Francis Bacon, Baron of Verulam, Vicont St. Alban, who is designated as
“Tertius a Platone Philosophiæ Princeps,” is represented pen in hand,
tall hat on head, a voluminous lace ruff round his neck, in the act of
inditing: _Mundus Mens Connubio Jungam Stabili_.[40] On the opposite
page two worlds, a _Mundus Visibilis_ and a _Mundus Intellectualis_ are
shown clasping hands across space, in order, no doubt, to give emphasis
to the idea of a world and mind _connubium_. The picture typifies the
conception of Bacon which has prevailed ever since. A skater on his way
to the Engadine declared he was at a loss to understand why anyone ever
went to Switzerland in summer for _pleasure_. Some of us would have been
tempted to smile at the remark. But the prevailing conception of Bacon
is probably quite as inadequate as this skater’s conception of
Switzerland. The age of Queen Elizabeth probably had no presage--not a
hint--that Francis Bacon would ever develop into a “prince of
philosophy.” In my opinion the Bacon known to it was not a natural
philosopher{1} even in aspiration, but an artist--an artist in words,
who, if circumstances, more especially family circumstances, had been
favourable any time between 1580 and 1590 would have openly confessed
that poetry was his ideal, and declared himself a poet. As it was, he
took the line of least friction, and sooner or later acquired the title
of “concealed poet.” How far the concealment extended in the early days
it is impossible to discover. To Sir Philip Sidney,{2} Sir J.
Harrington, and other accomplished young men of their class, the true
state of the case was doubtless an open secret.
Professor Nichol (_Francis Bacon_, Part I), though he thinks that Bacon
“did not write Shakespeare’s plays,” considers that “there is something
startling in the like magnificence of speech in which they find voice
for sentiments, often as nearly identical when they anticipate as when
they contravene the manners of thought and standards of action that
prevail in our country in our age. They are similar in this respect for
rank,” etc. Shelley discerned that Bacon “was a poet,” and Macaulay
perceived that the “poetical faculty” was “powerful” in Bacon. Taine
held that Bacon “thought as artists and poets habitually think,” that he
was one of the finest of a “poetic line,” that “his mental _procédé_ was
that of the creator, not reasoning but intuition.” Bacon, then, was
essentially a poet, belonged to the same race as Sidney for example.
Sidney died young, and his poetic activity ceased some time before he
died. Yet Sidney’s poetical achievement has come down to our day. What
has become of Bacon’s poetical achievement? Was it also concealed?
Hallam, in the _Introduction to the Literature of Europe_, confessed he
was unable to identify “the young man who came up from Stratford, was
afterwards an indifferent player in a London theatre, and retired to his
native place in middle life, with the author of Macbeth and Lear.”
Emerson (_Representative Men_) declared: “The Egyptian verdict of
Shakespearean societies comes to mind, that Shakespeare{3} was a jovial
actor and manager. I cannot marry this fact to his verse. Other
admirable men have led lives in some sort of keeping with their thought;
but this man in wide contrast.” It would be easy to adduce other
evidence pointing in the same direction. But Hallam and Emerson,
unexceptionable witnesses, will serve the turn. On one side, then, we
are brought into contact with a poet or maker whose poems elude us. On
another side we are confronted with poems whose poet or maker eludes
us--some of us. What if Shakespeare were to Bacon what Callisthenes,
Aristophanes’ actor-friend, was to Aristophanes? Suppose by way of
working hypothesis that such was the case, that Shakespeare was a
pen-name of Bacon’s. In that case his ultimate intention as to dropping
or retaining the mask of pseudonymity would be affected by various
considerations extending far beyond the family circle. (a) To be
“rewarded of” the stage-manager was probably nothing less than degrading
to a man of good birth. (b) The conditions under which the hypothetical
Shakespeare must have written, were unfavourable to careful work. A man
who is half ashamed of what he is doing is hardly likely to do his best,
especially when more or less concealed. Certainly many of the plays
suffer from faulty construction, inconsistency, obscurity, bombast and
so forth, and what is more important, Shakespeare himself{4} was
probably quite as conscious of these blemishes as were any of his
critics. (c) With us the daily paper exerts a certain influence on
public opinion. In Bacon’s day the theatre was one of the most effective
means of appeal to any considerable audience, and in that way the name
Shakespeare probably got entangled in controversies with which Bacon
felt no desire to meddle autonymously.{5} (d) The moral tendency of
Shakespearean work published before 1609, _Venus and Adonis_ for
example, was not such as to forward any of the hypothetical author’s
schemes for place. (e) Early in the seventeenth century Bacon seems to
have convinced himself that for purposes of moment Latin was destined to
supplant English. He was haunted moreover by fear of impending civil
commotions, and augured ill for that “fair weather learning which
needs the nursing of luxurious leisure.” (f) Had there been no
other considerations than these, Bacon, even after he became
Solicitor-General, might have been induced himself to give to the world
some at least of his hypothetical offspring really “perfect of their
limbes as he conceived them.” It is not to be supposed that he would
ever have claimed all or nearly all that passed for Shakespeare’s. Much
would have been disavowed altogether, and many of the more inconvenient
things would, quite fairly, have been ascribed to collaboration,
misprints, inexperience, haste, carelessness, etc. But the action of
the ill-conditioned group which in 1609 engineered the publication of
the _Sonnets_ of Shakespeare, must have greatly reduced the chance that
Bacon would ever consent to edit anything of Shakespeare’s. So far as
intimate friends were concerned, the piratical publication, however
irritating,{6} would be comparatively innocuous, and as for charitable
strangers, they might be trusted to discover extenuating circumstances
in the youth of the author and the fashion of the time. But the great
indiscriminating public, unaccustomed to make allowances, and led by an
enemy like Sir Edward Coke, would chortle over the self-revelations
suggested by the book, and put the worst construction on everything.
Rather than face such a prospect, Bacon would be willing to pay almost
any price, and the price he may be supposed to have paid was to seem to
know nothing and care nothing about “Shakespeare” or anything that was
his. Adherence to this policy would not necessarily involve any visible
change of attitude or conduct. On the contrary, the hypothetical
Shakespeare would be urged to hold on his usual course by the fear that
any sudden stoppage, of the supply of plays for instance, might arouse
suspicions which otherwise would have slept. Parenthetically it may be
observed that Bacon had already known what it was to give to the world
things--the Essays of 1597--which he would rather have kept back, but
was compelled to publish because “to labour the state of them had been
troublesome and subject to interpretation.”
The parting between Prospero and Ariel has been thought to adumbrate
the farewell of Shakespeare, whoever he was, to Poetry--a view that is
plausible enough. It would explain the position assigned to _The
Tempest_ in the First Folio, and suggest an interesting answer to the
question why Prospero, who “prized his books above his dukedom”
threatened--only threatened--to drown a particular “book.” But no one
knows within several years when _The Tempest_ was written. Nor is it at
all certain that the poem was wholly Shakespeare’s.[41] For anything we
know to the contrary, the editor of the First Folio may have
interpolated the striking invocation--to mention one passage only--which
begins: “Ye elves of hills.”{7} _The Tempest_ then, does not enable us
to fix the date of Shakespeare’s practical renunciation of poetry. I
say, _practical_ renunciation, because certain passages in _Henry the
Eighth_ which feelingly represent the insecurity of greatness might _ex
hypothesi_ have been contributed by Bacon just after his fall, though
his practical renunciation could hardly have taken place later than
1612.[42] But whether the date were 1612 or somewhat earlier, the
hypothetical Shakespeare was amply provided with other interests and
pursuits. (a) Rhetoric had long held a high place in his affections.
“Rhetoric and Logic,” says he, “these two, rightly taken, are the
gravest of the sciences, being the arts of arts,”{8} and what excellence
he attained in the former of these arts we know from Ben Jonson. (b)
Though poesy, the recreation of his leisure--Bacon would never have
allowed that it was anything but a recreation--were denied him, prose,
splendid inimitable prose was his to command. (c) The delightful days
and months and years which he had spent with poets both ancient and
modern, particularly Ovid,{9} might be turned to philosophical account.
(d) Historical projects allured him. In the _Advancement of Learning_, a
history--a prose history no doubt--of England from the “Wars of the
Roses” downwards is noted as a desideratum, and seems to have been
begun. _The History of the Reign of King Henry VII_ (1622), however, is
the only portion of the desiderated history which reached completeness.
(e) Legislative projects also attracted him, less strongly no doubt than
historical. (f) But at this time the _Great Instauration_ had possessed
itself of the chief place in his affection: “Of this I can assure you
that though many things of great hope decay with youth,{10} yet the
proceeding in that work doth gain upon me, upon affection and desire,”
he writes, about 1609, to his bosom friend Matthew. The instauration,
say rather transfiguration, of human knowledge--that was the vision
which now fascinated him. When the spell began to work it is difficult
to determine. Early in the seventeenth century his conception of human
“learning” or “knowledge” or “science”--three words to which he attached
practically the same meaning--included Poetry, not as an appendix, but
as one of three fundamental constituents. Perhaps the word “culture,”
with “barbarism” for antithesis, would now come nearest to what he then
meant by learning. The _Advancement of Learning_ is the work not of a
scholar in the technical sense, but of an omnivorous apprehensive
imaginative reader. It is the expression by an artist in words of the
serried thoughts of a mind steeped in poetry, deep versed in human
nature, but certainly not versed in natural philosophy as understood by
his contemporaries--Galileo for example, Gilbert and others. A passage
in the first of its two books runs: “No man that wadeth in learning or
contemplation thoroughly but will find printed in his heart _nil novi
super terram_.” It is incredible that Bacon can at this time have caught
so much as a glimpse of the “New Logic,” “New Art,” or--to give its
latest name--_Novum Organum_, which he afterwards declared was “quite
new, totally new in every kind.”[11] But though the _Advancement_ was in
fact a plea for culture, in Bacon’s intention it was a serious attempt
to grapple with philosophy, an attempt so serious that he afterwards
declared the _Novum Organum_ itself to be the “same argument sunk
deeper.” Moreover, in my opinion, it was his first serious attempt in
that direction, hence its importance to any right apprehension of his
genius.{12}
About the year 1609, the philosophical enthusiasm reached a climax.
_Cogitata et Visa de Interpretatione Naturæ_, _Redargutio
Philosophiarum_, _Sapientia Veterum_, and other pieces, some of which
Boswell, one of his executors, seems to have called _impetus
philosophici_, were thrown off in rapid succession. As early as 1610,
however, he solicits the King to employ him in writing a history of his
Majesty’s “Time,” a hint surely that the philosophical impetus had begun
to abate. The change, whether it began that year, or a year or two
later, is intelligible enough. Science had not claimed him her
deliverer. Harvey is reported to have sneered at his philosophy. Gilbert
and Napier may have started the sneer; for Bacon obviously undervalued
mathematics, and spoke almost contemptuously of Gilbert (whom Galileo
fully appreciated). About this time, too, he probably began to suspect
that somewhere in the _New Art_, there lurked a defect which would have
to be cured before the apparatus would work. The truth is that in the
philosophical work published or privately circulated by Bacon before
1610, though there was much to appeal to the æsthetic side of the human
mind, much to stimulate the cultivated layman’s admiration for
knowledge, for the devoted student of science there was very little help
of a constructive kind, the only kind of help he really needed.{13}
The _Sapientia Veterum_, 1609, is based on a number of myths selected
from the poets and fabulists of antiquity in virtue of a certain
congruity with Bacon’s intuitions and predilections. _The Sylva Sylvarum
or Natural History_, his latest work, is based on an assemblage of what
by way of distinction might be called facts. The dissonance between the
two works is amazing. The _Sapientia_, which was intended to bespeak a
favourable hearing for the New Art, busies itself with venerable
fictions. From the _Natural History_ on the other hand, poetry and fable
were to have been rigorously excluded. Bacon’s biographer, Rawley, wrote
for the first edition of the work (1627), an address “To the Reader,”
which winds up: “I will conclude with an usual speech of his lordship’s;
that this work of his Natural History is the world as God made it, and
not as man made it; for it hath nothing of imagination.”
Several years before the _Sylva_ was written, Galileo had censured as
paper philosophers certain contemporaries of his, who set about the
investigation of nature as if she were a “book like the Æneid or the
Odyssey.” One at least of Bacon’s intimate friends, Sir Tobie Mathew,
was no stranger to Padua and Florence, and it is quite possible that he
may have informed Bacon of these strictures of Galileo’s not long after
they were uttered. But, be this as it may, a momentous change must have
taken place after 1609, not in Bacon’s aspiration to be the greatest of
human benefactors to man, but in his conception of the means by which
his vast expectations were to be realised. Had the change been less than
“fundamental,” “a good and well ordered Natural History” would not have
been described in the _Phenomena Universi_ (1622), as holding the “keys
both of sciences and of operations.” After 1612 Bacon became for some
eight or nine years so immersed in affairs, as Attorney-General, Privy
Councillor--no sinecure then--Lord Chancellor, etc., that it must have
been impossible for him to give to his New Logic a tithe of the
attention it required. “At this period,” says Dr. Abbott: “there is a
great gap in the series of Bacon’s philosophical works. In 1613 he was
appointed Attorney-General, and from that time till 1620 no literary
work of any kind published or unpublished is known to have issued from
his pen. All that he did was apparently to rewrite repeatedly and revise
the _Novum Organum_.{14} The _Organum_ made its appearance in 1620 with
a dedication to the King by no means confident of either the worth or
the use of his offering. But as he says in the _proemium_ that “all
other ambition whatsoever was in his opinion lower than the work in
hand,” one would infer that his zeal for philosophy had begun to revive
even before the tragedy of 1621. The remaining five years of the great
man’s life--“a long cleansing week of five years’ expiation and more,”
he calls it--were more or less distracted with anxieties in no way
connected with philosophy. He hoped, nevertheless, to present the old
King with a “good history of England, and a better digest” of the laws,
and the young King with a history of the “time and reign of King Henry
the Eighth.”{15} But after the most distressful _sequelæ_ of his fall
had been relieved, his grandiose, imposing scheme for the renovation or
transfiguration of philosophy must have regained the position it had
held some ten or a dozen years earlier. Without it, life for him would
have been a mean and melancholy failure. “God hath framed the mind of
man as a mirror or glass capable of the image of the universal world,
and joyful to receive the impression thereof ... and not delighted in
beholding the variety of things and vicissitude of times, but raised
also to find out the ordinances which throughout all those changes are
infallibly observed.”{16} This capacity, this wonder-working exaltation
of the mind had been neglected, and all but lost, by reason of the
interference of Aristotle and other insolent dictators, and Bacon
imagined himself destined to rehabilitate it, to usher in a new era, to
endow the human race, not with knowledge alone, but with legions of
beneficent arts,{17} and for reward to go down to the ages as
pre-eminently the Friend of man.{18} Compared with a vision so
magnificent, his youthful dream of a poet’s immortality would seem
paltry, stale, and unprofitable. No wonder the old love, poetry, was
forsaken. The wonder would have been if for the sake of the old love he
had done or permitted or countenanced anything which he thought might
possibly prejudice posterity against the new love, his “darling
philosophy.”{19}
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}