He was very fond of the doctrine of Special Providences.
"Every now and then I have—I suppose it is common—what may be called a run of luck in ordinary things; I get out of scrapes in a way I don't deserve; I find letters I have mislaid; annoyances are mysteriously shunted aside; money flows in; days of extraordinary happiness succeed one another; little events save vast complications of trouble, so that I long to turn round and grasp by the hand or kiss the cheek of the sweet friend who stands at my elbow, suggesting, ordering, providing day and night, smiling on me as I sleep, hovering around me as I work, without a word of praise. Guardian angels! no fable. God gives you a sudden and particular thought, and while you are independent of circumstances you master them as well."
But such portraiture as the above is apt to get very vague and insipid unless one is able to convey a vivid picture of the man as he walked, and spoke, and lived. The sic sedebat in Trinity College (Cambridge) chapel has given more people a thrill at the thought of Bacon than ever gained one from his books. Personality, personal characteristics, how one craves for them! To take a late instance, how far more impressive General Gordon's little cane is, which he twirled in his hand as he stormed redoubts and directed an action, than a thousand pages of rhetoric about his philosophy or his views of life.
He was now, as ever, for strangers meeting him for the first time, an impressive but rather disappointing man. He had shaved his beard, keeping only his usual moustache; his face was very spare, with a pallor that was not unhealthy. His hair, which was dark and lay in masses, he wore generally rather long. He had got into the way, when without his glasses, of half closing his eyes, because, as he said, it did him so little good to keep them open, as it only served to remind him of people's presence without giving him any more definite idea of them. He could not, for instance, unassisted, see the play of features on a face, and, for this reason, in all important interviews he wore his glasses, giving three reasons.
1. Utilitarian—that he could see by his opponent's face what he was driving at, and what effect his own remarks had on him.
2. Impressional—it gave a man an "adventitious consequence."
3. Precautional—"I show emotion quickest by the eye, and so, generally speaking, do most people; some change colour very quick; some reveal it in the mouth; but the sudden dilatation and contraction of the eye, the expression it is capable of, make it on the whole the safest guide.
"I trust the eye on the whole," he said; "guilelessness and an unstained conscience are not really manifested either in feature or deportment, but the eye will almost always tell you true."
His conversation, when he was in form, was, without exactly being very brilliant, very inspiring. He had great freshness of expression, and told very few stories, and those only in illustration, never on their own merits. He was very μνημονικός, or retentive—the first requisite, says Plato, of a philosopher—and was consequently well supplied with quotations and allusions, not slavishly repeated, but worked naturally in. I do not mean that he passed for a good talker by skilful plagiarizing, but I found that the wider my range of reading became the more I appreciated his talk—drawn, as it was, from all kinds of sources, and bringing with it that aroma of a far-reaching mind, the fascination that culture can bestow, the feeling that, after all, everything is interesting, and that no knowledge is unworthy of the attention of the philosopher.
He hardly ever discussed current politics, though he would argue on political principles with the greatest keenness: neither had he accurate historical knowledge, or antiquarian; but he enjoyed listening to such talk. For the principles, the poetic aspect, of science he had a devoted interest. In literary matters I seldom heard his equal. Many and many is the book which I have been induced to read solely by hearing him sketch the purport in little sentences of extraordinary felicity. "The birth and fatal effects of Impulse in a prosaic soul," was a sketch he gave of a celebrated novel. On one subject he was always dumb—Economics. "It is the one subject on which I have never hazarded a remark successfully," he said to me once. "I can never appreciate the value of an economic statement; I hardly know whether it is interesting."