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.