Part 6

The more vulnerable points of this tentative theory{20} of Bacon’s relation to poetry seem to be three. First, Bacon’s final perseverence in ignoring his hypothetical offspring. Second, his _Translation of certain Psalms into English Verse_ which, according to Dr. Abbott, “so clearly betrays the cramping influence of rhyme and verse, that it could hardly have been the work of a true poet even of a low order.” Third, the detailed treatment of poetry in the _Advancement of Learning_ is essentially and flagrantly defective. Objection number one--Bacon’s persistent neglect of the plays--is easily answered.{21} The reasons for continuing to ignore them may in the aggregate have been even more cogent at the close, than at the opening of his career. For a Lord Chancellor, one who had been a “principal councillor and instrument of monarchy,” to publish not verses merely, but common plays, would have been a disgrace to the peerage, and ingratitude, if not disloyalty, to the sovereign to whom he owed his many promotions. Amongst the reasons for concealment, which did not exist at the opening of life, two more may be mentioned: one, the publication of the _Sonnets_, has been sufficiently discussed; the other, solicitude for the _Great Instauration_, has not. In casting about for an explanation of his frigid reception by contemporary science, Bacon must have hit upon a suspicion, shared maybe by King James,{22} that his true greatness after all lay rather in the domain of poetry than in that of philosophy.{23} Disappointed in his contemporaries, he would turn to the ages unborn, resolved that they at any rate should not start with a bias against his message. Any suggestion therefore, that he should allow his true name to be put to a volume of poetry, so distinguished from versified theology, would be unconditionally rejected.

To the objection founded on the _Translation of certain Psalms into English Verse_ several answers suggest themselves. No artist is always at his best, least of all in illness and old age, and the _Translation_ belongs to 1624 when Bacon was recovering from an attack of a painful disease. In the delightful preface to his select edition of Wordsworth’s Poems, Matthew Arnold writes: “Work altogether inferior, work quite uninspired, flat and dull, is produced by him (Wordsworth) with evident unconsciousness of its defects and he presents it to us with the same faith and seriousness as his best work.” Yet no competent judge of poetry would think of denying that Wordsworth was a “true poet” of a “high order.”[43] Again, conventional feeling may have been partly responsible for the dullness of this _Translation_. Dr. Abbott surely underrates the consequence of his admission that “theological verse like theological sculpture might seem to require something of the archaic, and a close adherence to the simplicity of the original prose.” Grant that Bacon was under the influence of some such feeling, and the objection we are considering is virtually answered, such was “Bacon’s versatility in adapting language to the slightest shade of circumstance and purpose.” Once more, the evidence that Bacon was a “concealed poet” is strong enough to hold its own against every argument that can fairly be urged against it, and to concealment dissimulation is apt to prove indispensable. It was so considered by Bacon, and Bacon’s experience of the device was extensive, if not unique. In a famous Essay he carefully distinguishes between Simulation and Dissimulation, and lets it be seen that he regarded the former as positively culpable, the latter as not only permissible but necessary.{24} A man dissimulates when he “lets fall signs or arguments that he is not that he is.... He that will be secret must be a dissembler in some degree. For men are too cunning to suffer a man to keep an indifferent carriage.... They will so beset a man with questions and draw him on and pick it out of him, that without an absurd silence he must show inclination one way.... So that no man can be secret except he give himself a little scope of dissimulation; which is as it were but the skirts or train of secrecy.” The application is obvious. Bacon’s _Translation of Certain Psalms_ is uninspired, lacks “choiceness of phrase ... the sweet falling of the clauses,” etc! Why? Possibly because the author “is letting fall signs or arguments that he is not that he is!” The fact that a thing so trivial as this _Translation_ should have been published, instead of being reserved for private circulation only--published too on the heels of the Shakespeare First Folio--lends additional probability to this explanation.{25}

Objection number three. On the hypothesis that Shakespeare was a pen-name of Bacon’s this objection, like the last, would fall to the ground, for the essential inadequacy of the _Advancement of Learning_ in relation to poetry would explain itself as part of the “train of secrecy.” But it may also be answered without resorting to the hypothesis. In the _Advancement_, dramatic poesy, though recognised, is deprived of its customary name, “dramatic,” and dubbed “representative,” whilst lyric, elegiac, and several other kinds of poetry are conspicuously ignored. The Latin version of the _Advancement_, however, the _De Augmentis Scientiarum_, published some eighteen years after the _Advancement_, not only restores to “representative poesy” its proper name “dramatic,” but also mentions _elegias_, _odes_, _lyricos_, etc. The objection, as I understand it, is founded on the assumption that, at the date of the _Advancement_, Bacon had still to learn what poetry essentially was, a defect which at the date of the _De Augmentis_ he had contrived to supply by getting up the subject (poetry) much as a lawyer will cram an unfamiliar subject in order to speak to his brief. But is there warrant for so questionable an assumption? Not a scrap. To see its absurdity, one has only to compare the _Advancement of Learning_ with the _Apologie for Poetry_ by the “learned” Sir Philip Sidney (so the author is described on the title page), a treatise which somehow or other made its first appearance in 1595, and its second under a different title and with slight additions in 1596.{26} One of the many resemblances involved in the comparison is, not that Sidney and Bacon appear to have read the same books, but that their literary preference should have coincided so closely. Among classical authors, Plutarch was manifestly the prime favourite of both. Next after Plutarch seem to have come Virgil, Cicero, Seneca, and Ovid. The Bible, it is true, plays a far more important part in the _Advancement_ than in the _Apologie_, inevitably, considering the scope of the _Advancement_, and that it was specially addressed to a theological king. In those days, however, libraries were so scantily furnished that lovers of literature necessarily became acquainted with what seems to be an unusually large proportion of the same authors.{27} It may, therefore, be urged that similarity of literary preference did not imply direct intercommunication. I will not argue the point, not because it is incontestable, but because there are other resemblances the cumulative force of which is more than enough for my purpose. The production of a sample half dozen of these will I hope be forgiven. (a) According to the _Apologie for Poetrie_ geometry and arithmetic would seem to be the only constituents of the science of mathematics. The _Advancement of Learning_ appears to take the same view. (b) According to the _Apologie_ “knowledge of a man’s self” is the highest or “mistress” knowledge, and her highest end is “well doing and not well knowing only.” The _Advancement_ holds “the end and term of natural philosophy” is “knowledge of ourselves” with a view to “active life” rather than to contemplative. (c) According to the _Apologie_ “metaphysic” concerns itself with “abstract notions,” builds upon “the depths of Nature” as distinct from Matter. The _Advancement_ defines “metaphysic”--which includes mathematics--as the science of “that which is abstracted and fixed,” “physic” being the science of “that which is inherent in matter and therefore transitory.” (d) The _Apologie_ censures philosophers for reducing “true points of knowledge” into “method” and “school art.” In the _Advancement_, Bacon condemns “the over early and peremptory reduction of knowledge into acts and methods.” It is a theme on which he is ever ready to descant. Indeed, the _Novum Organum_, a congeries of aphorisms, was probably designed for a monumental warning against premature systematisation. (e) The _Apologie_ contrasts the necessary limitations of other artists{28} with the perfect freedom of the poet: “only the poet ... goeth hand in hand with nature, not inclosed within the narrow warrant of her gifts ... where with the force of a divine breath he bringeth things forth for surpassing her doings, with no small argument to the incredulous of the first accursed fall of Adam; sith our erected wit maketh us know what perfection is.” The _Advancement_, in a charming passage, instructs us that one of the chief uses of poetry “hath been to give some shadow of satisfaction to the mind of man in those points wherein the nature of things doth deny it, the world being in proportion inferior to the soul.... Therefore poesy was ever thought to have some participation of divineness, because it doth raise and erect the mind, by submitting the shows of things to the desires of the mind; whereas reason doth buckle and bow the mind into the nature of things.” (f) The _Apologie_ holds “that there are many mysteries contained in poetry which of purpose were written darkly, lest by profane wits it should be abused.” The _Advancement_ affirms that one of the uses of poesy is to “retire and obscure ... that which is delivered,” “that is when the secrets and mysteries of religion, policy, and philosophy are involved in fables and parables.” (g) The author of the _Apologie_ venerated learning--“the noble name of learning,” he calls it--as if it were a sort of talisman. Bacon’s attitude towards learning, the theme of the _Advancement_, probably differed but little, if it differed at all from that of the Apologist. (h) The aims of the two authors were to a large extent identical, for the first book of the _Advancement_ was a vindication of the dignity and importance of Poetry as one of the chief constituents of “learning.” Other resemblances, more or less significant, will doubtless be picked up by any alert reader. So numerous are they in the earlier portion of the _Advancement_ that reading it one seems to be continually in touch with Sidney--assuming him to have been author of the _Apologie_. The effect in my own case has been such as to generate a conviction not indeed that Sidney and Bacon were personally intimate--though that is quite possible--but that Bacon when writing the _Advancement_ was thoroughly familiar with the _Apologie_.

It appears then that the poetical defects or eccentricities of the _Advancement_, to whatever cause they may have been due--and honest dissimulation is the most likely cause--were not due to ignorance of poetry. Consequently the last of the three objections fails of effect.

“But,” says one, “suppose for a moment that your precious theory is not incoherent, what then? A dream is not less a dream because it happens to hang together. So with your theory. Its value is of the smallest unless it serve to harmonise or explain phenomena otherwise intractable. The omission to apply this test is fatal to your pretensions.” I have no fault to find with the criticism, except that it is founded on misapprehension. It takes for granted that I have undertaken to establish something, a Bacon theory to wit. That feat may be possible to an able advocate, after a “harvest of new disclosures.” For my part, so diffident am I of my power to do anything of the kind, that the thought of attempting it here had not even occurred to me.

For the rest, on good cause shown my precious theory will be abandoned without reserve and without a pang, though I shall hardly be able to rise to that fullness of joy which according to M. Poincaré (Le Science et l’Hypothèse) ought to be felt by the physicist who has just renounced a favourite hypothesis because it has failed to satisfy a crucial test.

NOTES TO SHAKESPEARE--A THEORY

1: Note: The words philosopher, philosophy, philosophicals throughout this paper mean what they meant in Bacon’s day. The word science, on the other hand, when not in quotation, is to be understood in its modern sense.

2: From Sidney’s _Apologie for Poetrie_ (of which more hereafter) we learn that he was in the secret of some “_Queis meliore luto finxit præcordia Titan_, and who are better content to suppress the outflowing of their wit than by publishing it to be accounted knights of the same order” as those “servile wits who think it enough to be rewarded of the printer.” Similarly Puttenham, in his _Arte of English Poesie_ (1589), writes: “I know very many notable Gentlemen in the Court that have written commendably and suppressed it again, or else suffered it to be publisht without their names to it.” The _Arte of English Poesie_ was dedicated to Bacon’s uncle and _quasi_ guardian, Lord Burleigh. In this connexion, a saying ascribed to Edmund Waller is worth notice: “Sidney and Bacon were nightingales who sang only in the spring, it was the diversion of their youth.”

3: From Mr. Shakespeare’s autographs one gathers that he was indifferent as to the spelling of his name, and that if he had a preference, it was for the form Shakspere rather than Shakespeare. For my present purpose it is necessary to distinguish between the owner of New Place, Stratford, and the author of Macbeth and Lear. For the former, Shakspere would have been better than “Mr. Shakespeare.” But having followed the Belvoir document so far, I shall continue to use “Mr.” as the distinction between the two--without prejudice to the question whether or not they were actually one and the same. [The signatures show that the Stratford player wrote his name “Shakspere.” He seems never to have made use of the form “Shakespeare,” which is, in truth, a quite different name from that of “Shakspere,” or “Shaksper,” or “Shaxpur,” and such like forms. Ed.]

4: Some will have it that Shakespeare was a kind of writing machine, and look to Ben Jonson as their prophet. Yet Jonson’s testimony both in the great Ode to Shakespeare and elsewhere--agreeing herein with the internal evidence of several of the plays--negatives a mechanical explanation.

5: In the case of something which apparently “grew from” himself, dealt with the Deposing of Richard II, and “went about in other men’s names,” pseudonymity seems to have failed to screen Bacon from cross-examination and censure by Queen Elizabeth. (Bacon’s _Apologie in certaine imputations concerning the late Earl of Essex_. 1604.)

6: Browning and others less eminent than he have questioned the autobiographical value of the _Sonnets_. Even so they would be serious _impedimenta_ to a Solicitor-General on his way to the Attorney-Generalship, Privy Councillorship, and other conspicuous offices.

7: It is obviously borrowed, _mutatis mutandis_, from Ovid’s _Metamorphoses_. “Deeper than did ever plummet sound,” however, is not from Ovid’s _Medea_, but it seems to me from Act III, Sc. 3, of _The Tempest_ itself. Golding’s English version of the _Metamorphoses_ may well have been in the writer’s mind along with the Latin original.

8: _Advancement of Learning._ “Art of Arts” was a favourite phrase of his. Of “rational knowledges” he says in the same book: “These be truly said to be the art of arts.”

9: The _idée mère_ of the _Sapientia Veterum_--allegorisation--is one which I think no notable man of science among his contemporaries would have attempted to press into the service of science as Bacon pressed it. With contemporary men of letters, poets especially, it was in high favour, partly I suppose as an exercise of ingenuity, partly as a “talking point” wherewith to capture the vulgar, and partly of course for higher reasons. Sir John Harington’s application of it to _Orlando Furioso_ (1591), is a _reductio ad absurdum_ of the fashion.

10: Poetry for example!

11: The second book of the _Advancement_--where “rational knowledges” or “arts intellectual” are being discussed--promises, “if God give me leave, a disquisition, digested into two parts; whereof the one I term _experientia literata_, and the other _interpretatio naturæ_, the former being but a degree or rudiment of the latter.” What the latter was in 1605 is matter of conjecture. Possibly _Valerius Terminus, Of the Interpretation of Nature, with the Annotations of Hermes Stella_, a curious essay, seemingly meant to be anonymous, or pseudonymous, may enable us to measure its value. Concerning the former, _experientia literata_, we may learn from the _De Augmentis Scientiarum_, the authorised Latin version of the _Advancement of Learning_, quite as much as any of us need wish to know.

It may be well to bear in mind that in addition to the above double promise, the _Advancement of Learning_ contains other promises including one, “if God give me leave,” of a legal work--_prudentia activa_--digested into aphorisms.

12: The nebulous _Temporis Partus Maximus_, of very uncertain date, was scarcely more serious, I suppose, than the eloquent eulogies of “knowledge” or “philosophy” in Bacon’s “apparently unacknowledged” _Conference of Pleasure_, 1592, and _Gesta Graiorum_, 1594, though towards the close of his life he seems to have claimed for it a somewhat higher value.

13: According to Professor Fowler (_Francis Bacon_, Macmillan) the foundation of the Royal Society was due to the impulse given by Bacon to experimental science. Dr. Abbott (_Francis Bacon_, Macmillan) is struck by a different aspect of Bacon: “By a strange irony the great depreciator of words seems destined to derive an immortal memory from the rich variety of his style and the vastness of his too sanguine expectations.” I cannot help doubting whether, if Bacon had died before 1620 or thereabouts, he would have been held to have placed experimental science under any obligation at all.

14: No student I suppose would willingly be without the volume here quoted, “_Francis Bacon_”, by Edwin A. Abbott.

15: Rawley’s dedication, 1627, of the _Natural History_ to Charles the First.

16: _Advancement of Learning._ Book I.

17: The art of prolonging life was, he thought, one of the most desirable.

18: He “bequeathed” his soul and body to God. “For my name and memory I leave it to men’s charitable speeches, and to foreign nations, and to the next ages.”

19: Rawley in the dedication of 1627 uses this expression as if it were Bacon’s rather than his own.

20: I am not aware that in its integrity it is shared by anyone.

21: More easily by far than Mr. Shakespeare’s neglect of his supposed poetical issue more especially after his retirement to Stratford. What was there, what would there be in the Stratford of those days with its Quineys, Harts, Sadlers, Walkers, and the rest, to interest a spirit so finely touched as Shakespeare’s? But this is too large a question to be discussed here.

22: James I is reported to have said of the _Novum Organum_: “It is like the peace of God which passeth all understanding.”

23: Bacon’s tripartite division of knowledge--history with memory for its organ, poetry with imagination, and philosophy with reason--is well known. When he made this division the poetic use of the imagination was one which few may have known better than he. That he was equally well acquainted with the scientific use of the imagination is highly improbable.

24: Sir P. Sidney seems to have arrived at a like conclusion, for he speaks of an “honest dissimulation.”

25: Whether the absence of proof that Bacon, as Dr. Abbott observes, “felt any pride in or set any value on his unique mastery of English” should be similarly interpreted is a more difficult question. Possibly admiration of his vernacular became nauseous to him as suggesting something less than admiration of his philosophy. Of his Latin, the Latin of the _Sapientia Veterum_, he writes to his friend: “They tell me my Latin is turned silver and become current.” His apparent indifference to vehicle or language therefore did not extend beyond his mother tongue.

26: It must have circulated privately some years before 1595, for Sir John Harington in his English version (1591) of Ariosto’s _Orlando Furioso_, calls Sidney “our English Petrarke,” and refers to his _Apologie for Poetry_ (along with the _Arte of English Poesie_, 1589, dedicated to Lord Burleigh) as handling sundry poetical questions “right learnedly.” I may add that the motto to Sidney’s _Apologie_--_odi profanum vulgus et arceo_--touches the motto to Shakespeare’s _Venus and Adonis_; that _King Lear_ touches the _Arcadia_; and generally that a complete enumeration of the apparent contacts between Sidney and Shakespeare would probably fill many pages. [Some have even ventured to doubt whether the poetry which goes in the name of Sidney, who died at Zutphen in 1586, was really written by Sidney at all. Ed.]

27: It is interesting to note in relation to Aristotle, who is cited again and again in both _Advancement_ and _Apologie_, that the _Apologie_ endorses his dramatic precept of “one place, one day.” Another of the _Apologie’s_ references to Aristotle: “which reason of his, as all his, is most full of reason,” gives one to think. The _Advancement_ disapproves, it may be added, of tying modern tongues to ancient measures: “In modern languages it seemeth to me as free to make new measures of verses as of dances.”

28: Astronomy and metaphysic are there considered as _arts_, whilst poetry ranks as a _science_.

BEN JONSON AND SHAKESPEARE[44]

_Another exasperating lucubration on the Shakespeare problem! We have the Plays themselves. Why disturb a venerable belief by hypotheses incapable of proof, and neither venerable nor even respectable?_ To answer offhand--Curiosity about the _How_ of remarkable events is not likely to die out so long as intelligent beings continue to exist: Without the aid of hypotheses, science were impossible: Astronomers would still be expounding the once venerated doctrine of a stable Earth and a revolving Sun, a doctrine daily corroborated by the testimony of our eyes. Moreover, the “venerable belief” that Shakspere and Shakespeare were one and the same is mainly founded on the hypothesis that Ben Jonson’s famous Ode to Shakespeare (1623) is all to be taken at face-value. Praise--splendid praise--is unquestionably its dominant constituent; but other ingredients--enigma, jest, _make-believe_--are commingled with the praise.

The exordium of this Ode consists of sixteen laborious lines:

To draw no envy (Shakespeare) on thy name, Am I thus ample to thy Booke and Fame; While I confesse thy writings to be such, As neither Man nor Muse can praise too much. Tis true, and all mens suffrage. But these wayes Were not the paths I meant unto thy praise; For seeliest Ignorance on these may light, Which, when it sounds at best, but eccho’s right; Or blinde Affection, which doth ne’er advance The truth, but gropes, and urgeth all by chance; Or crafty Malice might pretend this praise, And thinke to ruine, where it seem’d to raise. These are, as some infamous Baud, or whore, Should praise a Matron. What could hurt her more? But thou art proof against them, and indeed Above th’ill fortune of them, or the need. I, therefore, will begin, etc.