A Century of Science and Other Essays Part 11

There are many phrases, however, in the "Promus" which undoubtedly agree with phrases in the plays. They show that Bacon heard or read the plays with great interest, and culled from them his "elegancies" with no stinted hand. As for Mrs. Pott's bulky volume, it brings us so near to the final _reductio ad absurdum_ of the Bacon theory that we hardly need spend many words upon the gross improbabilities which that theory involves. The plays of Shakespeare were universally ascribed to him by his contemporaries; many of them were published during his lifetime with his name upon the t.i.tle-page as the author; all were collected and published together by Hemminge and Condell, two of his fellow actors, seven years after his death; and for more than two centuries n.o.body ever dreamed of looking for a different authorship, or of a.s.sociating the plays with Bacon. But this Chimborazo of _prima facie_ evidence becomes a mere mole-hill in the hands of your valiant Baconizer. It is all clear to him. Bacon did not acknowledge the authorship of these works because such literature was deemed frivolous, and current prejudices against theatres and playwrights might injure his hopes of advancement at the bar and in political life. Therefore, by some sort of private understanding with the ignorant and sordid wretch Shakespeare,[42] at whose theatre they were brought out, their authorship was ascribed to him, the real author died without revealing the secret, and the whole world was deceived until the days of Delia Bacon.

But there are questions which even this ingenious hypothesis fails to answer. Why should Bacon have taken the time to write those thirty-seven plays, two poems, and one hundred and fifty-four sonnets, if they were never to be known as his works? Not for money, surely, for that grasping Shakespeare seems to have got the money as well as the fame; Bacon died a poor man. His princ.i.p.al aim in life was to construct a new system of philosophy; on this n.o.ble undertaking he spent such time as he could save from the exactions of his public career as member of Parliament, chancery lawyer, solicitor-general, attorney-general, lord chancellor; and he died with this work far from finished. The volumes which he left behind him were only fragments of the mighty structure which he had planned. We may well ask, Where did this overburdened writer find the time for doing work of another kind voluminous enough to fill a lifetime, and what motive had he for doing it without recompense in either fame or money? Baconizers find it strange that Shakespeare's will contains no reference to his plays as literary property. The omission is certainly interesting, since it seems to indicate that he had parted with his pecuniary interest in them,--had perhaps sold it out to the Globe Theatre. If this omission can be held to show that Shakespeare was lacking in fondness for the productions of his own genius, what shall be said of the notion that Bacon spent half his life in writing works the paternity of which he must forever disown?

This question is answered by Mr. Ignatius Donnelly, a writer who speculates with equal infelicity on all subjects, but never suffers for lack of boldness. He published in 1887 a book even bigger than that of Mrs. Pott, for it has nearly 1000 pages. Its t.i.tle is, "The Great Cryptogram," and its thesis is, that Bacon really did claim the authorship of the Shakespeare plays. Only the claim was made in a cipher, and if you simply make some numbers mean some words, and other words mean other numbers, and perform a good many sums in what the Mock Turtle called "ambition, distraction, uglification, and derision," you will be able to read this claim between the lines, along with much other wonderful information. Thus does the arithmetical Donnelly carry us quite a long stride nearer to the _reductio ad absurdum_, or suicide point, than we were left by Mrs. Pott, with her lisping and limping comparisons.

But before we come to the jumping-off place, let us pause for a moment and take a retrospective glance at the natural history of the Bacon-Shakespeare craze. What was it that first unlocked the sluice-gates, and poured forth such a deluge of foolishness upon a sorely suffering world? It will hardly do to lay the blame upon poor Delia Bacon. Her suggestions would have borne no fruit had they not found a public, albeit a narrow one, in some degree prepared for them.

Who, then, prepared the soil for the seeds of this idiocy to take root?

Who but the race of fond and foolish Shakespeare commentators, with their absurd claims for their idol? During the eighteenth century Shakespeare was generally underrated. Voltaire wondered how a nation that possessed such a n.o.ble tragedy as Addison's "Cato" could endure such plays as "Hamlet" and "Oth.e.l.lo." In the days of Scott and Burns a reaction set in; and Shakespeare worship reached its height when the Germans took it up, and, not satisfied with calling him the prince of poets and peerless master of dramatic art, began to discover in his works all sorts of hidden philosophy and impossible knowledge. Of the average German mind Lowell good-naturedly says that "it finds its keenest pleasure in divining a profound significance in the most trifling things, and the number of mare's nests that have been stared into by the German _Gelehrter_ through his spectacles pa.s.ses calculation."[43] But the Germans are not the only sinners; let me cite an instance from near home. In the quarto "Hamlet" of 1603 we read:--

"Full forty years are past, their date is gone, Since happy time joined both our hearts as one: And now the blood that filled my youthful veins Runs weakly in their pipes," etc.

Whereupon Mr. Edward Vining calls upon us to observe how Shakespeare, "to whom all human knowledge seems to be but a matter of instinct, in [these lines] a.s.serts the circulation of the blood in the veins and 'pipes,' a truth which Harvey probably did not even suspect until at least thirteen years later," etc.[44] Does Mr. Vining really suppose that what Harvey did was to discover that blood runs in our veins? A little further study of history would have taught him that even the ancients knew that blood runs in the veins.[45] About fourteen hundred years before "Hamlet" was written, Galen proved that it also runs in the arteries. After Galen's time, it was believed that the dark blood nourishes such plebeian organs as the liver, while the bright blood nourishes such lordly organs as the brain, and that the interchange takes place in the heart; until the sixteenth century, when Vesalius proved that the interchange does not take place in the heart, and the martyr Servetus proved that it does take place in the lungs; and so on till 1619, when Harvey discovered that dark blood is brought by the veins to the right side of the heart, and thence driven into the lungs, where it becomes bright and flows into the left side of the heart, thence to be propelled throughout the body in the arteries. That it then grows dark and returns through the veins Harvey believed, but no one could tell how, until, forty years later, Malpighi with his microscope detected the capillaries. Now to talk about Shakespeare discerning as if by instinct a truth which Harvey afterward discovered is simply silly.

Instead of showing rare scientific knowledge, his remark about blood running in the veins is one that anybody might have made.

This is a fair specimen of the ignorant way in which doting commentators have built up an impossible Shakespeare, until at last they have provoked a reaction. Sooner or later the question was sure to arise, Where did your Stratford boy get all this abstruse scientific knowledge?

The keynote was perhaps first sounded by August von Schlegel, who persuaded himself that Shakespeare had mastered "all the things and relations of this world," and then went on to declare that the accepted account of his life must be a mere fable. Thus we reach the point from which Delia Bacon started.

It may safely be said that all theories of Shakespeare's plays which suppose them to be attempts at teaching occult philosophical doctrines, or which endow them with any other meanings than those which their words directly and plainly convey, are a delusion and a snare. Those plays were written, not to teach philosophy, but to fill the theatre and make money. They were written by a practised actor and manager, the most consummate master of dramatic effects that ever lived; a poet unsurpa.s.sed for fertility of invention, unequalled for melody of language, unapproached for delicacy of fancy, inexhaustible in humour, profoundest of moralists; a man who knew human nature by intuition, as Mozart knew counterpoint or as Chopin knew harmony. The name of that writer was none other than William Shakespeare of Stratford-on-Avon.

It was inevitable that the Bacon folly, after once adopting such methods as those of Mrs. Pott and Mr. Donnelly, should proceed to commit suicide by piling up extravagances. By such methods one can prove anything, and accordingly we find these writers busy in tracing Bacon's hand in the writings of Greene, Marlowe, Shirley, Marston, Ma.s.singer, Middleton, and Webster. They are sure that he was the author of Montaigne's Essays, which were afterward translated into what we have always supposed to be the French original. Mr. Donnelly believes that Bacon also wrote Burton's "Anatomy of Melancholy." Next comes Dr. Orville Owen with a new cipher, which proves that Bacon was the son of Queen Elizabeth by Robert Dudley, and that he was the author of the "Faerie Queene" and other poems attributed to Edmund Spenser. Finally we have Mr. J. E. Roe, who does not mean to be outdone. He asks us what we are to think of the notion that an ignorant tinker, like John Bunyan, could have written the most perfect allegory in any language. Perish the thought! n.o.body but Bacon could have done it. Of course Bacon had been more than fifty years in his grave when "Pilgrim's Progress" was published as Bunyan's. But your true Baconizer is never stopped by trifles. Mr. Roe a.s.sures us that Bacon wrote that heavenly book, as well as "Robinson Crusoe" and the "Tale of a Tub;" which surely begins to make him seem ubiquitous and everlasting. If things go on at this rate, we shall presently have a religious sect holding as its first article of faith that Francis Bacon created the heavens and the earth in six days, and rested on the seventh day.

_November, 1896._

XIV

SOME CRANKS AND THEIR CROTCHETS

"Now, by two-headed Ja.n.u.s, Nature hath framed strange fellows in her time!"

_Merchant of Venice_, I. i.

About five-and-twenty years ago, when I was a.s.sistant librarian at Harvard University, much of my time was occupied in revising and bringing toward completion the gigantic pair of twin catalogues--of authors and subjects--which my predecessor, Dr. Ezra Abbot, had started in 1861. Twins they were in simultaneity of birth, but not in likeness of growth. Naturally, the cla.s.sified catalogue was much bigger than its brother, filled more drawers, cost more money, and made a vast deal more trouble. For while some books were easy enough to cla.s.sify, others were not at all easy, and sometimes curious questions would arise.

One day, for example, I happened to be looking at a pamphlet on the value of Pi; and, should any of my readers ask what that might mean, I should answer that Pi (p) is the Greek letter which geometers use to denote the ratio of the circ.u.mference of a circle to its diameter. The arithmetical value of this symbol is 3.1415926536, and so on in an endless fraction. Is it not hard to see what there can be in such an innocent decimal to irritate human beings and destroy their peace of mind? Yet so it is. Many a human life has been wrecked upon Pi.

To a certain cla.s.s of our fellow-creatures its existence is maddening.

It interferes with the success of a little scheme on which they have set their hearts,--nothing less than to construct a square which shall be exactly equivalent in dimensions to a given circle. n.o.body has ever done such a thing, for it cannot be done. But when mathematicians tell these poor people that such is the case, they howl with rage, and, dipping their pens in gall, write book after book bristling with figures to prove that they have "squared the circle." The Harvard library does not buy such books, but it accepts all manner of gifts, and has thus come to contain some queer things.

When I consulted the subject catalogue, to see under what head it had been customary to cla.s.sify these lucubrations on Pi, I found, sure enough, that it was Mathematics -- Circle-Squaring. Following this cue, I explored the drawers in other directions, and found books on "perpetual motion" formed a section under Physics, while crazy interpretations of the book of Daniel were grouped along with works of solid Biblical scholarship by such eminent writers as Reuss and Kuenen and Cheyne.

Clearly, here was a case for reform. The principle of cla.s.sification was faulty. In one sense, the treatment of the quadrature of the circle may be regarded as a section under the general head of mathematics; as, for example, when Lindemann, in 1882, showed that Pi cannot be represented as the root of any algebraic equation with rational coefficients. But our circle-squaring literature is very different. It is usually written by persons whose mathematical horizon scarcely extends beyond long division: just as the writers on perpetual motion know nothing of physics; just as so many expositors have dealt with the ten-horned beast in blissful ignorance alike of ancient history and of the principles of literary criticism. What all such books ill.u.s.trate, however various may be their ostensible themes, is the pathology of the human mind. They are specimens of Insane Literature. As such they have a certain sort of interest; and to any rational being it is the only sort they can have.

So I culled from many a little drawer the cards appertaining to divers printed products of morbid cerebration, and gathered them into a cla.s.s of Insane Literature; and under this rubric such sections as Circle-Squaring, Perpetual Motion, Great Pyramid, Earth not a Globe, etc., were evidently in their proper place. The name of the cla.s.s was duly inscribed on the outside of its drawer, and the matter seemed happily disposed of.

The way of the reformer, however, is beset with difficulties, and it is seldom that his first efforts are crowned with entire success. Not many days had elapsed since this emendation of the catalogue, when one of my a.s.sistants brought me the card of a book on the Apocalypse, by a certain Mr. Smallwit, and called my attention to the fact that it was cla.s.sified as Insane Literature.

"Very well," I said, "so it is."

"I don't doubt it, sir," said she; "but the author lives over in Chelsea, and I saw him this morning in one of the alcoves. Perhaps, if he were to look in the catalogue and see how his book is cla.s.sified, he mightn't altogether like it. Then, as I looked a little further along the cards, I came upon this pamphlet by Herr Dummkopf, of Breslau, upsetting the law of gravitation; and--do you know?--Herr Dummkopf is spending the winter here in Cambridge!"

"To be sure," said I, "it was very stupid of me not to foresee such cases. Of course we can't call a man a fool to his face. In a catalogue which marshals the quick along with the dead some heed must be paid to the amenities of life. Pray get and bring me all those cards."

By the time they arrived a satisfactory solution of the difficulty had suggested itself. I told the a.s.sistant simply to scratch out "Insane,"

and put "Eccentric" instead. For while the harsh Latin epithet would of course infuriate Messrs. Dummkopf, Smallwit & Co., it might be doubted if their feelings would be hurt by the milder Greek word. Some people of their stripe, to whom notoriety is the very breath of their nostrils, would consider it a mark of distinction to be called eccentric. At all events, the harshness would be delicately veiled under a penumbra of ambiguity.

Thus the cla.s.s Eccentric Literature was established in our catalogue, and there it has remained, while the books in the library have increased from a hundred thousand to half a million. Once or twice, I am told, has some disgusted author uttered a protest, but the quiet of Gore Hall has not been disturbed thereby. Care is needed in treating such a subject, and my rule was that no amount of mere absurdity, no extremity of dissent from generally received opinions, should consign a book to the cla.s.s of Eccentric Literature, unless it showed unmistakable symptoms of crankery, or the buzzing of a bee in the author's bonnet. This rule has been strictly followed. One lot of books--the Bacon-Shakespeare stuff--which I intended to put in this cla.s.s, but forgot to do so because of sore stress of work, still remain absurdly grouped along with the books on Shakespeare written by men in their senses. With this exception, the cla.s.s offers us a fairly comprehensive view of the literature of cranks.

Just where the line should be drawn between sanity and crankery is not always easy to determine, and must usually be left to soundness of judgment in each particular case, as with so many other questions of all grades, from the supreme court down to the kitchen. One of the most frequent traits of your crank is his megalomania, or self-magnification.

His intellectual equipment is so slender that he cannot see wherein he is inferior to Descartes or Newton. Without enough knowledge to place him in the sixth form of a grammar school, he will a.s.sail the conclusions of the greatest minds the world has seen. His mood is belligerent; since people will not take him at his own valuation, he is apt to regard society as engaged in a conspiracy to ignore and belittle him. Of humour he is pretty sure to be dest.i.tute; an abounding sense of the ludicrous is one of the best safeguards of mental health, and even a slight endowment will usually nip and stunt the fungus growth of crankery.

The slightest glimmering sense of humour would have restrained that inveterate circle-squarer, James Smith, from publishing (in 1865) his pamphlet ent.i.tled "The British a.s.sociation in Jeopardy, and Dr. Whewell, the Master of Trinity, in the Stocks without Hope of Escape." His case, with those of many other ingenious lunatics, was racily set forth by the late Professor De Morgan in his "Budget of Paradoxes" (London, 1872), a bulky book dealing with the author's personal experiences with cranks and their crotchets. It was De Morgan's lot as an eminent mathematician to be outrageously bored by circle-squarers and their kin, and it was a happy thought to put on record the queer things that happened. His friends asked him again and again why he took the trouble to mention and expose such absurdities. He replied that, when your crank publishes a book "full of figures which few readers can criticise, a great many people are staggered to this extent, that they imagine there must be the indefinite _something_ in the mysterious _all this_. They are brought to the point of suspicion that the mathematicians ought not to treat _all this_ with such undisguised contempt, at least. Now I have no fear for p; but I do think it possible that general opinion might in time demand that the crowd of circle-squarers, etc., should be admitted to the honours of opposition; and this would be a time-tax of five per cent. one man with another, upon those who are better employed." At any rate, continues De Morgan, with a twinkle in the corner of his eye, whether in chastising cranks he has any motive but public good "must be referred to those who can decide whether a missionary chooses his pursuit solely to convert the heathen." He confesses that perhaps he may have a little of the spirit of Colonel Quagg, whose principle of action was thus succinctly expressed: "I licks ye because I kin, and because I like, and because ye's critters that licks is good for!"

Among the creatures whose malady seemed to call for such drastic treatment was Captain Forman, R. N., who in 1833 wrote against the law of gravitation, and got not a word of notice. Then he wrote to Sir John Herschel and Lord Brougham, asking them to get his book reviewed in some of the quarterlies. Receiving no answer from these gentlemen, he addressed in one of the newspapers a card to Lord John Russell, inveighing against their "dishonest" behaviour. Still getting no satisfaction, the valorous captain wrote to the Royal Astronomical Society with a challenge to controversy. To this letter came a polite but brief answer, advising him to study the rudiments of mechanics. It was not in the paradoxer's nature to submit tamely to such treatment; and he replied in a printed pamphlet, wherein he called that learned society "craven dunghill c.o.c.ks," and bestrewed them, with other choice flowers of rhetoric, much to the relief of his feelings.

One of this naval officer's fellow sufferers was a farm labourer, who took it into his head that the Lord Chancellor had offered 100,000 reward to any one who should square the circle. So Hodge went to work and squared it, and then hied him to London, blissfully dreaming of sudden wealth. Hearing that De Morgan was a great mathematician, he left his papers with him, including a letter to the Lord Chancellor, claiming the 100,000. De Morgan returned the papers with a note, saying that no such prize had ever been offered, and gently hinting that the worthy Hodge had not sufficient knowledge to see in what the problem consisted.

This elicited from the rustic philosopher a long letter, from which I must quote a few sentences, so characteristic of the circle-squaring talent and temper:--

Doctor Morgan, Sir. Permit me to address you

Brute Creation may perhaps enjoy the faculty of beholding visible things with a more penitrating eye than ourselves.

But Spiritual objects are as far out of their reach as though they had no being Nearest therefore to the brute Creation are those men who Suppose themselves to be so far governed by external objects as to believe nothing but what they See and feel And Can accomedate to their Shallow understanding and Imaginations

... When a Gentleman of your Standing in Society ... Can not understand or Solve a problem That is explicitly explained by words and Letters and mathematacally operated by figuers He had best consult the wise proverd

Do that which thou Canst understand and Comprehend for thy good.

I would recommend that Such Gentleman Change his business

And appropriate his time and attention to a Sunday School to Learn what he Could and keep the Litle Children form durting their Close

With Sincere feelings of Grat.i.tude for your weakness and Inability I am

Sir your Superior in Mathematics.

X. Y.

A few days after this elegant epistle there came to De Morgan another from the same hand. Hodge had sent his papers to some easy-going American professor, whose reply must clearly have been too polite. It is never safe to give your crank an inch of comfort; it will straightway become an ell of a.s.surance. This American savant, crows Rusticus, "highly approves of my work. And Says he will Insure me Reward in the States I write this that you may understand that I have knowledge of the unfair way that I am treated in my own nati County I am told and have reasons to believe that it is the Clergy that treat me so unjust. I am not Desirious of heaping Disonors upon my own nation. But if I have to Leave this kingdom without my Just dues. The world Shall know how I am and have been treated

"I am Sir Desirous of my Just dues

"X. Y."

A cynical philosopher once said that you cannot find so big a fool but there will be some bigger fool to swear by him; and so our agricultural friend had his admiring disciple who felt bound to break a lance for him with the unappreciative De Morgan:--

"He has done what you nor any other mathematician as those who call themselves such have done. And what is the reason that you will not candidly acknowledge to him ... that he has squared the circle shall I tell you? it is because he has performed the feat to obtain the glory of which mathematicians have battled from time immemorial that they might encircle their brows with a wreath of laurels far more glorious than ever conqueror won it is simply this that it is a poor man a humble artisan who has gained that victory that you don't like to acknowledge it you don't like to be beaten and worse to acknowledge that you have miscalculated, you have in short too small a soul to acknowledge that he is right.... I am backed in my opinion not only by Mr. Q. a mathematician and watchmaker residing in the boro of Southwark but by no less an authority than the Professor of mathematics of ... College United States Mr. Q and I presume that he at least is your equal as an authority and Mr. Q says that the government of the U. S. will recompense X. Y. for the discovery he has made if so what a reflection upon Old england the boasted land of freedom the nursery of the arts and sciences that her sons are obliged to go to a foreign country to obtain that recompense to which they are justly ent.i.tled."[46]