The Letter of
Lord Chandos
THIS is the letter
Philip, Lord Chandos, younger son of the Earl of Bath,
wrote to Francis Bacon, later Baron Verulam, Viscount St.
Albans, apologizing for his complete abandonment of
literary activity.
IT IS kind of you, my
esteemed friend, to condone my two years of silence and
to write to me thus. It is more than kind of you to give
to your solicitude about me, to your perplexity at what
appears to you as mental stagnation, the expression of
lightness and jest which only great men, convinced of the
perilousness of life yet not discouraged by it, can
master.
You conclude with the
aphorism of Hippocrates, "Qui gravi morbo correpti
dolores non sentiunt, us mens aegrotat" (Those who
do not perceive that they are wasted by serious
illness are sick in mind), and suggest that I am in need
of medicine not only to conquer my malady, but even more,
to sharpen my senses for the condition of my inner self.
I would fain give you an answer such as you deserve, fain
reveal myself to you entirely, but I do not know how to
set about it. Hardly do I know whether I am still the
same person to whom your precious letter is addressed.
Was it I who, now six-and-twenty, at nineteen wrote The
New Paris, The Dream of Daphne, Epithalamium, those
pastorals reeling under the splendour of their
words-plays which a divine Queen and several
overindulgent lords and gentlemen are gracious
enough still to remember? And again, was it I who, at
three-and-twenty, beneath the stone arcades of the
great Venetian piazza, found in myself that structure of
Latin prose whose plan and order delighted me more than
did the monuments of Palladio and Sansovino rising out of
the sea? And could I, if otherwise I am still the same
person, have lost from my inner inscrutable self all
traces and scars of this creation of my most intensive
thinking-lost them so completely that in your letter now
lying before me the title of my short treatise stares at
me strange and cold? I could not even comprehend, at
first, what the familiar picture meant, but had to study
it word by word, as though these Latin terms thus strung
together were meeting my eye for the first time.
But I am, after all, that person, and there is rhetoric
in these questions-rhetoric which is good for women or
for the House of Commons, whose power, however, so
overrated by our time, is not sufficient to
penetrate into the core of things. But it is my
inner self that I feel bound to reveal to you-a
peculiarity, a vice, a disease of my mind, if you like-if
you are to understand that an abyss equally unbridgeable
separates me from the literary works lying seemingly
ahead of me as from those behind me: the latter having
become so strange to me that I hesitate to call them my
property.
I know not whether to
admire more the urgency of your benevolence or the
unbelievable sharpness of your memory, when you recall to
me the various little projects I entertained during those
days of rare enthusiasm which we shared together. True, I
did plan to describe the first years of the reign of our
glorious sovereign, the late Henry VIII. The papers
bequeathed to me by my grandfather, the Duke of Exeter,
concerning his negotiations with France and Portugal,
offered me some foundation. And out of Sallust, in those
happy, stimulating days, there flowed into me as though
through never~ongested conduits the realization of
form-that deep, true, inner form which can be sensed only
beyond the domain of rhetorical tricks: that form of
which one can no longer say that it organizes
subject-matter, for it penetrates it, dissolves it,
creating at once both dream and reality, an interplay of
eternal forces, something as marvellous as music or
algebra. This was my most treasured plan.
But what is man that he
should make plans!
I also toyed with other
schemes. These, too, your kind letter conjures up. Each
one, bloated with a drop of my blood, dances before me
like a weary gnat against a sombre wall whereon the
bright sun of halcyon days no longer lies.
I wanted to decipher the
fables, the mythical tales bequeathed to us by the
Ancients, in which painters and sculptors found an
endless and thoughtless pleasure decipher them as the
hieroglyphs of a secret, inexhaustible wisdom whose
breath I sometimes seemed to feel as though from
behind a veil.
I well remember this
plan. It was founded on I know not what sensual and
spiritual desire: as the hunted hart craves water, so I
craved to enter these naked, glistening bodies, these
sirens and dryads, this Narcissus and Proteus, Perseus
and Actaeon. I longed to disappear in them and talk out
of them with tongues. And I longed for more. I planned to
start an Apophthegmata, like that composed by Julius
Caesar:
you will remember that
Cicero mentions it in a letter. In it I thought of
setting side by side the most memorable sayings
which-while associating with the learned men and witty
women of our time, with unusual people from among the
simple folk or with erudite and distinguished
personages I had managed to collect during my travels.
With these I meant to combine the brilliant maxims and
reflections from classical and Italian works, and
anything else of intellectual adornment that appealed to
me in books, in manuscripts or conversations; the
arrangement, moreover, of particularly beautiful
festivals and pageants, strange crimes and cases of
madness, descriptions of the greatest and most
characteristic architectural monuments in the
Netherlands, in France and Italy; and many other things.
The whole work was to have been entitled Nosce te
ipsum.
To sum up: In those days
I, in a state of continuous intoxication, conceived
the whole of existence as one great unit: the spiritual
and physical worlds seemed to form no contrast, as little
as did courtly and bestial conduct, art and barbarism,
solitude and society; in everything I felt the
presence of Nature, in the aberrations of insanity
as much as in the utmost refinement of the Spanish
ceremonial; in the boorishness of young peasants no less
than in the most delicate of allegories; and in all
expressions of Nature I felt my-self. When in my hunting
lodge I drank the warm foaming milk which an unkempt
wench had drained into a wooden pail from the udder of a
beautiful gentle~yed cow, the sensation was no
different from that which I experienced when, seated on a
bench built into the window of my study, my mind absorbed
the sweet and foaming nourishment from a book. The one
was like the other: neither was superior to the other,
whether in dreamlike celestial quality or in physical
intensity-and thus it prevailed through the whole
expanse of life in all directions; everywhere I was in
the centre of it, never suspecting mere appearance: at
other times I divined that all was allegory and that each
creature was a key to all the others; and I felt myself
the one capable of seizing each by the handle and
unlocking as many of the others as were ready to yield.
This explains the title which I had intended to give to
this encyclopedic book.
To a person susceptible
to such ideas, it might appear a well-designed plan of
divine Providence that my mind should fall from such a
state of inflated arrogance into this extreme of
despondency and feebleness which is now the permanent
condition of my inner self. Such religious ideas,
however, have no power over me: they belong to the
cobwebs through which my thoughts dart out into the void,
while the thoughts of so many others are caught there and
come to rest. To me the mysteries of faith have been
condensed into a lofty allegory which arches itself
over the fields of my life like a radiant rainbow, ever
remote, ever prepared to recede should it occur to me to
rush toward it and wrap myself into the folds of its
mantle.
But, my dear friend,
worldly ideas also evade me in a like manner. How shall I
try to describe to you these strange spiritual torments,
this rebounding of the fruit-branches above my
outstretched hands, this recession of the murmuring
stream from my thirsting lips?
My case, in short, is
this: I have lost completely the ability to think
or to speak of anything coherently.
At first I grew by
degrees incapable of discussing a loftier or more general
subject in terms of which everyone, fluently and without
hesitation, is wont to avail himself. I experienced an
inexplicable distaste for so much as uttering the words
spirit, soul, or body. I found it impossible to express
an opinion on the affairs at Court, the events in
Parliament, or whatever you wish. This was not motivated
by any form of personal deference (for you know that my
candour borders on imprudence), but because the abstract
terms of which the tongue must avail itself as a matter
of course in order to voice a judgment-these terms
crumbled in my mouth like mouldy fungi. Thus, one day,
while reprimanding my four-year-old daughter, Katherina
Pompilia, for a childish lie of which she had been guilty
and demonstrating to her the necessity of always being
truthful, the ideas streaming into my mind suddenly
took on such iridescent colouring, so flowed over into
one another, that I reeled off the sentence as best I
could, as if suddenly overcome by illness. Actually, I
did feel myself growing pale, and with a violent pressure
on my forehead I left the child to herself, slammed the
door behind me, and began to recover to some extent only
after a brief gallop over the lonely pasture.
Gradually, however, these
attacks of anguish spread like a corroding rust. Even in
familiar and humdrum conversation all the opinions which
are generally expressed with ease and sleep-walking
assurance became so doubtful that I had to cease
altogether taking part in such talk. It filled me with an
inexplicable anger, which I could conceal only with
effort, to hear such things as: This affair has turned
out well or ill for this or that person; Sheriff N. is a
bad, Parson T. a good man; Farmer M. is to be pitied, his
sons are wasters; another is to be envied because his
daughters are thrifty; one family is rising in the world,
another is on the downward path. All this seemed as
indemonstrable, as mendacious and hollow as could be. My
mind compelled me to view all things occurring in such
conversations from an uncanny closeness. As once, through
a magnifying glass, I had seen a piece of skin on my
little finger look like a field full of holes and
furrows, so I now perceived human beings and their
actions. I no longer succeeded in comprehending
them with the simplifying eye of habit. For me everything
disintegrated into parts, those parts again into parts;
no longer would anything let itself be encompassed
by one idea. Single words floated round me; they
congealed into eyes which stared at me and into which I
was forced to stare back-whirlpools which gave me vertigo
and, reeling incessantly, led into the void.
I tried to rescue myself
from this plight by seeking refuge in the spiritual world
of the Ancients. Plato I avoided, for I dreaded the
perilousness of his imagination. Of them all, I
intended to concentrate on Seneca and Cicero.
Through the harmony of their clearly defined and orderly
ideas I hoped to regain my health. But I was unable to
find my way to them. These ideas, I understood them well:
I saw their wonderful interplay rise before me like
magnificent fountains upon which played golden balls. I
could hover around them and watch how they played, one
with the other; but they were concerned only with each
other, and the most prof6und, most personal quality of my
thinking remained excluded from this magic circle. In
their company I was overcome by a terrible sense of
loneliness; I felt like someone locked in a garden
surrounded by eyeless statues. So once more I
escaped into the open.
Since that time I have
been leading an existence which I fear you can hardly
imagine, so lacking in spirit and thought is its flow: an
existence which, it is true, differs little from that of
my neighbours, my relations, and most of the
landowning nobility of this kingdom, and which is
not utterly bereft of gay and stimulating moments. It is
not easy for me to indicate wherein these good moments
subsist; once again words desert me. For it is, indeed,
something entirely unnamed, even barely nameable
which, at such moments, reveals itself to me,
filling like a vessel any casual object of my daily
surroundings with an overflowing flood of higher life. I
cannot expect you to understand me without examples, and
I must plead your indulgence for their absurdity. A
pitcher, a harrow abandoned in a field, a dog in the sun,
a neglected cemetery, a cripple, a peasant's hut-all
these can become the vessel of my revelation. Each of
these objects and a thousand others similar, over which
the eye usually glides with a natural indifference, can
suddenly, at any moment (which I am utterly
powerless to evoke), assume for me a character so exalted
and moving that words seem too poor to describe it. Even
the distinct image of an absent object, in fact, can
acquire the mysterious function of being filled to the
brim with this silent but suddenly rising flood of divine
sensation. Recently, for instance, I had given the order
for a copious supply of rat-poison to be scattered in the
milk cellars of one of my dairy-farms. Towards evening I
had gone off for a ride and, as you can imagine, thought
no more about it. As I was trotting along over the
freshly-ploughed land, nothing more alarming in sight
than a scared covey of quail and, in the distance, the
great sun sinking over the undulating fields, there
suddenly loomed up before me the vision of that cellar,
resounding with the death-struggle of a mob of rats. I
felt everything within me: the cool, musty air of the
cellar filled with the sweet and pungent reek of poison,
and the yelling of the death cries breaking against the
mouldering walls; the vain convulsions of those
convoluted bodies as they tear about in confusion and
despair; their frenzied search for escape, and the
grimace of icy rage when a couple collide with one
another at a blocked-up crevice. But why seek again
for words which I have foresworn! You remember, my
friend, the wonderful description in Livy of the
hours preceding the destruction of Alba Longa: when
the crowds stray aimlessly through the streets which they
are to see no more . . . when they bid farewell to the
stones beneath their feet. I assure you, my friend, I
carried this vision within me, and the vision of burning
Carthage, too; but there was more, something more divine,
more bestial; and it was the Present, the fullest, most
exalted Present. There was a mother, surrounded by her
young in their agony of death; but her gaze was cast
neither toward the dying nor upon the merciless walls of
stone, but into the void, or through the void into
Infinity, accompanying this gaze with a gnashing of
teeth!-A slave struck with helpless terror standing
near the petrifying Niobe must have experienced
what I experienced when, within me, the soul of this
animal bared its teeth to its monstrous fate.
Forgive this description,
but do not think that it was pity I felt. For if you did,
my example would have been poorly chosen. It was far more
and far less than pity: an immense sympathy, a flowing
over into these creatures, or a feeling that an aura of
life and death, of dream and wakefulness, had flowed for
a moment into them-but whence? For what had it to do with
pity, or with any comprehensible concatenation of human
thought when, on another evening, on finding beneath a
nut-tree a half-filled pitcher which a gardener boy had
left there, and the pitcher and the water in it, darkened
by the shadow of the tree, and a beetle swimming on the
surface from shore to shor~when this combination of
trifles sent through me such a shudder at the presence of
the Infinite, a shudder running from the roots of my hair
to the marrow of mv heels? What was it that made me want
to break into words which, I know, were I to find them,
would force to their knees those cherubim in whom I do
not believe? What made me turn silently away from this
place? Even now, after weeks, catching sight of that
nut-tree, I pass it by with a shy sidelong glance, for I
am loath to dispel the memory of the miracle hovering
there round the trunk, loath to scare away the celestial
shudders that still linger about the shrubbery in this
neighbourhood! In these moments an insignificant
creature-a dog, a rat, a beetle, a crippled apple tree, a
lane winding over the hill, a moss-covered stone, mean
more to me than the most beautiful, abandoned mistress of
the happiest night. These mute and, on occasion,
inanimate creatures rise toward me with such an
abundance, such a presence of love, that my enchanted eye
can find nothing in sight void of life. Everything
that exists, everything I can remember, everything
touched upon by my confused thoughts, has a meaning. Even
my own heaviness, the general torpor of my brain, seems
to acquire a meaning; I experience in and around me a
blissful, never-ending interplay, and among the objects
playing against one another there is not one into which I
cannot flow. To me, then, it is as though my body
consists of nought but ciphers which give me the key to
everything; or as if we could enter into a new and
hopeful relationship with the whole of existence if
only we begin to think with the heart. As soon,
however, as this strange enchantment falls from me,
I find myself confused; wherein this harmony transcending
me and the entire world consisted, and how it made
itself known to me, I could present in sensible words as
little as I could say anything precise about the
inner movements of my intestines or a congestion of my
blood.
Apart from these strange
occurrences, which, incidentally, I hardly know whether
to ascribe to the mind or the body, I live a life of
barely believable vacuity, and have difficulties in
concealing from my wife this inner stagnation, and from
my servants the indifference wherewith I contemplate the
affairs of my estates. The good and strict education
which I owe to my late father and the early habit of
leaving no hour of the day unused are the only things, it
seems to me, which help me maintain towards the outer
world the stability and the dignified appearance
appropriate to my class and my person.
I am rebuilding a wing of
my house and am capable of conversing occasionally with
the architect concerning the progress of his work; I
administer my estates, and my tenants and employees may
find me, perhaps, somewhat more taciturn but no less
benevolent than of yore. None of them, standing with
doffed cap before the door of his house while I ride by
of an evening, will have any idea that my glance, which
he is wont respectfully to catch, glides with longing
over the rickety boards under which he searches for
earthworms for fishing-bait; that it plunges through the
latticed window into the stuffy chamber where, in a
corner, the low bed with its chequered linen seems
forever to be waiting for someone to die or another to be
born; that my eye lingers long upon the ugly puppies or
upon a cat stealing stealthily among the flower-pots; and
that it seeks among all the poor and clumsy objects of a
peasant's life for the one whose insignificant form,
whose unnoticed being, whose mute existence, can become
the source of that mysterious, wordless, and boundless
ecstasy. For my unnamed blissful feeling is sooner
brought about by a distant lonely shepherd's fire than by
the vision of a starry sky, sooner by the chirping of the
last dying cricket when the autumn wind chases wintry
clouds across the deserted fields than by the majestic
booming of an organ. And in my mind I compare myself from
time to time with the orator Crassus, of whom it is
reported that he grew so excessively enamoured of a tame
lamprey-a dumb, apathetic, red-eyed fish in his
ornamental pond-that it became the talk of the town; and
when one day in the Senate Domitius reproached him for
having shed tears over the death of this fish, attempting
thereby to make him appear a fool, Crassus answered,
"Thus have I done over the death of my fish as you have
over the death of neither your first nor your second
wife."
I know not how oft this
Crassus with his lamprey enters mv mind as a mirrored
image of my Self, reflected across the abyss of
centuries. But not on account of the answer he gave
Domitius. The answer brought the laughs on his side, and
the whole affair turned into a jest. I, however, am
deeply affected by the affair, which would have remained
the same even had Domitius shed bitter tears of sorrow
over his wives. For there would still have been Crassus,
shedding tears over his lamprey. And about this
figure, utterly ridiculous and contemptible in the
midst of a world-governing senate discussing the most
serious subjects, I feel compelled by a mysterious power
to reflect in a manner which, the moment I attempt to
express it in words, strikes me as supremely
foolish.
Now and then at night the
image of this Crassus is in my brain, like a splinter
round which everything festers, throbs, and boils. It is
then that I feel as though I myself were about to
ferment, to effervesce, to foam and to sparkle. And the
whole thing is a kind of feverish thinking, but thinking
in a medium more immediate, more liquid, more glowing
than words. It, too, forms whirlpools, but of a sort that
do not seem to lead, as the whirlpools of language, into
the abyss, but into myself and into the deepest womb of
peace.
I have troubled you
excessively, my dear friend, with this extended
description of an inexplicable condition which is wont,
as a rule, to remain locked up in me.
You were kind enough to
express your dissatisfaction that no book written by me
reaches you any more, "to compensate for the loss of our
relationship." Reading that, I felt, with a certainty not
entirely bereft of a feeling of sorrow, that neither in
the coming year nor in the following nor in all the years
of this my life shall I write a book, whether in English
or in Latin: and this for an odd and embarrassing reason
which I must leave to the boundless superiority of your
mind to place in the realm of physical and spiritual
values spread out harmoniously before your
unprejudiced eye: to wit, because the language in which I
might be able not only to write but to think is neither
Latin nor English, neither Italian nor Spanish, but a
language none of whose words is known to me, a
language in which inanimate things speak to me and
wherein I may one day have to justify myself before an
unknown judge.
Fain had I the power to
compress in this, presumably my last, letter to Francis
Bacon all the love and gratitude, all the unmeasured
admiration, which I harbour in my heart for the greatest
benefactor of my mind, for the foremost Englishman of my
day, and which I shall harbour therein until death break
it asunder.
This 22 August, A.D.
1603
PHI. CHANDOS