Do you not see these pamphlets, libels, rhimes,
These strange compressed tumults of the mind,
Are grown to be the sickness of the times,
The great disease inflicted on mankind?
Your virtues, by your follies made your crimes,
Have issue with your indiscretion joined.
Burke insists on identifying the “literary cabal” as the chief element in the ferment of Revolution: “Men of letters, fond of distinguishing themselves, are rarely averse to innovation” (p. 208). See how a retired observer in the time of the first Stuart anticipates the effects of the same misplaced activity.
For when the greater wits cannot attain
Th’ expected good which they account their right,
And yet perceive others to reap that gain
Of far inferior virtues in their sight;
They present, with the sharp of envy, strain
To wound them with reproaches and despite.
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Hence discontented sects and schisms arise;
Hence interwounding controversies spring,
That feed the simple, and offend the wise.
Action, Philocosmus goes on to say, differs materially from what is read of in books:
[xxviii] The world’s affairs require in managing
More arts than those wherein you clerks proceed.
Men of letters, in the indulgence of the tastes which their pursuits have fostered, lose those faculties which are necessary to the conduct of affairs.
The skill wherewith you have so cunning been
Unsinews all your powers, unmans you quite.
Public society and commerce of men
Require another grace, another port.
Beware of the philosopher who pretends to statesmanship. The Scholar replies, that the Statesman, with all his boasted skill, cannot anticipate the perils of the time, or see
how soon this rolling world can take
Advantage for her dissolution,
Fain to get loose from this withholding stake
Of civil science and discretion;
How glad it would run wild, that it might make
One formless form of one confusion.
The mysteries of State, the “Norman subtleties,” says the Scholar, are now vulgarised and common. Giddy innovations would overthrow the whole fabric of society. But what is the remedy? To “pull back the onrunning state of things”? This might end in bringing men more astray, and destroy the faith in the unity and continuity of civil life, which is
that close-kept palladium
Which once remov’d, brings ruin evermore.
Investigation would discover much the same vein of thought in many of Daniel’s contemporaries. Compare, for instance, Fletcher’s portraiture of Dichostasis, or Sedition,
That wont but in the factious court to dwell,
But now to shepherd swains close linked is.
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
A subtle craftsman fram’d him seemly arms,
Forg’d in the shop of wrangling sophistry;
And wrought with curious arts, and mighty charms,
Temper’d with lies, and false philosophy.
The Purple Island, Canto vii.
[xxix] Among Shakspere’s most obvious characteristics is that which is often called his objectiveness. He does not task his characters to utter his private sentiments and convictions. His characters are realities, not masks. But no one who has endeavoured to penetrate the mind of Shakspere as reflected in his whole works will deny to him a full participation in Burke’s doctrine of faith in the order of society. To borrow the words of Hartley Coleridge,1 Shakspere, as manifested in his writings, is one of those “who build the commonweal, not on the shifting shoals of expedience, or the incalculable tides of popular will, but on the sure foundations of the divine purpose, demonstrated by the great and glorious ends of rational being; who deduce the rights and duties of men, not from the animal nature, in which neither right nor duty can inhere, not from a state of nature which never existed, nor from an arbitrary contract which never took place in the memory of man nor angels, but from the demands of the complex life of the soul and the body, defined by reason and conscience, expounded and ratified by revelation.” So exact is the application, one might think he was speaking of Burke. A book might be made up by illustrating the political conceptions of Shakspere out of his plays: but it will be enough for our purpose to consider one or two specimens. The following extract from the speech in which Ulysses demonstrates the ills arising from the feuds of the Greek champions is alike remarkable for the compass of its thought and for the accuracy with which it reflects a feeling which has always been common among Englishmen. A narrower conception of the same argument is summed up in a famous epigram of Pope commencing “Order is heaven’s first law.”
The heavens themselves, the planets and this centre,
Observe degree, priority, and place,
Insisture, course, proportion, season, form,
Office and custom, in all line of order:
And therefore is the glorious planet, Sol,
In noble eminence enthroned and sphered
Amidst the other: whose med’cinable eye
Corrects the ill aspects of planets evil,
And posts, like the commandment of a king,
Sans check, to good and bad. But when the planets
[xxx] In evil mixture to disorder wander,
What plagues and what portents! what mutiny!
What raging of the sea! shaking of earth!
Commotion in the winds! frights, changes, horrors,
Divert and crack, rend and deracinate
The unity and married calm of states
Quite from their fixture! O, when degree is shak’d,
Which is the ladder of all high designs,
The enterprise is sick! How could communities,
Degrees in schools, and brotherhoods in cities,
Peaceful commerce from dividable shores,
The primogenitive and due of birth,
Prerogative of age, crowns, sceptres, laurels,
But by degree, stand in authentic place?
Take but degree away, untune that string,
And, hark! what discord follows! Each thing meets
In mere oppugnancy: the bounded waters
Should lift their bosoms higher than the shores,
And make a sop of all this solid globe:
Strength should be lord of imbecility,
And the rude son should strike his father dead:
Force should