But before we come to the jumping-off place, let us pause for a moment and take a retrospective glance at the natural history of the Bacon-Shakespeare craze. What was it that first unlocked the sluice-gates, and poured forth such a deluge of foolishness upon a sorely suffering world? It will hardly do to lay the blame upon poor Delia Bacon. Her suggestions would have borne no fruit had they not found a public, albeit a narrow one, in some degree prepared for them. Who, then, prepared the soil for the seeds of this idiocy to take root? Who but the race of fond and foolish Shakespeare commentators, with their absurd claims for their idol? During the eighteenth century Shakespeare was generally underrated. Voltaire wondered how a nation that possessed such a noble tragedy as Addison's "Cato" could endure such plays as "Hamlet" and "Othello." In the days of Scott and Burns a reaction set in; and Shakespeare worship reached its height when the Germans took it up, and, not satisfied with calling him the prince of poets and peerless master of dramatic art, began to discover in his works all sorts of hidden philosophy and impossible knowledge. Of the average German mind Lowell good-naturedly says that "it finds its keenest pleasure in divining a profound significance in the most trifling things, and the number of mare's nests that have been stared into by the German Gelehrter through his spectacles passes calculation."43 But the Germans are not the only sinners; let me cite an instance from near home. In the quarto "Hamlet" of 1603 we read: —
"Full forty years are past, their date is gone,
Since happy time joined both our hearts as one:
And now the blood that filled my youthful veins
Runs weakly in their pipes," etc.
Whereupon Mr. Edward Vining calls upon us to observe how Shakespeare, "to whom all human knowledge seems to be but a matter of instinct, in [these lines] asserts the circulation of the blood in the veins and 'pipes,' a truth which Harvey probably did not even suspect until at least thirteen years later," etc.44 Does Mr. Vining really suppose that what Harvey did was to discover that blood runs in our veins? A little further study of history would have taught him that even the ancients knew that blood runs in the veins.45 About fourteen hundred years before "Hamlet" was written, Galen proved that it also runs in the arteries. After Galen's time, it was believed that the dark blood nourishes such plebeian organs as the liver, while the bright blood nourishes such lordly organs as the brain, and that the interchange takes place in the heart; until the sixteenth century, when Vesalius proved that the interchange does not take place in the heart, and the martyr Servetus proved that it does take place in the lungs; and so on till 1619, when Harvey discovered that dark blood is brought by the veins to the right side of the heart, and thence driven into the lungs, where it becomes bright and flows into the left side of the heart, thence to be propelled throughout the body in the arteries. That it then grows dark and returns through the veins Harvey believed, but no one could tell how, until, forty years later, Malpighi with his microscope detected the capillaries. Now to talk about Shakespeare discerning as if by instinct a truth which Harvey afterward discovered is simply silly. Instead of showing rare scientific knowledge, his remark about blood running in the veins is one that anybody might have made.
This is a fair specimen of the ignorant way in which doting commentators have built up an impossible Shakespeare, until at last they have provoked a reaction. Sooner or later the question was sure to arise, Where did your Stratford boy get all this abstruse scientific knowledge? The keynote was perhaps first sounded by August von Schlegel, who persuaded himself that Shakespeare had mastered "all the things and relations of this world," and then went on to declare that the accepted account of his life must be a mere fable. Thus we reach the point from which Delia Bacon started.
It may safely be said that all theories of Shakespeare's plays which suppose them to be attempts at teaching occult philosophical doctrines, or which endow them with any other meanings than those which their words directly and plainly convey, are a delusion and a snare. Those plays were written, not to teach philosophy, but to fill the theatre and make money. They were written by a practised actor and manager, the most consummate master of dramatic effects that ever lived; a poet unsurpassed for fertility of invention, unequalled for melody of language, unapproached for delicacy of fancy, inexhaustible in humour, profoundest of moralists; a man who knew human nature by intuition, as Mozart knew counterpoint or as Chopin knew harmony. The name of that writer was none other than William Shakespeare of Stratford-on-Avon.
It was inevitable that the Bacon folly, after once adopting such methods as those of Mrs. Pott and Mr. Donnelly, should proceed to commit suicide by piling up extravagances. By such methods one can prove anything, and accordingly we find these writers busy in tracing Bacon's hand in the writings of Greene, Marlowe, Shirley, Marston, Massinger, Middleton, and Webster. They are sure that he was the author of Montaigne's Essays, which were afterward translated into what we have always supposed to be the French original. Mr. Donnelly believes that Bacon also wrote Burton's "Anatomy of Melancholy." Next comes Dr. Orville Owen with a new cipher, which proves that Bacon was the son of Queen Elizabeth by Robert Dudley, and that he was the author of the "Faerie Queene" and other poems attributed to Edmund Spenser. Finally we have Mr. J. E. Roe, who does not mean to be outdone. He asks us what we are to think of the notion that an ignorant tinker, like John Bunyan, could have written the most perfect allegory in any language. Perish the thought! Nobody but Bacon could have done it. Of course Bacon had been more than fifty years in his grave when "Pilgrim's Progress" was published as Bunyan's. But your true Baconizer is never stopped by trifles. Mr. Roe assures us that Bacon wrote that heavenly book, as well as "Robinson Crusoe" and the "Tale of a Tub;" which surely begins to make him seem ubiquitous and everlasting. If things go on at this rate, we shall presently have a religious sect holding as its first article of faith that Francis Bacon created the heavens and the earth in six days, and rested on the seventh day.
November, 1896.
XIV
SOME CRANKS AND THEIR CROTCHETS
"Now, by two-headed Janus,
Nature hath framed strange fellows in her time!"
Merchant of Venice, I. i.
About five-and-twenty years ago, when I was assistant librarian at Harvard University, much of my time was occupied in revising and bringing toward completion the gigantic pair of twin catalogues – of authors and subjects – which my predecessor, Dr. Ezra Abbot, had started in 1861. Twins they were in simultaneity of birth, but not in likeness of growth. Naturally, the classified catalogue was much bigger than its brother, filled more drawers, cost more money, and made a vast deal more trouble. For while some books were easy enough to classify, others were not at all easy, and sometimes curious questions would arise.
One day, for example, I happened to be looking at a pamphlet on the value of Pi; and, should any of my readers ask what that might mean, I should answer that Pi (pi) is the Greek letter which geometers use to denote the ratio of the circumference of a circle to its diameter. The arithmetical value of this symbol is 3.1415926536, and so on in an endless fraction. Is it not hard to see what there can be in such an innocent decimal to irritate human beings and destroy their peace of mind? Yet so it is. Many a human life has been wrecked upon Pi. To a certain class of our fellow-creatures its existence is maddening. It interferes with the success of a little scheme on which they have set their hearts, – nothing less than to construct a square which shall be exactly equivalent in dimensions to a given circle. Nobody has ever done such a thing, for it cannot be done. But when mathematicians tell these poor people that such is the case, they howl with rage, and, dipping their pens in gall, write book after book bristling with figures to prove that they have "squared the circle." The Harvard library does not buy such books, but it accepts all manner of gifts, and has thus come to contain some queer things.
When I consulted the subject catalogue, to see under what head it had been customary to classify these lucubrations on Pi, I found, sure enough, that it was Mathematics § Circle-Squaring. Following this cue, I explored the drawers in other directions, and found books on "perpetual motion" formed a section under Physics, while crazy interpretations of the book of Daniel were grouped along with works of solid Biblical scholarship by such eminent writers as Reuss and Kuenen and Cheyne. Clearly, here was a case for reform. The principle of classification was faulty. In one sense, the treatment of the quadrature of the circle may be regarded as a section under the general head of mathematics; as, for example, when Lindemann, in 1882, showed that Pi cannot be represented as the root of any algebraic equation with rational coefficients. But our circle-squaring literature is very different. It is usually written by persons whose mathematical horizon scarcely extends beyond long division: just as the writers on perpetual motion know nothing of physics; just as so many expositors have dealt with the ten-horned beast in blissful ignorance alike of ancient history and of the principles of literary criticism. What all such books illustrate, however various may be their ostensible themes, is the pathology of the human mind. They are specimens of Insane Literature. As such they have a certain sort of interest; and to any rational being it is the only sort they can have.
So I culled from many a little drawer the cards appertaining to divers printed products of morbid cerebration, and gathered them into a class of Insane Literature; and under this rubric such sections as Circle-Squaring, Perpetual Motion, Great Pyramid, Earth not a Globe, etc., were evidently in their proper place. The name of the class was duly inscribed on the outside of its drawer, and the matter seemed happily disposed of.
The way of the reformer, however, is beset with difficulties, and it is seldom that his first efforts are crowned with entire success. Not many days had elapsed since this emendation of the catalogue, when one of my assistants brought me the card of a book on the Apocalypse, by a certain Mr. Smallwit, and called my attention to the fact that it was classified as Insane Literature.
"Very well," I said, "so it is."
"I don't doubt it, sir," said she; "but the author lives over in Chelsea, and I saw him this morning in one of the alcoves. Perhaps, if he were to look in the catalogue and see how his book is classified, he mightn't altogether like it. Then, as I looked a little further along the cards, I came upon this pamphlet by Herr Dummkopf, of Breslau, upsetting the law of gravitation; and – do you know? – Herr Dummkopf is spending the winter here in Cambridge!"
"To be sure," said I, "it was very stupid of me not to foresee such cases. Of course we can't call a man a fool to his face. In a catalogue which marshals the quick along with the dead some heed must be paid to the amenities of life. Pray get and bring me all those cards."
By the time they arrived a satisfactory solution of the difficulty had suggested itself. I told the assistant simply to scratch out "Insane," and put "Eccentric" instead. For while the harsh Latin epithet would of course infuriate Messrs. Dummkopf, Smallwit & Co., it might be doubted if their feelings would be hurt by the milder Greek word. Some people of their stripe, to whom notoriety is the very breath of their nostrils, would consider it a mark of distinction to be called eccentric. At all events, the harshness would be delicately veiled under a penumbra of ambiguity.
Thus the class Eccentric Literature was established in our catalogue, and there it has remained, while the books in the library have increased from a hundred thousand to half a million. Once or twice, I am told, has some disgusted author uttered a protest, but the quiet of Gore Hall has not been disturbed thereby. Care is needed in treating such a subject, and my rule was that no amount of mere absurdity, no extremity of dissent from generally received opinions, should consign a book to the class of Eccentric Literature, unless it showed unmistakable symptoms of crankery, or the buzzing of a bee in the author's bonnet. This rule has been strictly followed. One lot of books – the Bacon-Shakespeare stuff – which I intended to put in this class, but forgot to do so because of sore stress of work, still remain absurdly grouped along with the books on Shakespeare written by men in their senses. With this exception, the class offers us a fairly comprehensive view of the literature of cranks.
Just where the line should be drawn between sanity and crankery is not always easy to determine, and must usually be left to soundness of judgment in each particular case, as with so many other questions of all grades, from the supreme court down to the kitchen. One of the most frequent traits of your crank is his megalomania, or self-magnification. His intellectual equipment is so slender that he cannot see wherein he is inferior to Descartes or Newton. Without enough knowledge to place him in the sixth form of a grammar school, he will assail the conclusions of the greatest minds the world has seen. His mood is belligerent; since people will not take him at his own valuation, he is apt to regard society as engaged in a conspiracy to ignore and belittle him. Of humour he is pretty sure to be destitute; an abounding sense of the ludicrous is one of the best safeguards of mental health, and even a slight endowment will usually nip and stunt the fungus growth of crankery.
The slightest glimmering sense of humour would have restrained that inveterate circle-squarer, James Smith, from publishing (in 1865) his pamphlet entitled "The British Association in Jeopardy, and Dr. Whewell, the Master of Trinity, in the Stocks without Hope of Escape." His case, with those of many other ingenious lunatics, was racily set forth by the late Professor De Morgan in his "Budget of Paradoxes" (London, 1872), a bulky book dealing with the author's personal experiences with cranks and their crotchets. It was De Morgan's lot as an eminent mathematician to be outrageously bored by circle-squarers and their kin, and it was a happy thought to put on record the queer things that happened. His friends asked him again and again why he took the trouble to mention and expose such absurdities. He replied that, when your crank publishes a book "full of figures which few readers can criticise, a great many people are staggered to this extent, that they imagine there must be the indefinite something in the mysterious all this. They are brought to the point of suspicion that the mathematicians ought not to treat all this with such undisguised contempt, at least. Now I have no fear for π; but I do think it possible that general opinion might in time demand that the crowd of circle-squarers, etc., should be admitted to the honours of opposition; and this would be a time-tax of five per cent. one man with another, upon those who are better employed." At any rate, continues De Morgan, with a twinkle in the corner of his eye, whether in chastising cranks he has any motive but public good "must be referred to those who can decide whether a missionary chooses his pursuit solely to convert the heathen." He confesses that perhaps he may have a little of the spirit of Colonel Quagg, whose principle of action was thus succinctly expressed: "I licks ye because I kin, and because I like, and because ye's critters that licks is good for!"
Among the creatures whose malady seemed to call for such drastic treatment was Captain Forman, R. N., who in 1833 wrote against the law of gravitation, and got not a word of notice. Then he wrote to Sir John Herschel and Lord Brougham, asking them to get his book reviewed in some of the quarterlies. Receiving no answer from these gentlemen, he addressed in one of the newspapers a card to Lord John Russell, inveighing against their "dishonest" behaviour. Still getting no satisfaction, the valorous captain wrote to the Royal Astronomical Society with a challenge to controversy. To this letter came a polite but brief answer, advising him to study the rudiments of mechanics. It was not in the paradoxer's nature to submit tamely to such treatment; and he replied in a printed pamphlet, wherein he called that learned society "craven dunghill cocks," and bestrewed them, with other choice flowers of rhetoric, much to the relief of his feelings.
One of this naval officer's fellow sufferers was a farm labourer, who took it into his head that the Lord Chancellor had offered £100,000 reward to any one who should square the circle. So Hodge went to work and squared it, and then hied him to London, blissfully dreaming of sudden wealth. Hearing that De Morgan was a great mathematician, he left his papers with him, including a letter to the Lord Chancellor, claiming the £100,000. De Morgan returned the papers with a note, saying that no such prize had ever been offered, and gently hinting that the worthy Hodge had not sufficient knowledge to see in what the problem consisted. This elicited from the rustic philosopher a long letter, from which I must quote a few sentences, so characteristic of the circle-squaring talent and temper: —
Doctor Morgan, Sir. Permit me to address you
Brute Creation may perhaps enjoy the faculty of beholding visible things with a more penitrating eye than ourselves. But Spiritual objects are as far out of their reach as though they had no being Nearest therefore to the brute Creation are those men who Suppose themselves to be so far governed by external objects as to believe nothing but what they See and feel And Can accomedate to their Shallow understanding and Imaginations
… When a Gentleman of your Standing in Society … Can not understand or Solve a problem That is explicitly explained by words and Letters and mathematacally operated by figuers He had best consult the wise proverd
Do that which thou Canst understand and Comprehend for thy good.
I would recommend that Such Gentleman Change his business
And appropriate his time and attention to a Sunday School to Learn what he Could and keep the Litle Children form durting their Close
With Sincere feelings of Gratitude for your weakness and Inability I am
Sir your Superior in Mathematics.
X. Y.
A few days after this elegant epistle there came to De Morgan another from the same hand. Hodge had sent his papers to some easy-going American professor, whose reply must clearly have been too polite. It is never safe to give your crank an inch of comfort; it will straightway become an ell of assurance. This American savant, crows Rusticus, "highly approves of my work. And Says he will Insure me Reward in the States I write this that you may understand that I have knowledge of the unfair way that I am treated in my own nati County I am told and have reasons to believe that it is the Clergy that treat me so unjust. I am not Desirious of heaping Disonors upon my own nation. But if I have to Leave this kingdom without my Just dues. The world Shall know how I am and have been treated
"I am Sir Desirous of my Just dues
"X. Y."
A cynical philosopher once said that you cannot find so big a fool but there will be some bigger fool to swear by him; and so our agricultural friend had his admiring disciple who felt bound to break a lance for him with the unappreciative De Morgan: —
"He has done what you nor any other mathematician as those who call themselves such have done. And what is the reason that you will not candidly acknowledge to him … that he has squared the circle shall I tell you? it is because he has performed the feat to obtain the glory of which mathematicians have battled from time immemorial that they might encircle their brows with a wreath of laurels far more glorious than ever conqueror won it is simply this that it is a poor man a humble artisan who has gained that victory that you don't like to acknowledge it you don't like to be beaten and worse to acknowledge that you have miscalculated, you have in short too small a soul to acknowledge that he is right… I am backed in my opinion not only by Mr. Q. a mathematician and watchmaker residing in the boro of Southwark but by no less an authority than the Professor of mathematics of … College United States Mr. Q and I presume that he at least is your equal as an authority and Mr. Q says that the government of the U. S. will recompense X. Y. for the discovery he has made if so what a reflection upon Old england the boasted land of freedom the nursery of the arts and sciences that her sons are obliged to go to a foreign country to obtain that recompense to which they are justly entitled."46
Ordinarily, the aim of the paradoxers is to achieve renown by doing what nobody ever did. Hence the fascination exercised upon them by those apparently simple problems which already in ancient times were recognized as "old stickers," the quadrature of the circle, the trisection of angles, and the duplicature of the cube. The ancients found these geometric problems insolvable, though it was left for modern algebra to point out the reason, namely, that no quantities can be geometrically constructed from given quantities, except such as can be formed from them algebraically by the solution of quadratic equations; if the algebraic solution comes as the root of a cubic or biquadratic equation, it cannot be constructed by geometry. Against this hopeless wall the crowd of paradoxers will doubtless continue to break their heads until the millennium dawns.
Sometimes, however, our crank has a practical end in view, as in the numerous attempts to discover "perpetual motion," or, in other words, to invent a machine out of which you can get indefinitely more energy than you put in. It is not strange that many thousands of dollars have been wasted in this effort to recover Aladdin's lost lamp. The notorious Keely motor is but one of a host of contrivances born and bred of crass ignorance of the alphabet of dynamics. But perpetual motion is not the only form assumed by wealth-seeking crankery. In 1861 a Captain Roblin, of Normandy, having ascertained to his own satisfaction, from the prolonged study of the zodiac of Denderah, the sites of sundry gold-mines, came forward with proposals for a joint stock company to dig and be rich. The labours of Herr Johannes von Gumpach were of a more philanthropic turn. He published in 1861 a pamphlet entitled "A Million's Worth of Property and Five Hundred Lives annually lost at Sea by the Theory of Gravitation. A Letter on the True Figure of the Earth, addressed to the Astronomer Royal." Next year this pamphlet grew into a stout volume. It maintained that a great many shipwrecks were occasioned by errors of navigation due to an erroneous conception of the shape of the earth. Since Newton's time, it has been supposed to be flattened at the poles, whereas the amiable Gumpach calls upon his fellow-creatures to take notice that it is elongated, and to mend their ways accordingly.
The desire to prove great men wrong is one of the crank's most frequent and powerful incentives. The name of Newton is the greatest in the history of science: how flattering to one's self it must be, then, to prove him a fool! In eccentric literature the books against Newton are legion. Here is a title: "David and Goliath, or an Attempt to prove that the Newtonian System of Astronomy is directly opposed to the Scriptures. By William Lander, Mere, Wilts, 1833." And here is De Morgan's terse summary of the book: "Newton is Goliath; Mr. Lander is David. David took five pebbles; Mr. Lander takes five arguments. He expects opposition; for Paul and Jesus both met with it."
There are few subjects over which cranks are more painfully exercised than the figure of the earth, and its relations to heavenly bodies. Aristotle proved that the earth is a globe; Copernicus showed that it is one of a system of planets revolving about the sun; Newton explained the dynamics of this system. But at length came a certain John Hampden, who with dauntless breast maintained that all this is wrong! His pamphlet was prudently dedicated "to the unprofessional public and the common sense men of Europe and America;" he knew that it could find no favor with bigoted men of science. This Hampden, like his great namesake, is nothing if not bold. "The Newtonian or Copernican theory," he tells us, "from the first hour of its invention, has never dared to submit to an appeal to facts!" Again, "Defenders it never had; and no threats, no taunts or exposure, will ever rouse the energies of a single champion." In other words, astronomers do not waste their time in noticing Mr. Hampden's taunts and threats. Why is this so? His next sentence reminds us that "cowardice always accompanies conscious guilt." He goes on to tell us the true state of the case: "The earth, as it came from the hands of its Almighty Creator, is a motionless Plane, based and built upon foundations which the Word of God expressly declares cannot be searched out or discovered… The stars are hardly bigger than the gas jets which light our streets, and, if they could be made to change places with them, no astronomer could detect the difference." The North Pole is the centre of the flat earth, and its extreme southern limit is not a South Pole, but a circle 30,000 miles in circumference. Night is caused by the sun passing behind a layer of clouds 7000 miles thick. It is not gravitation which makes a river run down hill, but the impetus of the water behind pressing on the water before. Is not this delicious? As for Newton, poor fellow, he "lived in a superstitious age and district; he was educated among an illiterate peasantry." This is like the way in which the Baconizing cranks dispose of Shakespeare. So zealous was Mr. Hampden that in 1876 he began publishing a periodical called "The Truth Seeker's Oracle." Similar views were set forth by one Samuel Rowbotham, who wrote under the name of "Parallax," and by a William Carpenter, whose pamphlet, "One Hundred Proofs that the Earth is not a Globe" (Baltimore, 1885), is quite a curiosity; for example, Proof 33: "If the earth were a globe, people – except those on top – would certainly have to be fastened to its surface by some means or other;… but as we know that we simply walk on its surface, without any other aid than that which is necessary for locomotion on a plane, it follows that we have herein a conclusive proof that Earth is not a globe." Since Mr. Carpenter understands the matter so thoroughly, can we wonder at the earnestness with which he rebukes the late Richard Proctor? "Mr. Proctor, we charge you that, whilst you teach the theory of the earth's rotundity, you know that it is a plane!"
More original than Messrs. Hampden and Carpenter are the writers who maintain that the earth is hollow, and supports a teeming population in its interior. Early in the present century this idea came with the force of a revelation to the mind of Captain John Cleves Symmes, a retired army officer engaged in trade at St. Louis. In 1818 he issued a circular, of which the following is an abridgment: "To all the world I declare the earth is hollow and habitable within; containing a number of solid concentric spheres, one within the other, and that it is open at the poles twelve or sixteen degrees. I pledge my life in support of this truth, and am ready to explore the hollow, if the world will support and aid me in the undertaking… My terms are [Hear, Messrs. Quay and Platt! and give ear, O Tammany!] the patronage of this and the new worlds… I select Dr. S. L. Mitchell, Sir H. Davy, and Baron Alexander von Humboldt as my protectors. I ask one hundred brave companions, well equipped, to start from Siberia, in the fall season, with reindeer and sleighs, on the ice of the frozen sea. I engage we find a warm and rich land, stocked with thrifty vegetables and animals, if not men, on reaching one degree northward of latitude 82°. We will return in the succeeding spring."
This circular was sent by mail to men of science, colleges, learned societies, legislatures, and municipal bodies, all over the United States and Europe; for when it comes to postage, your crank seems always to have unlimited funds at his disposal. At Paris, the distinguished traveller, Count Volney, doubtless with a significant shrug, presented the precious document to the Academy of Sciences, by which it was mirthfully laid upon the table. Nowhere did learned men take it seriously; it was generally set down as a rather stupid hoax. But, nothing daunted by such treatment, the worthy Symmes began giving lectures on the subject, and succeeded in making some impression upon an uninstructed public. In 1824 his audience at Hamilton, Ohio, at the close of a lecture, "resolved, that we esteem Symmes' Theory of the Earth deserving of serious examination and worthy of the attention of the American people." At a theatre in Cincinnati, a benefit was given for the proposed polar expedition, and verses were recited suitable to the occasion: —
"Has not Columbia one aspiring son
By whom the unfading laurel may be won?
Yes! history's pen may yet inscribe the name
Of Symmes to grace her future scroll of fame."
The captain's petitions to Congress, however, praying for ships and men, were heartlessly laid on the table, and nothing was left him but to keep on crying in the wilderness, which he did until his death in 1829. In the cemetery at Hamilton, the freestone monument over his grave, placed there by his son, Americus Symmes, is surmounted with a hollow globe, open at the poles.