Bacon Part 6

"_Auctori consilium_.

Instaurare paras veterum doc.u.menta sophorum: Instaura leges just.i.tiamque prius."

He added, with allusion to the ship in the frontispiece of the _Novum Organum_,

"It deserveth not to be read in schools, But to be freighted in the ship of Fools."

CHAPTER VII.

BACON'S LAST YEARS.

[1621-1626.]

The tremendous sentences of those days, with their crushing fines, were often worse in sound than in reality. They meant that for the moment a man was defeated and disgraced. But it was quite understood that it did not necessarily follow that they would be enforced in all their severity. The fine might be remitted, the imprisonment shortened, the ban of exclusion taken off. At another turn of events or caprice the man himself might return to favour, and take his place in Parliament or the Council as if nothing had happened. But, of course, a man might have powerful enemies, and the sentence might be pressed. His fine might be a.s.signed to some favourite; and he might be mined, even if in the long run he was pardoned; or he might remain indefinitely a prisoner. Raleigh had remained to perish at last in dishonour. Northumberland, Raleigh's fellow-prisoner, after fifteen years' captivity, was released this year.

The year after Bacon's condemnation such criminals as Lord and Lady Somerset were released from the Tower, after a six years' imprisonment.

Southampton, the accomplice of Ess.e.x, Suffolk, sentenced as late as 1619 by Bacon for embezzlement, sat in the House of Peers which judged Bacon, and both of them took a prominent part in judging him.

To Bacon the sentence was ruinous. It proved an irretrievable overthrow as regards public life, and, though some parts of it were remitted and others lightened, it plunged his private affairs into trouble which weighed heavily on him for his few remaining years. To his deep distress and horror he had to go to the Tower to satisfy the terms of his sentence. "Good my Lord," he writes to Buckingham, May 31, "procure my warrant for my discharge this day. Death is so far from being unwelcome to me, as I have called for it as far as Christian resolution would permit any time these two months. But to die before the time of his Majesty's grace, in this disgraceful place, is even the worst that could be." He was released after two or three days, and he thanks Buckingham (June 4) for getting him out to do him and the King faithful service--"wherein, by the grace of G.o.d, your Lordship shall find that my adversity hath neither _spent_ nor _pent_ my spirits." In the autumn his fine was remitted--that is, it was a.s.signed to persons nominated by Bacon, who, as the Crown had the first claim on all his goods, served as a protection against his other creditors, who were many and some of them clamorous--and it was followed by his pardon. His successor, Williams, now Bishop of Lincoln, who stood in great fear of Parliament, tried to stop the pardon. The a.s.signment of the fine, he said to Buckingham, was a gross job--"it is much spoken against, not for the matter (for no man objects to that), but for the manner, which is full of knavery, and a wicked precedent. For by this a.s.signment he is protected from all his creditors, which (I dare say) was neither his Majesty's nor your Lordship's meaning." It was an ill-natured and cowardly piece of official pedantry to plunge deeper a drowning man; but in the end the pardon was pa.s.sed. It does not appear whether Buckingham interfered to overrule the Lord Keeper's scruples. Buckingham was certainly about this time very much out of humour with Bacon, for a reason which, more than anything else, discloses the deep meanness which lurked under his show of magnanimity and pride. He had chosen this moment to ask Bacon for York House. This meant that Bacon would never more want it. Even Bacon was stung by such a request to a friend in his condition, and declined to part with it; and Buckingham accordingly was offended, and made Bacon feel it. Indeed, there is reason to think with Mr. Spedding that for the sealing of his pardon Bacon was indebted to the good offices with the King, not of Buckingham, but of the Spaniard, Gondomar, with whom Bacon had always been on terms of cordiality and respect, and who at this time certainly "brought about something on his behalf, which his other friends either had not dared to attempt or had not been able to obtain."

But, though Bacon had his pardon, he had not received permission to come within the verge of the Court, which meant that he could not live in London. His affairs were in great disorder, his health was bad, and he was cut off from books. He wrote an appeal to the Peers who had condemned him, asking them to intercede with the King for the enlargement of his liberty. "I am old," he wrote, "weak, ruined, in want, a very subject of pity." The Tower at least gave him the neighbourhood of those who could help him. "There I could have company, physicians, conference with my creditors and friends about my debts and the necessities of my estate, helps for my studies and the writings I have in hand. Here I live upon the sword-point of a sharp air, endangered if I go abroad, dulled if I stay within, solitary and comfortless, without company, banished from all opportunities to treat with any to do myself good, and to help out my wrecks." If the Lords would recommend his suit to the King, "You shall do a work of charity and n.o.bility, you shall do me good, you shall do my creditors good, and it may be you shall do posterity good, if out of the carcase of dead and rotten greatness (as out of Samson's lion) there may be honey gathered for the use of future times." But Parliament was dissolved before the touching appeal reached them; and Bacon had to have recourse to other expedients. He consulted Selden about the technical legality of the sentence. He appealed to Buckingham, who vouchsafed to appear more placable. Once more he had recourse to Gondomar, "in that solitude of friends, which is the base-court of adversity," as a man whom he had "observed to have the magnanimity of his own nation and the cordiality of ours, and I am sure the wit of both"--and who had been equally kind to him in "both his fortunes;" and he proposed through Gondomar to present Gorhambury to Buckingham "for nothing," as a peace-offering. But the purchase of his liberty was to come in another way. Bacon had reconciled himself to giving up York House; but now Buckingham would not have it: he had found another house, he said, which suited him as well.

That is to say, he did not now choose to have York House from Bacon himself; but he meant to have it. Accordingly, Buckingham let Bacon know through a friend of Bacon's, Sir Edward Sackville, that the price of his liberty to live in London was the cession of York House--not to Buckingham, but of all men in the world, to Lionel Cranfield, the man who had been so bitter against Bacon in the House of Commons. This is Sir Edward Sackville's account to Bacon of his talk with Buckingham; it is characteristic of every one concerned:

"In the forenoon he laid the law, but in the afternoon he preached the gospel; when, after some revivations of the old distaste concerning York House, he most n.o.bly opened his heart unto me; wherein I read that which augured much good towards you. After which revelation the book was again sealed up, and must in his own time only by himself be again manifested unto you. I have leave to remember some of the vision, and am not forbidden to write it. He vowed (not court like), but constantly to appear your friend so much, as if his Majesty should abandon the care of you, you should share his fortune with him. He pleased to tell me how much he had been beholden to you, how well he loved you, how unkindly he took the denial of your house (for so he will needs understand it); but the close for all this was harmonious, since he protested he would seriously begin to study your ends, now that the world should see he had no ends on you. He is in hand with the work, and therefore will by no means accept of your offer, though I can a.s.sure you the tender hath much won upon him, and mellowed his heart towards you, and your genius directed you aright when you writ that letter of denial to the Duke. The King saw it, and all the rest, which made him say unto the Marquis, you played an after-game well; and that now he had no reason to be much offended.

"I have already talked of the Revelation, and now am to speak in apocalyptical language, which I hope you will rightly comment: whereof if you make difficulty, the bearer can help you with the key of the cypher.

"My Lord Falkland by this time hath showed you London from Highgate.

_If York House were gone, the town were yours_, and all your straitest shackles clean off, besides more comfort than the city air only. The Marquis would be exceeding glad the Treasurer had it. This I know; yet this you must not know from me. Bargain with him presently, upon as good conditions as you can procure, so you have direct motion from the Marquis to let him have it. Seem not to dive into the secret of it, though you are purblind if you see not through it. I have told Mr. Meautys how I would wish your Lordship now to make an end of it. From him I beseech you take it, and from me only the advice to perform it. If you part not speedily with it, you may defer the good which is approaching near you, and disappointing other aims (which must either shortly receive content or never), perhaps anew yield matter of discontent, though you may be indeed as innocent as before. Make the Treasurer believe that since the Marquis will by no means accept of it, and that you must part with it, you are more willing to pleasure him than anybody else, because you are given to understand my Lord Marquis so inclines; which inclination, if the Treasurer shortly send unto you about it, desire may be more clearly manifested than as yet it hath been; since as I remember none hitherto hath told you _in terminis terminantibus_ that the Marquis desires you should gratify the Treasurer. I know that way the hare runs, and that my Lord Marquis longs until Cranfield hath it; and so I wish too, for your good; yet would not it were absolutely pa.s.sed until my Lord Marquis did send or write unto you to let him have it; for then his so disposing of it were but the next degree removed from the immediate acceptance of it, and your Lordship freed from doing it otherwise than to please him, and to comply with his own will and way."

It need hardly be said that when Cranfield got it, it soon pa.s.sed into Buckingham's hands. "Bacon consented to part with his house, and Buckingham in return consented to give him his liberty." Yet Bacon could write to him, "low as I am, I had rather sojourn in a college in Cambridge than recover a good fortune by any other but yourself." "As for York House," he bids Toby Matthews to let Buckingham know, "that _whether in a straight line or a compa.s.s line_, I meant it for his Lordship, in the way which I thought might please him best." But liberty did not mean either money or recovered honour. All his life long he had made light of being in debt; but since his fall this was no longer a condition easy to bear. He had to beg some kind of pension of the King.

He had to beg of Buckingham; "a small matter for my debts would do me more good now than double a twelvemonth hence. I have lost six thousand by the year, besides caps and courtesies. Two things I may a.s.sure your Lordship. The one, that I shall lead such a course of life as whatsoever the King doth for me shall rather sort to his Majesty's and your Lordship's honour than to envy; the other, that whatsoever men talk, I can play the good husband, and the King's bounty shall not be lost."

It might be supposed from the tone of these applications that Bacon's mind was bowed down and crushed by the extremity of his misfortune.

Nothing could be farther from the truth. In his behaviour during his accusation there was little trace of that high spirit and fort.i.tude shown by far inferior men under like disasters. But the moment the tremendous strain of his misfortunes was taken off, the vigour of his mind recovered itself. The buoyancy of his hopefulness, the elasticity of his energy, are as remarkable as his profound depression. When the end was approaching, his thoughts turned at once to other work to be done, ready in plan, ready to be taken up and finished. At the close of his last desperate letter to the King he cannot resist finishing at once with a jest, and with the prospect of two great literary undertakings--

"This is my last suit which I shall make to your Majesty in this business, prostrating myself at your mercy seat, after fifteen years service, wherein I have served your Majesty in my poor endeavours with an entire heart, and, as I presumed to say unto your Majesty, am still a virgin for matters that concern your person and crown; and now only craving that after eight steps of honour I be not precipitated altogether. But because he that hath taken bribes is apt to give bribes, I will go furder, and present your Majesty with a bribe. For if your Majesty will give me peace and leisure, and G.o.d give me life, I will present your Majesty with a good history of England, and a better digest of your laws."

The Tower did, indeed, to use a word of the time, "mate" him. But the moment he was out of it, his quick and fertile mind was immediately at work in all directions, reaching after all kinds of plans, making proof of all kinds of expedients to retrieve the past, arranging all kinds of work according as events might point out the way. His projects for history, for law, for philosophy, for letters, occupy quite as much of his thoughts as his pardon and his debts; and they, we have seen, occupied a good deal. If he was pusillanimous in the moment of the storm, his spirit, his force, his varied interests, returned the moment the storm was past. His self-reliance, which was boundless, revived. He never allowed himself to think, however men of his own time might judge him, that the future world would mistake him. "_Aliquis fui inter vivos_," he writes to Gondomar, "_neque omnino intermoriar apud posteros_." Even in his time he did not give up the hope of being restored to honour and power. He compared himself to Demosthenes, to Cicero, to Seneca, to Marcus Livius, who had been condemned for corrupt dealings as he had been, and had all recovered favour and position.

Lookers-on were puzzled and shocked. "He has," writes Chamberlain, "no manner of feeling of his fall, but continuing vain and idle in all his humours as when he was at the highest." "I am said," Bacon himself writes, "to have a feather in my head."

Men were mistaken. His thoughts were, for the moment, more than ever turned to the future; but he had not given up hope of having a good deal to say yet to the affairs of the present. Strangely enough, as it seems to us, in the very summer after that fatal spring of 1621 the King called for his opinion concerning the reformation of Courts of Justice; and Bacon, just sentenced for corruption and still unpardoned, proceeds to give his advice as if he were a Privy Councillor in confidential employment. Early in the following year he, according to his fashion, surveyed his position, and drew up a paper of memoranda, like the notes of the _Commentarius Solutus_ of 1608, about points to be urged to the King at an interview. Why should not the King employ him again? "Your Majesty never chid me;" and as to his condemnation, "as the fault was not against your Majesty, so my fall was not your act." "Therefore," he goes on, "if your Majesty do at any time find it fit for your affairs to employ me publicly upon the stage, I shall so live and spend my time as neither discontinuance shall disable me nor adversity shall discourage me, nor anything that I do give any new scandal or envy upon me." He insists very strongly that the King's service never miscarried in his hands, for he simply carried out the King's wise counsels. "That his Majesty's business never miscarried in my hands I do not impute to any extraordinary ability in myself, but to my freedom from any particular, either friends or ends, and my careful receipt of his directions, being, as I have formerly said to him, but as a bucket and cistern to that fountain--a bucket to draw forth, a cistern to preserve." He is not afraid of the apparent slight to the censure pa.s.sed on him by Parliament. "For envy, it is an almanack of the old year, and as a friend of mine said, _Parliament died penitent towards me_." "What the King bestows on me will be further seen than on Paul's steeple." "There be mountebanks, as well in the civil body as in the natural; I ever served his Majesty with modesty; no shouting, no undertaking." In the odd fashion of the time--a fashion in which no one more delighted than himself--he lays hold of sacred words to give point to his argument.

"I may allude to the three pet.i.tions of the Litany--_Libera nos Domine_; _parce n.o.bis, Domine_; _exaudi nos, Domine_. In the first, I am persuaded that his Majesty had a mind to do it, and could not conveniently in respect of his affairs. In the second, he hath done it in my fine and pardon. In the third, he hath likewise performed, in restoring to the light of his countenance."

But if the King did not see fit to restore him to public employment, he would be ready to give private counsel; and he would apply himself to any "literary province" that the King appointed. "I am like ground fresh. If I be left to myself I will graze and bear natural philosophy; but if the King will plough me up again, and sow me with anything, I hope to give him some yield." "Your Majesty hath power; I have faith.

Therefore a miracle may be wrought." And he proposes, for matters in which his pen might be useful, first, as "active" works, the recompiling of laws; the disposing of wards, and generally the education of youth; the regulation of the jurisdiction of Courts; and the regulation of Trade; and for "contemplative," the continuation of the history of Henry VIII.; a general treatise _de Legibus et Just.i.tia_; and the "Holy War"

against the Ottomans.

When he wrote this he had already shown what his unquelled energy could accomplish. In the summer and autumn after his condemnation, amid all the worries and inconveniences of that time, moving about from place to place, without his books, and without free access to papers and records, he had written his _History of Henry VII_. The theme had, no doubt, been long in his head. But the book was the first attempt at philosophical history in the language, and it at once takes rank with all that the world had yet seen, in cla.s.sical times and more recently in Italy, of such history. He sent the book, among other persons, to the Queen of Bohemia, with a phrase, the translation of a trite Latin commonplace, which may have been the parent of one which became famous in our time; and with an expression of absolute confidence in the goodness of his own work.

"I have read in books that it is accounted a great bliss for a man to have _Leisure with Honour_. That was never my fortune. For time was, I had Honour without Leisure; and now I have _Leisure without Honour_.... But my desire is now to have _Leisure without Loitering_, and not to become an abbey-lubber, as the old proverb was, but to yield some fruit of my private life.... If King Henry were alive again, I hope verily he would not be so angry with me for not flattering him, as well pleased in seeing himself so truly described in colours that will last and be believed."

But the tide had turned against him for good. A few fair words, a few grudging doles of money to relieve his pressing wants, and those sometimes intercepted and perhaps never rightly granted from an Exchequer which even Cranfield's finance could not keep filled, were all the graces that descended upon him from those fountains of goodness in which he professed to trust with such boundless faith. The King did not want him, perhaps did not trust him, perhaps did not really like him.

When the _Novum Organum_ came out, all that he had to say about it was in the shape of a profane jest that "it was like the peace of G.o.d--it pa.s.sed all understanding." Other men had the ear of Buckingham; shrewd, practical men of business like Cranfield, who hated Bacon's loose and careless ways, or the clever ecclesiastic Williams, whose counsel had steered Buckingham safely through the tempest that wrecked Bacon, and who, with no legal training, had been placed in Bacon's seat. "I thought," said Bacon, "that I should have known my successor." Williams, for his part, charged Bacon with trying to cheat his creditors, when his fine was remitted. With no open quarrel, Bacon's relations to Buckingham became more ceremonious and guarded; the "My singular good Lord" of the former letters becomes, now that Buckingham had risen so high and Bacon had sunk so low, "Excellent Lord." The one friend to whom Bacon had once wished to owe everything had become the great man, now only to be approached with "sweet meats" and elaborate courtesy. But it was no use.

His full pardon Bacon did not get, though earnestly suing for it, that he might not "die in ignominy." He never sat again in Parliament. The Provostship of Eton fell vacant, and Bacon's hopes were kindled. "It were a pretty cell for my fortune. The College and School I do not doubt but I shall make to flourish." But Buckingham had promised it to some nameless follower, and by some process of exchange it went to Sir Henry Wotton. His English history was offered in vain. His digest of the Laws was offered in vain. In vain he wrote a memorandum on the regulation of usury; notes of advice to Buckingham; elaborate reports and notes of speeches about a war with Spain, when that for a while loomed before the country. In vain he affected an interest which he could hardly have felt in the Spanish marriage, and the escapade of Buckingham and Prince Charles, which "began," he wrote, "like a fable of the poets, but deserved all in a piece a worthy narration." In vain, when the Spanish marriage was off and the French was on, he proposed to offer to Buckingham "his service to live a summer as upon mine own delight at Paris, to settle a fast intelligence between France and us;" "I have somewhat of the French," he said, "I love birds, as the King doth."

Public patronage and public employment were at an end for him. His pet.i.tions to the King and Buckingham ceased to be for office, but for the clearing of his name and for the means of living. It is piteous to read the earnestness of his requests. "Help me (dear Sovereign lord and master), pity me so far as that I who have borne a bag be not now in my age forced in effect to bear a wallet." The words are from a carefully-prepared and rhetorical letter which was not sent, but they express what he added to a letter presenting the _De Augmentis; "det Vestra Majestas obolum Belisario_." Again, "I prostrate myself at your Majesty's feet; I your ancient servant, now sixty-four years old in age, and three years and five months old in misery. I desire not from your Majesty means, nor place, nor employment, but only after so long a time of expiation, a complete and total remission of the sentence of the Upper House, to the end that blot of ignominy may be removed from me, and from my memory and posterity, that I die not a condemned man, but may be to your Majesty, as I am to G.o.d, _nova creatura_." But the pardon never came. Sir John Bennett, who had been condemned as a corrupt judge by the same Parliament, and between whose case and Bacon's there was as much difference, "I will not say as between black and white, but as between black and gray," had got his full pardon, "and they say shall sit in Parliament." Lord Suffolk had been one of Bacon's judges. "I hope I deserve not to be the only outcast." But whether the Court did not care, or whether, as he once suspected, there was some old enemy like c.o.ke, who "had a tooth against him," and was watching any favour shown him, he died without his wish being fulfilled, "to live out of want and to die out of ignominy."

Bacon was undoubtedly an impoverished man, and straitened in his means; but this must be understood as in relation to the rank and position which he still held, and the work which he wanted done for the _Instauratio_. His will, dated a few months before his death, shows that it would be a mistake to suppose that he was in penury. He no doubt often wanted ready money, and might be vexed by creditors. But he kept a large household, and was able to live in comfort at Gray's Inn or at Gorhambury. A man who speaks in his will of his "four coach geldings and his best caroache," besides many legacies, and who proposes to found two lectures at the universities, may have troubles about debts and be cramped in his expenditure, but it is only relatively to his station that he can be said to be poor. And to subordinate officers of the Treasury who kept him out of his rights, he could still write a sharp letter, full of his old force and edge. A few months before his death he thus wrote to the Lord Treasurer Ley, who probably had made some difficulty about a claim for money:

"MY LORD,--I humbly entreat your Lordship, and (if I may use the word) advise your Lordship to make me a better answer. Your Lordship is interested in honour, in the opinion of all that hear how I am dealt with. If your Lordship malice me for Long's cause, surely it was one of the justest businesses that ever was in Chancery. I will avouch it; and how deeply I was tempted therein, your Lordship knoweth best. Your Lordship may do well to think of your grave as I do of mine; and to beware of hardness of heart. And as for fair words, it is a wind by which neither your Lordship nor any man else can sail long. Howsoever, I am the man that shall give all due respects and reverence to your great place.

"20th June, 1625.

FR. ST. ALBAN."

Bacon always claimed that he was not "vindicative." But considering how Bishop Williams, when he was Lord Keeper, had charged Bacon with "knavery" and "deceiving his creditors" in the arrangements about his fine, it is not a little strange to find that at the end of his life Bacon had so completely made friends with him that he chose him as the person to whom he meant to leave his speeches and letters, which he was "willing should not be lost," and also the charge of superintending two foundations of 200 a year for Natural Science at the universities. And the Bishop accepted the charge.

The end of this, one of the most pathetic of histories, was at hand; the end was not the less pathetic because it came in so homely a fashion. On a cold day in March he stopped his coach in the snow on his way to Highgate, to try the effect of cold in arresting putrefaction. He bought a hen from a woman by the way, and stuffed it with snow. He was taken with a bad chill, which forced him to stop at a strange house, Lord Arundel's, to whom he wrote his last letter--a letter of apology for using his house. He did not write the letter as a dying man. But disease had fastened on him. A few days after, early on Easter morning, April 9, 1626, he pa.s.sed away. He was buried at St. Albans, in the Church of St. Michael, "the only Christian church within the walls of old Verulam." "For my name and memory," he said in his will, "I leave it to men's charitable speeches, and to foreign nations and the next ages."

So he died: the brightest, richest, largest mind but one, in the age which had seen Shakespeare and his fellows; so bright and rich and large that there have been found those who identify him with the writer of _Hamlet_ and _Oth.e.l.lo_. That is idle. Bacon could no more have written the plays than Shakespeare could have prophesied the triumphs of natural philosophy. So ended a career, than which no other in his time had grander and n.o.bler aims--aims, however mistaken, for the greatness and good of England; aims for the enlargement of knowledge and truth, and for the benefit of mankind. So ended a career which had mounted slowly and painfully, but resolutely, to the highest pinnacle of greatness--greatness full of honour and beneficent activity--suddenly to plunge down to depths where honour and hope were irrecoverable. So closed, in disgrace and disappointment and neglect, the last sad chapter of a life which had begun so brightly, which had achieved such permanent triumphs, which had lost itself so often in the tangles of insincerity and evil custom, which was disfigured and marred by great misfortunes, and still more by great mistakes of his own, which was in many ways misunderstood not only by his generation but by himself, but which he left in the constant and almost unaccountable faith that it would be understood and greatly honoured by posterity. With all its glories, it was the greatest shipwreck, the greatest tragedy, of an age which saw many.

But in these gloomy and dreary days of depression and vain hope to which his letters bear witness--"three years and five months old in misery,"

again later, "a long cleansing week of five years' expiation and more"--his interest in his great undertaking and his industry never flagged. The King did not want what he offered, did not want his histories, did not want his help about law. Well, then, he had work of his own on which his heart was set; and if the King did not want his time, he had the more for himself. Even in the busy days of his Chancellorship he had prepared and carried through the press the _Novum Organum_, which he published on the very eve of his fall. It was one of those works which quicken a man's powers, and prove to him what he can do; and it had its effect. His mind was never more alert than in these years of adversity, his labour never more indefatigable, his powers of expression never more keen and versatile and strong. Besides the political writings of grave argument for which he found time, these five years teem with the results of work. In the year before his death he sketched out once more, in a letter to a Venetian correspondent, Fra Fulgenzio, the friend of Sarpi, the plan of his great work, on which he was still busy, though with fast diminishing hopes of seeing it finished. To another foreign correspondent, a professor of philosophy at Annecy, and a distinguished mathematician, Father Baranzan, who had raised some questions about Bacon's method, and had asked what was to be done with metaphysics, he wrote in eager acknowledgment of the interest which his writings had excited, and insisting on the paramount necessity, above everything, of the observation of facts and of natural history, out of which philosophy may be built. But the most comprehensive view of his intellectual projects in all directions, "the fullest account of his own personal feelings and designs as a writer which we have from his own pen," is given in a letter to the venerable friend of his early days, Bishop Andrewes, who died a few months after him. Part, he says, of his _Instauratio_, "the work in mine own judgement (_si nunquam fallit imago_) I do most esteem," has been published; but because he "doubts that it flies too high over men's heads," he proposes "to draw it down to the sense" by examples of Natural History. He has enlarged and translated the _Advancement_ into the _De Augmentis_. "Because he could not altogether desert the civil person that he had borne," he had begun a work on Laws, intermediate between philosophical jurisprudence and technical law. He had hoped to compile a digest of English law, but found it more than he could do alone, and had laid it aside. The _Instauratio_ had contemplated the good of men "in the dowries of nature;" the _Laws_, their good "in society and the dowries of government." As he owed duty to his country, and could no longer do it service, he meant to do it honour by his history of Henry VII. His _Essays_ were but "recreations;" and remembering that all his writings had hitherto "gone all into the City and none into the Temple," he wished to make "some poor oblation," and therefore had chosen an argument mixed of religious and civil considerations, the dialogue of "an Holy War" against the Ottoman, which he never finished, but which he intended to dedicate to Andrewes, "in respect of our ancient and private acquaintance, and because amongst the men of our times I hold you in special reverence."

The question naturally presents itself, in regard to a friend of Bishop Andrewes, What was Bacon as regards religion? And the answer, it seems to me, can admit of no doubt. The obvious and superficial thing to say is that his religion was but an official one, a tribute to custom and opinion. But it was not so. Both in his philosophical thinking, and in the feelings of his mind in the various accidents and occasions of life, Bacon was a religious man, with a serious and genuine religion. His sense of the truth and greatness of religion was as real as his sense of the truth and greatness of nature; they were interlaced together, and could not be separated, though they were to be studied separately and independently. The call, repeated through all his works from the earliest to the last, _Da Fidel quae Fidel sunt_, was a warning against confusing the two, but was an earnest recognition of the claims of each.

The solemn religious words in which his prefaces and general statements often wind up with thanksgiving and hope and prayer, are no mere words of course; they breathe the spirit of the deepest conviction. It is true that he takes the religion of Christendom as he finds it. The grounds of belief, the relation of faith to reason, the profounder inquiries into the basis of man's knowledge of the Eternal and Invisible, are out of the circle within which he works. What we now call the philosophy of religion is absent from his writings. In truth, his mind was not qualified to grapple with such questions. There is no sign in his writings that he ever tried his strength against them; that he ever cared to go below the surface into the hidden things of mind, and what mind deals with above and beyond sense--those metaphysical difficulties and depths, as we call them, which there is no escaping, and which are as hard to explore and as dangerous to mistake as the forces and combinations of external nature. But it does not follow, because he had not asked all the questions that others have asked, that he had not thought out his reasonable faith. His religion was not one of mere vague sentiment: it was the result of reflection and deliberate judgment. It was the discriminating and intelligent Church of England religion of Hooker and Andrewes, which had gone back to something deeper and n.o.bler in Christianity than the popular Calvinism of the earlier Reformation; and though sternly hostile to the system of the Papacy, both on religious and political grounds, attempted to judge it with knowledge and justice. This deliberate character of his belief is shown in the remarkable Confession of Faith which he left behind him: a closely-reasoned and n.o.bly-expressed survey of Christian theology--"a _summa theologiae_, digested into seven pages of the finest English of the days when its tones were finest." "The entire scheme of Christian theology," as Mr. Spedding says, "is constantly in his thoughts; underlies everything; defines for him the limits of human speculation; and, as often as the course of inquiry touches at any point the boundary line, never fails to present itself. There is hardly any occasion or any kind of argument into which it does not at one time or another incidentally introduce itself." Doubtless it was a religion which in him was compatible, as it has been in others, with grave faults of temperament and character. But it is impossible to doubt that it was honest, that it elevated his thoughts, that it was a refuge and stay in the times of trouble.

CHAPTER VIII.

BACON'S PHILOSOPHY.

Bacon was one of those men to whom posterity forgives a great deal for the greatness of what he has done and attempted for posterity. It is idle, unless all honest judgment is foregone, to disguise the many deplorable shortcomings of his life; it is unjust to have one measure for him, and another for those about him and opposed to him. But it is not too much to say that in temper, in honesty, in labour, in humility, in reverence, he was the most perfect example that the world had yet seen of the student of nature, the enthusiast for knowledge. That such a man was tempted and fell, and suffered the Nemesis of his fall, is an instance of the awful truth embodied in the tragedy of _Faust_. But his genuine devotion, so unwearied and so paramount, to a great idea and a great purpose for the good of all generations to come, must shield him from the insult of Pope's famous and shallow epigram. Whatever may have been his sins, and they were many, he cannot have been the "meanest of mankind," who lived and died, holding unaltered, amid temptations and falls, so n.o.ble a conception of the use and calling of his life: the duty and service of helping his brethren to know as they had never yet learned to know. That thought never left him; the obligations it imposed were never forgotten in the crush and heat of business; the toils, thankless at the time, which it heaped upon him in addition to the burdens of public life were never refused. Nothing diverted him, nothing made him despair. He was not discouraged because he was not understood.

There never was any one in whose life the "_Souverainete du but_" was more certain and more apparent; and that object was the second greatest that man can have. To teach men to know is only next to making them good.

The Baconian philosophy, the reforms of the _Novum Organum_, the method of experiment and induction, are commonplaces, and sometimes lead to a misconception of what Bacon did. Bacon is, and is not, the founder of modern science. What Bacon believed could be done, what he hoped and divined, for the correction and development of human knowledge, was one thing; what his methods were, and how far they were successful, is another. It would hardly be untrue to say that though Bacon is the parent of modern science, his methods contributed nothing to its actual discoveries; neither by possibility could they have done so. The great and wonderful work which the world owes to him was in the idea, and not in the execution. The idea was that the systematic and wide examination of facts was the first thing to be done in science, and that till this had been done faithfully and impartially, with all the appliances and all the safeguards that experience and forethought could suggest, all generalisations, all antic.i.p.ations from mere reasoning, must be adjourned and postponed; and further, that sought on these conditions, knowledge, certain and fruitful, beyond all that men then imagined, could be attained. His was the faith of the discoverer, the imagination of the poet, the voice of the prophet. But his was not the warrior's arm, the engineer's skill, the architect's creativeness. "I only sound the clarion," he says, "but I enter not into the battle;" and with a Greek quotation very rare with him, he compares himself to one of Homer's peaceful heralds, [Greek: chairete kerukes, Dios angeloi ede kai andron]. Even he knew not the full greatness of his own enterprise. He underrated the vastness and the subtlety of nature. He overrated his own appliances to bring it under his command. He had not that incommunicable genius and instinct of the investigator which in such men as Faraday close hand to hand with phenomena. His weapons and instruments wanted precision; they were powerful up to a certain point, but they had the clumsiness of an unpractised time. Cowley compared him to Moses on Pisgah surveying the promised land; it was but a distant survey, and Newton was the Joshua who began to take possession of it.

The idea of the great enterprise, in its essential outline, and with a full sense of its originality and importance, was early formed, and was even sketched on paper with Bacon's characteristic self-reliance when he was but twenty-five. Looking back, in a letter written in the last year of his life, on the ardour and constancy with which he had clung to his faith--"in that purpose my mind never waxed old; in that long interval of time it never cooled"--he remarks that it was then "forty years since he put together a youthful essay on these matters, which with vast confidence I called by the high-sounding t.i.tle, The Greatest Birth of Time." "The Greatest Birth of Time," whatever it was, has perished, though the name, altered to "Partus Temporis _Masculus_" has survived, attached to some fragments of uncertain date and arrangement. But in very truth the child was born, and, as Bacon says, for forty years grew and developed, with many changes yet the same. Bacon was most tenacious, not only of ideas, but even of the phrases, images, and turns of speech in which they had once flashed on him and taken shape in his mind. The features of his undertaking remained the same from first to last, only expanded and enlarged as time went on and experience widened; his conviction that the knowledge of nature, and with it the power to command and to employ nature, were within the capacity of mankind and might be restored to them; the certainty that of this knowledge men had as yet acquired but the most insignificant part, and that all existing claims to philosophical truth were as idle and precarious as the guesses and traditions of the vulgar; his belief that no greater object could be aimed at than to sweep away once and for ever all this sham knowledge and all that supported it, and to lay an entirely new and clear foundation to build on for the future; his a.s.surance that, as it was easy to point out with fatal and luminous certainty the rottenness and hollowness of all existing knowledge and philosophy, so it was equally easy to devise and practically apply new and natural methods of investigation and construction, which should replace it by knowledge of infallible truth and boundless fruitfulness. His object--to gain the key to the interpretation of nature; his method--to gain it, not by the means common to all previous schools of philosophy, by untested reasonings and imposing and high-sounding generalisations, but by a series and scale of rigorously verified inductions, starting from the lowest facts of experience to discoveries which should prove and realise themselves by leading deductively to practical results--these, in one form or another, were the theme of his philosophical writings from the earliest sight of them that we gain.

He had disclosed what was in his mind in the letter to Lord Burghley, written when he was thirty-one (1590/91), in which he announced that he had "taken all knowledge for his province," to "purge it of 'frivolous disputations' and 'blind experiments,' and that whatever happened to him, he meant to be a 'true pioneer in the mine of truth.'" But the first public step in the opening of his great design was the publication in the autumn of 1605 of the _Advancement of Learning_, a careful and balanced report on the existing stock and deficiencies of human knowledge. His endeavours, as he says in the _Advancement_ itself, are "but as an image in a cross-way, that may point out the way, but cannot go it." But from this image of his purpose, his thoughts greatly widened as time went on. The _Advancement_, in part at least, was probably a hurried work. It shadowed out, but only shadowed out, the lines of his proposed reform of philosophical thought; it showed his dissatisfaction with much that was held to be sound and complete, and showed the direction of his ideas and hopes. But it was many years before he took a further step. Active life intervened. In 1620, at the height of his prosperity, on the eve of his fall, he published the long meditated _Novum Organum_, the avowed challenge to the old philosophies, the engine and instrument of thought and discovery which was to put to shame and supersede all others, containing, in part at least, the principles of that new method of the use of experience which was to be the key to the interpretation and command of nature, and, together with the method, an elaborate but incomplete exemplification of its leading processes.

Here were summed up, and stated with the most solemn earnestness, the conclusions to which long study and continual familiarity with the matters in question had led him. And with the _Novum Organum_ was at length disclosed, though only in outline, the whole of the vast scheme in all its parts, object, method, materials, results, for the "Instauration" of human knowledge, the restoration of powers lost, disused, neglected, latent, but recoverable by honesty, patience, courage, and industry.

The _Instauratio_, as he planned the work, "is to be divided," says Mr. Ellis, "into six portions, of which the _first_ is to contain a general survey of the present state of knowledge. In the _second_, men are to be taught how to use their understanding aright in the investigation of nature. In the _third_, all the phenomena of the universe are to be stored up as in a treasure-house, as the materials on which the new method is to be employed. In the _fourth_, examples are to be given of its operation and of the results to which it leads. The _fifth_ is to contain what Bacon had accomplished in natural philosophy _without_ the aid of his own method, _ex eodem intellects usu quem alii in inquirendo et inveniendo adhibere consueverunt_. It is therefore less important than the rest, and Bacon declares that he will not bind himself to the conclusions which it contains. Moreover, its value will altogether cease when the _sixth_ part can be completed, wherein will be set forth the new philosophy--the results of the application of the new method to all the phenomena of the universe.

But to complete this, the last part of the _Instauratio_, Bacon does not hope; he speaks of it as a thing, _et supra vires et ultra spes nostras collocata_."--_Works_, i. 71.