The Mantle of Sir Edwin

I have just spent three days reading Mr. E. G. Harman’s Edmund Spenser and the Impersonations of Francis Bacon, published by the firm of Constable. There are books which he who runs may read; there are also books from which he who reads will run. This to me comes into neither category. It is very large and crowded with most complicated detail; it is, though quite competently written, devoid of literary grace; and it supports a monstrous thesis with arguments many of which are of staggering absurdity. Yet in point of deadly fascination it vies with the basilisk. It is a monument of the “scientific method.” The author’s learning and industry are terrifying; his tone seems completely dispassionate; he proceeds from discovery to discovery with mild ruthlessness; and not the most uncompromising of Wospolus was ever more sternly resolved to embrace logical conclusions. His chief fault is that his premises are usually arbitrary or quite insufficient; but the objective charm of his massive progress, as of a steam-roller, from stage to stage, is not affected by this.

Mr. Harman does not in this volume discuss in detail Bacon’s authorship of Shakespeare’s plays. He assumes that. He assumes also that Bacon did publish literature under the rose and that he did employ impersonators; his reasons being that he had to express his feelings and that acknowledgement of authorship would have damaged his prospects of political promotion. This much granted, Mr. Harman looks around for writings in which he thinks he can detect traces of Bacon and examines the evidence for their reputed authorships. He does not descend to the puerile level of the late Sir Edwin Durning-Lawrence, with his “Hic, Hæc, Hog.” He says nothing of cryptogram. But in case after case he finds (1) that there are marks of Baconian thought and language, (2) that allegorical references to Bacon’s political disappointments may be found, (3) that documentary evidence supporting accepted authorships is very slight. Nothing stops him. Where there is a real resemblance in style things are easy. Where there are marked differences we are asked to note the fact that Bacon’s method enabled him to write in a variety of styles—as though serious writers expressing their inmost selves could put on styles like trousers. If somebody has borne witness that an Elizabethan wrote his own works, then that somebody was in the plot too.

As to Spenser, with whom Mr. Harman chiefly deals, one is certainly struck with the paucity of the evidence for him. We know less about him than we know about Shakespeare; and his biographers have had to rely almost entirely upon “internal evidence” drawn from his works. But personally I must say that I prefer their methods to Mr. Harman’s. He, analysing exhaustively the plot of the Faerie Queene, with its Britomarts, Arthegalls, and Blatant Beasts, finds a knowledge of court life that could not be possessed by Spenser, who lived in Ireland and was (according to him) an ex-Board School boy in a small Civil Service job—which is at any rate politer than “drunken, illiterate clown.” This is question-begging; but what shall we say of the assumption that if Spenser had written the poem the rivers of Ireland would have been described as fully as the rivers of England? Why should the emigrant Civil servant know anything about the rivers of Ireland? As far as that goes, there is one slip in the description of the rivers of England which indicates to my mind that the author relied on some inaccurate map for his information about them. The Baconian authorship forces Mr. Harman to the conclusion that some of Spenser’s sonnets were written by Bacon when he was eight or nine years old. But Mr. Harman is a strong man. After all, Mozart was a precocious child, so why not Bacon? He does not shrink from this any more than he shrinks from arguing that any book or letter which favourably mentions one of Bacon’s cryptic works must also have been written or instigated by him. They must have been written by him, and, this granted, internal corroboration must be sought for. Anything is good enough for this purpose. Mr. Harman even finds evidence in the occurrence in several “Baconian” works of the phrase “golden wyres” as applied to the Queen’s hair. If he would read the body of Elizabethan lyrics, or even extracts of them in such a contemporary anthology as England’s Parnassus, he would find that an Elizabethan poet could no more help comparing a lady’s Hayre to Golden Wyres than he could help likening her Teares to Pearles or her Brests to Iuorie.

But there is no space here for detailed examination. It is enough to yield oneself to the pleasure of following the Harmanian trail. I have noted the works which in the course of his narrative or in footnotes he ascribes to Bacon. The Authorized Version of the Bible is not mentioned. But, apart from his voluminous acknowledged writings, Bacon wrote the works of Spenser (including the Faerie Queene, the longest poem in the world, which Bacon published before he was out of his twenties); the works of Shakespeare; practically the whole body of Elizabethan poetical criticism (including Webbe’s Discourse of Poesie, Puttenham’s Art of Poesie, Sidney’s Apologie, Daniel’s A Defence of Ryme, and Meres’s Palladis Tamia); many of the poems of Gascoigne (written by Bacon before he was twelve); certain works imputed to Nashe, Greene, and Gabriel Harvey; the poems of Sir Walter Raleigh and the Last Fight of the “Revenge”; the works of Essex; Sidney’s Arcadia and Astrophel and Stella (with this key Bacon unlocked his heart); Lyly’s Euphues (a long book); Bryskett’s Discourse of Civil Life; Sir Humphrey Gilbert’s Discourses and the account of his last voyage; Leicester’s Commonwealth and Leicester’s Ghost; and other minor scraps. If this be all correct, we shall have to revise our opinion of the Elizabethan time as a time replete with various genius. All we shall be able to refer to now will be “the spacious Bacon of great Elizabeth.”

An enormous number of people—including supposed writers and their relations—must have been in the secret. Sometimes they must have marvelled at Bacon’s extraordinary behaviour, as for instance when he wrote for Raleigh a laudatory poem on the Queen:

“Bacon (who, in my opinion, is the author of the poem) makes use of the opportunity in taking up the personality of Ralegh to express his own feelings. He was undoubtedly most unhappy at his exclusion from access and the waning of all his hopes of advancement. This is what is reflected under the disguise of Ralegh’s loss of favour in the poem.”

They must have wondered how on earth Bacon expected his grievances to be remedied if his complaints were published over another man’s name, and why, if Raleigh could address poems to the Queen in propria persona without loss of caste, Bacon could not do the same. But no doubt most of them, for many were impecunious, did not allow such questions to bother them much. They were content to take Bacon’s bribes for the use of their names. What he must have spent in subsidies to sham authors one gasps to contemplate. No wonder that for years he was in such financial straits, and that at one point things came to such a pass with him that he was arrested for debt.