Part 16 (1/2)
”There are, as everybody knows, many falsehoods that are justifiable, some that it is actually a duty to tell.” It may be so; I pray that I may never tell any of them (or any more of them).
Among justifiable lies I do not reckon that of Scott if ever he plumply denied that he wrote the Waverley novels. I do not judge Sir Walter. Heaven forbid! But if, in Mr. Greenwood's words, he, ”we are told, thought it perfectly justifiable for a writer who wished to preserve his anonymity, to deny, when questioned, the authors.h.i.+p of a work, since the interrogator had no right to put such a question to him,” {267a} I disagree with Sir Walter. Many other measures, in accordance with the conditions of each case, were open to him. Some are formulated by his own Bucklaw, in The Bride of Lammermoor, as regards questions about what occurred on his bridal night. Bucklaw would challenge the man, and cut the lady, who asked questions. But Scott's case, as cited, applies only to Bacon (or Mr. Greenwood's Unknown), if HE were asked whether or not he were the author of the plays. No idiot, at that date, was likely to put the question! But, if anyone did ask, Bacon must either evade, or deny, or tell the truth.
On the parallel of Scott, Bacon could thus deny, evade, or tell the truth. But the parallel of Scott is not applicable to any other person except to the author who wishes to preserve his anonymity, and is questioned. The parallel does not apply to Ben. HE had not written the Shakespearean plays. n.o.body was asking HIM if he had written them. If he knew that the author was Bacon, and knew it under pledge of secrecy, and was asked (per impossibile) ”Who wrote these plays?” he had only to say, ”Look at the t.i.tle-page.” But no mortal was asking Ben the question. But we are to suppose that, in the panegyric and in Discoveries, Ben chooses to a.s.sert, first, that Shakespeare was his Beloved, his Sweet Swan of Avon; and that he ”loved him, on this side idolatry, as much as any.” There is no evidence that he did love Shakespeare, except his own statement, when, according to the Baconians, he is really speaking of Bacon, and, according to Mr. Greenwood, of an unknown person, singularly like Bacon. Consequently, unless we can prove that Ben really loved the actor, he is telling a disgustingly hypocritical and wholly needless falsehood, both before and after the death of Bacon. To be silent about the authors.h.i.+p of a book, an authors.h.i.+p which is the secret of your friend and patron, is one thing and a blameless thing.
All the friends, some twenty, to whom Scott confided the secret of his authors.h.i.+p were silent. But not one of them publicly averred that the author was their very dear friend, So-and-so, who was not Scott, and perhaps not their friend at all. That was Ben's line.
Thus the parallel with Scott drawn by Mr. Greenwood, twice, {268a} is no parallel. It has no kind of a.n.a.logy with Ben's alleged falsehoods, so elaborate, so incomprehensible except by Baconians, and, if he did not love the actor Shakspere dearly, so detestably hypocritical, and open to instant detection.
It is not easy to find a parallel to the conduct with which Ben is charged. But suppose that Scott lived unsuspected of writing his novels, which, let us say, he signed ”James Hogg,” and died without confessing his secret, and without taking his elaborate precautions for its preservation on record.
Next, imagine that Lockhart knew Scott's secret, under vow of silence, and was determined to keep it at any cost. He therefore, writing after the death of Hogg of Ettrick, and in Scott's lifetime, publishes verses declaring that Hogg was his ”beloved” (an enormous fib), and that Hogg, ”Sweet Swan of Ettrick,” was the author of the Waverley novels.
To complete the parallels, Lockhart, after Scott's death, leaves a note in prose to the effect that, while he loved Hogg on this side idolatry (again, a monstrous fable), he must confess that Hogg, author of the Waverley novels, often fell into things that were ridiculous; and often needed to have a stopper put on him for all these remarks. Lockhart, while speaking of Hogg, is thinking of Scott--and he makes the remarks solely to conceal Scott's authors.h.i.+p of the novels--of which, on the hypothesis, n.o.body suspected Scott to be the author. Lockhart must then have been what the Baconian Mr.
Theobald calls Mr. Churton Collins, ”a measureless liar,”--all for no reason.
Mr. Greenwood, starting as usual from the case, which is no parallel, of Scott's denying his own authors.h.i.+p, goes on, ”for all we know, Jonson might have seen nothing in the least objectionable in the publication by some great personage of his dramatic works under a pseudonym” (under another man's name really), ”even though that pseudonym led to a wrong conception as to the authors.h.i.+p; and that, if, being a friend of that great personage, and working in his service” (Ben worked, by the theory, in Bacon's), ”he had solemnly engaged to preserve the secret inviolate, and not to reveal it even to posterity, then DOUBTLESS ('I thank thee, Jew' (meaning Sir Sidney Lee), 'for teaching me that word'!) he would have remained true to that solemn pledge.” {270a}
To remain ”true,” Ben had only to hold his peace. But he lied up and down, and right and left, and even declared that Bacon was a friend of the players, and needed to be shut up, and made himself a laughing-stock in his plays,--styling Bacon” Shakespeare.” All this, and much more of the same sort, we must steadfastly believe before we can be Baconians, for only by believing these doctrines can we get rid of Ben Jonson's testimony to the authors.h.i.+p of Will Shakspere, Gent.
CHAPTER XIII: THE PREOCCUPATIONS OF BACON
Let us now examine a miracle and mystery in which the Baconians find nothing strange; nothing that is not perfectly normal. Bacon was the author of the Shakespearean plays, they tell us. Let us look rapidly at his biography, after which we may ask, does not his poetic supremacy, and imaginative fertility, border on the miraculous, when we consider his occupations and his ruling pa.s.sion?
Bacon, born in 1561, had a prodigious genius, was well aware of it, and had his own ideal as to the task which he was born to do. While still at Cambridge, and therefore before he was fifteen, he was utterly dissatisfied, as he himself informed Dr. Rawley, with the scientific doctrines of the Schools. In the study of nature they reasoned from certain accepted ideas, a priori principles, not from what he came to call ”interrogation of Nature.” There were, indeed, and had long been experimental philosophers, but the school doctors went not beyond Aristotle; and discovered nothing. As Mr. Spedding puts it, the boy Bacon asked himself, ”If our study of nature be thus barren, our method of study must be wrong; might not a better method be found? . . . Upon the conviction 'This may be done,' followed at once the question, HOW may it be done? Upon that question answered followed the resolution to try and do it.”
This was, in religious phrase, the Conversion of Bacon, ”the event which had a greater influence than any other upon his character and future course. From that moment he had a vocation which employed and stimulated him . . . an object to live for as wide as humanity, as immortal as the human race; an idea to live in vast and lofty enough to fill the soul for ever with religious and heroic aspirations.”
{274a} The vocation, the idea, the object, were not poetical.
In addition to this ceaseless scientific preoccupation, Bacon was much concerned with the cause of reformed religion (then at stake in France, and supposed to be in danger at home), and with the good government of his native country. He could only aid that cause by the favour of Elizabeth and James; by his services in Parliament, where, despite his desire for advancement, he conscientiously opposed the Queen. He was obliged to work at such tasks of various sorts, legal and polemical literature, as were set him by people in power.
With these three great objects filling his heart, inspiring his ambition, and occupying his energies and time, we cannot easily believe, without direct external evidence, that he, or any mortal, could have leisure and detachment from his main objects (to which we may add his own advancement) sufficient to enable him to compose the works ascribed to Shakespeare.
Thus, at the age of twenty-two (1583), when, if ever, he might have penned sonnets to his mistress's eyebrow, he reports that he wrote ”his first essay on the Instauration of Philosophy, which he called Temporis Partus Maximus, 'The Greatest Birth of Time,'” and ”we need not doubt that between Law and Philosophy he found enough to do.”
{275a} For the Baconians take Bacon to have been a very great lawyer (of which I am no judge), and Law is a hard mistress, rapacious of a man's hours. In 1584 he entered Parliament, but we do not hear anything very important of his occupations before 1589, when he wrote a long pamphlet, ”Touching the Controversies of the Church of England.” {275b} He had then leisure enough; that he was not anonymously supplying the stage with plays I can neither prove nor disprove: but there is no proof that he wrote Love's Labour's Lost!
By 1591-2, we learn much of him from his letter to Cecil, who never would give him a place wherein he could meditate his philosophy. He was apparently hard at scientific work. ”I account my ordinary course of study and meditation to be more painful than most parts of action are.” He adds, ”The contemplative planet carries me away wholly,” and by contemplation I conceive him to mean what he calls ”vast contemplative ends.” These he proceeds to describe: he does NOT mean the writing of Venus and Adonis (1593), nor of Lucrece (1594), nor of comedies! ”I have taken all knowledge to be my province,” and he recurs to his protest against the pseudo-science of his period. ”If I could purge knowledge of two sorts of rovers whereof the one, with frivolous disputations, confutations, and verbosities; the other with blind experiments, and auricular traditions and impostures, hath committed so many spoils, I hope I should bring in industrious observations, grounded conclusions, and profitable inventions and discoveries . . . This, whether it be curiosity, or vainglory, or nature, or (if one take it favourably) philanthropy, is so fixed in my mind that it cannot be removed.” If Cecil cannot help him to a post, if he cannot serve the truth, he will reduce himself, like Anaxagoras, to voluntary poverty, ” . . .
and become some sorry bookmaker, or a true pioneer in that mine of truth . . . ” {276a} Really, from first to last he was the prince of begging-letter writers, endlessly asking for place, pensions, reversions, money, and more money.
Though his years were thirty-one, Bacon was as young at heart as Sh.e.l.ley at eighteen, when he wrote thus to Cecil, ”my Lord Treasurer Burghley.” What did Cecil care for his youngish kinsman's philanthropy, and ”vast speculative ends” (how MODERN it all is!), and the rest of it? But just because Bacon, at thirty-one, IS so extremely ”green,” going to ”take all knowledge for his province (if some one will only subsidise him, and endow his research), I conceive that he was in earnest about his reformation of science. Surely no Baconian will deny it! Being so deeply in earnest, taking his ”study and meditation” so hard, I cannot see him as the author of Venus and Adonis, and whatever plays of the period,--say, Love's Labour's Lost, The Two Gentlemen of Verona, Henry VI, Part I,--are attributed to him, about this time, by Baconians. Of course my view is merely personal or ”subjective.” The Baconians' view is also ”subjective.”
I regard Bacon, in 1591, and later, as intellectually preoccupied by his vast speculative aims:- what he says that he desires to do, in science, is what he DID, as far as he was able. His other desires, his personal advancement, money, a share in the conduct of affairs, he also hotly pursued, not much to his own or the public profit.
There seems to be no room left, no inclination left, for compet.i.tion in their own line with Marlowe, Greene, Nash, and half a dozen other professed playwrights: no room for plays done under the absurd pseudonym of an ignorant actor.
You see these things as the Baconians do, or as I do. Argument is unavailing. I take Bacon to have been sincere in his effusive letter to Cecil. Not so the Baconians; he concealed, they think, a vast LITERARY aim. They must take his alternative--to be ”some sorry bookmaker, OR a pioneer in that mine of truth,” as meaning that he would either be the literary hack of a company of players, OR the founder of a regenerating philosophy. But, at that date, playwrights could not well be called ”bookmakers,” for the owners of the plays did their best to keep them from appearing as printed books. If Bacon by ”bookmaker” meant ”playwright,” he put a modest value on his poetical work!
Meanwhile (1591-2), Bacon attached himself to the young, beautiful, and famous Ess.e.x, on the way to be a Favourite, and gave him much excellent advice, as he always did, and, as always, his advice was not taken. It is not a novel suggestion, that Ess.e.x is the young man to whom Bacon is so pa.s.sionately attached in the Sonnets traditionally attributed to Shakespeare. ”I applied myself to him”
(that is, to Ess.e.x), says Bacon, ”in a manner which, I think, happeneth rarely among men.” The poet of the Sonnets applies himself to the Beloved Youth, in a manner which (luckily) ”happeneth rarely among men.”
It is difficult to fit the Sonnets into Bacon's life. But, if you pursue the context of what Bacon says concerning Ess.e.x, you find that he does not speak OPENLY of a tenderly pa.s.sionate attachment to that young man; not more than THIS, ”I did nothing but advise and ruminate with myself, to the best of my understanding, propositions and memorials of anything that might concern his Lords.h.i.+p's honour, fortune, or service.” {279a} As Bacon did nothing but these things (1591-2), he had no great leisure for writing poetry and plays.
Moreover, speaking as a poet, in the Sonnets, he might poetically exaggerate his intense amatory devotion to Ess.e.x into the symbolism of his pa.s.sionate verse. WAS ESs.e.x THEN A MARRIED MAN? If so, the Sonneteer's insistence on his marrying must be symbolical of-- anything else you please.
We know that Bacon, at this period, ”did nothing” but ”ruminate”