Disrespecting Bacon
When
planning pageants, writers had to be careful in how they portrayed historical
characters: as heroes, as villains, and noble knights or comic fools.
Misjudging a town’s local hero could be very harmful. Thus King John appears as
the bad King John forced by the barons to sign Magna Carta or, at Bury St
Edmunds, taking the Abbey’s treasures. However, as at the Stafford or Bridport
Pageants, he appears as the King who granted a Borough Charter, alleviated
taxation and gave the right to hold annual fairs.
One
surprising miscalculation was in the Oxford Pageant of 1907 which featured a
scene with the medieval Franciscan Friar, philosopher and scientist Roger Bacon
who lived in Oxford for many years. Here, the Friar was presented not as the
great polymath of the thirteenth-century but as a buffoonish inventor who
amazed onlookers with a human head made of brass which then answers questions
put to it, dispensing magic pills and finally climbing aboard one of his inventions
– a medieval motor car – which broke down in a great cloud of smoke before
being pushed away by delighted townspeople. In fact, in one performance, the Friar’s ‘car’ ‘made insufficient allowance in turning the
corner’, and ended up ‘full speed into the river.’ (Aberdeen Journal, 4 July 1907, p. 8).
Friar Bacon was portrayed, hammily (sorry!) by Charles Oman, the Chichele Professor of Modern History who had been a major backer of the Pageant, who had written the episode. One could (as papers such as the Manchester Guardian) laugh this off as an academic making an irreverent jest about a fellow Oxford scholar.
This scene did not go down well with a number of Catholic intellectuals who found this portrayal of Bacon hard to swallow. To them, Bacon was a symbol of English Catholicism and a key figure who was able to reconcile science and religion. The historian and Catholic Cardinal Francis Gasquet wrote to the Times requesting the offending scene be withdrawn in subsequent episodes: ‘Surely it is a mistake, to put it mildly, for the University of Oxford, after years of strange, neglect, to degrade the memory of one of its most distinguished sons in so unnecessary and offensive a manner.’ (Times, 25 June 1907, p. 4)
Gasquet was joined by John Nicolas in his review of the Oxford Pageant for The Outlook. After praising the Pageant at length, and noting Oman’s humorous qualities, Nicolas lamented with Bacon and expressed his dismay at such poor humour:
Possibly it has long been a favourite, and the Pageant only gave him an opportunity to put it to a wider world than the All Souls’ Common Room. By all means let us have next year an Oxford pantomime; Professor Oman, with a little assistance from Mr. Schiller, would write it admirably; let us have Roger Bacon on a motor-car, and Theobaldus Stampensis as a populariser of Pragmatism from some American University, and all the comic history of Oxford. But this year, when it is expected to commemorate the tradition of learning that Mark Pattison was perhaps the last to honour, it is rather silly to expose ridicule at a public festival one of the first and greatest of Oxford philosophers. (The Outlook, 29 June 1907)
The harshest words of all came from the Catholic Newspaper, The Tablet, in an anonymous article entitled ‘A Blot on the Pageant’, which criticized Oman’s ‘ill-judged caricature’ and his rasher representation of Bacon than they could stomach. Rather than the esteemed man of learning, Bacon had become ‘the mouthing mounteback of the Pageant, the ranting, jesting, money-grabbing cheap-jack, whose grotesque grimaces and vulgar buffoonery may draw a laugh from the groundlings, but make sad the heart of thinking men and women.'
The writer went on to call Oman’s credentials as an historian into light:
Mr. Oman is recognised, at Oxford and elsewhere, as an eminent authority in certain departments of historical science. It is not long since he succeeded to the important chair of modern history called by the name of the Archbishop Chichele; and one cannot but regret that work so unworthy should have been put forward by the holder of an honourable office associated with the clarum et venerabile nomen of one of the greatest and saintliest of English pre-reformation prelates. The present Chichele professor makes little secret, either in his university lectures or his published writings, of his unsympathetic attitude towards the religion which informed and dominated medieval England. He has now revealed to us, and to the thousands of spectators, English and foreign, who witnessed and applauded the Oxford Pageant, what is his “conception” of one of the great lights of the English branch of the world-wide Order of St. Francis, lately returned to the ancient city which its sons so long adorned by their virtues and their learning.
Charles Oman’s Bacon was at best half-cooked:
The character of a humble English Greyfriar, at once sage and saint, is apparently beyond his ken, outside the perspective in which he views and reviews the past history of his country; and he doubtless (with that at least he may be credited) sees nothing offensive in the ridiculous burlesque for which he has made himself responsible. It may, moreover, be presumed that the Professor is not devoid of a certain sense of humour. One can only hope that he will exercise it, next time he is moved to try his hand at historical caricature, on some less inappropriate subject than one whose memory is dear and fragrant to many English men and women, one whom they, at least, cannot without pain see held up to public ridicule and made an object of popular derision. (The Tablet, 6 July 1907, p. 8)
What then, could the response to this onslaught possibly be? One ‘Mythologus’ leapt to Oman’s defence,or to save his bacon (in fact, the writer was almost certainly Oman himself):
Sir, – In your special correspondent’s rather severe notice of one episode of the late Oxford Pageant, a set of facts was admitted which, as I think, should have been borne in mind when “Friar Bacon” was being discussed. All the strange devices attributed to that worthy in the pageant have ancient authority for them. The life-pills are described at length by Roger himself in section vi, exemplum ii of the Opus Majus. The brazen head and the motor-car are no inventions of the twentieth-century author, but come directly from the well-known Famous Historie of Fryer Bacon. (Outlook, 6 July 1907)
All this evidently did not perturb Charles Oman, who continued as an organiser and supporter of the Oxford Pageant of English Literature of 1911 and 1914, the Oxford Millenary Pageant of 1912, the Oxford Victory Pageant of 1919 and the Pageant of Empire of 1924. However, after the grilling his Bacon had received, Oman had learnt to be careful before mocking historical figures. Certainly, Roger Bacon did not appear in any subsequent Pageants.
Seven years later Roger Bacon got the recognition at Oxford many believed he deserved. Amanda Power recounts the scene on 10 June 1914, when dozens of eminent scholars and eminent persons including the former Prime Minister, A.J. Balfour and a future Pope, gathered to commemorate the 700th anniversary of Bacon’s death by unveiling a statue and memorial tablet, an event covered by both the national and international press. Charles Oman was not among those who attended.
A photograph of Charles Oman
Sources used:
Oman Papers, Bodleian Library, MSS. Eng. c. 8200; d. 4142
Amanda Power, ‘A Mirror for Every Age: The Reputation of Roger Bacon’, English
Historical Review, cxxi. 492 (June 2006), pp. 657-92
Oxford Dictionary of National Biography entries on ‘Bacon [Bakun], Roger (c.1214–1292?)’ and ‘Oman, Sir Charles William Chadwick (1860–1946)’
Aberdeen Journal
Times
The Outlook
The Tablet
My thanks to Dr Tom Hulme for his work on the Oxford Pageant.