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so much actual official abuses as authority in the abstract. Perhaps he
saw so far because he also is a rebel against authority; at all events it is odd
that, having gone so far, he went no further. What roused Dekker to a
white heat of indignation was not authority, but humbug; that authority
by which art is tongue-tied, that complacency which sees, with Laodicean
indifference, desert a beggar born. His cause is Shakespeare’s.
But there is something else in him, which sets him above Butler and Heine;
reading him, one is strongly reminded of Spengler; he has, on a smaller scale,
the same comprehensiveness of mind. All arts, all sciences, interest him
equally, and he sees them in their unseverable relation to each other, in a
way that is new in our day, and must have seemed unheard of in his:—
“. . . studies and essays on:—
The difference between the conceptions of Infinite time and Eternity.
The gravity of light.
The existence of an impersonal God in the minds of men.
Electricity as a motive power without soft iron.
The connection between poetry and the mathematical sciences.
Architecture as an expression of ideas.”
And so on.
Were contemporary readers puzzled by this abrupt interpolation of apparent
irrelevancies? I believe Dekker deliberately inserted them, in extremity of
loneliness: that he found himself moving about in a spiritually tangible
universe which to those about him was impossible of apprehension. He
could not try to convince them of realities which lay beyond them in time;
that might well have landed him in the madhouse. But for those to follow
him he left his gipsy patteran at the cross-roads, faint but unmistakable,
to show which way he had gone.
M. ROBINSON.