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 authorship of Will Shakspere, Gent.
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 passion?
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 Shelley 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 competition 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 Essex, 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 Essex is the young man to whom Bacon is so passionately attached in the Sonnets traditionally attributed to Shakespeare. “I applied myself to him” (that is, to Essex), 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.”