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LORD BACON

JULY, 1837

NOTE ON THE ESSAY

HE essay on Bacon, by far the longest and most elaborate of Macaulay's Essays, might be termed an expansion of Pope's famous antithesis respecting "the brightest, wisest, meanest of mankind." It falls into two unequal portions, devoted the one to Bacon's personal career and political action, the other to a criticism of Bacon as a philosopher. Each may be considered separately.

The events of Bacon's life have been investigated with such diligence by several eminent writers that we cannot reasonably expect much more to be discovered. Mr. Spedding as a biographer and Professor Gardiner as a historian, have signalised themselves by their astonishing industry and affectionate zeal for Bacon's memory. Were it not that almost all who study the career of a great man become his adherents and apologists it would be presumptuous for any unqualified person to swerve from their judgment upon Bacon. If they have interpreted Bacon's character aright, the estimate of Bacon expressed in the following essay must be held perverse and misleading. In some respects, undoubtedly, Macaulay did injustice to Bacon. He never allowed sufficiently for the circumstances of the age. He tried a statesman, formed in the Tudor discipline, upon principles more applicable to the case of Somers or of Walpole. He forgot that a degree of compliance in affairs of State and of adulation in addressing the sovereign, which in later times would justly have been deemed abject, was then matter of general usage and approved by current morality. He yielded to his instinct for strong contrasts and eager invective. He enforced a view of Bacon's character untenable in some respects and exaggerated in others. But when all these admissions have been made can anybody who judges Bacon as coldly as he would judge Charles V. or Richelieu deny that there is a fair portion of truth in the following sentences?

"The moral qualities of Bacon were not of a high order. We do not say that he was a bad man. He was not inhuman or tyrannical. He bore with meekness his high civil honours and the far higher honours gained by his intellect. He was very seldom, if ever, provoked

into treating any person with malignity and insolence. No person more readily held up the left cheek to those who had smitten the right. No man was more expert at the soft answer which turneth away wrath. He was never charged by any accuser, entitled to the smallest credit, with licentious habits. His even temper, his flowing courtesy, the general respectability of his demeanour, made a favourable impression on those who saw him in situations which do not severely try the principles. His faults were-we write it with pain-coldness of heart and meanness of spirit. He seems to have been incapable of feeling strong affection, of facing great dangers, of making great sacrifices. His desires were set on things below."

Is it possible to point out many occasions in Bacon's life in which he appears to have been guided by a higher principle than prudence? He might well believe himself capable of doing good service to the State and he might well desire promotion on public no less than on private grounds. But when he had risen did he ever risk his place in the bold endeavour to forward good or to stop bad measures? Did he not go with the current, tender good advice when it seemed likely that his master would not resent it and hold his peace when his counsel might have displeased? If we think with Professor Gardiner that he uniformly acted on conviction, upheld the Tudor methods of government because he believed them to be the best, and always bent to the wishes of James because he preferred an enlightened monarch to a prejudiced Parliament, we only save his virtue at the expense of his intellect which Professor Gardiner seems to rate as high as did Macaulay. Able and honest men have often clung to a polity which was becoming obsolete, but by so doing they have proved themselves wanting in political genius. Such men have often been misled by personal affection or by common prejudice into overrating the wisdom and goodness of monarchs. James was by no means a bad man and his talents were respectable. But that Bacon, after long experience of courts and princes, should have been blind to the faults of James, still more to the glaring faults of a foolish youth, raised by the King's doting affection to a power which nothing in his character or education fitted him to exercise properly, seems inconsistent with Bacon's established reputation for sagacity. That he should have believed himself able to guide the favourite and by means of the favourite to guide the sovereign in the path of wise government, and that he should have persevered in this belief after many rude lessons that he was valued rather as an agent than as a councillor would seem to imply that Bacon wanted even common shrewdness. That the author of the Essays, the keenest and coldest of observing critics, should have built such expectations upon the wisdom of James controlled by Villiers is a paradox which even Professor Gardiner's authority can hardly make conceivable. In truth the paradox is unnecessary, for Bacon's writings upon politics and morals afford no reason for thinking him a dreamer or an enthusiast. They contain many sagacious and some noble aphorisms on the conduct of life; but they rarely express any warm or generous emotion. Bacon always regards life as an art and the object of that art as power. At

bottom he has somewhat in common with Machiavelli, although the vehement Florentine has commonly passed for a downright cynic, whilst the self-contained Englishman has often been regarded as a lofty moralist.

Only the inexperienced believe it possible to classify mankind summarily into the good and the bad. Only the thoughtless would peremptorily assign the exact proportions of vice and virtue in such a character as that of Bacon. But the apologist who would persuade us, for instance, that Bacon did not know himself to be doing wrong when he took those presents from suitors which brought down upon him the condemnation of a Parliament void of all particular malice against him asks us to believe what is incredible and asks us to do so without any genuine necessity. For, sad as it is, it is not unlikely that a statesman of Bacon's temper, living in an age like that of James I., should sometimes be led by love of riches to do what he must have known to be criminal.

Macaulay's delineation of Bacon's character, crude as it is in places, and imperfect everywhere, is still recognisable. But Macaulay's delineation of Bacon's philosophy is the most ill-considered passage in all the Essays. Several causes conspired to mislead Macaulay in this matter. Although he had read many philosophical treatises, he had very little of the philosophical instinct. His practical mind dwelt among second causes and felt no need to attempt an explanation of ultimate principles. His patriotism as an Englishman and a member of the University of Cambridge led him to magnify Bacon's philosophical performance. His love of contrast completed the mischief. Having exhibited Bacon in practical life as mean and selfish he would exhibit him in science as universal and supreme. "The difference between the soaring angel and the creeping snake was but a type of the difference between Bacon the philosopher and Bacon the attorney-general, Bacon seeking for truth and Bacon seeking for the seals."

With this bias Macaulay could not give a just idea of Bacon's place in the history of philosophy. It would be easy to show the unfairness of Macaulay's estimate of Greek philosophy, the first great effort of the European mind to rise to some theory of the universe higher than legend, leading directly to that remarkable age of scientific progress which extends from the time of Aristotle to the time of Ptolemy. It would be easy to show that the Greek moralists, although they did not make everybody moral, formed a long series of noble characters. When Macaulay comes down to the modern world, he falls into the grave error of ignoring all that other scientific men had done before Bacon or were doing in Bacon's lifetime, and so represents his hero as an unaccountable prodigy who opened the way of truth to a public hitherto absorbed in theological disputes, or at best in trying to imitate classical Latin. Had this been the case, Francis Bacon would hardly have made more impression upon the men of the seventeenth than Roger Bacon had made upon the men of the thirteenth century. But Macaulay in this instance has grossly travestied history. The revival of learning or, if we like better, the growth of human reason, even before Bacon was

born, had led to changes far more penetrating than the substitution of the style of Cicero for the style of Duns Scotus. The literature and art of the Renaissance from the first expressed a fresh curiosity regarding the secrets of nature. By the close of the sixteenth century an immense mass of new facts had been collected, reasonable methods of inquiry were coming into use and physical science was advancing on many lines. Copernicus had transformed astronomy. Galileo had begun to transform physics. Vesalius had begun to transform anatomy. So far from Bacon having revived natural science, Bacon was ill acquainted with some of the chief scientific discoveries of his own time. The real merit of Bacon and it is glory enough for one who was also a distinguished statesman and a great author is to have felt the power of the new spirit and to have given it expression in the most forcible language and with the happiest illustrations. Whether he should be termed a great philosopher may be open to dispute, but he is undeniably a most eloquent, inspiring and suggestive preacher.

Macaulay needlessly lowers the great man whom he has tried to exalt when he narrows Bacon's aspiration to the end of making everybody more comfortable. Mankind had not waited for Bacon's admonition to desire their own comfort. The great majority of mankind in all ages have thought of little else. It was for this very reason that material civilisation had remained so imperfect. Every intelligent person will agree that those who embrace what the antique philosophers recommended and Macaulay ridiculed, the pursuit of truth for its own sake, accomplish far more for human well-being than those who never stretch their thoughts beyond a definite practical result. What is true and precious in Bacon's teaching is not the exhortation always to aim at tangible benefits, but the exhortation to discard groundless prejudices and obsolete methods, to begin with doubt in order that we may end in certainty.

Whatever the defects of this celebrated essay we learn from the author himself that they were not the fruit of haste or indolence.

"My opinion," he wrote to Macvey Napier, "is formed, not at second-hand, like those of nine-tenths of the people who talk about Bacon, but after several very attentive perusals of his greatest works and after a good deal of thought. If I am in the wrong, my errors may set the minds of others at work and may be the means of bringing both them and me to a knowledge of the truth. I never bestowed so much care on anything that I have written. There is not a sentence in the latter half of the article which has not been repeatedly re-cast. I have no expectation that the popularity of the article will bear any proportion to the trouble which I have expended on it. But the trouble has been so great a pleasure to me that I have already been very greatly overpaid."

The venomous Brougham in a letter to Macvey Napier on the same subject remarked, "He has no science at all and cannot reason."

It would be impossible here even to make a selection from the literature which has gathered round Bacon's life and writings. Those who wish to know all that can be said for Bacon as a man should

consult Mr. Spedding's Life and his Evenings with a Reviewer, in which he defends his hero against Macaulay's indictment. In his great History of England Professor Gardiner shows himself a less partial but still friendly, perhaps too friendly, critic. Dr. Abbott in his "Francis Bacon" takes a view of Bacon's character not very different from that which has been suggested above. Church's "Life of Bacon" in English Men of Letters affords a judicious yet sympathetic estimate of the man and the writer. Dr. Fowler's edition of the Novum Organum includes a well-considered statement of Bacon's place in the history of science and a notice of many of the critics of the Baconian philosophy. Among foreign critics M. de Rémusat and Kuno Fischer are not the least notable.