What Is Man? and Other Essays
Good friend for Iesus sake forbeare
To digg the dust encloased heare:
Blest be ye man yt spares thes stones
And curst be he yt moves my bones.
Ben Jonson says of Bacon, as orator:
His language, _where he could spare and pass by a jest_, was nobly
censorious. No man ever spoke more neatly, more pressly, more
weightily, or suffered less emptiness, less idleness, in what he
uttered. No member of his speech but consisted of his (its) own
graces.... The fear of every man that heard him was lest he should make
an end.
From Macaulay:
He continued to distinguish himself in Parliament, particularly by his
exertions in favor of one excellent measure on which the King’s heart
was set—the union of England and Scotland. It was not difficult for
such an intellect to discover many irresistible arguments in favor of
such a scheme. He conducted the great case of the _Post Nati_ in the
Exchequer Chamber; and the decision of the judges—a decision the
legality of which may be questioned, but the beneficial effect of which
must be acknowledged—was in a great measure attributed to his dexterous
management.
Again:
While actively engaged in the House of Commons and in the courts of
law, he still found leisure for letters and philosophy. The noble
treatise on the _Advancement Of Learning_, which at a later period was
expanded into the _De Augmentis_, appeared in 1605.
The _Wisdom Of The Ancients_, a work which, if it had proceeded from
any other writer, would have been considered as a masterpiece of wit
and learning, was printed in 1609.
In the mean time the _Novum Organum_ was slowly proceeding. Several
distinguished men of learning had been permitted to see portions of
that extraordinary book, and they spoke with the greatest admiration of
his genius.
Even Sir Thomas Bodley, after perusing the _Cogitata Et Visa_, one of
the most precious of those scattered leaves out of which the great
oracular volume was afterward made up, acknowledged that “in all
proposals and plots in that book, Bacon showed himself a master
workman”; and that “it could not be gainsaid but all the treatise over
did abound with choice conceits of the present state of learning, and
with worthy contemplations of the means to procure it.”
In 1612 a new edition of the _Essays_ appeared, with additions
surpassing the original collection both in bulk and quality.
Nor did these pursuits distract Bacon’s attention from a work the most
arduous, the most glorious, and the most useful that even his mighty
powers could have achieved, “the reducing and recompiling,” to use his
own phrase, “of the laws of England.”
To serve the exacting and laborious offices of Attorney-General and
Solicitor-General would have satisfied the appetite of any other man
for hard work, but Bacon had to add the vast literary industries just
described, to satisfy his. He was a born worker.
The service which he rendered to letters during the last five years of
his life, amid ten thousand distractions and vexations, increase the
regret with which we think on the many years which he had wasted, to
use the words of Sir Thomas Bodley, “on such study as was not worthy
such a student.”
He commenced a digest of the laws of England, a History of England
under the Princes of the House of Tudor, a body of National History, a
Philosophical Romance. He made extensive and valuable additions to his
Essays. He published the inestimable _Treatise De Augmentis
Scientiarum_.
Did these labors of Hercules fill up his time to his contentment, and
quiet his appetite for work? Not entirely:
The trifles with which he amused himself in hours of pain and languor
bore the mark of his mind. _The Best Jest-Book In The World_ is that
which he dictated from memory, without referring to any book, on a day
on which illness had rendered him incapable of serious study.
Here are some scattered remarks (from Macaulay) which throw light upon
Bacon, and seem to indicate—and maybe demonstrate—that he was competent
to write the Plays and Poems:
With great minuteness of observation he had an amplitude of
comprehension such as has never yet been vouchsafed to any other human
being.
The _Essays_ contain abundant proofs that no nice feature of character,
no peculiarity in the ordering of a house, a garden, or a court-masque,
could escape the notice of one whose mind was capable of taking in the
whole world of knowledge.
His understanding resembled the tent which the fairy Paribanou gave to
Prince Ahmed: fold it, and it seemed a toy for the hand of a lady;
spread it, and the armies of the powerful Sultans might repose beneath
its shade.
The knowledge in which Bacon excelled all men was a knowledge of the
mutual relations of all departments of knowledge.
In a letter written when he was only thirty-one, to his uncle, Lord
Burleigh, he said, “I have taken all knowledge to be my province.”
Though Bacon did not arm his philosophy with the weapons of logic, he
adorned her profusely with all the richest decorations of rhetoric.
The practical faculty was powerful in Bacon; but not, like his wit, so
powerful as occasionally to usurp the place of his reason and to
tyrannize over the whole man.
There are too many places in the Plays where this happens. Poor old
dying John of Gaunt volleying second-rate puns at his own name, is a
pathetic instance of it. “We may assume” that it is Bacon’s fault, but
the Stratford Shakespeare has to bear the blame.
No imagination was ever at once so strong and so thoroughly subjugated.
It stopped at the first check from good sense.
In truth, much of Bacon’s life was passed in a visionary world—amid
things as strange as any that are described in the _Arabian Tales_...
amid buildings more sumptuous than the palace of Aladdin, fountains
more wonderful than the golden water of Parizade, conveyances more
rapid than the hippogryph of Ruggiero, arms more formidable than the
lance of Astolfo, remedies more efficacious than the balsam of
Fierabras. Yet in his magnificent day-dreams there was nothing
wild—nothing but what sober reason sanctioned.
Bacon’s greatest performance is the first book of the _Novum
Organum_.... Every part of it blazes with wit, but with wit which is
employed only to illustrate and decorate truth. No book ever made so
great a revolution in the mode of thinking, overthrew so may
prejudices, introduced so many new opinions.
But what we most admire is the vast capacity of that intellect which,
without effort, takes in at once all the domains of science—all the
past, the present and the future, all the errors of two thousand years,
all the encouraging signs of the passing times, all the bright hopes of
the coming age.
He had a wonderful talent for packing thought close and rendering it
portable.
His eloquence would alone have entitled him to a high rank in
literature.
It is evident that he had each and every one of the mental gifts and
each and every one of the acquirements that are so prodigally displayed
in the Plays and Poems, and in much higher and richer degree than any
other man of his time or of any previous time. He was a genius without
a mate, a prodigy not matable. There was only one of him; the planet
could not produce two of him at one birth, nor in one age. He could
have written anything that is in the Plays and Poems. He could have
written this:
The cloud-cap’d towers, the gorgeous palaces,
The solemn temples, the great globe itself,
Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve,
And, like an insubstantial pageant faded,
Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff
As dreams are made on, and our little life
Is rounded with a sleep.
Also, he could have written this, but he refrained:
Good friend for Iesus sake forbeare
To digg the dust encloased heare:
Blest be ye man yt spares thes stones
And curst be he yt moves my bones.
When a person reads the noble verses about the cloud-cap’d towers, he
ought not to follow it immediately with Good friend for Iesus sake
forbeare, because he will find the transition from great poetry to poor
prose too violent for comfort. It will give him a shock. You never
notice how commonplace and unpoetic gravel is until you bite into a
layer of it in a pie.
XI
Am I trying to convince anybody that Shakespeare did not write
Shakespeare’s Works? Ah, now, what do you take me for? Would I be so
soft as that, after having known the human race familiarly for nearly
seventy-four years? It would grieve me to know that any one could think
so injuriously of me, so uncomplimentarily, so unadmiringly of me. No,
no, I am aware that when even the brightest mind in our world has been
trained up from childhood in a superstition of any kind, it will never
be possible for that mind, in its maturity, to examine sincerely,
dispassionately, and conscientiously any evidence or any circumstance
which shall seem to cast a doubt upon the validity of that
superstition. I doubt if I could do it myself. We always get at second
hand our notions about systems of government; and high tariff and low
tariff; and prohibition and anti-prohibition; and the holiness of peace
and the glories of war; and codes of honor and codes of morals; and
approval of the duel and disapproval of it; and our beliefs concerning
the nature of cats; and our ideas as to whether the murder of helpless
wild animals is base or is heroic; and our preferences in the matter of
religious and political parties; and our acceptance or rejection of the
Shakespeares and the Author Ortons and the Mrs. Eddys. We get them all
at second hand, we reason none of them out for ourselves. It is the way
we are made. It is the way we are all made, and we can’t help it, we
can’t change it. And whenever we have been furnished a fetish, and have
been taught to believe in it, and love it and worship it, and refrain
from examining it, there is no evidence, howsoever clear and strong,
that can persuade us to withdraw from it our loyalty and our devotion.
In morals, conduct, and beliefs we take the color of our environment
and associations, and it is a color that can safely be warranted to
wash. Whenever we have been furnished with a tar baby ostensibly
stuffed with jewels, and warned that it will be dishonorable and
irreverent to disembowel it and test the jewels, we keep our
sacrilegious hands off it. We submit, not reluctantly, but rather
gladly, for we are privately afraid we should find, upon examination
that the jewels are of the sort that are manufactured at North Adams,
Mass.
I haven’t any idea that Shakespeare will have to vacate his pedestal
this side of the year 2209. Disbelief in him cannot come swiftly,
disbelief in a healthy and deeply-loved tar baby has never been known
to disintegrate swiftly; it is a very slow process. It took several
thousand years to convince our fine race—including every splendid
intellect in it—that there is no such thing as a witch; it has taken
several thousand years to convince the same fine race—including every
splendid intellect in it—that there is no such person as Satan; it has
taken several centuries to remove perdition from the Protestant
Church’s program of post-mortem entertainments; it has taken a weary
long time to persuade American Presbyterians to give up infant
damnation and try to bear it the best they can; and it looks as if
their Scotch brethren will still be burning babies in the everlasting
fires when Shakespeare comes down from his perch.
We are The Reasoning Race. We can’t prove it by the above examples, and
we can’t prove it by the miraculous “histories” built by those
Stratfordolaters out of a hatful of rags and a barrel of sawdust, but
there is a plenty of other things we can prove it by, if I could think