborne by the genius of a military chief whom this historian compares in king-craft with his contemporaries Ferdinand of Spain, and Louis XI. It is a history which was dedicated to Charles I., which was corrected in the manuscript by James I., at the request of the author; and he owed to that monarch's approval of it, permission to come to town for the purpose of superintending its publication. It is the History of the Founding of the Tudor Dynasty: prepared, – as were the rest of these works, – under the patronage of an insolent favourite with whom it was necessary 'entirely to drop the character that carried with it the least show of truth or gracefulness,' and under the patronage of a monarch with whom it was not sufficient 'for persons of superior gifts and endowments to act the deformity of obsequiousness, unless they really changed themselves and became abject and contemptible in their persons.'
'I am in this (Volumnia)
Your wife, your son, these senators, the nobles,
And you will rather show our general lowts,
How you can frown, than spend a fawn upon them,
For the inheritance of their loves, and safeguard,
Of what that want might ruin.
Away my disposition!
When you do find him, or alive or dead,
He will be found like Brutus, LIKE HIMSELF.
'Yet country-men, O yet, hold up your heads.
I will proclaim my name about the field.
I am the son of Marcus Cato, HO!
A foe TO TYRANTS, and my country's friend.
'And I am Brutus, Marcus Brutus I,
Brutus, MY COUNTRY'S FRIEND, know ME for BRUTUS.'
FINIS
Эта и ещё 2 книги за 399 ₽