shaking a lance
As brandish’t at the eyes of Ignorance.
The pun does not fit the name of--Bacon! The apostrophe to ‘sweet Swan
of Avon’ hardly applies to Bacon either; he was not a Swan of Avon. It
were a sight, says Ben, to see the Swan ‘in our waters yet appear,’
and Judge Webb actually argues that Shakespeare was dead, and could not
appear, so somebody else must be meant! ‘No poet that ever lived would
be mad enough to talk of a swan as YET appearing, and resuming its
flights, upon the river some seven or eight years after it was dead.’*
The Judge is like the Scottish gentleman who when Lamb, invited to meet
Burns’s sons, said he wished it were their father, solemnly replied that
this could not be, for Burns was dead. Wordsworth, in a sonnet, like
Glengarry at Sheriffmuir, sighed for ‘one hour of Dundee!’ The poet, and
the chief, must have been mad, in Judge Webb’s opinion, for Dundee had
fallen long ago, in the arms of victory. A theory which not only rests
on such arguments as Judge Webb’s, but takes it for granted that Bacon
might be addressed as ‘sweet Swan of Avon,’ is conspicuously impossible.
*Webb, p. 134.
Another of the Judge’s arguments reposes on a misconception which
has been exposed again and again. In his Memorial verses Ben gives
to Shakespeare the palm for POETRY: to Bacon for ELOQUENCE, in the
‘Discoveries.’ Both may stand the comparison with ‘insolent Greece
or haughty Rome.’ Shakespeare is not mentioned with Bacon in the
‘Scriptorum Catalogus’ of the ‘Discoveries’: but no more is any dramatic
author or any poet, as a poet. Hooker, Essex, Egerton, Sandys, Sir
Nicholas Bacon are chosen, not Spenser, Marlowe, or Shakespeare. All
this does not go far to prove that when Ben praised ‘the wonder of our
stage,’ ‘sweet Swan of Avon,’ he meant Bacon, not Shakespeare.
When Judge Webb argued that in matters of science [‘falsely so called’)
Bacon and Shakespeare were identical, Professor Tyrrell, of Trinity
College, Dublin, was shaken, and said so, in ‘The Pilot.’ Professor
Dowden then proved, in ‘The National Review,’ that both Shakespeare and
Bacon used the widely spread pseudo-scientific ideas of their time (as
is conspicuously the case), and Mr. Tyrrell confessed that he was sorry
he had spoken. ‘When I read Professor Dowden’s article, I would gladly
have recalled my own, but it was too late.’ Mr. Tyrrell adds, with
an honourable naivete, ‘I AM NOT VERSED IN THE LITERATURE OF THE
SHAKESPEAREAN ERA, and I assumed that the Baconians who put forward
the parallelisms had satisfied themselves that the coincidences were
peculiar to the writings of the philosopher and the poet. Professor
Dowden has proved that this is not so....’ Professor Dowden has indeed
proved, in copious and minute detail, what was already obvious to
every student who knew even such ordinary Elizabethan books as Lyly’s
‘Euphues’ and Phil Holland’s ‘Pliny,’ and the speculations of such
earlier writers as Paracelsus. Bacon and Shakespeare, like other
Elizabethans, accepted the popular science of their period, and
decorated their pages with queer ideas about beasts, and stones, and
plants; which were mere folklore. A sensible friend of my own was
staggered, if not converted, by the parallelisms adduced in Judge Webb’s
chapter ‘Of Bacon as a Man of Science.’ I told him that the parallelisms
were Elizabethan commonplaces, and were not peculiar to Bacon and
Shakespeare. Professor Dowden, out of the fulness of his reading,
corroborated this obiter dictum, and his article (in ‘The National
Review,’ vol. xxxix., 1902) absolutely disposes of the Judge’s argument.
Mr. Tyrrell went on: ‘The evidence of Ben Jonson alone seems decisive of
the question; the other’ (the Judge, for one) ‘persuades himself (how, I
cannot understand) that it may be explained away.’*
*Pilot, August 30, 1902, p. 220.
We have seen how Judge Webb ‘explains away’ the evidence of Ben. But
while people ‘not versed in the literature of the Shakespearean
era’ assume that the Baconians have examined it, to discover whether
Shakespearo-Baconian parallelisms are peculiar to these two writers or
not, these people may fall into the error confessed by Mr. Tyrrell.
Some excuse is needed for arguing on the Baconian doctrine. ‘There is
much doubt and misgiving on the subject among serious men,’ says Judge
Webb, and if a humble author can, by luck, allay the doubts of a single
serious man, he should not regret his labour.