I have just spent three days reading Mr. E. G. Harman’s _Edmund Spenser
and the Impersonations of Francis Bacon_, published by the firm of
Constable. There are books which he who runs may read; there are also
books from which he who reads will run. This to me comes into neither
category. It is very large and crowded with most complicated detail;
it is, though quite competently written, devoid of literary grace;
and it supports a monstrous thesis with arguments many of which are
of staggering absurdity. Yet in point of deadly fascination it vies
with the basilisk. It is a monument of the “scientific method.” The
author’s learning and industry are terrifying; his tone seems completely
dispassionate; he proceeds from discovery to discovery with mild
ruthlessness; and not the most uncompromising of Wospolus was ever more
sternly resolved to embrace logical conclusions. His chief fault is
that his premises are usually arbitrary or quite insufficient; but the
objective charm of his massive progress, as of a steam-roller, from stage
to stage, is not affected by this.
Mr. Harman does not in this volume discuss in detail Bacon’s authorship
of Shakespeare’s plays. He assumes that. He assumes also that
Bacon did publish literature under the rose and that he did employ
impersonators; his reasons being that he had to express his feelings
and that acknowledgement of authorship would have damaged his prospects
of political promotion. This much granted, Mr. Harman looks around for
writings in which he thinks he can detect traces of Bacon and examines
the evidence for their reputed authorships. He does not descend to the
puerile level of the late Sir Edwin Durning-Lawrence, with his “Hic,
Hæc, Hog.” He says nothing of cryptogram. But in case after case he
finds (1) that there are marks of Baconian thought and language, (2)
that allegorical references to Bacon’s political disappointments may be
found, (3) that documentary evidence supporting accepted authorships is
very slight. Nothing stops him. Where there is a real resemblance in
style things are easy. Where there are marked differences we are asked
to note the fact that Bacon’s method enabled him to write in a variety
of styles—as though serious writers expressing their inmost selves could
put on styles like trousers. If somebody has borne witness that an
Elizabethan wrote his own works, then that somebody was in the plot too.
As to Spenser, with whom Mr. Harman chiefly deals, one is certainly
struck with the paucity of the evidence for him. We know less about
him than we know about Shakespeare; and his biographers have had to
rely almost entirely upon “internal evidence” drawn from his works.
But personally I must say that I prefer their methods to Mr. Harman’s.
He, analysing exhaustively the plot of the _Faerie Queene_, with its
Britomarts, Arthegalls, and Blatant Beasts, finds a knowledge of court
life that could not be possessed by Spenser, who lived in Ireland and
was (according to him) an ex-Board School boy in a small Civil Service
job—which is at any rate politer than “drunken, illiterate clown.”
This is question-begging; but what shall we say of the assumption that
if Spenser had written the poem the rivers of Ireland would have been
described as fully as the rivers of England? Why should the emigrant
Civil servant know anything about the rivers of Ireland? As far as that
goes, there is one slip in the description of the rivers of England which
indicates to my mind that the author relied on some inaccurate map for
his information about them. The Baconian authorship forces Mr. Harman to
the conclusion that some of Spenser’s sonnets were written by Bacon when
he was eight or nine years old. But Mr. Harman is a strong man. After
all, Mozart was a precocious child, so why not Bacon? He does not shrink
from this any more than he shrinks from arguing that any book or letter
which favourably mentions one of Bacon’s cryptic works must also have
been written or instigated by him. They _must_ have been written by him,
and, this granted, internal corroboration must be sought for. Anything
is good enough for this purpose. Mr. Harman even finds evidence in the
occurrence in several “Baconian” works of the phrase “golden wyres” as
applied to the Queen’s hair. If he would read the body of Elizabethan
lyrics, or even extracts of them in such a contemporary anthology as
_England’s Parnassus_, he would find that an Elizabethan poet could no
more help comparing a lady’s Hayre to Golden Wyres than he could help
likening her Teares to Pearles or her Brests to Iuorie.
But there is no space here for detailed examination. It is enough to
yield oneself to the pleasure of following the Harmanian trail. I have
noted the works which in the course of his narrative or in footnotes he
ascribes to Bacon. The Authorized Version of the Bible is not mentioned.
But, apart from his voluminous acknowledged writings, Bacon wrote the
works of Spenser (including the _Faerie Queene_, the longest poem in
the world, which Bacon published before he was out of his twenties);
the works of Shakespeare; practically the whole body of Elizabethan
poetical criticism (including Webbe’s _Discourse of Poesie_, Puttenham’s
_Art of Poesie_, Sidney’s _Apologie_, Daniel’s _A Defence of Ryme_, and
Meres’s _Palladis Tamia_); many of the poems of Gascoigne (written by
Bacon before he was twelve); certain works imputed to Nashe, Greene, and
Gabriel Harvey; the poems of Sir Walter Raleigh and the _Last Fight of
the “Revenge”_; the works of Essex; Sidney’s _Arcadia_ and _Astrophel
and Stella_ (with this key Bacon unlocked his heart); Lyly’s _Euphues_
(a long book); Bryskett’s _Discourse of Civil Life_; Sir Humphrey
Gilbert’s _Discourses_ and the account of his last voyage; _Leicester’s
Commonwealth_ and _Leicester’s Ghost_; and other minor scraps. If this be
all correct, we shall have to revise our opinion of the Elizabethan time
as a time replete with various genius. All we shall be able to refer to
now will be “the spacious Bacon of great Elizabeth.”
An enormous number of people—including supposed writers and their
relations—must have been in the secret. Sometimes they must have
marvelled at Bacon’s extraordinary behaviour, as for instance when he
wrote for Raleigh a laudatory poem on the Queen:
“Bacon (who, in my opinion, is the author of the poem) makes
use of the opportunity in taking up the personality of Ralegh
to express his own feelings. He was undoubtedly most unhappy at
his exclusion from access and the waning of all his hopes of
advancement. This is what is reflected under the disguise of
Ralegh’s loss of favour in the poem.”
They must have wondered how on earth Bacon expected his grievances to be
remedied if his complaints were published over another man’s name, and
why, if Raleigh could address poems to the Queen _in propria persona_
without loss of caste, Bacon could not do the same. But no doubt most of
them, for many were impecunious, did not allow such questions to bother
them much. They were content to take Bacon’s bribes for the use of their
names. What he must have spent in subsidies to sham authors one gasps to
contemplate. No wonder that for years he was in such financial straits,
and that at one point things came to such a pass with him that he was
arrested for debt.
“The Cattle of the Boyne”
I have referred before to the frequency of misprints in the penny
_Times_. It does seem a pity that the conductors of the paper cannot keep
it up to its old traditions in this respect. Last week there was a more
curious instance than usual. These words appeared:
“The anniversary of the Cattle of the Boyne was celebrated with
unusual enthusiasm throughout Canada.”
I was so moved by the report of these zoological novelties that I made a
little poem about them, full of Celtic twilight. It runs thus:
THE SANDS OF BOYNE
_Och, Geoffrey, go and call the Cattle home,_
_And call the Cattle home,_
_And call the Cattle home,_
_Acrost the sands of Boyne._
_Shure, ye’re the bhoy that’s got inured to foam,_
_So come, bring in the koine._
_Och, are they fish, flesh, fowl or good red herrings?_
_Perhaps they are red herrings,_
_Forlorn and wildered herrings,_
_Strayed from their native broine,_
_This hapless party which has lost its bearings_
_Fornint the sands of Boyne._
_No, no, they have no herring for their father._
_The proof-reader’s their father,_
_A most prolific father_
_By mishap or desoign._
_If this is what wan penny means, I’d rather_
_Stump up the ancient coin_
_Than daily find—Och tempora, Och ~Times~!—_
_Bad grammar in my ~Times~_
_And misprints in my ~Times~_
_In ivry other loine,_
_Capped by this worst of typographic crimes_
_“The ~CATTLE~ of the Boyne”!_
But perhaps one ought not really to complain of misprints, even in the
_Times_, when they are funny.
August 1914
And it is less than three months since I was writing complacently about
the Leipzig book exhibition! I wrote about the exquisite collections
of bindings and drawings, the bands, the parading crowds of peaceful
Germans, the pavilions of all nations from Holland to Siam, and the
charming Tudor structure erected by Britain, with its long low halls
containing cases of Shakespeare folios and editions from the Kelmscott
Press. Enormous crowds from all over Europe would, it was hoped, visit
the exhibition as the summer wore on. “August, of course,” said the
officials to me, “will be _the_ month.”
The buildings in the wide Street of Nations are still there, no doubt.
The flags, perhaps, have been hauled down, but those files of white wood
and plaster palaces still stand behind their flower-beds along the broad
avenues. The crowds are dispersed. The officials in charge of the various
buildings have fled to their respective domiciles. The cheerful male
members of the Bavarian Peasants’ Band have taken off their green hats
and put on helmets, left the women behind, and gone off to burn villages
like their own, and disembowel sunburnt French peasants as naturally
amiable as themselves. Memories so recent make the pit of one’s stomach
sink. In May last a German barber in Berlin had his razor at my throat,
and when he scratched my skin he was most concerned and apologetic.
“Nescis, mi fili, quam parva sapientia regitur mundus.” The remark was
made by a Swedish statesman in the eighteenth century. Voltaire, looking
down from heaven—if one may risk his displeasure by presuming his
presence in so uncongenial a place—must feel that since the eighteenth
century there has been no great change, and that the human race is as
horribly ridiculous an institution as ever it was.
But here we are.[1] Like most other inhabitants of the “civilized” world,
I have for the last week read no books, but only newspapers. Fourteen
a day is about my average, which means nearly a hundred a week. And
nine-tenths of them contain nothing that one did not know before. There
never was a war, since telegraphs were invented, about which news was
so scarce. Almost every rumour that comes through is dubious, and it is
invariably contradicted. In successive issues and even in the same issue
of a journal one reads that troops have and have not entered a certain
village, that somebody’s neutrality has and has not been violated,
and that a naval engagement has and has not taken place. If you go
over the eight pages of “war news” in a daily and make a summary of
the unquestionable facts contained therein, as distinguished from the
doubtful reports and the office-written padding, you find it could all
be got into a paragraph. We have frequently heard that the day of the
war correspondent was over. We heard it during the Russo-Japanese War—of
which we certainly got very little news—and we heard it during the Balkan
campaign. But at the moment of writing I have scarcely seen a single item
regarding a single encounter which looked indisputable or which appeared
to come direct from an eye-witness. Almost all the information we have
been getting has come either from rumour travelling across many tongues
or from official sources. Both these founts of news are great liars, the
former excelling in the _suggestio falsi_, and the latter both in that
and in the _suppressio veri_.
The desperate straits in which we have been for news could be gathered
(if in no other way) from the outlandish places of origin ascribed to
reports that get into print. Stockholm informs one that advices from
Teheran report a conflict at Toul; and we hear that the _Mercure de
Bruxelles_ states “on excellent authority” that something has happened at
Basle. Deliberate fabrication has been at work all over the place. Our
good old friend the doctor, with the cholera microbes which he puts into
wells, even turned up at the very start. This mythical gentleman is at
least as old as the Franco-German War of 1870, and his last appearance
was in the Balkans. No sooner does a war start than one of the combatants
hastens to describe his diabolical activities in the hope, presumably,
of making the world’s blood boil at the thought of an “outrage against
humanity.”
The papers cannot be blamed for printing rumours, but they might give the
clearest indication, whenever possible, of the value of their sources.
Rumours before they get into print presumably travel in much the same
way as after they get into print. Of how rapidly “news” develops I had
an experience in a club on Tuesday night. A late evening paper printed a
brief report, stating that Aberdeen doctors had gone to attend to wounded
who were being landed at Cromarty. Five minutes after I had seen this, I
was told by a member that single British and German destroyers had had
a brush off the Scottish coast. Five minutes after that the vessels had
expanded into flotillas, and within the hour a club servant, with very
gloomy face, remarked to me, “I don’t know if you’ve heard it, sir, but
there’s been a great naval battle in the North Sea and the British Fleet
has met with an awful disaster.” With correspondents kept out of the area
of hostilities, it is no wonder that by the time reports of occurrences
reach the persons who send them to our newspapers they bear very little
relation to the events (if any) which have originally generated them.
War correspondents in Europe to-day seem to be able to do little more
than sit in friendly foreign capitals and send home little bits of news
out of the local papers. And if we want a really accurate and full
description of the big battles, especially the big naval battles, of the
future we shall usually have to wait until peace allows combatants to
publish such books as the Japanese _Human Bullets_, describing the attack
on Port Arthur, and those vivid Russian books which told the story of
Rozhdestvensky’s voyage to the China Sea with his mouldy squadron and the
magnificent and pitiful end of it at Tsushima. But of no great modern war
will the whole truth ever be properly known. Forces work over such vast
areas that full information is impossible to collect.
FOOTNOTES:
[1] I have left all this as I wrote it.—S. E.
Mrs. Barclay sees it through
_Over the turmoil of a world in arms_
_There floats a rich indomitable coo ..._
_’Tis Barclay.... Though excursions and alarms_
_Torture the firmament, though Wilhelm II_
_In shining armour waits his Waterloo,_
_Though on all sides the blood rains down in torrents_
_Love’s interests still are in safe hands with Florence._
_What though the rest of us are turning tail,_
_Assured by those who have a right to speak_
_That only Patriotism has a sale?_
_~She~ knows Love’s drawing-power remains unique;_
_~Her~ books need never be postponed a week;_
_Sure of her subject, certain of her vogue,_
_She has no need to adjourn, much less prorogue._
_Business as usual. Yet who knows, who knows_
_Whether she has not chosen the better part,_
_Swelling the proud full sail of her great prose_
_Still with the gentler zephyrs of the heart,_
_Rather than seize an Amazonian dart,_
_Leaping into the middle of the fray_
_Like certain other poets of the day._
_Has Robert Bridges’ success with fighting_
_Been such as to encourage emulation?_
_Or Dr. Watson’s “bit them in the Bight”-ing?_
_Or the same author’s other lucubration_
_(Yet one more blow for a disthressful nation)_
_In which, dead gravelled for a rhyme for “Ireland,”_
_He struggled out with “motherland and sireland”?_
_Did even the voice from Rudyard Kipling’s shelf_
_Say anything it had not said before?_
_And was not Stephen Phillips just himself?_
_And was not Newbolt’s effort on the war_
_Distinctly less effective than of yore?_
_And would not German shrapnel in the leg be_
_Less lacerating than the verse of Begbie?_
When the Muse seized me, in this manner, by the hair, it was three
o’clock in the morning, and I had just finished the new novel by the
author of _The Rosary_. Had it been earlier I should have written
more. But next day the mouse of inspiration had fled to its hole; the
spell of the book had been dissipated; my vision had faded into the
light of common day; and I resumed my consideration of the position of
Przemysl, a place of which, until this week, I had never heard. But what
a fascination the book exercised while one was reading it! I can well
understand why Mrs. Barclay commands a greater audience than perhaps any
other living writer. She can beat the basilisk at its own game.
The reader is swept away with a rush of strong emotion at the very start.
A tall, reticent, bronzed man arrives by the boat train at Charing Cross.
Thrown over by a woman, he has been abroad for ten years, nursing his
grief and creating a reputation as a novelist. No sooner does he get to
the station than he extracts from the coy bookstall clerk a confession
that to him the books of Rodney Steele are the best in the world. Lump
in the throat number one; and a sovereign in the pocket of the clerk.
Steele leaves the station to drive to a flat a friend has left him. Oh,
the fragrance and glitter of dear old smoky London! Oh, the beauty of the
Queen Victoria Memorial!
“Mysterious through the gloom, he saw the nation’s fine
memorial to a deathless memory. The gush of green waters, the
golden figure at the summit, needed sunlight for their better
seeing. But clear through the orange darkness gleamed the white
marble majesty of England’s Great Queen.
“Rodney Steele lifted his hand in reverent salute as he
passed....
“‘Lest we forget!’ quoted Rodney Steele as he looked at the
majestic marble figure, throned outside the palace above the
rushing waters. ‘Yet—could we, who really remember, ever
forget?’”
The rest of the book tells how he was wooed and won by his old love, now
a widow. She had deserted him under a misapprehension and was resolved
to recover him. She therefore took the next flat to his—or rather to her
brother’s, which Steele was occupying. She had heard that owing to a
change of telephone numbers her brother was constantly being rung up by
mistake for a Hospital. One night therefore Steele was rung up and a Kind
Voice asked for the Matron. The voice reminded him of Madge. He began to
feel so lonely that he willed, with all his will, that the unknown Kind
Voice should ring him up again.
“‘Speak to me again,’ he said, ‘you, you spoke to me last
night. Speak to me again. What wait I for? I wait for you! Just
now—in my utter loneliness, in my empty solitude—I wait for
you.’...
“The distant clock slowly chimed a quarter past the hour of
ten; and—as that sound died away—the bell of the telephone
rang.”
This time he made the Kind Voice promise to ring him up nightly in order
to console him in his loneliness. The Kind Voice consented. Ultimately on
the telephone they discussed (he not revealing his identity or knowing
hers) his novels. This is the kind of thing they say over the telephone:
“‘The thing of first importance is to uplift your readers; to
raise their ideals; to leave them with a sense of hopefulness,
which shall arouse within them a brave optimism such as
inspired Browning’s oft-quoted noble lines.’”
When finally he confesses to the Kind Voice that his life has been ruined
by a girl with whom he is still in love, Madge thinks the time ripe for
an appointment. They meet. He finds that the Kind Voice has been Madge
all the time and he steels his breast against the woman who has added
deception to her previous crime. But her “gracious gracefulness” and
other qualities win in the end, and we finish at Christmas with Herald
Angels and wedding-bells.
Mrs. Barclay certainly has skill. Nobody else can write a silly story
half so well as she. Her English is fluent and vivid, although loose; her
humour is genuine if not subtle; and she handles her dialogue, such as it
is, very cleverly. But, above all, she knows how to serve out the glamour
and the pathos with a ladle. The hero of this book is as generous as he
is clever. He can conjure; he can make seagulls settle on his shoulder;
and he does kind actions to widows. There are also an heroic ex-soldier
who saved a man’s life at Spion Kop; a bishop’s window brimming over with
love and reminiscences; and an honest, stupid Englishman with no thoughts
of self. The only bad character dies, and the end is a pæan of joy. As
long as she can keep this up Mrs. Barclay will never lose her hold. In
spite of the war, this book, I should think, will sell in millions and
millions.
_Vorwärts_ reports that Dr. Ludwig Frank, a member of the Reichstag, has
been killed in battle near Lunéville. Dr. Frank, who sat for Mannheim,
was one of the leaders of the Southern Revisionists. I had tea with him
at the Reichstag last May. He took me into the Strangers’ Gallery of
the House, where I heard Dr. Liebknecht makes one of his anti-armament
speeches, the one in which he incidentally accused a Prussian general of
negotiating sales of decorations. It seems very remote now. Dr. Frank was
barrister; a big Jew with a heavy, handsome face—sallow skin, aquiline
nose, black moustache, strong chin, dominating eyes. His romantic air—he
was supposed to resemble Lassalle—made him very popular in the rich
Jewish salons of Berlin. He was a strong man, and one would have said an
ambitious one. But a middle-class man who enters the German Socialist
Party sacrifices so much that he _ipso facto_ clears himself of the
suspicion of mere ambition.
A Topic of Standing Interest
The Oxford University Press has just issued a beautiful little edition of
Erasmus’s _Praise of Folly_, with a good reproduction of Quentin Matsys’
portrait of Erasmus as a frontispiece. The last edition of the _Encomium
Moriæ_ with which I am familiar is that issued in 1887 by the firm of
Hamilton, Adams. It had a binding which did not please, but contained
Holbein’s interesting illustrations. Whether any considerable sale of
the book is likely nowadays I very much doubt. Erasmus’s humour was an
improvement on mediæval humour, which, except in a few cases, cannot
make a modern man laugh save sometimes through the brazenness of its
indecency. Erasmus was a child of the Renaissance, a wit, a scholar, a
questioner of all things, a man of the world, a revolutionary conformist.
But there are long dull passages in his most famous book, and many
remarks that seemed most daring to the men of his own time are to us
platitudinous; whilst he often labours some obvious joke in the worst
mediæval way.