XIII. HIS WIT. But it will be said, Was he not lacking in the sense of humor? By no means. It was the defect of his public speeches that his wit led him aside from the path of dignity. Ben Jonson says his oratory was "nobly censorious when he could spare or pass by a jest." Sir Robert Naunton says, "He was abundantly facetious, which took much with the Queen." The Queen said, “He hath a great wit." "I wish your Lordship a good Easter," says the Spanish Jew, Gondomar, about to cross the Channel. "I wish you a good Pass-over," replied Bacon. Queen Elizabeth asked Bacon whether he had found anything that smacked of treason in a certain book. "No," said Bacon, "but I have found much felony." "How is that?" asked the Queen. "The author," said Bacon, "has stolen many of his conceits from Cornelius Tacitus." In the midst even of his miseries, after his downfall, he writes (1625) to the Duke of Buckingham: I marvel that your Grace should think to pull down the monarchy of Spain without my good help. Your Grace will give me leave to be merry, however the world goeth with me. I have just quoted Macaulay's declaration that Bacon's sense of wit and humor was so powerful that it oftentimes usurped the place of reason and tyrannized over the whole man. We find in the author of the Shakespeare Plays the same inability to restrain his wit. Says Carlyle: In no point does Shakespeare exaggerate but only in laughter. Fiery objurgations, words that pierce and burn, are to be found in Shakespeare; yet he is always in measure here, never what Johnson would remark as a specially "good hater." But his laughter seems to pour from him in floods. . . Not at mere weakness, at misery or poverty, never. CHAPTER II. THE WRITER OF THE PLAYS A PHILOSOPHER. First, let me talk with this philosopher. Lear, iii, 4. IN N the attempt to establish identity I have shown that Bacon was a poet as well as a philosopher. I shall now try to estab lish that the writer of the Plays was a philosopher as well as a poet. In this way we will come very near getting the two heads under one hat. The poet is not necessarily a philosopher; the philosopher is not necessarily a poet. One may be possessed of marvelous imaginative powers, with but a small share of the reasoning faculty. Another may penetrate into the secrets of nature with a brain as dry as grave-dust. The crude belief about Shakespeare is that he was an inspired plow-boy, a native genius, a Cornish diamond, without polishing; a poet, and nothing but a poet. I propose to show that his mind was as broad as it was lofty; that he was a philosopher, and more than that, a natural philosopher; and more than that, that he held precisely the same views which Bacon held. Let us see what some of the great thinkers have had to say upon this subject: Carlyle makes this most significant speech: There is an understanding manifested in the construction of Shakespeare's Plays equal to that in Bacon's Novum Organum. Hazlitt has struck upon the same pregnant comparison: The wisdom displayed in Shakespeare was equal in profoundness to the great Lord Bacon's Novum Organum. Coleridge said: He was not only a great poet, but a great philosopher. Richard Grant White calls him The greatest philosopher and the worldly-wisest man of modern times. Says Emerson: He was inconceivably wise. The others conceivably.' Barry Cornwall says: He was not a mere poet in the vulgar sense of the term. trary, he was a man eminently acute, logical and philosophical. On the con His reasoning faculty was on a par with his imagination and pervaded all his works completely.* Landor calls Shakespeare The wisest of men, as well as the greatest of poets. The wisest of mankind. Pope calls Bacon Jeffrey says of Shakespeare: He was more full of wisdom and sagacity than all the moralists and satirists that ever lived. Coleridge says: Shakespeare's judgment equaled, if it did not surpass, his creative faculty. Dr. Johnson says: From his works may be collected a system of civil and economical prudence Swinburne calls Shakespeare: The wisest and mightiest mind that ever was informed with the spirit or genius of creative poetry. Richard Grant White says of Shakespeare: He was the most observant of men. On the other hand, Edmund Burke said of Bacon: He possessed the most distinguished and refined observation of human life. Alfred H. Welsh says of Bacon: Never was observation at once more recondite, better-natured and more carefully sifted. Surely these two men, if we can call them such, ran in closely parallel lines. And it must be remembered that these witnesses are not advocates of the Baconian authorship of the Plays. Many of them never heard of it. I. BACON'S PHILOSOPHY. But there are two kinds of philosophy — the transcendental and the practical. Naturally, the first has most relation to the imagination; the latter tends to drag down the mind to the base details 1 Representative Men, p. 209. 2 Preface to Works of Ben Jonson, of life. The mind must be peculiarly constructed that can at the same time grapple with the earth and soar in the clouds. It was the striking peculiarity of Bacon's system of philosophy that it tended to make great things little and little things great. It was the reverse of that old-time philosophy to which Shakespeare sneeringly alluded when he said: We have our philosophical persons, to make modern and familiar things supernatural and causeless.' Says Macaulay: Some people may think the object of the Baconian philosophy a low object.? This persuasion that nothing can be too insignificant for the attention of the wisest which is not too insignificant to give pleasure or pain to the meanest, is the essential spirit of the Baconian philosophy.3 Bacon cared nothing for the grand abstrusenesses: he labored for the "betterment of men's bread and wine"- the improvement of the condition of mankind in their worldly estate. This was the U gospel he preached. Like Socrates, he "dragged down philosophy from the clouds." He said: The evil, however, has been wonderfully increased by an opinion, or inveterate conceit, which is both vainglorious and prejudicial, namely, that the dignity of the human mind is lowered by long and frequent intercourse with experiments and particulars, which are the objects of sense and confined to matter, especially since such matters are mean subjects for meditation.* And again, in his Experimental Natural History, he says: We briefly urge as a precept, that there be admitted into this (natural) history: 1. The most common matters, such as one might think it superfluous to insert, from their being well known; 2. Base, illiberal and filthy matters, and also those which are trifling and puerile, . . . nor ought their worth to be measured by their intrinsic value, but by their application to other points and their influence on philosophy. And again: This was a false estimation that it should be a diminution to the mind of man to be much conversant in experiences and particulars, subject to sense and bound in matter, and which are laborious to search, ignoble to meditate, harsh to deliver, illiberal to practice, infinite as is supposed in number, and noways accommodate to the glory of arts." And, strange to say, when we turn to Shakespeare we find embalmed in poetry, where one would think there would be the 1 All's Well that Ends Well, ii, 3. 2 Essay Bacon, p. 278. 3 Ibid., p. 272. 4 Novum Organum, book i. Filum Labyrinthi. least chance to find it, and with which it would seem to have no natural kindred or coherence, this novel philosophy. Shakespeare says: Some kinds of baseness And again: Are nobly undergone, and most poor matters Nature, what things there are, Most abject in regard and dear in use! What things again most dear in the esteem This is the very doctrine taught by Bacon, which I have just quoted: Base, illiberal and filthy matters, and also those which are trifling and puerile, nor ought their worth to be measured by their intrinsic value, but by their application to other points and their influence on philosophy. Why did not Bacon quote that sentence from the Tempest? Some kinds of baseness Are nobly undergone, and most poor matters Point to rich ends. No wonder Birch is reminded of Bacon when he reads Shakespeare. He says: Glendower is very angry at the incredulity of Hotspur, and reiterates again and again the signs that he thought marked him extraordinary. Hotspur not only replies with badinage, but ascribes, with Baconian induction, all that Glendower thought miraculous and providential to nature and the earth." Dowden describes the philosophy of Shakespeare in words that fully fit the philosophy of Bacon. He says: The noble positivism of Shakespeare. Energy, devotion to the fact, self-government, tolerance, . . . an indifference to externals in comparison with that which is of the invisible life, and a resolution to judge of all things from a purely human standpoint. The same writer says: The Elizabethan drama is essentially mundane. To it all that is upon this earth is real, and it does not concern itself greatly about the reality of other things. Of heaven or hell it has no power to sing. It finds such and such facts here and now, and does not invent or discover supernatural causes to explain these facts.5 Richard Grant White says: For although of all poets he is most profoundly psychological, as well as most fanciful and most imaginative, yet with him philosophy, fancy and imagination 1 Tempest, iii, 1. 2 Troilus and Cressida, iii, 3. 3 Birch, Philos, and Relig, of Shak., p. 238. 5 Ibid., p. 23. |