FRANCIS BACON AND THE CIPHER.
To the Editor of the Times:
Sir:—We may hope that, the truth in this matter may be established now thatThe Timesis seriously facing the problem, even though at first your sympathies lean heavily against what Baconians conceive to be the truth.
May I ask your contributor who has been investigating the Cipher whether, apart from defects and irregularities in Mrs. Gallup’s interpretation, he has found any fairly considerable number of cipher words to correspond with her interpretation. No one could weave the cipher into a mass of print without making a multitude of mistakes. In ordinary handwriting we most of us slur over scores of the letters we intend to form legibly, but if our readers can read the majority and see what we mean they do not reject the whole because of the defective bits. Of course the double types confuse the perfection of the Cipher, but Bacon seems to have deliberately aimed at confusion, fearing premature discovery. Thus some cipher students tell me that after getting on fairly well for a time, they will suddenly find that, though the two kinds of type still appear, there is no sense to be made of them, until they discover that, from the appearance of a particular mark until its reappearance, the significance of theaandbfounts is reversed. With this clue, that which was at first confusion becomes luminous with sense again. But, though no newcomer to the work can hope to read the Cipher successfully throughout, if a newcomer finds, for example, that he can identify four or five out of every dozen words that Mrs. Gallup can identify, surely that will dismiss the theory that such identities can be accidental to the region in which chances are expressed by millions to one against accident. For the rest, of course, Mrs. Gallup may have arbitrarily interpreted diphthongs and double types to suit the sense of the passage, as any one in dealing with writing would interpret a scrawl at the end of a word as sometimes meaning “ing,” sometimes “ly,” according to sense. Or whenshe has found a long word like (say) “interpretation” to come out—i, n, then a group of five letters you can make nothing of, then r, p, and the rest of the word right, of course she puts down the whole word “interpretation.” Or perhaps the latter half of the word will come out right only by curtailing some previous group of some of its proper letters; then, of course, the sensible thing to do is to curtail them accordingly. That is the principle to be adopted if we want to get at truth; and if we find i, n, right and p, r, e, t, a, t, i, o, n right, it would surely be silly to cavil at the absence of the t, e, r, or at any sort of confusion in the beginning. . . .
“Apart from the Cipher,” there are floods of reasons for disbelieving that Shakespeare could have written the Plays. Genius, alowing that hypothesis, might have given him lofty and beautiful thoughts, but no genius would have given him detailed familiarity with Chancery law and foreign languages, nor with the contents of Bacon’s commonplace book, which must have been in the possession of the author of the Plays. But it is miserably unjust to the arguments on the Baconian side to hint at them in such few words as these. The “ignorance” in this connection is to be found rather amongst those who idly accept the old tradition than in the camp of those who are endeavouring to clear from foul slanders the memory of one whom they regard as the greatest Englishman who ever lived and the rightful sovereign of our literary allegiance. We make a formidable claim on such men as Mr. Sidney Lee when we ask them to abandon a tradition around which they have woven a great mass of ingenious imagination in the effort to account for that which Emerson found unaccountable—the contrast between the little that is actually known of Shakespeare and the works assigned to him. “Other admirable men have led lives in some sort of keeping with their thought, but this man in wide contrast.” But the glory of leading the homage that has so long been misdirected to the right shrine will surely be worth the sacrifice.
A. P. Sinnett.
27, Leinster-gardens, W., Dec. 26, 1901.