Neglecting Bacon’s poetical and interesting Devices, I confine my observations to the Advancement of Learning (1605), which though not written in what Waller held to be the singing time of life, reveals (while trying to conceal) the true bent of his genius. The Work was expressly intended to embrace the totality of human knowledge then garnered. Yet with the air of one who had no misgivings about the propriety of his classification he divides his vast subject into three categories, three only, and one of these is Poesie. The other two are History and Philosophie, the latter of which embraces “Natural Science,” divided into “Phisicke” and “Metaphisicke,” “Mathematicke” pure and mixt, anatomy, medicine, mental and moral science, and much besides. The work teems with poetical quotations, similies, allusions. Dealing with medicine the author gravely informs his readers that “the poets did well to conjoin music and medicine in Apollo, because the office of medicine is but to tune this curious harp of man’s body, and reduce it to harmony.” He cannot refrain from telling us that the pseudo-science of the alchemist was foretold and discredited by the fable of Ixion and the Cloud. With him, what we mean by endowment of research becomes provision for encouraging “experiments appertaining to Vulcan and Dædalus,” etc. No wonder the Harveys, Napiers, and other pioneers of 17th. century science did not join in that chorus of admiration for Bacon, which seems to have included all 17th century men of letters. Sir Henry Wotton (for example) will have it that Bacon had “done a great and ever living benefit to all the children of Nature; and to Nature herself in her uttermost extent ... who never before had so noble nor so true an interpreter, or so inward a secretary of her cabinet.” One can imagine the laughter with which Galileo would have greeted this preposterous assertion.
Out of sight of philosophy, metaphysics, mathematics, etc., and in the presence of poetry, the author is in his element and speaks with authority. In handling the subject of mental culture—“Georgics of the mind” is his phrase—he takes for granted that poets (with whom he couples historians) are the best teachers of this science, for in them:
We may find painted forth, how affections are kindled and incited; and how pacified and refrained; and how again contained from act and further degree; how they disclose themselves; how they work; how they vary; how they gather and fortify; how they are enwrapped one within another; and how they do fight and encounter one with another.
“Poesie,” he says elsewhere, is “for the most part restrained in measure of words,” but in “other points extreamely licensed, and doth truly refer to the imagination.” Its use, he goes on to say:
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; by reason whereof there is agreeable to the spirit of man, a more ample greatness, a more exact goodness, and a more absolute variety, than can be found in the nature of things ... and therefore it 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.... In this third part of learning (or knowledge) which is poesie, I can report no deficience. For being as a plant that cometh of the lust of the earth, without formal seed, it hath sprung up and spread abroad more than any other kind. But to ascribe unto it that which is due; for the expressing of affections, passions, corruptions, and customs, we are beholding to poets more than to the philosophers’ works; and for wit and eloquence, not much less than to orators’ harangues. But it is not good to stay too long in the theatre.
Why, when he was enumerating the various kinds of poesie, did he eschew the apt word dramatic, and choose the vague word representative instead? Why hurry away from his subject (poetry) by reason of its intimate connection with the theatre? The answer leaps to the eye. For him, poetry, especially dramatic poetry, was like (the name) Shakespeare, under taboo.
The Bacon hypothesis, it may be urged, solves a few riddles. But what of the difficulties it involves? For example, it seems incredible that Bacon should ever have resolved to disown his wonderful offspring; except indeed on the impossible assumption that he, with his unrivalled knowledge of human nature and command of all the arts of expression—that he of all men was incapable of appreciating the children of his brain. Here, once more, my anonymous Essay suggests pertinent considerations:
The emotional chill, which rarely fails to accompany that creeping illness, old age, was one of these considerations. Another was the growth of a widespread feeling ... that English books would never be “citizens of the world,” that Latin was the “universal language” and Latin books the only books that “would live.” But there must have been a “strain of rareness” about Shakespeare’s affection for poetry, which nothing but a new and incompatible emotion could ever have subdued.... With Bacon, affection for literature, especially poetry, came (in time) long before affection for anything like science. Among the various indications of this, not the least interesting is a passage in the De Augmentis Scientiarum (the latinised version, 1623, of the more noteworthy Advancement of Learning, 1605, already quoted):—“Poesy is at it were a dream of learning; a thing sweet and varied and fain to be thought partly divine, a quality which dreams also sometimes affect. But now it is time for me to become fully awake, to lift myself up from the earth, and to wing my way through the liquid ether of philosophy and the sciences.” Of a certainty this beautiful passage was no mere flourish.... It was a pathetic renunciation—the last possibly of a series of more or less ineffectual renunciations—of poetry and an ... aspiration after something else, neither poetry, nor science, nor philosophy, which Bacon towards the close of life was wont to regard, so Rawley informs us, as “his darling philosophy.”
In other words, the Novum Organum, the potent New Instrument that was to enlarge man’s dominion over every province of Nature, was Bacon’s chief solace for an unparalleled renunciation. Posterity, he was determined, should never know that the inventor of that Instrument had once revelled in the play of the imagination, lest men of science should have it in their power to pooh-pooh it as the fabric of a brain that had invented A Midsummer-night’s Dream, and The Tempest.
Bacon and his friends (moved by the fascination of the man, and pity for his fall) would naturally destroy all tell-tale correspondence they could lay hands on. Two private letters, and so far as we know, two only, escaped the flames. One from a bosom friend, Sir T. Mathew to Bacon (“Viscount St. Alban”), bears the following postscript: “The most prodigious wit that ever I knew of my nation ... is of your Lordship’s name, though he be known by another.” This letter is given in Dr. Birch’s Letters, etc., of Francis Bacon, 1763. Mathew himself made a Collection of Letters which included many of his own to Bacon, but excluded the one just quoted, an exclusion dictated, I imagine, by loyalty to his friend. Montague gives the letter in his Bacon, but I have not found it in Spedding’s Work. The other escape was a letter of Bacon’s to another of his friends, the poet Davies, written some twenty years earlier than Mathew’s letter. In this letter (to Davies), after commending himself to Davies’s “love,” and “the well using of my name ... if there be any biting or nibling at it, in that place” (the Royal Court), Bacon concludes: “So desiring you to be good to concealed poets, I continue,” etc. My quotation is from a copy dated 1657 (bound up with Rawley’s Resuscitatio), in which “concealed poets” is in italics. Spedding gives the words without the italics, and contents himself with saying that he cannot explain them. For another letting out of the secret we have to thank Aubrey’s notebooks, which inform us that Bacon was “a good poet but concealed, as appears by his letters.” Lastly there are the “Shakespeare” and “Bacon” scribbles on the half-burnt MS. of Bacon’s “Device,” A Conference of Pleasure. Possibly the “letters” referred to by Aubrey, or evidence more important, may yet be discovered in libraries unexplored, or explored only by orthodox searchers intent on proving their own case. A library in so unlikely a place as Valladolid seems, about eighty years ago, to have possessed a First Folio of Shakespeare which belonged to and was perhaps annotated by Count Gondomar, a friend of Bacon’s last years.[55]] If Spain held such a treasure so recently what may not Great Britain still hold? Florence, for whose Duke Sir T. Mathew had Bacon’s Essays translated into Italian, contained a copy of this translation not long ago. But my searches there, and in Venice, Milan, Padua, were far too hurried to justify any conclusion as to possible finds in Italy.