Old Age-Bacon and Aristotle. 17 opinions than knowledge. Their propositions are always qualified by a 'probably' or a 'perhaps." They are uncharitable, taking everything in its worst sense. They are suspicious, because experience has deprived them of confidence. They neither love nor hate; or, rather, obeying the precept of Bias, they treat their friends as possible enemies, and their enemies as possible friends. Life has humbled them; they desire nothing great or even extraordinary, and are satisfied with what is barely necessary. They are stingy; for they know that money must be had, and that it is hard to earn and easy to lose. Their coldness makes them timid, as the warmth of the young makes them bold. They love life, and more and more dearly as its end approaches; for men desire most the things of which they have least. Their selfishness makes them prefer what is useful to what is great; for utility is relative to the individual, greatness is intrinsic. They are shameless, because, caring only for what is profitable, they are indifferent to opinion. They have seen that most things are bad, and that most events turn out ill; and therefore they are desponding. As their past life is long, and their future life short, they live rather in memory than in hope, and hence their garrulity. Their resentment is quick, but weak, and so are the desires that have not left them; hence their apparent temperateness. Their great object is gain. They are governed rather by reason than by impulse; for reason comes from the head, impulse from the heart. Their injuries are rather malicious than insolent. Their pity is the result not of kindness, but of weakness: if they sympathize with misfortune, it is because they expect misfortune." We cannot but suspect that the picture drawn by Bacon was, in some of its features, borrowed from Aristotle. It is less full and less precise, and inferior to the comparison of the intellectual qualities of the young and the old contained in his essay on Youth and Age. There are passages in that essay equal in wisdom of thought, and force, and concentration of style, to anything that he ever wrote. "Young men are fitter to invent than to judge, fitter for execution than for counsel, and fitter for new projects than for settled business; for the experience of age, in things that fall within the compass of it, directeth them, but in new things abuseth them. The errors of young men are the ruin of business, but the errors of aged men amount but to this-that more might have been done, or sooner. Young men, in the conduct and manage of actions, embrace more than they can hold; stir more than they can quiet; fly to the end, without consideration of the means and degrees; pursue some few principles which they have chanced upon absurdly; care not to innovate, VOL. XXVII. NO. LIII. B which draws unknown inconveniences; use extreme remedies at first, and that, which doubleth all errors, will not acknowledge or retract them, like an unready horse, that will neither stop nor Men of age object too much, consult too long, adventure too little, repent too soon, and seldom drive business home to the full period, but content themselves with a mediocrity of success." turn. Archbishop Whately has accounted, with great perspicacity, for the unfavourableness of Aristotle's picture of old age: 66 Many readers of Aristotle's admirable description of the young and the old forget that he is describing the same man at different periods of life, since the old must have been young. As it is, he gives just the right view of the character of the natural man' (as the Apostle Paul expresses it), which is, to become, on the whole, gradually worse, when no superior and purifying principle has been implanted. Some people fancy that a man grows good by growing old, without taking any particular pains about it. But the older the crab-tree, the more crabs it bears,' says the proverb. Unless a correcting principle be engrafted, a man may, perhaps, outgrow the vices and follies of youth, but other vices, and even worse, will come in their stead. If, indeed, a wilding tree be grafted when young with a good fruit-tree, then, the older it is, if it be kept well pruned, the more good fruit it will bear."1 This explanation, however, does not apply to Bacon, for he wrote in a Christian community: a community in which men were as eager as to religious questions, and probably as much influenced by religious feelings, as they are now. If it be true, as we think that it is, that our aged contemporaries are more amiable and more agreeable than those whom he has described, that superiority must be accounted for by supposing either that they have been improved by the general progress of civilization, or that the society from which Bacon took his models was morally below the average at that time, or, lastly, that he wrote under the influence of temporary ill-humour. It is remarkable that Bacon, who took this desponding view of the influence of time on the human heart, appears himself to have improved as he grew older. His Essays, as they were first published in 1597, when he was about twenty-seven, are addressed almost exclusively to the intellect. As intellectual exercises, they are unsurpassed. The very first, the Essay on Study, contains more thought, and more closely packed, than perhaps any other English composition. But there is no os in any one of them. If a person unacquainted with their respective dates were to compare the Essay on Followers and Friends, which is now nearly 1 Note, p. 388. in the state in which it was printed in 1597, with that on Friendship, published fifteen years afterwards, he would suppose the former to be the work of a veteran, whose kindly feelings have been dried up by long experience of treachery and ingratitude, and the latter, that of a youth, eager for sympathy, ready to trust, and miserable if he cannot find one to whom he can "impart griefs, joys, fears, hopes, suspicions, counsels, and whatsoever lieth upon the heart to oppress it, by a kind of civil shrift or confession." There cannot be a more melancholy opinion than that with which the Essay on Followers and Friends concludes:-" There is little friendship in the world, and least of all between equals, which was wont to be magnified. That that is, is between superior and inferior, whose fortunes may comprehend the one the other." Contrast this with one of the first sentences in the Essay on Friendship : "Little do men perceive what solitude is, and how far it extendeth; for a crowd is not company, and faces are but a gallery of pictures, and talk but a tinkling cymbal, where there is no love. The Latin adage meeteth with it a little: "Magna civitas, magna solitudo,"-because in a great town friends are scattered, so that there is not that fellowship, for the most part, which is in less neighbourhoods; but we may go further, and affirm most truly, that it is a mere and miserable solitude to want true friends, without which the world is but a wilderness; and, even in this scene also of solitude, whosoever in the frame of his nature and affections is unfit for friendship, he taketh it of the beast, and not from humanity." The first three of the Essays, which appeared for the first time in the edition of 1825, and are probably among the very last things which he wrote-the Essay on Truth, on Revenge, and on Adversity, give to his character its most Christian, its loftiest, and its grandest features. He must have soared high above the region of ambition, avarice, subservience, and intrigue, in which he lived, as a lawyer, a courtier, and a chancellor, when he wrote, "Truth, which only doth judge itself, teacheth that the inquiry of truth, which is the love-making or wooing of it-the knowledge of truth, which is the presence of it-and the belief of truth, which is the enjoying of it-is the sovereign good of human nature. Certainly it is a heaven upon earth to have a man's mind move in charity, rest in Providence, and turn upon the poles of truth." 1 He must have conquered resentment and regret, when he felt that "that which is past is gone and irrevocable, and wise men Essay on Truth, p. 3. have enough to do with things present and to come; therefore they do but trifle with themselves that labour in past matters. There is no man doth a wrong for the wrong's sake, but thereby to purchase himself profit, or pleasure, or honour, or the like; therefore, why should I be angry with a man for loving himself better than me? And if any man should do wrong merely out of ill-nature, why, yet it is but like the thorn or brier, which prick and scratch because they can do no other. "Cosmus, Duke of Florence, had a desperate saying against perfidious or neglecting friends, as if those wrongs were unpardonable. 'You shall read,' saith he, that we are commanded to forgive our enemies, but you never read that we are commanded to forgive our friends.' "But yet the spirit of Job was in a better tune: 'Shall we,' saith he, take good at God's hands, and not be content to take evil also?' and so of friends in a proportion. This is certain, that a man that studieth revenge, keeps his own wounds green, which otherwise would heal and do well."1 We believe that the explanation of his improvement is to be found in the Essay on Adversity. "Prosperity is the blessing of the Old Testament; adversity is the blessing of the New, which carrieth the greater benediction, and the clearer revelation of God's favour. Yet, even in the Old Testament, if you listen to David's harp, you shall hear as many hearse-like airs as carols; and the pencil of the Holy Ghost hath laboured more in describing the afflictions of Job than the felicities of Solomon. Prosperity is not without many fears and distastes; and adversity is not without comforts and hopes. We see, in needleworks and embroideries, it is more pleasing to have a lively work upon a sad and solemn ground, than to have a dark and melancholy work upon a lightsome ground: judge, therefore, of the pleasure of the heart by the pleasure of the eye. Certainly virtue is like precious odours: most fragrant where they are incensed or crushed; for prosperity doth best discover vice, but adversity doth best discover virtue. The five years of shame, poverty, and sickness, which followed Bacon's disgrace, are the brightest part of his life. He did not waste them in sorrow or in anger. He felt that "that which is past is gone and irrecoverable, and that they do but trifle with themselves who labour in past matters." He felt that, having, as he says, wasted his best years and his best exertions in matters for which "he was not very fit by nature, and was more unfit by the preoccupation of his mind," he ought to dedicate the remainder to the improvement of mankind. 2 Essay on Revenge, p. 41. Not that Bacon was positively unfit for the worldly struggles which nearly filled his first sixty years. He was the very best debater, he was one of the best courtiers, and he was one of the best lawyers of his time. He gained every prize for which he contended-wealth, favour, rank, and power. But he was relatively unfit. His abilities for practical life were great, but they were inferior to those of several of his contemporaries. He was not so good a lawyer as Coke, or so good a courtier as Villiers; and, above all, he wanted the masculine virtues, the courage, the firmness, and the self-denial, without which an ambitious man is a gladiator unprotected by defensive armour. The humblest and the commonest of these virtues is frugality. Bacon knew well its importance. The Essay on Expense was printed before he was thirty. "Certainly," he says in that essay, "if a man would keep but of even hand, his ordinary expenses ought to be but to the half of his receipts; and if he think to wax rich, but to the third part." He estimates himself, while Attorney-General, his official income as L.7,600 a-year,1 equal at least to L.40,000 a-year at present. He had no children; his wife was an heiress; he had a patrimonial property; yet he was always in debt, and, when he could borrow no more, had recourse to the desperate expedient of judicial corruption. In the Essay on Great Place, he dwells on the necessity of binding the hands of servants; yet he allowed his own servants to plunder both the suitors in his court and himself. "Sit down," he said to them after his disgrace, when they rose on his approach; "your rise has been my fall." No man could owe more to another, than he did to Lord Essex. His benefactor was on his trial: Bacon had not the courage to refuse to act as counsel against him. Elizabeth wished to escape from the odium thrown on her by Essex's execution. She required Bacon to write a pamphlet to blacken the memory of his friend: Bacon complied. James, with his cruel cowardice, was eager to punish, as a traitor, Peacham, whose only crime was the possession of an offensive manuscript. Bacon submitted to declare what was at most a misdemeanour to be treason; to extort, by private solicitation and intimidation, the concurrence of the judges; and to try to obtain further evidence against the prisoner, by questioning him "before torture, in torture, between torture, and after torture." Bacon, during his greatness, always proclaimed his preference of study to business, of theory to practice: whether sincerely may be doubted. "You may observe," he says, in his Essay on Envy, "that the more deep and sober sort of politic persons, in their 1 Letter to the King, Feb. 12, 1615. |