And the two lines of life in Francis Bacon were joined by a strange hyphen at last: He got out of his coach (which was not paid for), and in his silk stockings walked through the snow, to prosecute some scientific post-mortem experiment upon the body of a chicken he had secured by the roadside, near to London. He caught cold—as lesser men would have done; and he died of it. This date of his death (1626) brings us beyond Elizabeth’s time—beyond James’ time, too, and far down to the early years of Charles I. He was born, as I said, three years before Shakespeare, three years after Elizabeth came to the throne; and the Novum Organum was published in the same year in which the Pilgrims landed at Plymouth Rock—a convenient peg on which to hang the date of two great events.
He was buried in the old town of St. Alban’s, of whose antiquities I have already spoken, and near to which Gorhambury, the country home of Bacon, was situated. The town and region are well worth a visit: and it is one of the few spots whither one can still go by a well-appointed English stage-coach with sleek horses—four-in-hand, which starts every morning in summer from the White Horse Cellar, in Piccadilly, and spins over the twenty miles of intervening beautiful road (much of it identical with the old Roman Watling Street) in less than two hours and a half. The drive is through Middlesex, and into “pleasant Hertfordshire,” where the huge Norman tower of the old abbey buildings, rising from the left bank of the Ver, marks the town of St. Alban’s. The tomb and monument of Bacon are in the Church of St. Michael’s: there is still an Earl of Verulam presiding over a new Gorhambury House; and thereabout, one may find remnants of the old home of the great Chancellor and some portion of the noble gardens in which he took so much delight, and in which he wandered up and down, in peaked hat and in ruff, and with staff—pondering affairs of State—possibly meditating the while upon that most curious and stately Essay of his upon “Gardens,” which opens thus:—
“God Almighty first planted a garden. And, indeed, it is the purest of human pleasures. It is the greatest refreshment to the spirits of man, without which building and palaces are but gross handyworks: and a man shall ever see, that when ages grow to civility and elegancy, men come to build stately, sooner than to garden finely; as if gardening were the greater perfection.”
Surely, we who grow our own salads and “graff” our own pear-trees may take exaltation from this: and yet I do not believe that the great Chancellor ever put his hand, laboringly, to a rake-stave: but none the less, he snuffed complacently the odor of his musk-roses and his eglantine, and looked admiringly at his clipped walls of hedges.
Thomas Hobbes.
There used to come sometimes to these gardens of Gorhambury, in Bacon’s day, a young man—twenty years his junior—of a strangely subtle mind, who caught so readily at the great Chancellor’s meaning, and was otherwise so well instructed that he was employed by him in some clerical duties. His name was Thomas Hobbes; and it is a name that should be known and remembered, because it is identified with writings which had as much influence upon the current of thought in the middle of the next century (the seventeenth) as those of Herbert Spencer have now, and for somewhat similar reasons. He was a very free thinker, as well as a deep one; keeping, from motives of policy, nominally within Church lines, yet abhorred and disavowed by Church-teachers; believing in the absolute right of kings, and in self-interest as the nucleus of all good and successful schemes for the conduct of life; weighing relations to the future and a Supreme Good (if existing) with a trader’s prudence, and counting Friendship “a sense of social utility.” His theory of government was—a crystallization of forces, coming about regularly by the prudent self-seeking of individuals. Of divine or spiritual influences he does not take any sympathetic cognizance; hard, cold, calculating; not inspiring, not hopeful; feeding higher appetites on metaphysic husks.
Of his Deism I give this exhibit:—
“Forasmuch as God Almighty is incomprehensible, it followeth that we can have no conception or image of the Deity; and consequently, all his attributes signify our inability and defect of power to conceive anything concerning his nature, and not any conception of the same, except only this—that there is a God. For the effects, we acknowledge naturally, do include a power of their producing, before they were produced; and that power presupposeth something existent that hath such power: and the thing so existing with power to produce, if it were not eternal, must needs have been produced by somewhat before it; and that, again, by something else before that, till we come to an eternal (that is to say, the first) Power of all Powers, and first Cause of all Causes; and this is it which all men conceive by the name God, implying eternity, incomprehensibility, and omnipotency. And thus all that will consider may know that God is, though not what he is.”
Cribbing his emotional nature (if he ever had any), he yet writes with wonderful directness, perspicacity, and verve—making “Hobbism” talked of, as Spencerism is talked of. Indeed, one does not see clearly how any man, flinging only his bare hook of logic and his sinker of reason into the infinite depths around us, can fish up anything of a helpfully spiritual sort much better than Hobbism now.