and take a retrospective glance at the natural history of the
Bacon-Shakespeare craze. What was it that first unlocked the
sluice-gates, and poured forth such a deluge of foolishness upon a
sorely suffering world? It will hardly do to lay the blame upon poor
Delia Bacon. Her suggestions would have borne no fruit had they not
found a public, albeit a narrow one, in some degree prepared for them.
Who, then, prepared the soil for the seeds of this idiocy to take root?
Who but the race of fond and foolish Shakespeare commentators, with
their absurd claims for their idol? During the eighteenth century
Shakespeare was generally underrated. Voltaire wondered how a nation
that possessed such a noble tragedy as Addison's "Cato" could endure
such plays as "Hamlet" and "Othello." In the days of Scott and Burns a
reaction set in; and Shakespeare worship reached its height when the
Germans took it up, and, not satisfied with calling him the prince of
poets and peerless master of dramatic art, began to discover in his
works all sorts of hidden philosophy and impossible knowledge. Of the
average German mind Lowell good-naturedly says that "it finds its
keenest pleasure in divining a profound significance in the most
trifling things, and the number of mare's nests that have been stared
into by the German _Gelehrter_ through his spectacles passes
calculation."[43] But the Germans are not the only sinners; let me cite
an instance from near home. In the quarto "Hamlet" of 1603 we read:--
"Full forty years are past, their date is gone,
Since happy time joined both our hearts as one:
And now the blood that filled my youthful veins
Runs weakly in their pipes," etc.
Whereupon Mr. Edward Vining calls upon us to observe how Shakespeare,
"to whom all human knowledge seems to be but a matter of instinct, in
[these lines] asserts the circulation of the blood in the veins and
'pipes,' a truth which Harvey probably did not even suspect until at
least thirteen years later," etc.[44] Does Mr. Vining really suppose
that what Harvey did was to discover that blood runs in our veins? A
little further study of history would have taught him that even the
ancients knew that blood runs in the veins.[45] About fourteen hundred
years before "Hamlet" was written, Galen proved that it also runs in
the arteries. After Galen's time, it was believed that the dark blood
nourishes such plebeian organs as the liver, while the bright blood
nourishes such lordly organs as the brain, and that the interchange
takes place in the heart; until the sixteenth century, when Vesalius
proved that the interchange does not take place in the heart, and the
martyr Servetus proved that it does take place in the lungs; and so on
till 1619, when Harvey discovered that dark blood is brought by the
veins to the right side of the heart, and thence driven into the lungs,
where it becomes bright and flows into the left side of the heart,
thence to be propelled throughout the body in the arteries. That it then
grows dark and returns through the veins Harvey believed, but no one
could tell how, until, forty years later, Malpighi with his microscope
detected the capillaries. Now to talk about Shakespeare discerning as if
by instinct a truth which Harvey afterward discovered is simply silly.
Instead of showing rare scientific knowledge, his remark about blood
running in the veins is one that anybody might have made.
This is a fair specimen of the ignorant way in which doting commentators
have built up an impossible Shakespeare, until at last they have
provoked a reaction. Sooner or later the question was sure to arise,
Where did your Stratford boy get all this abstruse scientific knowledge?
The keynote was perhaps first sounded by August von Schlegel, who
persuaded himself that Shakespeare had mastered "all the things and
relations of this world," and then went on to declare that the accepted
account of his life must be a mere fable. Thus we reach the point from
which Delia Bacon started.
It may safely be said that all theories of Shakespeare's plays which
suppose them to be attempts at teaching occult philosophical doctrines,
or which endow them with any other meanings than those which their words
directly and plainly convey, are a delusion and a snare. Those plays
were written, not to teach philosophy, but to fill the theatre and make
money. They were written by a practised actor and manager, the most
consummate master of dramatic effects that ever lived; a poet
unsurpassed for fertility of invention, unequalled for melody of
language, unapproached for delicacy of fancy, inexhaustible in humour,
profoundest of moralists; a man who knew human nature by intuition, as
Mozart knew counterpoint or as Chopin knew harmony. The name of that
writer was none other than William Shakespeare of Stratford-on-Avon.
It was inevitable that the Bacon folly, after once adopting such methods
as those of Mrs. Pott and Mr. Donnelly, should proceed to commit suicide
by piling up extravagances. By such methods one can prove anything, and
accordingly we find these writers busy in tracing Bacon's hand in the
writings of Greene, Marlowe, Shirley, Marston, Massinger, Middleton, and
Webster. They are sure that he was the author of Montaigne's Essays,
which were afterward translated into what we have always supposed to be
the French original. Mr. Donnelly believes that Bacon also wrote
Burton's "Anatomy of Melancholy." Next comes Dr. Orville Owen with a new
cipher, which proves that Bacon was the son of Queen Elizabeth by Robert
Dudley, and that he was the author of the "Faerie Queene" and other
poems attributed to Edmund Spenser. Finally we have Mr. J. E. Roe, who
does not mean to be outdone. He asks us what we are to think of the
notion that an ignorant tinker, like John Bunyan, could have written the
most perfect allegory in any language. Perish the thought! Nobody but
Bacon could have done it. Of course Bacon had been more than fifty years
in his grave when "Pilgrim's Progress" was published as Bunyan's. But
your true Baconizer is never stopped by trifles. Mr. Roe assures us
that Bacon wrote that heavenly book, as well as "Robinson Crusoe" and
the "Tale of a Tub;" which surely begins to make him seem ubiquitous and
everlasting. If things go on at this rate, we shall presently have a
religious sect holding as its first article of faith that Francis Bacon
created the heavens and the earth in six days, and rested on the seventh
day.
_November, 1896._
XIV
SOME CRANKS AND THEIR CROTCHETS
"Now, by two-headed Janus,
Nature hath framed strange fellows in her time!"
_Merchant of Venice_, I. i.
About five-and-twenty years ago, when I was assistant librarian at
Harvard University, much of my time was occupied in revising and
bringing toward completion the gigantic pair of twin catalogues--of
authors and subjects--which my predecessor, Dr. Ezra Abbot, had started
in 1861. Twins they were in simultaneity of birth, but not in likeness
of growth. Naturally, the classified catalogue was much bigger than its
brother, filled more drawers, cost more money, and made a vast deal more
trouble. For while some books were easy enough to classify, others were
not at all easy, and sometimes curious questions would arise.
One day, for example, I happened to be looking at a pamphlet on the
value of Pi; and, should any of my readers ask what that might mean, I
should answer that Pi (π) is the Greek letter which geometers
use to denote the ratio of the circumference of a circle to its
diameter. The arithmetical value of this symbol is 3.1415926536, and so
on in an endless fraction. Is it not hard to see what there can be in
such an innocent decimal to irritate human beings and destroy their
peace of mind? Yet so it is. Many a human life has been wrecked upon Pi.
To a certain class of our fellow-creatures its existence is maddening.
It interferes with the success of a little scheme on which they have set
their hearts,--nothing less than to construct a square which shall be
exactly equivalent in dimensions to a given circle. Nobody has ever done
such a thing, for it cannot be done. But when mathematicians tell these
poor people that such is the case, they howl with rage, and, dipping
their pens in gall, write book after book bristling with figures to
prove that they have "squared the circle." The Harvard library does not
buy such books, but it accepts all manner of gifts, and has thus come to
contain some queer things.
When I consulted the subject catalogue, to see under what head it had
been customary to classify these lucubrations on Pi, I found, sure
enough, that it was Mathematics § Circle-Squaring. Following this cue, I
explored the drawers in other directions, and found books on "perpetual
motion" formed a section under Physics, while crazy interpretations of
the book of Daniel were grouped along with works of solid Biblical
scholarship by such eminent writers as Reuss and Kuenen and Cheyne.
Clearly, here was a case for reform. The principle of classification was
faulty. In one sense, the treatment of the quadrature of the circle may
be regarded as a section under the general head of mathematics; as, for
example, when Lindemann, in 1882, showed that Pi cannot be represented
as the root of any algebraic equation with rational coefficients. But
our circle-squaring literature is very different. It is usually written
by persons whose mathematical horizon scarcely extends beyond long
division: just as the writers on perpetual motion know nothing of
physics; just as so many expositors have dealt with the ten-horned beast
in blissful ignorance alike of ancient history and of the principles of
literary criticism. What all such books illustrate, however various may
be their ostensible themes, is the pathology of the human mind. They are
specimens of Insane Literature. As such they have a certain sort of
interest; and to any rational being it is the only sort they can have.
So I culled from many a little drawer the cards appertaining to divers
printed products of morbid cerebration, and gathered them into a class
of Insane Literature; and under this rubric such sections as
Circle-Squaring, Perpetual Motion, Great Pyramid, Earth not a Globe,
etc., were evidently in their proper place. The name of the class was
duly inscribed on the outside of its drawer, and the matter seemed
happily disposed of.
The way of the reformer, however, is beset with difficulties, and it is
seldom that his first efforts are crowned with entire success. Not many
days had elapsed since this emendation of the catalogue, when one of my
assistants brought me the card of a book on the Apocalypse, by a certain
Mr. Smallwit, and called my attention to the fact that it was classified
as Insane Literature.
"Very well," I said, "so it is."
"I don't doubt it, sir," said she; "but the author lives over in
Chelsea, and I saw him this morning in one of the alcoves. Perhaps, if
he were to look in the catalogue and see how his book is classified, he
mightn't altogether like it. Then, as I looked a little further along
the cards, I came upon this pamphlet by Herr Dummkopf, of Breslau,
upsetting the law of gravitation; and--do you know?--Herr Dummkopf is
spending the winter here in Cambridge!"
"To be sure," said I, "it was very stupid of me not to foresee such
cases. Of course we can't call a man a fool to his face. In a catalogue
which marshals the quick along with the dead some heed must be paid to
the amenities of life. Pray get and bring me all those cards."
By the time they arrived a satisfactory solution of the difficulty had
suggested itself. I told the assistant simply to scratch out "Insane,"
and put "Eccentric" instead. For while the harsh Latin epithet would of
course infuriate Messrs. Dummkopf, Smallwit & Co., it might be doubted
if their feelings would be hurt by the milder Greek word. Some people of
their stripe, to whom notoriety is the very breath of their nostrils,
would consider it a mark of distinction to be called eccentric. At all
events, the harshness would be delicately veiled under a penumbra of
ambiguity.
Thus the class Eccentric Literature was established in our catalogue,
and there it has remained, while the books in the library have increased
from a hundred thousand to half a million. Once or twice, I am told, has
some disgusted author uttered a protest, but the quiet of Gore Hall has
not been disturbed thereby. Care is needed in treating such a subject,
and my rule was that no amount of mere absurdity, no extremity of
dissent from generally received opinions, should consign a book to the
class of Eccentric Literature, unless it showed unmistakable symptoms of
crankery, or the buzzing of a bee in the author's bonnet. This rule has
been strictly followed. One lot of books--the Bacon-Shakespeare
stuff--which I intended to put in this class, but forgot to do so
because of sore stress of work, still remain absurdly grouped along with
the books on Shakespeare written by men in their senses. With this
exception, the class offers us a fairly comprehensive view of the
literature of cranks.
Just where the line should be drawn between sanity and crankery is not
always easy to determine, and must usually be left to soundness of
judgment in each particular case, as with so many other questions of all
grades, from the supreme court down to the kitchen. One of the most
frequent traits of your crank is his megalomania, or self-magnification.
His intellectual equipment is so slender that he cannot see wherein he
is inferior to Descartes or Newton. Without enough knowledge to place
him in the sixth form of a grammar school, he will assail the
conclusions of the greatest minds the world has seen. His mood is
belligerent; since people will not take him at his own valuation, he is
apt to regard society as engaged in a conspiracy to ignore and belittle
him. Of humour he is pretty sure to be destitute; an abounding sense of
the ludicrous is one of the best safeguards of mental health, and even a
slight endowment will usually nip and stunt the fungus growth of
crankery.
The slightest glimmering sense of humour would have restrained that
inveterate circle-squarer, James Smith, from publishing (in 1865) his
pamphlet entitled "The British Association in Jeopardy, and Dr. Whewell,
the Master of Trinity, in the Stocks without Hope of Escape." His case,
with those of many other ingenious lunatics, was racily set forth by the
late Professor De Morgan in his "Budget of Paradoxes" (London, 1872), a
bulky book dealing with the author's personal experiences with cranks
and their crotchets. It was De Morgan's lot as an eminent mathematician
to be outrageously bored by circle-squarers and their kin, and it was a
happy thought to put on record the queer things that happened. His
friends asked him again and again why he took the trouble to mention and
expose such absurdities. He replied that, when your crank publishes a
book "full of figures which few readers can criticise, a great many
people are staggered to this extent, that they imagine there must be the
indefinite _something_ in the mysterious _all this_. They are brought to
the point of suspicion that the mathematicians ought not to treat _all
this_ with such undisguised contempt, at least. Now I have no fear for
π; but I do think it possible that general opinion might in
time demand that the crowd of circle-squarers, etc., should be admitted
to the honours of opposition; and this would be a time-tax of five per
cent. one man with another, upon those who are better employed." At any
rate, continues De Morgan, with a twinkle in the corner of his eye,
whether in chastising cranks he has any motive but public good "must be
referred to those who can decide whether a missionary chooses his
pursuit solely to convert the heathen." He confesses that perhaps he may
have a little of the spirit of Colonel Quagg, whose principle of action
was thus succinctly expressed: "I licks ye because I kin, and because I
like, and because ye's critters that licks is good for!"
Among the creatures whose malady seemed to call for such drastic
treatment was Captain Forman, R. N., who in 1833 wrote against the law
of gravitation, and got not a word of notice. Then he wrote to Sir John
Herschel and Lord Brougham, asking them to get his book reviewed in some
of the quarterlies. Receiving no answer from these gentlemen, he
addressed in one of the newspapers a card to Lord John Russell,
inveighing against their "dishonest" behaviour. Still getting no
satisfaction, the valorous captain wrote to the Royal Astronomical
Society with a challenge to controversy. To this letter came a polite
but brief answer, advising him to study the rudiments of mechanics. It
was not in the paradoxer's nature to submit tamely to such treatment;
and he replied in a printed pamphlet, wherein he called that learned
society "craven dunghill cocks," and bestrewed them, with other choice
flowers of rhetoric, much to the relief of his feelings.
One of this naval officer's fellow sufferers was a farm labourer, who
took it into his head that the Lord Chancellor had offered £100,000
reward to any one who should square the circle. So Hodge went to work
and squared it, and then hied him to London, blissfully dreaming of
sudden wealth. Hearing that De Morgan was a great mathematician, he left
his papers with him, including a letter to the Lord Chancellor, claiming
the £100,000. De Morgan returned the papers with a note, saying that no
such prize had ever been offered, and gently hinting that the worthy
Hodge had not sufficient knowledge to see in what the problem consisted.
This elicited from the rustic philosopher a long letter, from which I
must quote a few sentences, so characteristic of the circle-squaring
talent and temper:--
Doctor Morgan, Sir. Permit me to address you
Brute Creation may perhaps enjoy the faculty of beholding
visible things with a more penitrating eye than ourselves.
But Spiritual objects are as far out of their reach as
though they had no being Nearest therefore to the brute
Creation are those men who Suppose themselves to be so far
governed by external objects as to believe nothing but what
they See and feel And Can accomedate to their Shallow
understanding and Imaginations
... When a Gentleman of your Standing in Society ... Can
not understand or Solve a problem That is explicitly
explained by words and Letters and mathematacally operated
by figuers He had best consult the wise proverd
Do that which thou Canst understand and Comprehend for thy
good.
I would recommend that Such Gentleman Change his business
And appropriate his time and attention to a Sunday School
to Learn what he Could and keep the Litle Children form
durting their Close
With Sincere feelings of Gratitude for your weakness and
Inability I am
Sir your Superior in Mathematics.
X. Y.
A few days after this elegant epistle there came to De Morgan another
from the same hand. Hodge had sent his papers to some easy-going
American professor, whose reply must clearly have been too polite. It is
never safe to give your crank an inch of comfort; it will straightway
become an ell of assurance. This American savant, crows Rusticus,
"highly approves of my work. And Says he will Insure me Reward in the
States I write this that you may understand that I have knowledge of the
unfair way that I am treated in my own nati County I am told and have
reasons to believe that it is the Clergy that treat me so unjust. I am
not Desirious of heaping Disonors upon my own nation. But if I have to
Leave this kingdom without my Just dues. The world Shall know how I am
and have been treated
"I am Sir Desirous of my Just dues
"X. Y."
A cynical philosopher once said that you cannot find so big a fool but
there will be some bigger fool to swear by him; and so our agricultural
friend had his admiring disciple who felt bound to break a lance for him
with the unappreciative De Morgan:--
"He has done what you nor any other mathematician as those who call
themselves such have done. And what is the reason that you will not
candidly acknowledge to him ... that he has squared the circle shall I
tell you? it is because he has performed the feat to obtain the glory of
which mathematicians have battled from time immemorial that they might
encircle their brows with a wreath of laurels far more glorious than
ever conqueror won it is simply this that it is a poor man a humble
artisan who has gained that victory that you don't like to acknowledge
it you don't like to be beaten and worse to acknowledge that you have
miscalculated, you have in short too small a soul to acknowledge that he
is right.... I am backed in my opinion not only by Mr. Q. a
mathematician and watchmaker residing in the boro of Southwark but by no
less an authority than the Professor of mathematics of ... College
United States Mr. Q and I presume that he at least is your equal as an
authority and Mr. Q says that the government of the U. S. will
recompense X. Y. for the discovery he has made if so what a reflection
upon Old england the boasted land of freedom the nursery of the arts and
sciences that her sons are obliged to go to a foreign country to obtain
that recompense to which they are justly entitled."[46]
Ordinarily, the aim of the paradoxers is to achieve renown by doing
what nobody ever did. Hence the fascination exercised upon them by those
apparently simple problems which already in ancient times were
recognized as "old stickers," the quadrature of the circle, the
trisection of angles, and the duplicature of the cube. The ancients
found these geometric problems insolvable, though it was left for modern
algebra to point out the reason, namely, that no quantities can be
geometrically constructed from given quantities, except such as can be
formed from them algebraically by the solution of quadratic equations;
if the algebraic solution comes as the root of a cubic or biquadratic
equation, it cannot be constructed by geometry. Against this hopeless
wall the crowd of paradoxers will doubtless continue to break their
heads until the millennium dawns.
Sometimes, however, our crank has a practical end in view, as in the
numerous attempts to discover "perpetual motion," or, in other words, to
invent a machine out of which you can get indefinitely more energy than
you put in. It is not strange that many thousands of dollars have been
wasted in this effort to recover Aladdin's lost lamp. The notorious
Keely motor is but one of a host of contrivances born and bred of crass
ignorance of the alphabet of dynamics. But perpetual motion is not the
only form assumed by wealth-seeking crankery. In 1861 a Captain Roblin,
of Normandy, having ascertained to his own satisfaction, from the
prolonged study of the zodiac of Denderah, the sites of sundry
gold-mines, came forward with proposals for a joint stock company to dig
and be rich. The labours of Herr Johannes von Gumpach were of a more
philanthropic turn. He published in 1861 a pamphlet entitled "A
Million's Worth of Property and Five Hundred Lives annually lost at Sea
by the Theory of Gravitation. A Letter on the True Figure of the Earth,
addressed to the Astronomer Royal." Next year this pamphlet grew into a
stout volume. It maintained that a great many shipwrecks were occasioned
by errors of navigation due to an erroneous conception of the shape of
the earth. Since Newton's time, it has been supposed to be flattened at
the poles, whereas the amiable Gumpach calls upon his fellow-creatures
to take notice that it is elongated, and to mend their ways accordingly.
The desire to prove great men wrong is one of the crank's most frequent
and powerful incentives. The name of Newton is the greatest in the
history of science: how flattering to one's self it must be, then, to
prove him a fool! In eccentric literature the books against Newton are
legion. Here is a title: "David and Goliath, or an Attempt to prove
that the Newtonian System of Astronomy is directly opposed to the
Scriptures. By William Lander, Mere, Wilts, 1833." And here is De
Morgan's terse summary of the book: "Newton is Goliath; Mr. Lander is
David. David took five pebbles; Mr. Lander takes five arguments. He
expects opposition; for Paul and Jesus both met with it."