Part 20

That method, it must be acknowledged with due regard to the _bon mot_ of the old Greek statesman, is a method well adapted to conciliate the favour of an immense audience,--even in Boston. We are all descended from fighting ancestors, and many of us, who care little for the disinterested discussion of scientific theories, still like to see a man knocked down or impaled, provided the knocking down be done with a syllogistic club, or the impaling be restricted to such a hard substance as is afforded by the horns of a dilemma. It satisfies our combative instincts, without shocking our physical sympathies or making any great demand on our keener thinking powers, which most people do most of all dislike to be called upon to exercise. To this kind of feeling Mr. Cook's lectures appeal, and the peculiar character of his success seems to show that he knows well how to deal with it. In a moment of winning frankness he exclaims: "Do you suppose that I think that this audience can be _cheated_? I do not know where in America there is another weekly audience with as many brains in it; at least, I do not know where in New England I should be so likely to be tripped up, if I were to make an incorrect statement, as here."[34] After this coaxing little dose, Mr. Cook proceeds to show his respect for the learning of his audience in some remarks on _bathybius_, which, as he condescendingly explains, is a name derived from two Greek words, meaning _deep_ and _sea_!! The profound knowledge of Greek thus exhibited is quite equalled by his account of bathybius from the zoölogical point of view. He begins by telling his hearers that, in a paper published in the "Microscopical Journal" in 1868, Professor Huxley "announced his belief that the gelatinous substance found in the ooze of the beds of the deep seas is a sheet of living matter extending around the globe." Furthermore, of "this amazingly strategic [!!] and haughtily trumpeted substance ... Huxley assumed that it was in the past, and would be in the future, the progenitor of all the life on the planet." Now it is not true that, in the paper referred to, Huxley announces any such belief or makes any such assumption as is here ascribed to him; but we shall see, in a moment, that Mr. Cook's system of quotation is peculiar in enabling him to extract from the text of an author any meaning whatever that may happen to suit his purposes. This ingenious garbling enables the lecturer to come in with telling effect at the close of his third lecture, and earn an ignoble round of applause by holding up the current number of the "American Journal of Science and Arts" (which he would appear to have picked up at a bookstall on his way to the lecture room) and citing from it, as the fifty-first and closing "concession" of evolutionists, "that bathybius has been discovered in 1875, by the ship Challenger, to be--hear, O heavens! and give ear, O earth!--sulphate of lime; and that when dissolved it crystallizes as gypsum. [Applause.]" This is what Mr. Cook calls striking, with the "latest scientific intelligence," at the "bottom stem" of the great tree of evolution. The "latest scientific intelligence," with him, means the last book or article which he has glanced over without comprehending its import, but from which he has contrived to glean some statement calculated to edify his audience and scatter the hosts of Midian. In point of fact, the identification of bathybius with sulphate of lime was set down by Sir Wyville Thomson only as a suspicion, to which Huxley, like a true man of science, at once accorded all possible weight, while leaving the question open for further discussion. Only a mountebank, dealing with an audience upon whose ignorance of the subject he might safely rely, could pretend to suppose that the fate of the doctrine of evolution was in any way involved in the question as to the organic nature of bathybius. The amazing strategy was all Mr. Cook's own, and the haughty trumpeting appears to have been chiefly done with his own very brazen instrument.

I said a moment ago that Mr. Cook's system of quotation is peculiar. The following instance is so good that it will bear citing at some length. According to Mr. Cook, Professor Huxley says, in his article on Biology in the ninth edition of the "Encyclopædia Britannica:" "_Throughout almost the whole series of living beings, we find agamogenesis, or not-sexual generation._" After a pause, Mr. Cook proceeded in a lower voice: "When the topic of the origin of the life of our Lord on the earth is approached from the point of view of the microscope, some men, who know not what the holy of holies in physical and religious science is, say that we have no example of the origin of life without two parents." He went on to cite the familiar instances of parthenogenesis in bees and silk moths, and then proceeded as follows: "Take up your Mivart, your Lyell, your Owen, and you will read [where?] this same important fact which Huxley here asserts, when he says that the law that perfect individuals may be virginally born extends to the higher forms of life. I am in the presence of Almighty God; and yet, when a great soul like that tender spirit of our sainted Lincoln, in his early days, with little knowledge but with great thoughtfulness, was troubled by his difficulty, and almost thrown into infidelity by not knowing that the law that there must be two parents is not universal, I am willing to allude, even in such a presence as this, to the latest science concerning miraculous conception. [Sensation.]"

The vulgarity of this rhetoric is as glaring as its absurdity. All that concerns me now, however, is to point out the Brobdignagian dimensions of the misstatement of facts. Let us look back for a moment at the italicized quotation from Huxley, upon which Mr. Cook builds up the wondrous assertion "that the law that perfect individuals may be virginally born extends to the higher forms of life." Then let us turn to Huxley's article and see what he really does say.

Treating of the whole subject of agamogenesis in the widest possible way by including it under the more general process of cell-multiplication, Huxley says: "Common as the process is in plants and in the lower animals, it becomes rare among the higher animals. In these, the reproduction of the whole organism from a part, in the way indicated above, ceases. At most we find that the cells at the end of an amputated portion of the organism are capable of reproducing the lost part, and in the very highest animals even this power vanishes in the adult.... _Throughout almost the whole series of living beings, however, we find concurrently with the process of agamogenesis, or asexual generation_, another method of generation, in which the development of the germ into an organism resembling the parent depends on an influence exerted by living matter different from the germ. This is _gamogenesis_, or sexual generation."[35]

Comparing the italicized passage here with Mr. Cook's italicized quotation, we see vividly illustrated the fundamental method of procedure by which the "Monday Lectureship" jumps from a statement about the reproduction of a lobster's claw to the inference that a man may be born without a father. It reminds one of that worthy clergyman who introduced a scathing sermon on a new-fangled variety of ladies' headdress by the appropriate text, "Top-knot come down!" On being reminded by one of his deacons that the full verse seemed to read, "Let him that is upon the housetop not come down," the pastor boldly justified his abridgment on the ground that any particular collocation of words in Scripture is as authoritative as any other, since all parts of the Bible are equally inspired. Perhaps there are some who would justify Mr. Cook's peculiar principle of abridgment on the familiar ground that the end sanctifies the means, and that if a statement seems helpful to "the truth" in general, it is no matter whether the statement itself is true or not.

Enough of this. If we were to go through with these volumes in detail, we should find little else but misrepresentations of facts, misconceptions of principles, and floods of tawdry rhetoric, of which the specimens here quoted are quite sufficient to illustrate the lecturer's "fundamental method of procedure." If I have treated him somewhat lightly, it is because there is nothing in his matter or in his manner that would justify, or even excuse, a more serious style of treatment. The only aspect of his career which affords matter for grave reflection is the ease with which he succeeded for a moment in imposing on the credulity and in appealing to the prejudices of his public. The eagerness with which the orthodox world hailed the appearance of this new champion could not but remind one, with sad emphasis, of Oxenstjern's famous remark: "Quam parva sapientia mundus regitur!" It is comforting to remember that one of the world's greatest naturalists, Asa Gray,--whose orthodoxy is as unimpeachable as his science,--very promptly declared in print that such championship is something of which orthodoxy has no reason to feel proud.

_December, 1880._

XIII

FORTY YEARS OF BACON-SHAKESPEARE FOLLY[36]

Some time ago, while I happened to be looking over a wheelbarrow-load of rubbish written to prove that such plays as "King Lear" and "The Merry Wives of Windsor" emanated from one of the least poetical and least humorous minds of modern times, I was reminded of a story which I heard when a boy. I forget whether it was some whimsical man of letters like Charles Lamb, or some such professional wag as Theodore Hook, who took it into his head one day to stand still on a London street, with face turned upward, gazing into the sky. Thereupon the next person who came that way forthwith stopped and did likewise, and then the next, and the next, until the road was blocked by a dense crowd of men and women, all standing as if rooted in the ground, and with solemn sky-ward stare. The enchantment was at last broken when some one asked what they were looking at, and nobody could tell. It was simply an instance of a certain remnant of primitive gregariousness of action on the part of human beings, which exhibits itself from time to time in sundry queer fashions and fads.

So when Miss Delia Bacon, in the year which saw the beginning of "The Atlantic Monthly," published a book purporting to unfold the "philosophy" of Shakespeare's dramas, it was not long before other persons began staring intently into the silliest mare's nest ever devised by human dulness; and the fruits of so much staring have appeared in divers eccentric volumes, of which more specific mention will presently be made. Neither in number nor in quality are they such as to indicate that the Bacon-Shakespeare folly has yet become fashionable, and we shall presently observe in it marked suicidal tendencies which are likely to prevent its ever becoming so; but there are enough of such volumes to illustrate the point of my anecdote.

Another fad, once really fashionable, and in defence of which some plausible arguments could be urged, was the Wolfian theory of the Homeric poems, which dazzled so many of our grandparents. It is worth our while to mention it here by way of prelude. The theory that the Iliad and Odyssey are mere aggregations of popular ballads, collected and arranged in the time of Pisistratus, was perhaps originally suggested by the philosopher Vico, but first attracted general attention in 1795, when set forth by Friedrich August Wolf, one of the most learned and brilliant of modern scholars. Thus eminently respectable in its parentage and quite reasonable on the surface, this ballad theory came to be widely fashionable; forty years ago it was accepted by many able scholars, though usually with large modifications.

The Wolfians urged that we know absolutely nothing about the man Homer, not even when or where he lived. His existence is merely matter of tradition, or of inference from the existence of the poems. But as the poems know nothing of Dorians in Peloponnesus, their date can hardly be so late as 1100 B. C. What happened, then, when "an edition of Homer" was made at Athens, about 530 B. C., by Pisistratus, or under his orders? Did the editor simply edit two great poems already six centuries old, or did he make up two poems by piecing together a miscellaneous lot of ancient ballads? Wolf maintained the latter alternative, chiefly because of the alleged impossibility of composing and preserving such long poems in the alleged absence of the art of writing. Having thus made a plausible start, the Wolfians proceeded to pick the poems to pieces, and to prove by "internal evidence" that there was nothing like "unity of design" in them, etc.; and so it went on, till poor old Homer was relegated to the world of myth. As a schoolboy I used to hear the belief in the existence of such a poet derided as "uncritical" and "unscholarly."

In spite of these terrifying epithets, the ballad theory never made any impression upon me; for it seemed to ignore the most conspicuous and vital fact about the poems, namely, the _style_, the noble, rapid, simple, vivid, supremely poetical style,--a style as individual and unapproachable as that of Dante or Keats. For an excellent characterization of it, read Matthew Arnold's charming essays "On Translating Homer." The style is the man, and to suppose that this Homeric style ever came from a democratic multitude of minds, or from anything save one of those supremely endowed individual natures such as get born once or twice in a millennium, is simply to suppose a psychological impossibility. I remember once talking about this with George Eliot, who had lately been reading Frederick Paley's ingenious restatement of the ballad theory, and was captivated by its ingenuity. I told her I did not wonder that old dry-as-dust philologists should hold such views, but I was indeed surprised to find such a literary artist as herself ignoring the impassable gulf between Homer's language and that which any ballad theory necessarily implies. She had no answer for this except to say that she should have supposed an evolutionist like me would prefer to regard the Homeric poems as gradually evolved rather than suddenly created! A retort so clever and amiable most surely entitled her to the woman's privilege of the last word.

The Wolfian theory may now be regarded as a thing of the past; it has had its day and been flung aside. If Wolf himself were living, he would be the first to laugh at it. Its original prop has been knocked away, since it has become pretty clear that the art of writing was practised about the shores of the Ægean Sea long before 1100 B. C. Even Wolf would now admit that it might have been a real letter that Bellerophon carried to the father of Anteia.[37] All attempts to show a lack of unity in the design of the Iliad and the Odyssey have failed irretrievably, and the discussion has served only to make more and more unmistakable the work of the mighty master. The ballad theory is dead and buried, and he who would read its obituary may find keen pleasure, as well as many a wholesome lesson in sound criticism, in the sensible and brilliant book by Andrew Lang on "Homer and the Epic."

The Bacon-Shakespeare folly has never been set forth by scholars of commanding authority, like Wolf and Lachmann, or Niese and Wilamowitz Moellendorff. Among Delia Bacon's followers not one can by any permissible laxity of speech be termed a scholar, and their theory has found acceptance with very few persons. Nevertheless, it illustrates as well as the Wolfian theory the way in which such notions grow. It starts from a false premise, hazily conceived, and it subsists upon arguments in which trivial facts are assigned higher value than facts of vital importance. Mr. Lang's remark upon certain learned Homeric commentators, "that they pore over the hyssop on the wall, but are blind to the cedar of Lebanon," applies with tenfold force to the Bacon-Shakespeare sciolists. In them we always miss the just sense of proportion which is one of the abiding marks of sanity. The unfortunate lady who first brought their theory into public notoriety in 1857 was then sinking under the cerebral disease of which she died two years later, and her imitators have been chiefly weak minds of the sort that thrive upon paradox, closely akin to the circle-squarers and inventors of perpetual motion. Underlying all the absurdities, however, there is something that deserves attention. Like many other morbid phenomena, the Bacon-Shakespeare folly has its natural history which is instructive. The vagaries of Delia Bacon and her followers originated in a group of conditions which admit of being specified and described, and which the historian of nineteenth-century literature will need to notice. In order to understand the natural history of the affair, it is necessary to examine the Delia Bacon theory at greater length than it would otherwise deserve. Let us see how it is constructed.

It starts with a syllogism, of which the major premise is that the dramas ascribed to Shakespeare during his lifetime, and ever since believed to be his, abound in evidences of extraordinary book-learning. The minor premise is that William Shakespeare of Stratford-on-Avon could not have acquired or possessed so much book-learning. The conclusion is that he could not have written those plays.

The question then arises, Which of Shakespeare's contemporaries had enough book-lore to have written them? No doubt Francis Bacon had enough. The conclusion does not follow, however, that he wrote the plays; for there were other contemporaries with learning enough and to spare, as for example George Chapman and Ben Jonson. These two men, to judge from their acknowledged works, were great poets, whereas in Bacon's fifteen volumes there is not a paragraph which betrays poetical genius. Why not, then, ascribe the Shakespeare dramas to Chapman or Jonson? Here the Baconizers endeavour to support their assumption by calling attention to similarities in thought and phrase between Francis Bacon and the writer of the dramas. Up to this point their argument consists of deductions from assumed premises; here they adduce inductive evidence, such as it is. We shall see specimens of it by and by. At present we are concerned with the initial syllogism.

And first, as to the major premise, it must be met with a flat denial. The Shakespeare plays do not abound with evidences of scholarship or learning of the sort that is gathered from profound and accurate study of books. It is precisely in this respect that they are conspicuously different from many of the plays contemporary with them, and from other masterpieces of English literature. Such plays as Jonson's "Sejanus" and "Catiline" are the work of a scholar deeply indoctrinated with the views and mental habits of classic antiquity; he has soaked himself in the style of Lucan and Seneca, until their mental peculiarities have become like a second nature to him, and are unconsciously betrayed alike in the general handling of his story and in little turns of expression. Or take Milton's "Lycidas:" no one but a man saturated in every fibre with Theocritus and Virgil could have written such a poem. An extremely foreign and artificial literary form has been so completely mastered and assimilated by Milton that he uses it with as much ease as Theocritus himself, and has produced a work that even the master of idyls had scarcely equalled. After the terrific invective against the clergy and the beautiful invocation to the flowers, followed by the triumphant hallelujah of Christian faith, observe the sudden reversion to pagan sentiment where Lycidas is addressed as the genius of the shore. Only profound scholarship could have written this wonderful poem,--could have brought forth the Christian thought as if spontaneously through the medium of the pagan form. Now there is nothing of this sort in Shakespeare. He uses classical materials, or anything else under the sun that suits his purpose. He takes a chronicle from Holinshed, a biography from North's translation of Plutarch, a legend from Saxo Grammaticus through Belleforest's French version, a novel of Boccaccio, a miracle play,--whatever strikes his fancy; he chops up his materials and weaves them into a story without much regard to classical models; defying rules of order and unity, and not always heeding probability, but never forgetful of his abiding purpose, to create live men and women. These people may have Greek or Latin names, and their scene of action may be Rome or Mitylene, decorated with scraps of classical knowledge such as a bright man might pick up in miscellaneous reading; but all this is the superficial setting, the mere frame to the picture. The living canvas is human nature as Shakespeare saw it in London and depicted with supreme poetic faculty. Among the new books within his reach was Chapman's magnificent translation of the Iliad, which at a later day inspired Keats to such a noble outburst of encomium; and in "Troilus and Cressida" we have the Greek and Trojan heroes set before us with an incisive reality not surpassed by Homer himself. This play shows how keenly Shakespeare appreciated Homer, how delicately and exquisitely he could supplement the picture; but there is nothing in its five acts that shows him clothed in the garment of ancient thought as Milton wore it. Shakespeare's freedom from such lore is a great advantage to him; in "Troilus and Cressida" there is a freedom of treatment hardly possible to a professional scholar. It is because of this freedom that Shakespeare reaches a far wider public of readers and listeners than Milton or Dante, whose vast learning makes them in many places "caviare to the general." Book-lore is a great source of power, but one may easily be hampered by it. What we forever love in Homer is the freshness that comes with lack of it, and in this sort of freshness Shakespeare agrees with Homer far more than with the learned poets.

It is not for a moment to be denied that Shakespeare's plays exhibit a remarkable wealth of varied knowledge. The writer was one of the keenest observers that ever lived. In the woodland or on the farm, in the printing shop or the alehouse, or up and down the street, not the smallest detail escaped him. Microscopic accuracy, curious interest in all things, unlimited power of assimilating knowledge, are everywhere shown in the plays. These are some of the marks of what we call _genius_,--something that we are far from comprehending, but which experience has shown that books and universities cannot impart. All the colleges on earth could not by combined effort make the kind of man we call a genius, but such a man may at any moment be born into the world, and it is as likely to be in a peasant's cottage as anywhere.

There is nothing in which men differ more widely than in the capacity for imbibing and assimilating knowledge. The capacity is often exercised unconsciously. When my eldest son, at the age of six, was taught to read in the course of a few weeks of daily instruction, it was suddenly discovered that his four-year-old brother also could read. Nobody could tell how it happened. Of course the younger boy must have taken keen notice of what the elder one was doing, but the process went on without attracting attention until the result appeared.