Francis Bacon and his secret society - Grand Lodge of Colorado

120 FEANCIS BACON
meaning to educated or uneducated ears, to minds prosaic or
poetical, dull in spirit, and only to be impressed by plain and
homely words, or not impressed at all, except the words were
accompanied by gesture and action as if the speaker were
" upon the stage " ?
And so Bacon was " content to tune the instruments of the
muses," that they should be fit to give out melodies and harmonies
of any pitch, and suited to every frame of mind. In his
acknowledged writings (which seem to be an ingenious map of,
or clue to, his whole body of works) we find, as it were,
samples of many and varied styles of writing which he desires
to see studied and more perfectly used; and although in his
greatest productions he has built up a noble model of language
which the least observant reader must recognise as Baconian,
yet there are amongst his writings some so unlike what might
be expected from his pen, and so very unlike each other, as to
dispel the idea that his many-sided mind required, like ordinary
men, merely a one-sided language and
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" style " in which to
utter itself.
The manner of speaking or writing which pleases him best
was plain and simple, " a method as wholesome as sweet."
But, just as in the poems and plays which we attribute to him the
styles are so various as to raise doubts, not only of the identity
of the author, but even as to various portions of the same work,
so the style of writing of the Gesta Grayorum or the Conference
of Pleasure is totally unlike the New Atlantis or the Confession
of Faith. Neither is there, at first sight, anything which
would cause the casual reader to identify the author of any of
these with the Wisdom of the Ancients, or Life's a Bubble, or
the History of the Winds, or the Essay of Friendship, or
many more widely different works or portions of works known
to have been written by Bacon. Because this is known, no one
is so bold or so foolish as to point to the immense differences in
style as proof that one man could not have written all. One man
did write them; no one can challenge the statement, and consequently
no question has arisen about this particular group of
works; yet they differ amongst themselves more than, individ-