However, that does not impair the representation as it is managed.
There is a very bold artist here already, with all his deference for
the antique. We shall be sure to have _all_ when he is the plotter.
The action of this drama is not complicated. The persons of it are
few; the characterization is feeble, compared with that of some of the
later plays; but that does not hinder or limit the design, and it is
all the more apparent for this artistic poverty, anatomically clear;
while as yet that perfection of art in which all trace of the
structure came so soon to be lost in the beauty of the illustration,
is yet wanting; while as yet that art which made of its living
instance an intenser life, or which made with its _living_ art a life
more living than life itself, was only germinating.
The illustration here, indeed, approaches the allegorical form, in the
obtrusive, untempered predominance of the qualities represented, so
overdone as to wear the air of a caricature, though the historical
combination is still here. These diagrams are alive evidently; they
are men, and not allegorical spectres, or toys, though they are
'painted in character.'
The entire representation of the extant learning is dramatically
produced on this stage; the germ of the 'new' is here also; and the
unoccupied ground of it is marked out here as, in the Advancement of
Learning, by the criticism on the deficiences of that which has the
field. Here, too, the line of the extant culture,--the narrow indented
boundary of the _culture_ that professed to take all is always
defining the new,--cutting out the wild not yet visited by the art of
man;--only here the criticism is much more lively, because here 'we
come _to particulars_,' a thing which the new philosophy--much insists
on; and though this want in learning, and the wildness it leaves, is
that which makes tragedies in this method of exhibition; it has its
comical aspect also; and this is the laughing and weeping philosopher
in one who manages these representations; and in this case it is the
comical aspect of the subject that is seized on.
Our diagrams are still coarse here, but they have already the good
scientific quality of exhausting the subject. It is the New School
that occupies the centre of the piece. Their quarters are in that
palace, but the _king_ of it is the _Royalty_ (Raleigh) that founded
and endowed this School--that was one of his secret titles,--and under
that name he may sometimes be recognized in descriptions and
dedications that persons who were not in the secret of the School
naturally applied in another quarter, or appropriated to themselves.
'_Rex_ was a surname among the Romans,' says the Interpreter of this
School, in a very explanatory passage, 'as well as _King_ is _with
us_.' It is the New School that is under these boughs here, but hardly
that as yet.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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