“Now, look here, Richard,” he replied. “In the first place, I flatly deny that there is contempt for any sort of people, common or uncommon, in the Shakspearean pages. But let that pass, for what I am going to say will cover it fully. I want to call your attention to the distinctive peculiarity—the uniqueness—of the Shakspearean creations. In the Shakspearean mind you have an unexampled union of the subtlest observation and the profoundest reason. This author observed far more closely than even Thackeray, and philosophized far more greatly than even Plato. But this is not all. He constructed a series of works which show the principles of human action as they lie in the nature of man, and all the complex operation of the human passions. And more, he created a number of figures, which are not characters, but types. That is the grand distinctive Shakspearean peculiarity. Nobody has done that but he. The Don Quixote of Cervantes is a great figure, but it is not Shakspearean. The Greek Prometheus, the German Mephistopheles are immense allegorical creations, but they are not Shakspearean. He alone has made figures which are types—representative men and women standing for classes. In a word, he alone has given us in a series of models or images, the Science of Human Nature. This it is that makes him solitary, as the power with which it is done makes him supreme, in literature.”
“I understand,” said Wentworth, “and I agree; but I don’t see what you’re driving at, mine ancient.”
“Wait a minute, and you shall see,” returned Harrington. “Bacon wanted this very thing done. Nothing that you can do for the elevation of the world, he says substantially, is of any value, unless this is done. The radical defect in all science is, he says, that it has not been done, and he rates Aristotle sharply for not doing it. He wants a work which will give us the Science of Man, as he is, in order that we may make him what he ought to be—a work, he says, which is to contain the descriptions of the several characters and tempers of men’s natures and dispositions to the end that the precepts concerning the culture and cure of the mind may be concluded upon—a work which is also to contain examples in moral and civil life. This is what Bacon wanted done, and the author of the Shakspeare Drama did it. Bacon’s requirement is fulfilled exactly in the Shakspeare Drama. Even our critics have got hold of the idea that the Science of Human Nature which Bacon wanted is in the Shakspeare Drama, and the purpose which Bacon intended such a work to accomplish, is in daily process of accomplishment through the agency of those plays. And what is more, Bacon wanted that work to be in the form of poetry—the Georgics of the Mind, he calls it, with a reminiscence of Virgil. The poets, he says elsewhere, are the best doctors of this knowledge; and again, for the expression of such a purpose, reason is not so perspicuous, nor examples so apt, as the dramatic or poetic presentation. Very good. Bacon wanted it in poetry, and in poetry you have it.”