IX

THE BACON-SHAKESPEARE MANIA'

"L"

I

IKE as many substances in nature which are solid do putrefy and corrupt into worms, so it is the property of good and sound knowledge to putrefy and dissolve into a number of subtile, idle, unwholesome and (as I may term them) vermiculate questions, which have indeed a kind of quickness and life of spirit, but no soundness of matter or goodness of quality." So wrote Bacon in that incomparable analysis of the abuses of learning which he inserts in the first book of his great treatise.2 And there is no literature, ancient or modern, which does not abound in illustrations. A Roman philosopher and a Roman satirist ridiculed the fribbles who wasted life in discussing the exact number of Ulysses' crew; the exact quantity of wine

1 The Mystery of William Shakespeare: A Summary of Evidence. By his Honour Judge Webb, sometime Fellow of Trinity College, Regius Professor of Laws and Public Orator in the University of Dublin.

2 Advancement of Learning, bk. i.; Works, Spedding & Ellis, vol. iii. p. 285.

given to Aeneas and his followers by their Sicilian host; the name of Anchises' nurse and the name and nationality of Archemorus' stepmother. But the moderns have improved on the ancients, by substituting for futile and absurd inquiries still more futile and absurd paradoxes. That Solomon was the author of the Iliad, and Nausicaa the authoress of the Odyssey; that the Comedies of Terence, the Aeneid of Virgil and the Odes of Horace were the compositions of mediaeval monks; that the Annals of Tacitus were forged by Poggio Bracciolini; that Paradise Lost was concocted by a syndicate, the president of which was Ellwood; that King Alfred wrote the Beowulf, and George III the Letters of Junius; that Emily Tennyson was the author of In Memoriam-all these absurdities have been gravely maintained, and some of them supported by arguments surprisingly specious and ingenious, as well as with profound and curious erudition.

But among these and similar paradoxes one stands alone. It is not so much by its absurdity as by the absence of everything which could give any colour to that absurdity, that the Bacon-Shakespeare myth holds a unique place among literary follies. Its supporters have no pretensions to be considered even as sophists. Their systematic substitutions of inferences for facts and of hypotheses for proofs; their perverted analogies; their blunders and their mis

representations; their impudent fictions; and their prodigious ignorance of the very rudiments of the literature with which they are concerned could not, for one moment, impose on any one, who, with competent knowledge and a candid and open mind, had taken the trouble to investigate the subject. Their contentions and arguments, indeed, so far from misleading any sane scholar, produce the same impression on the mind as Mrs. Gamp's curls-those "bald old curls that could scarcely be called false, they were so very innocent of anything approaching to deception "-produced on the eyes of their beholders.

It

But, unhappily, the majority of those who are sufficiently interested in Bacon and Shakespeare to read what is popularly written about them are not sane scholars, or, indeed, scholars at all: and the believers in this monstrous myth are said to number upwards of half a million people in Europe and America. has periodicals devoted to its promulgation; it has its apostles in public lecturers; it has its Bibliography. The bulky volumes, the monographs, essays and articles of which it is the theme, would, as that Bibliography shows, fill no inconsiderable library. And this literature, judging from the contributions which have recently been made to it, is as yet only in its infancy.

Now, we will say at once that, had it not been for the appearance of Dr. Webb's volume, we should no more have thought of discussing this

subject than we should have thought of seriously discussing a treatise written by some undergraduate who, having been plucked for his classics in Smalls, instead of attempting to retrieve the disaster, betook himself to demonstrating that the tragedies of Aeschylus and Sophocles were originally composed in Latin by Livius Andronicus, and afterwards turned into Greek by Archias and Parthenius. But when a scholar of the eminence of Dr. Webb, a Fellow of Trinity College, Dublin, and a Professor of the University, not only gives the sanction of his name to this grotesque heresy, but elaborately defends it, the whole matter assumes quite another complexion. So far from an exposure of the qualifications and methods of the calumniators of that genius, who is the capital glory of the English-speaking race, being superfluous, it is nothing less than an imperative duty. Nor is this all. Dr. Webb is by far the ablest and most distinguished man who has appeared in the ranks of the Baconians. His work, which professes to be judicial, marshals all the arguments which his predecessors have advanced in favour of their contention. It thus presents in epitome the whole case, which may fairly be said to stand or fall in its presentation at the hands of a champion, whose pre-eminence among Baconians in ability and reputation probably no Baconian would dispute. We shall, therefore make no apology either for our minute

examination of Dr. Webb's book, or for our very plain speaking in commenting on it.

The history of the craze which Dr. Webb has thus invested with importance is, briefly, this. It is said to have originated from some suggestions thrown out by a Mr. J. C. Hart, an American, in a book entitled The Romance of Yachting, published at New York in 1848. This book, as it is neither in the British Museum nor in any library known to us, we have never seen, nor can we say whether Mr. Hart intended his remarks seriously, or as a joke. But, in 1856, one Mr. William Henry Smith, in a letter addressed to Lord Ellesmere, then President of the Shakespeare Society, elaborately propounded the theory that Bacon was the author of the plays attributed to Shakespeare. In the following year he expanded his letter into a small volume entitled Bacon and Shakespeare: An Inquiry touching Players, Playhouses, and Play-writers. Mr. Smith, who is said to have made a convert of Lord Palmerston, was the first to furnish the arguments which his successors have only expanded, namely the à priori reasons in favour of the Baconian and against the Shakespearean authorship of the plays; the evidence afforded by parallel passages; and the quotation-to which the Baconians attach so much importance-from the postscript of Sir Tobie Matthew's letter.1

1 In the postscript of a letter addressed to Bacon