Saving her Bacon
Pat Rogers
The Winding Stair: Francis Bacon, his Rise and Fall Daphne du Maurier (Gollancz £6.50) Too sane and thoughtful to make a hero for times like ours. Francis Bacon has become the nearly man of history. The two hundred and fiftieth anniversary of his death earlier this year provoked neither cheers nor derision. There was scarcely a ripple —not a conference, not a memorial slab, not even a woe-begone Festschrift—to let us know Bacon had passed our way. Once he was a glamorous intellectual name, the prophet of science, the priest of reason. To the seventeenth century in particular he opened up a new world of opportunity and discovery—his medium logic and dialectic, but his message practical and applicable. Now his works go unread; they are merely, from time to time, the object of research.
It is easy to see why Bacon should have lost popularity His character was intricate, worldly, tough-minded, rather lacking in temperamental light and shade. He was a careerist, and he had the effrontery to be a successful one—till near the end, it is the rise and rise of Francis Bacon which we contemplate. As for his attitudes, he stood for orderly classification as well as for articulate discourse. His values were ultimately public rather than private: he educated men's minds rather than their feelings, and he venerated the power of knowledge. Worst of all, he sought to make the world a better place by physical and mechanical means: in an era when the young have been scared by computers before they master the two-times table, and an ignorant anti-scientism prevails, the Baconian dream of a beneficent technology seems quaint at best. Finally, his literary modes are all but obsolete. Maxims, aphorisms, essays, fables—these are the resources of intelligence and learning. They require—as symbolism, stream of consciousness and confessional do not—a capacity to say things shortly, exactly and clearly.
Such a man seems an odd choice for Daphne du Maurier, with her fine wayward imagination and her gothic suggestiveness. Few Elizabethans had less of the mantic about them than Bacon; few steered a less infernal course. There is of course a sort of melodrama about Jacobean political life, but the Lord Chancellor's role was generally to hold show-trials and reimpose normalcy. Compared with the men whose falls he presided over (the magnifico Essex, the supposed poisoner and royal fancy-boy Somerset, the spectacular Raleigh), Bacon was humdrum both in his grandeur and his decadence. He went meekly, if glumly, to his disgrace, arraigned as a Poulson and not as a Trotsky.
Yet some compulsion has drawn the author of Jamaica Inn, the biographer of Branwell Brontë, to this unlikely assignment. Following Golden Lads, which studied Anthony Bacon and his circle, Dame Daphne has now recounted the last twentyfive years in the life of his brother Francis. As she rightly observes, the younger Bacon has'become a scholarly property. Her feeling was that 'the ordinary reader. ... has never been sufficiently interested in, or understood, the extraordinary complexity of Francis Bacon's character and the many facets of his personality. The endeavour to explain him would be a challenge.' It is a challenge boldly taken up, with evidence of energetic reading, an orderly and consecutive narrative, and a warmly personal tone. There are plenty of apt illustrations, and all the colour plates would make nice picture postcards.
But the book remains something of an uphill struggle. Though the story is accurately and sympathetically told, there is not much real penetration into the springs of Bacon's activity. Sensibly, since Bacon was a great writer, Dame Daphne tries to make his works supply some kind of revelation. But they won't afford the kind she wants. The major works on scientific method have a few choice phrases culled from them; Dame Daphne combs the essays for clues to Bacon's personality, and does what she can with speeches in Chancery or pamphlets on diplomacy. We are constantly told, Monty Python-fashion, that Bacon was The Most Brilliant Intellect of the Day, but we are forced to take this on trust. There is nothing wrong with searching out the 'intimate side' of a great man, even if it means itemising some fairly routine household accounts. But the ordinary reader (however patronisingly defined) wants explanation of the greatness besides chitchat about private foibles.
Anxious not to overplay her hand, Dame Daphne studs the biography with reminders about the dearth of evidence. Sometimes she is pawky : 'So we are left to speculate upon how he employed his time, and speculation can be a hazardous game'. At other moments she grows impatient : 'It :s exasperating, for the modern sleuth, that no letters have survived'. Or quizzical : 'Who was at his bedside? The chaplain Dr Rawley ? The very able friend and secretary Thomas Meautys ? His old friend and servant Henry Percy ? His wife? We do not know.' Once or twice, an eloquent despair sets in : 'Was she dark or fair? Alas, no portrait exists to tell us. The mystery remains. Dark ladies, lovely boys and ever-living poets continue to baffle many of us in the present century, despite the certainty of scholars and historians. Dame Daphne loves to lose herself in a reverie of what might have been: the whole text is replete with 'may well' and 'perhaps and 'possibly' and 'would have' and 'we have no means of knowing'. Responsible scholarship seldom has need of such a battery of conditionals, for the historical imagination should function not to muse or to guess ('It would be nice to think that .. but to reanimate the known.
When we reach the time of the Shakespearian First Folio, the Baconian heresY naturally provides 'food for speculation'. The biographer disappears briefly behind an intrusive passive voice: 'It is not intended here to enter into a long and tedious argument as to whether William Shakespeare was indeed the author of all the thirty-six plays published under his name in the First Folio. The original manuscripts, notes and prompt-copies have never been found. It is suggested, however, that some of the themes, plots, scenes and speeches could have been contributed by others, and woven into the necessary form for dramatic presentation bY. the actor-playwright.' A little later, 'It Is furthermore suggested that from [1594] both Anthony and Francis Bacon, and possibly others, were in collaboration with the actor dramatist on some of the earlier plays and that, after the Essex debacle, Anthony's death and the start of the new reign, Francis Bacon continued this collaboration.' Not shred of evidence is brought to support this half-hearted contention, and indeed It scarcely could be. The true Baconians, with their ciphers, anagrams and hermetic signals behind Shakespeare's back, would find such lukewarm advocacy disappointing. The answer is that Dame Daphne would like to add Macbeth and Twelfth Night to Bacon's claims as The Most Brilliant Intellect: Oil the other hand, she is forced to emphasise, as always, the poverty of physical evidence.
Daphne du Maurier has many literary gifts, but I am not sure that this book has fully enlisted them. Her archaising vein ('But stay, what was this ?') is perhaps more suited to Cornish romance, and her cosY relationship with her hero 'Francis' consorts oddly with his fiercely private nature and conscious dignity. Against this must be set a brisk narrative pace, an avoidance of pedantry, and some shrewdness in judging people. (James l's homosexuality is certainly played down, but there may be one dry allusion to 'his Majesty's favourite, Sir Robert Carr, not surprisingly a gentleman of the bed' chamber'.) As an all-round character studY, ci am stillinclined to prefer Catherine Drinker Bowen's The Temper of a Man of a decade ago. But there is always room for another book on anyone as complex and diversely gifted as Bacon. The man who took all knowledge as his provinCe should not be left to specialists and scholars; he deserves a revival, and if Daphne du Maurier has not taken us to the inmost recesses she has made a good studio portrait of the outer man.
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