But lest you may think too hardly of this eminent man, a qualifying word must be said of that stain upon him—of receiving bribes: it was no uncommon thing for high judicial personages to take gifts; no uncommon thing for all high officers of the Government—nay, for the Government itself, as typified in its supreme head. And, strange as it may seem, Bacon’s sense of justice does not appear to have been swayed by the gifts he took. Spedding has demonstrated, I think, that no judgment he rendered was ever reversed by subsequent and farther hearing.[98] He was not in the ordinary sense a money-lover; but he did love the importance and consideration which money gave, yet was always in straits; and those unwise receivings of his went to supply the shortcomings in a very extravagant and disorderly home-life. His servants plundered him; his tradespeople fleeced him; nor do I think that the mistress of the Chancellor’s household was either very wary or very winning. Almost the only time there is mention of her in his letters occurs previous to his marriage (which did not take place till he was well in middle age), and then only as “the daughter of an alderman who will bring a good dot” with her. His mother-in-law, too, appears to have been of the stage sort of mother-in-law, whom he addresses (by letter) in this fashion:—
“Madam,” he says, “you shall with right good-will be made acquainted with anything that concerneth your daughters, if you bear a mind of love and concord: Otherwise you must be content to be a stranger to us. For I may not be so unwise as to suffer you to be an author or occasion of dissension between your daughters and their husbands; having seen so much misery of that kind in yourself.”
This looks a little as if the mother-in-law found the “grapes sour” in the Bacon gardens. I do not think there was much domesticity about him, even if home influences had encouraged it: he was without children, and not one to read poetry to his wife in a boudoir; yet his essays concerning marriage and concerning children and concerning friendship and concerning extravagance, are full of piquant truths.
Indeed two distinct lines of life ran through the career of this extraordinary man. In one he loved parade, ceremony, glitter; he stooped ungraciously to those who ranked him in factitious distinctions; was profuse and heartless in his adulation; taking great gifts with servile acknowledgment; shunning friends who were falling; courting enemies who were rising: and yet through all this, and looking out from the same keen inscrutable eyes was the soul of a philosopher cognizant of all humanities, searching sharply after the largest and broadest truths; too indifferent to small ones; weighing his own shortcomings with bitter remorse; alive to everything in science that should help the advancement of the world, and absorbed in high ranges of thinking which the animosities and cares and criminalities and accidents of every-day life did not seem to reach or to disturb.
In such mood he wrote those essays, of some of which I have spoken—wonderfully compact of thought, and as wonderfully compact of language—which one should read and read again. No private library of a hundred English books is complete without a copy of Bacon’s Essays. The keen sagacity and perdurable sense of his observations always engage one. Thus of Travel, he says,—
“Let him [the Traveller] sequester himself from the company of his countrymen, and diet in such places where there is good company of the nation where he travelleth. He that travelleth into a country before he hath some entrance into the language, goeth to school and not to travel.”
Of Friendship:—“This communicating of a man’s self to his friend, works two contrary efforts; for it redoubleth joys and cutteth griefs in halves.” Again, of the advantages of talk with a friend:—“Certain it is, that whosoever hath his mind fraught with many thoughts, his wits and understanding do clarify and break up, in the communicating and discoursing with another; he tosseth his thoughts more easily; he marshalleth them more orderly; he seeth how they look when they are turned into words; finally, he waxeth wiser than himself: and that more by an hours discourse than by a days meditation.”
Thus I could go on for page after page of citations which you would approve, and which are so put in words that no mending or shortening or deepening of their force seems anyway possible. And yet this book of Essays—with all its sagacities, its ringing terseness, its stanch worldly wisdom—is one we do not warm toward. Even when he talks of friendship or marriage, death or love, a cold line of self-seeking pervades it. Of sacrifice for love’s sake, for friendship’s sake, or for charity’s sake, there is nothing; and in that Essay on “Parents and Children”—what iciness of reflection—of suggestion! A man might talk as Bacon talks there, of the entries in a “Herd-book.”
As for the Novum Organum and the Augmentis Scientiarum—you would not read them if I were to suggest it: indeed, there is no need for reading them, except as a literary excursus, seeing that they have wrought their work in breaking up old, slow modes of massing knowledge, and in pouring light upon new ways;—in serving, indeed, so far as their reach went, as a great logical lever, by which subsequent inquirers have prised up a thousand hidden knowledges and ways of knowledge to the comprehension and cognizance of the world.