CHAPTER XII.

SONNETS.
" In the midst Thon 8tand*Bt m though a mystery thoa didst*'
— (Addressed to Bacon. ' ' Underwood's " Ben Jonson.)
That the genius and mind of the author of the plays was completely beyond the comprehension of his age or times is proved by his own words : —
" So I, made lame by fortune's dearest spite."
Again repeated in Chester's " Love's Martyr " : —
" My undeserved wit, mt sprung too soon. To give thy greatnesse every gracious right"
Bacon writes the same thing to his son (the Masculine Birth of Time) in these words : —
" ' And what/ you will say, * is this legitimate method I Have done with artifice and circumlocution ; show me the naked truth of your design, that I may be able to form a judgment for myself.' I would, my dearest son, that matters were in such a state with you as to render this possible. Do you suppose that, when all the entrances and passages to the mind of all men are infested and obstructed with the darkest idols, and the^e seated and burned in, as it were, into their substance, that clear and smooth places can be found for receiving the true and natural rays of objects 1 A new process must be instituted by which to insinuate ourselves into minds so entirely obstructed. For, as the delusions of the insane are removed by ART and ingenuity, but aggravated by opposition, so must we adapt ourselves to the universal insanity"
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This is a confession that Bacon considered "naked truth** an impossibility in his age. And, therefore, he says, "a new process** or "artifice" must be adopted to ''adapt ourselves tothenni- versal insanity." Now, here (by the way only) is proof that Bacon concealed his opinions by some process connected with art I And we should like to know what that "process " was 1
But the greatest proof of all is that Bacon appeals to posterity, to after ages, to appreciate and comprehend him, so that we find his entire genius is in league with time ; and this same point we find endlessly repeated in the Sonnets : —
" And, all in war with Time, for love of you, As he takes from you, I eograft you new/'
" Bat wherefore do not you a mightier way, Make war upon this bloody tyrant, Time ? "
^ And nothing 'gainst Time's scythe can make defence, Save breedy to brave him when he takes thee hence."
" O fearful meditation ! where, alack. Shall Time's best jewel from Time's chest lie hid ? Or what strong hand can hold his swift foot back ? "
" Yet, do thy worst, old Time ; despite thy wrong. My love shall in my verse ever live young."
How is it we find the two foremost minds of the same age both bent upon cheating time, both addressing far-off ages 9
Here is one of Bacon's titles: — "To the present age and posterity, greeting." ("Topics of Life and Death.")
How is it we find Bacon (who had no child) addressing him- self to a son (in the Masculine Birth of Time), and Shakespeare in his Sonnets proposing the begetting of a son also, who is con- nected with some extraordinary rebirth associated with time 1 —
" So thou, thyself outgoing in thy noon, Unlook'd on diest, unless thou get a son"
" But were some child of yours alive that time. You should live twice; — ^in it, and in my rhyme."
" O I none but untbrif ts : — Dear my love, you know You had a father ; let your son say so." — Sonnets,
23© SONNETS.
And mark it, Time ia to surrender this son — ^this Mascoline Birth of Time : —
"O thou, my lovely boy, who in thy power Dost hold Time's fickle glass, his sickle, hour ; Who has by waning grown, and therein show'st Thy lovers withering, as thy sweet self grow'st ; If Nature, sovereign mistress over wrack As thou goest onwards, still will pluck thee back, She keeps thee to this purpose, that her skill May time disgrace, and wretched minutes kill. Yet fear her, O thou minion of her pleasure 1 She may detain, but not still keep, her treasure : Her audit, though delayed, answer' d must be. And her quietus is to render thee."
" 'Gainst death and all-oblivious enmity Shall you pace forth ; your praise shall still find room, Even in the eyes of all posterity That wear this world out to the ending doom. So till the judgment that yoursdf arue^ You live in this, and dwell in lovers' eyes."
— SonngU.
The entire theme of the Sonnets is marriage for the sake of getting this son, who is to be reborn through time. Cannot the reader see that this is the Logos doctrine ? —
^ Make thee another %eLf^ for love of me, That beauty still may live in thine or thee."
''Bat the Father of all things. The Mind, being Life and Light, begat (engendered) a Man like to Himself, whom He loved as His own child, for He was very beautiful, having the image of His Father. For, in fact, moreover The God loved His own form, and to this delivered over all His own creations." (Posmandres L, " Hermes Trismegistus.")
As we cannot quote the entire work, we refer the reader to Chambers's translation of '' Hermes Trismegistus,'' where he will find abundance of evidence. Also to Philo, Plato, and St John for this Logon doctrine.
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If, then, Bacon's knowledge was too dangerous to publish during his age, what other '' artifice " or resource had he 1 We reply Art. That art, however, if addressed to posterity, must be provided with a key for its unlocking. Here, in our opinion, his superhuman genius steps in to assist him. He will imitate Nature, and provide a key in his own works. And he will heighten the effect of his art by adding the same mystery, the same secrecy and reserve as Nature. He will be secretly open. He will hide himself behind his works, as the Divine Mind (son or Logos) in those works. He will provide a series of Sonnets profoundly veiled, as creative principles, in which this scheme is set forth at length. And he will allow another man to carry the title of author until he is revealed.
Now a second reason for concealment is, that having allowed his early works to go to the theatre anonymously, and thus to get associated with Shakespeare's name, he was forced to continue to do so, or else confess to the entire fraud. This, in his position of statesman and grave lawyer, would have added little to his reputation with Queen Elizabeth or King James, in an age when the playwright's art was looked down upon as a despised thing. Had .he confessed to his authorship, his plays would have been ransacked by his enemies into charges against him of treason (as in the case of Eichard II.) or of frivolous writing. In Bacon's age no statesman, or law officer of the crown, could have sustained his dignity, or his career of ambition, with an acknowledged reputation as poet or play writer.
We see that what he really valued in his plays and poems was just what he could not divulge to his age, and that therefore he was forced to address himself to another age for appreciation. This is proved by the following Sonnet, — in which he says his '' tongue-tied muse" is silent, whilst he receives all sorts of letters of praise for his "dumb thoughts speaking in effect"— ia action : —
" My tongue-tied muse in maimers holds her still, While comments of your praise, richly compil'd.
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Eeserve their character with golden quill,
And precious phrase by all the muses fill'd.
I think good thoughts, while others write good words,
And, like unlettered clerk, still cry Attien
To every hymn that able spirit affords,
In polish'd form of well-refined pen.
Hearing you prais'd, I say H is w, His true,
And to the most of praise add something more ;
But that is in my thought, whose love to you.
Though words come hindmost, holds his rank before. Then others for the breath of words respect^ Me for my dumb thoughts, speaking in effects"
Nothing can be plainer than the above Sonnet. He is praised extravagantly for his plays by his friends, but only for the ouitvard or external— for the " Ireath of words,'* not for the " spirit of the letter" (for it is the letter that killeth). Therefore he must address himself to posterity, in this fashion : —
" To give away yourself, keeps yourself still ; And you must live, drawn by your own sweet skill."
If he was to " give away himself," nobody would believe him or understand him, and it would be a barren task — only resulting in keeping himself.
" Who will believe my verse in time to come, If it were filled with your most high deserts ? Though yet heaven knows, it is but as a tomb Which hides your life, and shows not half your parts. If I could write the beauty of your eyes, And in fresh numbers number all your graces, The age to come would say, this poet lies, Such heavenly touches ne'er touched earthly faces."
Therefore, this scheme of rejuvenescence by which he will appear to after ages as to himself —
/" But here's the joy — my friend and I are one ; Self (or Sweet flattery ! then she loves but me alone."
Alter Ego), w »Tis thee (myself) that for myself I praise,
as I Painting my age with beauty of thy days.'' Creative ,'
Mind \ '* ^^^^ ^^^^ ^y ^^^ praise to mine own self bring? Loeos or "^^ what is^t but mine own, when I praise thee 1 "
Son. « Then do thy office, Muse ; I teach thee how
\ To make him seem long hence as he shows now."
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Therefore, as he cannot realize his fall glory except in dreams (and this touches the point of authorship), he writes : —
'' Thus have I had thee, as a dream doth flatter, In sleep a king, but waking, no such matter."
''^ Farewell ! thou art too dear for my poasessiDg,
* • • • •
Wander a word for shadows like myself, That take the pain^ btU cannot pluck the pelf J*
What more does the world want than these words of his own ! Does he not tell us that he is tired of life in an age where he cannot be understood ) —
'' And art made tongue-tied by authority.
• » « •
And simple truth miscall'd simplicity."
Are we not told that we are to take a new acquaintance with his mind
" The wrinkles which thy glass will truly show, Of mouthed graves will give thee memory ; Thou by thy dial's shady stealth may'st know Time's thievish progress to eternity. Look, what thy memory cannot contain, Commit to these waste blanks, and thou shalt find Those children nurs'd, deliver'd from thy brain. To take a new acquaintance of thy miiid. These offices, so oft as thou wilt look. Shall profit thee, and much enrich thy book."
We utterly despair of rousing the world to the fact that all this is addressed to us and not to any contemporary. How curious it is that these poems are read and reread by thousands, and all are blind as moles to the fact that the whole of the poet's art is unlocked in them. So true is it that —
*' The jewel that we find, we stop and take it. Because we see it ; but what we do not see, We tread upon, and never think of it."
Or as the same author writes in prose : —
" It is evident, that the dullness of men is such and so in* felicitous, that when things are put before their feet, they do not
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see them, unless admonished, bat pass right on.'' No doubt '' everything is subtle till it be conceiyed," writes the same author. " What is strange, is the result of ignorance in the case of all/' says Plato.
After accepting the plays and poems and all that has been written upon them as final and exhaustive, the world will all at once catch the true right light for the perspective of this art picture, and see what is written behind it, and then we shall have everybody rushing off to explain it. We would give a great deal to be able to be as clear to the reader, as what we are endeavour- ing to explain is clear to ourselves. Unhappily it is a difficult subject, though only apparently so. First it requires faith to open the understanding and keep it sustained to the point of interest (which only faith can give), faith being bom of clear sight. Secondly, such a miracle and seeming impossibility is suggested in this theory of rebirth that it is difficult to obtain a moment's serious thought concerning it Thirdly, that directly one brings in the word Logos, or talks of creative principles, the reader has a headache, or has to attend to the papering of the back attic. And we understand all this perfectly, having found out that words bark oftener than they bite, and«that behind the everlasting jugglery and legerdemain of philology lays all the metaphysical impostures of thought oyer which centuries of- sects and writers have fought and quarrelled often to the death. Nobody knew this better than Bacon, and our belief is that not only his entire Inductive Philosophy, but this art of his called Shakespeare's, was constructed once and for ever to show up by a pattern or exemplar, the fantastic tricks of theological, metaphy- sical, and philological mysteries, which have from words produced idols of Superstition which have enslaved and governed us as the Frankensteins of our own creation. We are determined not to fill this work with endless quotations from Plato, Philo, St John, or any other exponent of the Logos doctrine, to exemplify oar meaning. And we are sure the critic will thank us. If he does not understand what we mean, let him lay down tibis book.
SONNETS, 235
because a few quotations would not assist him, and would very much enlarge our volume to no effect. But we mean to illustrate the Logos doctrine in a very 'few words by the tfitest possible imaga It means Thought (Ideas) or Mind. It \b employed to signify the Creative intellect hidden behind the works of Nature. And at bottom it is just what the meaning of a myth, fable, or allegory is in relation to its vehicle— or external art side. This is certainly an easy way of dismissing it, but what is it we always find constant at the bottom of this Logos doctrine % We find that the Son is always the Heir, and at the same time the Truth, and Mind (Thought, or Wisdom), Life, Light through which everything was created. This is perfectly logical Because a man's thought is well pictured by the relationship of Son, inas- much as it comes forth of him, and is and is not him, at the same time. Then to become visible it must be united to words (art), or some material (vehicle) which resembles marriage. Whence from this marriage arises again the idea of the Svn begetting, because the Logos (meaning) is hidden and concealed or begot in the vehicle. Its reappearance is highly suggestive of a rebirth — since it comes to light again as the Father's Creative Thought. Thus in the marrying of an idea to art, there are always three factors, the Thinker (or Father creator) — the Thought (or Son) — the vehicle (or Woman). The Thought becomes sacrificed (incarnation), concealed, — and when it is reborn it reveals the father's thought. It is around these relationships or metaphysical conceits that the entire Trinity Doctrine revolves ! The student is bound to bear in mind, that the union of Idea (or Thought) to Matter, is of the nature of marriage^ since two things become identified as " a union in partition." Also that all the ancient writers describe this as male on one side, female on the other, and that the two constitute when united an androgynous being which we refind in the Sonnets under the title of Master-Mistress.
Cory writes : — '' By comparing all the varied legends of the west and east in conjunction, we may obtain the following outline of the theology of the ancients. It recognises, as the
236 SONNETS.
primary elements of all things, two independent principles, of the nature of male and female. And these in mystic unum, as soui and body, constitute the great Hfsrmaphroditic deity, the One, the universe itself, consisting of two elements of its composition, modified though combined in one individual, of which all things were considered but as parts." (Introductory Dissertation to Cory's " Ancient Fragments," p. xxxiv.)
It will be seen in this ** Hermaphroditic deity " we have the Master-Mistress of the poet's Sonnets — viz., the union of the male and the female, of the friend and the mistress.
^'Timseus Locrus says of the causes of all things: — ^Idea or Form is of the nature of Male and Father; but Matter of the nature of Female and Mother.' " (Cory's •* Fragments," 302.) Again: — ^'Matter is the receptacle of Form, the mother and female principle of the generation of the third essence; for, by receiving the likeness upon itself, and being stamped with Form, it perfects all things, jmrtaking of the nature of generation.'* (Ibid.)
''The world appears to them (the Egyptians) to consist of a masculine and feminine nature. And they engrave a scarabseus for Athena, and a vulture for Hephsestus. For these alone of all the Gods they consider as both male and female in their nature." (HorapoUo.)
"Plutarch, describing the mysteries, says : — * God is a male and female intelligence, being both life and light he brought forth another intelligence, the creator of the world'; Orpheus (who is sup- posed to have introduced the mysteries into Greece) sings: — ' Jove is a male, Jove is an unspotted virgin.* The Brahminical doctrine in the Sama Veda says: — ^the will to create exited wUh the Deity as his bride.' The Yerihad, Aranyaka, and Upanishad teaches the same : — ' he caused himself to fall in two and thus became husband and wife.* (' Yarker's Mysteries of Anti-- quities.') A study of the ancient doctrines of creation, will always discover this symbolism of marriage as expressive of the creative art For example, in every triad there is a male, a female,
SONNETS. 237
and an androgyne. An acute student of the Sonnets will find these treated separately, yet commixedly, as a paradox of con- tradictions. 'Eminent scholars, who have devoted themselves to the investigation of the ancient cults, have shown to demon- stration that the most primitive idea of God was that he con- sisted of a dual nature, masculine and feminine joined in one, and this androgynous deity gave birth to creation.' (* Great Dionysiak Myth.,' Brown, vol. ii., p. 302.)"
Heraclitus' conception of the Logos is that it is '' the rational law apparent in this world."
Why do we introduce all this ? Because the entire opening theme of the Sonnets is Marriage for the sake of rebirth or immortal offspring! But this is the actual simile by which Socrates in the Banquet illustrates Creation Divine or poetic. And there cannot be a moment's doubt that the Fnend of the Sonnets \& not Lord Southampton, or any real person at all, but the poet's alter ego, or Mind, which as creative Logos, is to be obscured by marriage with art, and be by rebirth his son and heir, as the spiritual in this art revealed, or again come to light — through time. This is no ingenious theory in the mazes of which we have lost ourselves, but the result of a dozen years' study, and we could fill volumes to prove it, not here and there, but everywhere in these marvellous Sonnets. Every paradox melts before it, but its genius is that of Hermetic mystery, because it is a metaphysical subject highly obscured to avoid premature discovery. We are told how careful he was when he took his way to hide each trifie that might reveal him too soon: —
" How careful was I when I took my way, Each trifie under truest bars to thrust, That to my use it might unused stay From hands of falsehood, in sure wards of trust ! '
What, then^ is our theory 1 It is that this art is completely DaiMe. Kot what may be termed allegorical, but like Nature, and it embraces another side, which is as philosophic as the " Novum Organumy Many have surmised this before us. Carlyle
238 SONNETS.
wrote (from Donnelly's " Great Cryptogram ") : — " There is an understanding manifested in the construction of Shakespeare's plays equal to that in Bacon's * Novum Organum.*"
Hazlit makes the same remark : — " The wisdom displayed in Shakespeare was equal in profoundness to the great Lord Bacon's * Novum Organum.* "
'*Novalis, one of the subtlest of German thinkers, remarks with regard to our poet's Art : —
" ' The latest sharp-minded observer will find new coincidences, with endless system of the universe, collisions with later ideas, relationships with the higher powers and senses of humanity. They are sijmbolical^ full of interpretation, simple and inexhausti- ble, like the creations of nature, and nothing more unfit can be said of them, than that they are a work of art in the narrow mechanical meaning of the word.' — (JFerke.) Novalis only enunciates what Coleridge endeavoured to enforce, viz., the organic character of the poet's art. This is only a metajshor, for dual unity. An organism is the product of an internal, spiritual force, giving itself outward expression through nature or art. There must be soul or symbolism where there is organism."
But the world accepts the plays in the light of an unconscious genius embodying more rationalism than it can itself explain, as in the case of Faust and Goethe. But this is quite an error. This art, as he tells us, was planned far from accident^ and is hugely politic, laying great bases for eternity I It was deliber- ately planned and constructed for a complete and perfect setfrevela- ii/m through time. When did this idea first take its inception 1 Not from the beginning, because he tells us in the 20th Sonnet, that it was first intended to be sin^gle, but that, like Pygmalion, he fell in love with his own creation, and determined to give it life. And this idea we can see repeated in the statue of Her- mione upon her pedestal, who represents his entire sleeping art, waiting the return of its life or spirit (Perdita) to reveal itself to us, not as now a speechless statue, but as a thing of rebirth and revelation — of £Oul and intellect, not as a mere picture, but
SONNETS. 239
as man-woman — that is, dual unity, separated and united as Hermione is from Leontes through time.
Marcus Antoninus says : — '' The nature of the universe de- lights not in anything so much as to alter all things and pre- sent them under another form. This is her conceit, to play one game and commence another. Nature is placed before her like a piece of wax, and she shapes it to all forms and figures. Now she makes a bird, then out of the bird a beast ; now a flower, then a frog."
Compare —
'* Since I left you, mine eye ia in my minde. And that which govemes me to goe about, Doth part his function, and is partly blind, Seemes seeing, but effectually is out : For it no forme delivers to the heart Of birds, or flower, or shape which it doth lack, Of his quick objects hath the mind no part, Nor his owne vision holds what it doth catch : For if it see the rud'st or gentlest sight, The most sweet favour or deformedst creature, The mountaioe, or the sea, the day, or night : The Crow, or Dove, it shapes them to your feature. Incapable of more repleat, with you. My most true minde thus maketh mine untrue.''