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]
Objection number three. On the hypothesis that Shakespeare was a pen-name of Bacon’s this objection, like the last, would fall to the ground, for the essential inadequacy of the Advancement of Learning in relation to poetry would explain itself as part of the “train of secrecy.” But it may also be answered without resorting to the hypothesis. In the Advancement, dramatic poesy, though recognised, is deprived of its customary name, “dramatic,” and dubbed “representative,” whilst lyric, elegiac, and several other kinds of poetry are conspicuously ignored. The Latin version of the Advancement, however, the De Augmentis Scientiarum, published some eighteen years after the Advancement, not only restores to “representative poesy” its proper name “dramatic,” but also mentions elegias, odes, lyricos, etc. The objection, as I understand it, is founded on the assumption that, at the date of the Advancement, Bacon had still to learn what poetry essentially was, a defect which at the date of the De Augmentis he had contrived to supply by getting up the subject (poetry) much as a lawyer will cram an unfamiliar subject in order to speak to his brief. But is there warrant for so questionable an assumption? Not a scrap. To see its absurdity, one has only to compare the Advancement of Learning with the Apologie for Poetry by the “learned” Sir Philip Sidney (so the author is described on the title page), a treatise which somehow or other made its first appearance in 1595, and its second under a different title and with slight additions in 1596.[26] One of the many resemblances involved in the comparison is, not that Sidney and Bacon appear to have read the same books, but that their literary preference should have coincided so closely. Among classical authors, Plutarch was manifestly the prime favourite of both. Next after Plutarch seem to have come Virgil, Cicero, Seneca, and Ovid. The Bible, it is true, plays a far more important part in the Advancement than in the Apologie, inevitably, considering the scope of the Advancement, and that it was specially addressed to a theological king. In those days, however, libraries were so scantily furnished that lovers of literature necessarily became acquainted with what seems to be an unusually large proportion of the same authors.[27] It may, therefore, be urged that similarity of literary preference did not imply direct intercommunication. I will not argue the point, not because it is incontestable, but because there are other resemblances the cumulative force of which is more than enough for my purpose. The production of a sample half dozen of these will I hope be forgiven. (a) According to the Apologie for Poetrie geometry and arithmetic would seem to be the only constituents of the science of mathematics. The Advancement of Learning appears to take the same view. (b) According to the Apologie “knowledge of a man’s self” is the highest or “mistress” knowledge, and her highest end is “well doing and not well knowing only.” The Advancement holds “the end and term of natural philosophy” is “knowledge of ourselves” with a view to “active life” rather than to contemplative. (c) According to the Apologie “metaphysic” concerns itself with “abstract notions,” builds upon “the depths of Nature” as distinct from Matter. The Advancement defines “metaphysic”—which includes mathematics—as the science of “that which is abstracted and fixed,” “physic” being the science of “that which is inherent in matter and therefore transitory.” (d) The Apologie censures philosophers for reducing “true points of knowledge” into “method” and “school art.” In the Advancement, Bacon condemns “the over early and peremptory reduction of knowledge into acts and methods.” It is a theme on which he is ever ready to descant. Indeed, the Novum Organum, a congeries of aphorisms, was probably designed for a monumental warning against premature systematisation. (e) The Apologie contrasts the necessary limitations of other artists[28] with the perfect freedom of the poet: “only the poet ... goeth hand in hand with nature, not inclosed within the narrow warrant of her gifts ... where with the force of a divine breath he bringeth things forth for surpassing her doings, with no small argument to the incredulous of the first accursed fall of Adam; sith our erected wit maketh us know what perfection is.” The Advancement, in a charming passage, instructs us that one of the chief uses of poetry “hath been to give some shadow of satisfaction to the mind of man in those points wherein the nature of things doth deny it, the world being in proportion inferior to the soul.... Therefore poesy was ever thought to have some participation of divineness, because it doth raise and erect the mind, by submitting the shows of things to the desires of the mind; whereas reason doth buckle and bow the mind into the nature of things.” (f) The Apologie holds “that there are many mysteries contained in poetry which of purpose were written darkly, lest by profane wits it should be abused.” The Advancement affirms that one of the uses of poesy is to “retire and obscure ... that which is delivered,” “that is when the secrets and mysteries of religion, policy, and philosophy are involved in fables and parables.” (g) The author of the Apologie venerated learning—“the noble name of learning,” he calls it—as if it were a sort of talisman. Bacon’s attitude towards learning, the theme of the Advancement, probably differed but little, if it differed at all from that of the Apologist. (h) The aims of the two authors were to a large extent identical, for the first book of the Advancement was a vindication of the dignity and importance of Poetry as one of the chief constituents of “learning.” Other resemblances, more or less significant, will doubtless be picked up by any alert reader. So numerous are they in the earlier portion of the Advancement that reading it one seems to be continually in touch with Sidney—assuming him to have been author of the Apologie. The effect in my own case has been such as to generate a conviction not indeed that Sidney and Bacon were personally intimate—though that is quite possible—but that Bacon when writing the Advancement was thoroughly familiar with the Apologie.
It appears then that the poetical defects or eccentricities of the Advancement, to whatever cause they may have been due—and honest dissimulation is the most likely cause—were not due to ignorance of poetry. Consequently the last of the three objections fails of effect.
“But,” says one, “suppose for a moment that your precious theory is not incoherent, what then? A dream is not less a dream because it happens to hang together. So with your theory. Its value is of the smallest unless it serve to harmonise or explain phenomena otherwise intractable. The omission to apply this test is fatal to your pretensions.” I have no fault to find with the criticism, except that it is founded on misapprehension. It takes for granted that I have undertaken to establish something, a Bacon theory to wit. That feat may be possible to an able advocate, after a “harvest of new disclosures.” For my part, so diffident am I of my power to do anything of the kind, that the thought of attempting it here had not even occurred to me.
For the rest, on good cause shown my precious theory will be abandoned without reserve and without a pang, though I shall hardly be able to rise to that fullness of joy which according to M. Poincaré (Le Science et l’Hypothèse) ought to be felt by the physicist who has just renounced a favourite hypothesis because it has failed to satisfy a crucial test.
NOTES TO SHAKESPEARE—A THEORY
[1] Note: The words philosopher, philosophy, philosophicals throughout this paper mean what they meant in Bacon’s day. The word science, on the other hand, when not in quotation, is to be understood in its modern sense.
[2] From Sidney’s Apologie for Poetrie (of which more hereafter) we learn that he was in the secret of some “Queis meliore luto finxit præcordia Titan, and who are better content to suppress the outflowing of their wit than by publishing it to be accounted knights of the same order” as those “servile wits who think it enough to be rewarded of the printer.” Similarly Puttenham, in his Arte of English Poesie (1589), writes: “I know very many notable Gentlemen in the Court that have written commendably and suppressed it again, or else suffered it to be publisht without their names to it.” The Arte of English Poesie was dedicated to Bacon’s uncle and quasi guardian, Lord Burleigh. In this connexion, a saying ascribed to Edmund Waller is worth notice: “Sidney and Bacon were nightingales who sang only in the spring, it was the diversion of their youth.”
[3] From Mr. Shakespeare’s autographs one gathers that he was indifferent as to the spelling of his name, and that if he had a preference, it was for the form Shakspere rather than Shakespeare. For my present purpose it is necessary to distinguish between the owner of New Place, Stratford, and the author of Macbeth and Lear. For the former, Shakspere would have been better than “Mr. Shakespeare.” But having followed the Belvoir document so far, I shall continue to use “Mr.” as the distinction between the two—without prejudice to the question whether or not they were actually one and the same. [The signatures show that the Stratford player wrote his name “Shakspere.” He seems never to have made use of the form “Shakespeare,” which is, in truth, a quite different name from that of “Shakspere,” or “Shaksper,” or “Shaxpur,” and such like forms. Ed.
[4] Some will have it that Shakespeare was a kind of writing machine, and look to Ben Jonson as their prophet. Yet Jonson’s testimony both in the great Ode to Shakespeare and elsewhere—agreeing herein with the internal evidence of several of the plays—negatives a mechanical explanation.