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Prose

Notes I should like to point out that the poet is compared with lover in the Midsummer’s Night Dream,
and in his essay Of Truth he says:
“ But howsoever these things are thus in men’s depraved judgments and affections, yet truth,
which only doth judge itself, teacheth that the inquiry of truth, which is the love making or wooing of
it, the knowledge of of truth, which is the presence of it, and the belief of truth, which is the
enjoying of it,— is the sovereign good of human nature.” and from :Midsummer Night Dream
“The lunatic, the lover, and the poet, Are of imagination all compact. One sees more devils than
vast hell can hold; That is the madman. The Lover, all as frantic, Sees Helen’s beauty in a brow of
Egypt. The poet’s eye in a fine frenzy rolling doth glance From heaven to earth, from earth to
heaven. And as imagination bodies forth the forms of things Unknown; the poet’s pen turns them
to shapes, And gives to airy nothing a local habitation And a name.” Act V. i. Observe how Helen
is compared to Cleopatra, and observe that we have in the lunatic’s and poet’s frenzy a hint for the
divine madness connected with Bacchus, which was called mania, and which fury was sometimes
the effect of wine. The lover, Bacon identifies with the madness ( in his essay Of Love—”mad
degree of love”). But it is poetic creation through love that Bacon is really thinking of, such as
Plato describes the love of wisdom, the begetting the truth upon the body of beauty.
It is somewhat strange to consider how the true character of Bacon’s essay Of Truth has so long
escaped discovery at the hands of critics— I mean the mingling, in this essay, of Truth and Poetry,
and their interrelationship after the manner (to borrow a title from the German poet, Goethe) of
Warheit und Dichtung. For the entire essay is an apology of the veils of poetry—that is to say, for
its shadows and outlines, its bare suggestions, its parabolical character, its complete reserve. What
I mean will be best understood by a study of Bacon’s introduction to the series of poetical and
classical myths entitled The Wisdom of the Ancients, in which collection Bacon has endeavored to
rationalize and explain away the shadows and veils in which the kernels of this ancient wisdom are
enwrapped. His efforts to discover the true forms, hidden behind poetical fancy in these pieces, are
just what he would have us apply to his theatre, with the help of his prose works. Just what Bacon,
in his essay Of Truth , calls “a shadow of a lie,” constitutes the outward poetical garb of all myth
containing inner meaning. “Aesop’s Fables” belong to this class of parable. The Fox and the Grapes,
outwardly, is the shadow of a lie, which conveys ( and veils at the same time) the inner moral
truth—”We affect to despise everything unattainable.”
Men being for the most part of the nature of children in their intellects, are only held and interested
in sensible objects, and in pictures, or emblems, which poetry can present to their imagination.
Two objects are served by creative poetry that embodies wisdom in poetic imagery and parable. It
serves to preserve and to reveal. Like the fly embalmed in amber, great truths may be handed
down to posterity and preserved intact through barbarous ages. The secrets of a society of learned
men can thus be transmitted to after times. This indeed is living art, and probably it has been
carried out to an almost incredible degree of perfection and completeness in the art we are now
discussing.
“And therefore in the infancy of learning, and in rude times, when those conceits which are now
trivial were then new, the world was full of parables and similitudes; for else would men either
have passed over without mark, or else rejected for paradoxes that which was offered, before they
had understood or judged. So in divine learning, we see how frequent parables and tropes are. For
it is a rule, that whatsoever science is not consonant to presuppositions, must pray in aid of
similitude’s.” (2nd book Advancement of Learning, p. 153)
Tennyson once made the remark “that the world was the shadow of God,” meaning that it not only
argued , as all shadows do, a great light to produce shadow, but also concealed God. In Esdras the
dead are said to “flee the shadow of the world,” and “which are departed from the shadow of the
world.” So, in like manner, I would suggest, Bacon’s theatre shadows a great rational interpretation,
or revelation, with which latter Bacon has particularly identified his own unmasking in glory to
man.

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