Sensationalism and a Cypher
The Speaker, January 11, 1902




The revival of the whole astonishing Bacon-Shakespeare business is chiefly interesting to the philosophical mind as an example of the power of the letter which killeth, and of how finally and murderously it kills. Baconianism is, indeed, the last wild monstrosity of literalism; it is a sort of delirium of detail. A handful of printers' types, a few alphabetical comparisons are sufficient to convince the Baconians of a proposition which is fully as fantastic historically as the proposition that the Battle of Waterloo was won by Leigh Hunt disguised as Wellington, or that the place of Queen Victoria for the last forty years of her reign was taken by Miss Frances Power Cobbe. Both these hypotheses are logically quite possible. The dates agree; the physical similarity is practically sufficient. Briefly, in fact, there is nothing to be said against the propositions except that every sane man is convinced that they are untrue.

Let us now consider for a moment the Baconian conception from the outside. A sensational theory about the position of Shakespeare was certain in the nature of things to arise. Men of small imagination have sought in every age to find a cipher in the indecipherable masterpieces of the great. Throughout the Middle Ages the whole of the Aeneid, full of the sad and splendid eloquence of Virgil, was used as a conjuring book. Men opened it at random, and from a few disconnected Latin words took a motto and an omen for their daily work. In the same way men in more modern times have turned to the Book of Revelation full of the terrible judgment, and yet more terrible consolation of a final moral arbitration, and found in it nothing but predictions about Napoleon Bonaparte and attacks on the English Ritualists. Everywhere, in short, we find the same general truth- the truth that facts can prove anything, and that there is nothing so misleading as that which is printed in black and white. Almost everywhere and almost invariably the man who has sought a cryptogram in a great masterpiece has been highly exhilarated, logically justified, morally excited, and entirely wrong.

If, therefore, we continue to study Baconianism from the outside- a process which cannot do it or any other thesis any injustice- we shall come more and more to the conclusion that it is in itself an inevitable outcome of the circumstances of the case and the tendencies of human nature. Shakespeare was by the consent of all human beings a portent. If he had lived some thousand years earlier, people would have turned him into a god. As it is, people can apparently do nothing but attempt to turn him into a Lord Chancellor. But their great need must be served. Shakespeare must have his legend, his whisper of something more than common origin. They must at least make of him a mystery, which is as near as our century can come to a miracle. Something sensational about Shakespeare was bound ultimately to be said, for we are still the children of the ancient earth, and have myth and idolatry in our blood. But in this age of a convention of scepticism we cannot rise to an apotheosis. The nearest we can come to it is a dethronement.

So much for the a priori probability of a Baconian theory coming into existence. What is to be said of the a priari probability of the theory itself; or, rather, to take the matter in its most lucid order, what is the theory? In the time roughly covered by the latter part of the reign of Queen Elizabeth and the earlier part of the reign of James I. there arose a school of dramatists who covered their country with glory and filled libraries with their wild and wonderful plays. They differed in type and station to a certain extent: some were scholars, a few were gentlemen, most were actors and many were vagabonds. But they had a common society, common meeting-places, a common social tone. They differed in literary aim and spirit: to a certain extent some were great philosophic dramatists, some were quaint humorists, some mere scribblers of a sort of half-witted and half-inspired melodrama. But they all had a common style, a common form and vehicle, a common splendour, and a common error in their methods. Now, the Baconian theory is that one of these well-known historical figures- a man who lived their life and shared their spirit, and who happened to be the most brilliant in the cultivation of their particular form of art- was, as a matter of fact, an impostor, and that the works which his colleagues thought he had written in the same spirit and the same circumstances in which they had written theirs, were not written by him, but by a very celebrated judge and politician of that time, whom they may sometimes have seen when his coach-wheels splashed them as he went by. Now, what is to be said about the a priori probability of this view, which I stated, quite plainly and impartially, above? The first thing to be said, I think, is that a man's answer to the question would be a very good test of whether he had the rudiments of a historical instinct, which is simply an instinct which is capable of realising the way in which things happen. To many this will appear a vague and unscientific way of approaching the question. But the method I now adopt is the method which every reasonable being adopts in distinguishing between fact and fiction in real life. What would any man say if he were informed that in the private writings of Lord Rosebery that statesman claimed to have written the poems of Mr. W. B. Yeats? Certainly, he could not deny that there were very singular coincidences in detail. How remarkable, for instance, is the name Primrose, which is obviously akin to modest rose, and thus to "Secret Rose." On the top of this comes the crushing endorsement of the same idea indicated in the two words "rose" and "bury." The remarks of the Ploughman in the "Countess Cathleen" (note the rank in the peerage selected) would be anxiously scanned for some not improbable allusion to a furrow; and everything else, the statesman's abandonment of Home Rule, the poet's aversion to Imperialism, would be all parts of Lord Rosebery's cunning. But what, I repeat, would a man say if he were asked if the theory was probable? He would reply, "The theory is as near to being impossible as a natural phenomenon can be. I know Mr. W. B. Yeats, I know how he talks, I know what sort of a man he is, what sort of people he lives among, and know that he is the man to have written those poems. I know Lord Rosebery, too, and what sort of a life his is, and I know that he is not."

Now, we know, almost as thoroughly as we should know the facts of this hypothetical case, the facts about Bacon and Shakespeare. We know that Shakespeare was a particular kind of man who lived with a particular kind of men, all of whom thought much as he thought and wrote much as he wrote. We know that Bacon was a man who lived in another world, who thought other thoughts, who talked with other men, who wrote another style, one might almost say another language. That Bacon wrote Shakespeare is certainly possible; but almost every other hypothesis, that Bacon never said so, that he lied when he said it, that the printers played tricks with the documents, that the Baconians played tricks with the evidence, is in its nature a hundred times more probable. Of the cipher itself, I shall speak in another article. For the moment it is sufficient to point out that the Baconian hypothesis has against it the whole weight of historical circumstance and the whole of that supra-logical realisation which some of us call transcendentalism, and most of us common sense.