been anticipated. Let me, however, state it in brief. We hear sometimes in
these days of a certain science, or rather portion of a more general
science, which takes to itself the name of _Social Statics_, and
professes, under that name, to have for its business--I give the very
phrase of those who define it--the investigation of "possible social
simultaneities." That is to say, there may be a science of what can
possibly go along with what in any social state or stage; or, to put it
otherwise, any one fact or condition of a state of society being given,
there may be inferred from that fact or condition some of the other facts
and conditions that must necessarily have co-existed with it. Thus at
length perhaps, by continued inference, the whole state of an old society
might be imaged out, just as Cuvier, from the sight of one bone, could
infer with tolerable accuracy the general structure of the animal. Well,
will _Social Statics_ be so good as to take the foregoing passages, and
whirr out of them their "possible social simultaneities"? Were this done,
I should be surprised if the England and Scotland of the fourteenth
century were to turn out so very unlovely, so atrociously barbarian, after
all. These passages are actual transmitted bits of the English and
Scottish mind of that age, and surely the substance from which they are
extracts cannot have been so very coarse or bad. Where such sentiments
existed and were expressed, where the men that could express them lived
and were appreciated, the surrounding medium of thought, of institutions,
and of customs, must have been to correspond. There must have been truth,
and honour, and courtesy, and culture, round those men; there must have
been high heart, shrewd sense, delicate art, gentle behaviour, and, in one
part of the island at least, a luxuriant complexity of most subtle and
exquisite circumstance.
* * * * *
The conclusion which we have thus reached vindicates that mood of mind
towards the whole historical past which we find to have been actually the
mood of all the great masters of literature whenever they have ranged back
in the past for their themes. When Shakespeare writes of Richard II., who
lived two hundred years before his own time, does he not overleap those
two hundred years as a mere nothing, plunge in among Richard's Englishmen
as intrinsically not different from so many great Elizabethans, make them
talk and act as co-equals in whom Elizabethans could take an interest, and
even fill the mouth of the weak monarch himself with soliloquies of
philosophic melancholy and the kingliest verbal splendours? And so when
the same poet goes back into a still remoter antique, as in the council of
the Greek chiefs in his _Troilus and Cressida_. We speak of Shakespeare's
anachronisms in such cases. There they are certainly for the critic to
note; but they only serve to bring out more clearly his main principle in
his art--his sense or instinct, for all historic time, of a grand
over-matching synchronism. And, indeed, without something of this
instinct--this sense of an intrinsic traditional humanity persisting
through particular progressive variations, this belief in a co-equality of
at least some minds through all the succession of human ages in what we
call the historic period--what were the past of mankind to us much more
than a history of dogs or ruminants? Nay, and with that measure with which
we mete out to others, with the same measure shall it not be meted out to
ourselves? If to be dead is to be inferior, and if to be long dead is to
be despicable, to the generation in possession, shall not we who are in
possession now have passed into the state of inferiority to-morrow, with
all the other defunct beyond us, and will not a time come when some far
future generation will lord it on the earth, and _we_ shall lie deep, deep
down, among the strata of the despicable?
THE END.
LONDON; R. CLAY, SONS, AND TAYLOR, PRINTERS.
Footnotes:
[1] _Fraser's Magazine_, Dec. 1844.
[2] _British Quarterly Review_, November, 1852.--1. "Shakspeare and His
Times." By M. Guizot. 1852.--2. "Shakspeare's Dramatic Art; and his
Relation to Calderon and Goethe." Translated from the German of Dr.
Hermann Ulrici. 1846.--3. "Conversations of Goethe with Eckermann and
Soret." Translated from the German by John Oxenford. 2 vols. 1850.
[3] According to Mr. Lewes, in his Life of Goethe, it is a mistake to
fancy that Goethe was tall. He seemed taller than he really was.
[4] This saying of Steevens, though still repeated in books, has lost its
force with the public. The Lives of Shakespeare by Mr. Halliwell and Mr.
Charles Knight, written on such different principles, have effectually
dissipated the old impression. Mr. Knight, by his use of the principle of
synchronism, and his accumulation of picturesque details, in his Biography
of Shakespeare, has left the public without excuse, if they still believe
in Steevens.
[5] _North British Review_, February 1852:--"The Works of John Milton." 8
vols. London: Pickering. 1851.
[6] _British Quarterly Review_, July, 1854. The Annotated Edition of the
English Poets: Edited by Robert Bell. "Poetical Works of John Dryden." 3
vols. London. 1854.
[7] _British Quarterly Review_, October 1854.--1. "The English Humourists
of the Eighteenth Century." A Series of Lectures. By W. M. Thackeray.
London: 1853. 2. "The Life of Swift." By Sir Walter Scott. Edinburgh:
1848.
[8] _Macmillan's Magazine_, July 1871.
* * * * *
Transcriber's note:
Text in italics is enclosed by underscores (_italics_).
The following misprints have been corrected:
"entersprie" corrected to "enterprise" (page 20)
"ancy" corrected to "fancy" (page 66)
"extravagan s" corrected to "extravagances" (page 222)
"hpyotheses" corrected to "hypotheses" (page 292)
Other than the corrections listed above, inconsistencies in spelling and
hyphenation have been retained from the original.