CHAPTER XII

MISCELLANEOUS SIMILITUDES

In his biography of Lord Bacon Dean Church quotes the remark of M. de Remusat, "Two men stand out 'the masters of those who know' without equals up to their time among men, the Greek Aristotle, and the English Bacon. They agree in the universality and comprehensiveness of their conception of human knowledge and they were absolutely alone in their serious practical ambition to work out this conception.... Aristotle first, and for his time more successfully, and Bacon after him ventured on the daring enterprise of taking all knowledge for their province, and in this they stood alone.

Gervinus, after commenting upon Shakespeare's genius, alludes to Bacon who "at that time in England stood as solitary as Shakespeare.... all competitors vanished, 'England was in the possession of a single man.

It is not my intention to question the admitted super-eminence of Bacon and Shakespeare or to depress their encyclopædic minds to the level of the commonplace; nevertheless it is abundantly clear that their abilities were shared in common by other men who are so little known or appreciated

that their names do not appear in any of our English Men of Letters Series.

The value of internal evidence varies according to different authorities. Mr Edwin Reed claims that :"The argument from parallelisms in general may be stated thus: One parallelism has no significance; five parallelisms attract attention; ten suggest inquiry; twenty raise a presumption; fifty establish a probability; one hundred dissolve every doubt. " Dr. A. B. Grosart assigns the anonymous Selimus to Robert Greene largely on account of one single parallelism! He says, "One specific passage by itself would have determined my assigning Selimus to Greene. He then cites a passage on the subject of the sweet content of country life (see p. 120)" which (meo judicio) needs only to be pondered to affirm the Selimus words to be from the same mind and pen.

On the other hand, as Goethe observes, "The world always remains the same; the conditions are repeated; one people lives, loves and feels like another; why then should not one poet write like another? The situations of life are alike why then should those of poems be unlike?"

The force of the parallelisms between Bacon and the dramatists lies chiefly in the prodigious gulf which separated their respective paths of life. The training and career of Francis Bacon "the Glory of his age and nation, the Adorner and Ornament of Learning, "the wisest of Englishmen, and those of the "refuse sort swarming like vermin around the playhouses, were, surely, as

I

"2

Intro: Selimus. Temple Dramatists.

2 Dr Rawley.

3 Ruskin.

"3

widely divergent as it is possible to conceive. I invite the reader to turn back to pp. 8-14 and refresh his memory of the dramatic temperament. As Mr. Saintsbury correctly says, the Elizabethan theatre was "the nucleus of all that was vile and hazardous in the floating population. The fright

ful conditions of the lower orders will not bear detailed description. Dr. Jessopp characterises the sediment of medieval town life as "a dense slough of stagnant misery, squalor, famine, loathsome disease and dull despair such as the worst slums of London, Paris or Liverpool know nothing of."1 In Tudor times these and additional "Italianate" horrors were plebeian characteristics, and the dramatists were admittedly and essentially men of the people. What in common had the supreme and peerless intellect of Francis Bacon with the brain of "sporting Kyd, of the blaring young atheist Marlowe, of the scoundrelly Greene, or the lascivious Peele? "Drink," said Drummond of Ben Jonson, "was the element in which he lived" and this seems to have been equally true of all "the tribe of Ben.

What affinity was there between the souls of Hamlet and Christopher Sly? A recent biographer, shocked at the careers of the dramatic poets, endeavours to dissociate Marlowe from their Society and to depict him as the companion of the great and good,

His words and thoughts are so noble, and his sentiments so lofty, that the mind revolts at seeing his name coupled with the debauched

I Story of London. Wheatley. p. 162.

and dissolute desperadoes it has been customary to like it with. "

Apart from the contrast between the environments of poets and philosophers, a second point to be borne in mind when considering Elizabethan parallelisms is the highly important one that Language was not then ready-shaped to the purWriters did not as they do now, possess a cut and dried vocabulary of word and phrase. Zones of thought, nowadays mapped out and familiar, were then districts unknown and unsurveyed.

pose.

The parallels which I quote in this chapter are not intrinsically of pith and moment, but form a necessary part of my demonstration, that the minutest currents of various minds ran simultaneously in identical channels.

I am of course aware that Thought is the property of him who can entertain it and adequately place it. "A certain awkwardness," says Emerson, "marks the use of borrowed thoughts; but as soon as we have learned what to do with them they become our own. One can understand and sympathise with an author who polishes and resets an intellectual jewel or who assimilates a felicitous phrase; but to find great artists systematically playing the sedulous ape and stooping to such senseless and unprofitable filchings as for instance the following is to say the least, perplexing.

I furrowed Neptune's seas

Northeast as far as the frozen Rhine.
Leaving fair Voya, cross'd up Danuby

2 Marlowe and his Associates. Ingram.

As high as Saba, whose entrancing streams
Cut 'twixt the Tartars and the Russians.

GREENE (Orlando Furioso) 1594.

I have crossed the frozen Rhine.

Leaving fair Po I sail'd up Danuby
As far as Saba, whose entrancing_streams
Cut 'twixt the Tartars and the Russians.

PEELE (Old Wives' Tale) 1595.

Though the most vitriolic jealousies seem to have existed, it was a common occurrence for the poets to give themselves away to any nimble and watchful antagonists by boldly annexing competitors' lines. Thus, for instance :

As when the Sun attir'd

in glistering robe Comes dancing from his oriental gate And bridegroom-like hurls through the gloomy air His radiant beams. PEELE (David & Bathsheba) 1599.

At last the golden orien-
tal gate

Of greater Heaven 'gan
to open fair
And Phoebus, fresh as
bridegroom to his mate,
Came dancing forth shak-
ing his dewy hair
And hurl'd his glist'ring
beams through gloomy
air.

SPENSER (Fairy Queen
Bk. 1. C. v. St. 2.)

1590.

Unfortunately, many parallelisms were published apparently simultaneously so that it is most difficult to decide who originated a thought and who stole it. On pages 118 and 307 the reader will note instances of simultaneous utterance. There was another very notable example in 1590.