and quiet his appetite for work? Not entirely:
The trifles with which he amused himself in hours of pain and
languor bore the mark of his mind. THE BEST JESTBOOK IN THE WORLD
is that which he dictated from memory, without referring to any
book, on a day on which illness had rendered him incapable of
serious study.
Here are some scattered remarks (from Macaulay) which throw light
upon Bacon, and seem to indicate–and maybe demonstrate–that he
was competent to write the Plays and Poems:
With great minuteness of observation he had an amplitude of
comprehension such as has never yet been vouchsafed to any other
human being.
The “Essays” contain abundant proofs that no nice feature of
character, no peculiarity in the ordering of a house, a garden or a
court-masque, could escape the notice of one whose mind was capable
of taking in the whole world of knowledge.
His understanding resembled the tent which the fairy Paribanou gave
to Prince Ahmed: fold it, and it seemed a toy for the hand of a
lady; spread it, and the armies of powerful Sultans might repose
beneath its shade.
The knowledge in which Bacon excelled all men was a knowledge of
the mutual relations of all departments of knowledge.
In a letter written when he was only thirty-one, to his uncle, Lord
Burleigh, he said, “I have taken all knowledge to be my province.”
Though Bacon did not arm his philosophy with the weapons of logic,
he adorned her profusely with all the richest decorations of
rhetoric.
The practical faculty was powerful in Bacon; but not, like his wit,
so powerful as occasionally to usurp the place of his reason, and
to tyrannize over the whole man.
There are too many places in the Plays where this happens. Poor
old dying John of Gaunt volleying second-rate puns at his own name,
is a pathetic instance of it. “We may assume” that it is Bacon’s
fault, but the Stratford Shakespeare has to bear the blame.
No imagination was ever at once so strong and so thoroughly
subjugated. It stopped at the first check from good sense.
In truth much of Bacon’s life was passed in a visionary world–amid
things as strange as any that are described in the “Arabian Tales”
. . . amid buildings more sumptuous than the palace of Aladdin,
fountains more wonderful than the golden water of Parizade,
conveyances more rapid than the hippogryph of Ruggiero, arms more
formidable than the lance of Astolfo, remedies more efficacious
than the balsam of Fierabras. Yet in his magnificent day-dreams
there was nothing wild–nothing but what sober reason sanctioned.
Bacon’s greatest performance is the first book of the Novum Organum
. . . Every part of it blazes with wit, but with wit which is
employed only to illustrate and decorate truth. No book ever made
so great a revolution in the mode of thinking, overthrew so many
prejudices, introduced so many new opinions.
But what we most admire is the vast capacity of that intellect
which, without effort, takes in at once all the domains of science-
-all the past, the present and the future, all the errors of two
thousand years, all the encouraging signs of the passing times, all
the bright hopes of the coming age.
He had a wonderful talent for packing thought close and rendering
it portable.
His eloquence would alone have entitled him to a high rank in
literature.
It is evident that he had each and every one of the mental gifts
and each and every one of the acquirements that are so prodigally
displayed in the Plays and Poems, and in much higher and richer
degree than any other man of his time or of any previous time. He
was a genius without a mate, a prodigy not matable. There was only
one of him; the planet could not produce two of him at one birth,
nor in one age. He could have written anything that is in the
Plays and Poems. He could have written this:
The cloud-cap’d towers, the gorgeous palaces,
The solemn temples, the great globe itself,
Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve,
And, like an insubstantial pageant faded,
Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff