BACON : “Teach us, O Lord, to number well our days, This bubble light, this vapor of our breath, "Return unto us, Lord, and balance now, With days of joy, our days of misery; Then shall thy servants, both with heart and voice, We think our readers must either reject Milton's authorship of Paradise Lost,' or admit that, so far as this doggerel is concerned, Bacon could have written 'Hamlet.' To the list of testimonies, given by scholars and critics of high standing to Bacon's poetic powers, presented elsewhere,1 we add the following: "All his works, his essays, his philosophical writings, commonly so called, and what he has done in history, are of one and the same character, reflective, and, so to speak, poetical. What then is his glory? In what did his greatness consist? In this, we should say :- that an intellect, at once one of the most capacious and one of the most profound ever granted to mortal, was in him united and reconciled with an almost equal endowment of the imaginative faculty."-GEORGE L. CRAIK. "Bacon, like Sidney, was a warbler of poetic prose. No English writer has surpassed him in fervor and brilliancy of style, in force of expression, or in richness and significancy of imagery."CHAMBERS' Cyclopædia of English Literature. "The poetic faculty was powerful in Bacon's mind."-MA CAULAY. "No one who reads the Essays with care can fail to see that he was gifted with a wonderful reproductive imagination. The house 1 Bacon vs. Shakspere, Chapter III. he builds is a real house; we could make a plan of his gardens. Even abstractions, like envy, ambition, vain glory, deformity, are animated by his touch, and move before us like living characters." STORR and GIBSON's Introduction to Bacon's Essays, p. lxxxi. "Rarement il résiste à l'envie d'être poète." — DE MAISTRE. "De Maistre makes what appears to me to be a very true criticism on Bacon, 'rarement il résiste à l'envie d'être poète.' There is a certain amount of truth, too, in the disparaging criticism which follows: 'L'image se présente avant tout à son esprit, et le contente.""-PRESIDENT THOMAS FOWLER, Oxford. "Bacon is almost Shakespeare in philosophic garb, so resplendent is his imagination and so versatile his genius."— Edinburgh Review, 1854. "It has been well said that Bacon's essays seem like scraps escaped from Shakespeare's desk."-HENRY J. RUGGLES. "Another virtue of the book [Bacon's Essays] is one which is not frequently found in union with the scientific or philosophical intellect; viz., a poetical imagination. Bacon's similes, for their aptness and their vividness, are of the kind of which Shakspeare, or Goethe, or Richter might have been proud."-JOHN STUART BLACKIE. "To this Bacon would bring something of that high poetical spirit which gleams out at every page of his philosophy."CHARLES KNIGHT. "Reason in him works like an instinct; the chain of thought reaches to the highest heaven of invention."1 WILLIAM HAZ LITT. "What he conceives as a poet he utters as a prophet."— WEST'S Preface to Bacon's Essays. "We have only to open 'The Advancement of Learning' to see how the Attic bees clustered above the cradle of the new philosophy. Poetry pervaded the thoughts, it inspired the similes, it hymned in the majestic sentences of the wisest of mankind." E. BULWER LYTTON. 1 By invention is meant the creative faculty or power of imagination. ... "The truth is that Bacon was not without the fine frenzy of the poet.. Had his genius taken the ordinary direction, I have little doubt that it would have carried him to a place among the great poets." - JAMES SPEDDING. "Lord Bacon was a poet."-PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY. Chapter Eight ORIGIN OF THE PSEUDONYM, ALLAS ATHENE was the national divinity of the Greeks. She was the goddess of wisdom, poetry, and the fine arts. Her statue stood on the Acropolis, wearing a helmet on which were figured the heads of two goats. On her breast was the celebrated ægis, made of goatskins. The goat was sacred to the drama, the word "goat" in Greek being Tрáyos, which, combined with adev (to sing), forms τpay-wdía, tragedy, or literally, goatThe name of Pallas was derived from Táλλew, to shake, evidently in reference to the spear which she held in her right hand, and which was seventy feet in length. She was thus the Spear-shaker, or Shake-spear, of the Greek drama.1 song. The use of such a pseudonym was quite in Bacon's manner. He thought at one time of publishing his great work on the "Interpretation of Nature" under a fictitious name. Indeed, he prepared to divide it into two parts, with a special pseudonym for each; one part in which he should appear as author, and the other in which he should appear as editor. His choice of names for these parts is significant; it shows that he gave no little attention to matters of this kind, and that he was fond of using classic models for his purpose. As author, in this instance, he selected the name of Valerius Terminus, evidently intending thereby to intimate that the 1 See supra, pp. 142, 143. 15 work in question was destined (as Mr. Spedding expresses it) "to put an end to the wandering of mankind in search of truth." As editor or annotator, he chose the name of Hermes Stella; Hermes being in Greek mythology the interpreter of the gods, and Stella signifying that the full meaning of the text could not at once be disclosed, but would be seen, as it were, by starlight. To a mind fond of emblematical nomenclature the pseudonym under which the Plays were written, suggesting, as it does, not only the genius of the Grecian civilization, but tragedy itself, would be at once natural and impressive. We may possibly find a confirmation of this interesting hypothesis in the caption, given by Jonson in his 'Discoveries,' to the famous paragraph on the author of the Plays: DE SHAKSPEARE NOSTRAT. (Concerning our country's Shakspeare), that is to say, as contradistinguished from some other of like generic or impersonal character elsewhere. Furthermore, we may now explain, what has hitherto been unexplainable, the existence of a hyphen between the two syllables, Shake and Speare, as printed on many of the quartos and in the Folio of 1623. |