The dramatic representation here is meagre; but we shall find upon
inquiry it is already the Globe Theatre, with all its new
solidarities, new in philosophy, new in poetry, that the leaves of
this park hide--this park that the doors and windows of the New
Academe open into--these new grounds that it lets out its students to
play and study in, and collect their specimens from--'still and
contemplative in living art.' It was all the world that was going
through that park that day haply, we shall find. It is all the world
that we get in this narrow representation here, as we get it in a more
limited representation still, in another place. 'All the world knows
_me_ in my book and my book in _me_,' cries the Egotist of the
Mountain. It is the first Canto of that great Epic, whose argument
runs through so many books, that is chanted here. It is the war, the
unsuccessful war of lore and nature, whose lost fields have made man's
life, that is getting reviewed at last and reduced to speech and
writing. It is the school itself that makes the centre of the plot in
this case; these gay young philosophers with 'the ribands' yet
floating in their 'cap of youth,' who oppose lore to love, who 'war
against _their own affections_ and THE HUGE ARMY OF THE WORLD'S
DESIRES,' ere they know what they are; who think to conquer nature's
potencies, her universal powers and causes, with wordy ignorance, with
resolutions that ignore them simply, and make a virtue of ignoring
them, these are the chief actors here, who come out of that classic
tiring house where they have been shut up with the ancients so long,
to celebrate on this green plot, which is life, their own defeat, and
propose a better wisdom, the wisdom of the moderns. And Holofernes,
the schoolmaster, who cultivates minds, and Sir Nathaniel, the curate,
who cures them, and Don Armado or Don A_drama_dio, from the flowery
heights of the new Belles Lettres, with the last refinement of
Euphuism on his lips, and Antony Dull, and the country damsel and her
swain, and the princess and her attendants, are all there to eke out
and complete the philosophic design,--to exhibit the extant learning
in its airy flights and gross descents, in its ludicrous attempt to
escape from those particulars or to grapple, without loss of grandeur,
those particulars of which man's life consisteth. It is the vain
pretension and assumption of those faulty wordy abstractions, whose
falseness and failure in practice this school is going to expose
elsewhere; it is the defect of those abstractions and idealisms that
the Novum Organum was invented to remedy, which is exhibited so
grossly and palpably here. It is the height of those great swelling
words of rhetoric and logic, in rude contrast with those actualities
which the history of man is always exhibiting, which the universal
nature in man is always imposing on the learned and unlearned, the
profane and the reverend, the courtier and the clown, the 'king and
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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