Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern — Volume 03

by Unknown

At the age of twelve he entered Trinity College, Cambridge (April, 1573), and left it before he was fifteen (Christmas, 1575); the institution meanwhile having been broken up for more than half a year (August, 1574, to March, 1575) by the plague, so that his intermittent university career summed up less than fourteen months. There is no record of his studies, and the names of his teachers are unknown; for though Bacon in later years called himself a pupil of Whitgift, and his biographers assumed that the relation was direct and personal, yet that great master of Trinity had certainly ended his teaching days before Bacon went to Cambridge, and had entered as Dean of Lincoln on his splendid ecclesiastical career. University life was very different from that of our times. The statutes of Cambridge forbade a student, under penalties, to use in conversation with another any language but Latin, Greek, or Hebrew, unless in his private apartments and in hours of leisure. It was a regular custom at Trinity to bring before the assembled undergraduates every Thursday evening at seven o'clock such junior students as had been detected in breaches of the rules during the week, and to flog them. It would be interesting to know in what languages young Bacon conversed, and what experiences of discipline befell him; but his subsequent achievements at least suggest that Cambridge in the sixteenth century may have afforded more efficient educational influences than our knowledge of its resources and methods can explain. For it is certain that, at an age when our most promising youths are beginning serious study, Bacon's mind was already formed, his habits and modes of research were fixed, the universe of knowledge was an open field before him. Thenceforth he was no man's pupil, but in intellectual independence and solitude he rapidly matured into the supreme scholar of his age.

After registering as a student of law at Gray's Inn, apparently for the purpose of a nominal connection with a profession which might aid his patrons in promoting him at court, Bacon was sent in June, 1576, to France in the train of the British Ambassador, Sir Amyas Paulet; and for nearly three years followed the roving embassy around the great cities of that kingdom. The massacre of St. Bartholomew had taken place four years before, and the boy's recorded observations on the troubled society of France and of Europe show remarkable insight into the character of princes and the sources of political movements. Sir Nicholas had hitherto directed his son's education and associations with the purpose of making him an ornament of the court, and had set aside a fund to provide Francis at the proper time with a handsome estate. But he died suddenly, February 20th, 1579, without giving legal effect to this provision, and the sum designed for the young student was divided equally among the five children, while Francis was excluded from a share in the rest of the family fortune; and was thus called home to England to find himself a poor man.

He made himself a bachelor's home at Gray's Inn, and devoted his energies to the law, with such success that he was soon recognized as one of the most promising members of the profession. In 1584 he entered Parliament for Melcombe Regis in Somersetshire, and two years later sat for Liverpool. During these years the schism between his inner and his outer life continued to widen. Drawing his first breath in the atmosphere of the court, bred in the faith that honor and greatness come from princes' favor, with a native taste for luxury and magnificence which was fostered by delicate health, he steadily looked for advancement through the influence of Burghley and the smiles of the Queen. But Burghley had no sympathy with speculative thought, and distrusted him for his confidences concerning his higher studies, while he probably feared in Bacon a dangerous rival of his own son; so that with expressions of kind interest, he refrained from giving his nephew practical aid. Elizabeth, too, suspected that a young man who knew so many things could not be trusted to know his own business well, and preferred for important professional work others who were lawyers and nothing besides. Thus Bacon appeared to the world as a disappointed and uneasy courtier, struggling to keep up a certain splendor of appearance and associations under a growing load of debt, and servile to a Queen on whose caprice his prospects of a career must depend. His unquestioned power at the bar was exercised only in minor causes; his eloquence and political dexterity found slow recognition in Parliament, where they represented only themselves; and the question whether he would ever be a man of note in the kingdom seemed for twenty-five years to turn upon what the Crown might do for its humble suitor.

Meanwhile this laborious advocate and indefatigable courtier, whose labors at the bar and in attendance upon his great friends were enough to fill the days of two ordinary men, led his real life in secret, unknown to the world, and uncomprehended even by the few in whom he had divined a capacity for great thought, and whom he had selected for his confidants. From his childhood at the university, where he felt the emptiness of the Aristotelian logic, the instrument for attaining truth which traditional learning had consecrated, he had gradually formed the conception of a more fruitful process. He had become convinced that the learning of all past ages was but a poor result of the intellectual capacities and labors which had been employed upon it; that the human mind had never yet been properly used; that the methods hitherto adopted in research were but treadmill work, returning upon itself, or at best could produce but fragmentary and accidental additions to the sum of knowledge. All nature is crammed with truth, he believed, which it concerns man to discover; the intellect of man is constructed for its discovery, and needs but to be purged of errors of every kind, and directed in the most efficient employment of its faculties, to make sure that all the secrets of nature will be revealed, and its powers made tributary to the health, comfort, enjoyment, and progressive improvement of mankind.

This stupendous conception, of a revolution which should transform the world, seems to have taken definite form in Bacon's mind as early as his twenty-fifth year, when he embodied the outline of it in a Latin treatise; which he destroyed in later life, unpublished, as immature, and partly no doubt because he came to recognize in it an unbecoming arrogance of tone, for its title was 'Temporis Partus Maximus' (The Greatest Birth of Time.) But six years later he defines these "vast contemplative ends" in his famous letter to Burghley, asking for preferment which will enable him to prosecute his grand scheme and to employ other minds in aid of it. "For I have taken all knowledge to be my province," he says, "and if I could purge it of two sorts of rovers, whereof the one with frivolous disputations, confutations, and verbosities, the other with blind experiments and auricular traditions and impostures, hath committed so many spoils, I hope I should bring in industrious observations, grounded conclusions, and profitable inventions and discoveries: the best state of that province. This, whether it be curiosity or vain glory, or nature, or (if one take it favorably) philanthropia is so fixed in my mind as it cannot be removed."

This letter reveals the secret of Bacon's life, and all that we know of him, read in the light of it, forms a consistent and harmonious whole. He was possessed by his vast scheme, for a reformation of the intellectual world, and through it, of the world of human experience, as fully as was ever apostle by his faith. Implicitly believing in his own ability to accomplish it, at least in its grand outlines, and to leave at his death the community of mind at work, by the method and for the purposes which he had defined, with the perfection of all science in full view, he subordinated every other ambition to this; and in seeking and enjoying place, power, and wealth, still regarded them mainly as aids in prosecuting his master purpose, and in introducing it to the world. With this clearly in mind, it is easy to understand his subsequent career. Its external details may be read in any of the score of biographies which writers of all grades of merit and demerit have devoted to him, and there is no space for them here. For our purpose it is necessary to refer only to the principal crises in his public life.

Until the death of Elizabeth, Bacon had no place in the royal service worthy of his abilities as a lawyer. Many who, even in the narrowest professional sense, were far inferior to him, were preferred before him. Yet he obtained a position recognized by all, and second only in legal learning to his lifelong rival and constant adversary, Sir Edward Coke. To-day, it is probable that if the two greatest names in the history of the common law were to be selected by the suffrages of the profession, the great majority would be cast for Coke and Bacon. As a master of the intricacies of precedent and an authority upon the detailed formulas of "the perfection of reason," the former is unrivaled still; but in the comprehensive grasp of the law as a system for the maintenance of social order and the protection of individual rights, Bacon rose far above him. The cherished aim of his professional career was to survey the whole body of the laws of England, to produce a digest of them which should result in a harmonious code, to do away with all that was found obsolete or inconsistent with the principles of the system, and thus to adapt the living, progressive body of the law to the wants of the growing nation. This magnificent plan was beyond the power of any one man, had his life no other task, but he suggested the method and the aim; and while for six generations after these legal giants passed away, the minute, accurate, and profound learning of Coke remained the acknowledged chief storehouse of British traditional jurisprudence, the seventh generation took up the work of revision and reform, and from the time of Bentham and Austin the progress of legal science has been toward codification. The contest between the aggregation of empirical rules and formulated customs which Coke taught as the common law, and the broad, harmonious application of scientific reason to the definition and enforcement of rights, still goes on; but with constant gains on the side of the reformers, all of whom with one consent confess that no general and complete reconstruction of legal doctrine as a science is possible, except upon the lines laid down by Bacon.

The most memorable case in which Bacon was employed to represent the Crown during Elizabeth's life was the prosecution of the Earl of Essex for treason. Essex had been Bacon's friend, patron, and benefactor; and as long as the earl remained faithful to the Queen and retained her favor, Bacon served him with ready zeal and splendid efficiency, and showed himself the wisest and most sincere of counselors. When Essex rejected his advice, forfeited the Queen's confidence by the follies from which Bacon had earnestly striven to deter him, and finally plunged into wanton and reckless rebellion, Bacon, with whom loyalty to his sovereign had always been the supreme duty, accepted a retainer from the Crown, and assisted Coke in the prosecution. The crime of Essex was the greatest of which a subject was capable; it lacked no circumstance of aggravation; if the most astounding instance of ingratitude and disloyalty to friendship ever known is to be sought in that age, it will be found in the conduct of Essex to Bacon's royal mistress. Yet writers of eloquence have exhausted their rhetorical powers in denouncing Bacon's faithlessness to his friend. But no impartial reader of the full story in the documents of the time can doubt that throughout these events Bacon did his duty and no more, and that in doing it he not merely made a voluntary sacrifice of his popularity, but a far more painful sacrifice of his personal feelings.

In 1603 James I. came to the throne, and in spite of the efforts of his most trusted ministers to keep Bacon in obscurity, soon discovered in him a man whom he needed. In 1607 he was made Solicitor-General; in 1613 Attorney-General; in March 1617, on the death of Lord Ellesmere, he received the seals as Lord Keeper; and in January following was made Lord Chancellor of England. In July 1618 he was raised to the permanent peerage as Baron Verulam, and in January 1621 received the title of Viscount St. Albans. During these three years he was the first subject in the kingdom in dignity, and ought to have been the first in influence. His advice to the King, and to the Duke of Buckingham who was the King's king, was always judicious. In certain cardinal points of policy, it was of the highest statesmanship; and had it been followed, the history of the Stuart dynasty would have been different, and the Crown and the Parliament would have wrought together for the good and the honor of the nation, at least through a generation to come. But the upstart Buckingham was supreme. He had studied Bacon's strength and weakness, had laid him under great obligations, had at the same time attached him by the strongest tie of friendship to his person, and impressed upon his consciousness the fact that the fate of Bacon was at all times in his hands. The new Chancellor had entered on his great office with a fixed purpose to reform its abuses, to speed and cheapen justice, to free its administration from every influence of wealth and power. In the first three months of service he brought up the large arrears of business, tried every cause, heard every petition, and acquired a splendid reputation as an upright and diligent judge. But Buckingham was his evil angel. He was without sense of the sanctity of the judicial character; and regarded the bench, like every other public office, as an instrument of his own interests and will. On the other hand, to Bacon the voice of Buckingham was the voice of the King, and he had been taught from infancy as the beginning of his political creed that the king can do no wrong. Buckingham began at once to solicit from Bacon favors for his friends and dependants, and the Chancellor was weak enough to listen and to answer him. There is no evidence that in any one instance the favorite asked for the violation of law or the perversion of justice; much less that Bacon would or did accede to such a request. But the Duke demanded for one suitor a speedy hearing, for another a consideration of facts which might not be in evidence, for a third all the favor consistent with law; and Bacon reported to him the result, and how far he had been able to oblige him. This persistent tampering with the source of justice was a disturbing influence in the Chancellor's court, and unquestionably lowered the dignity of his attitude and weakened his judicial conscience.

Notwithstanding this, when the Lord Chancellor opened the Parliament in January, 1621, with a speech in praise of his King and in honor of the nation, he seemed to be at the summit of earthly prosperity. No voice had been lifted to question his purity and worth. He was the friend of the King, one of the chief supports of the throne, a champion indeed of high prerogative, but an orator of power, a writer of fame, whose advancement to the highest dignities had been welcomed by public opinion. Four months later he was a convicted criminal, sentenced for judicial corruption to imprisonment at the King's pleasure, to a fine of £40,000, and to perpetual incapacity for any public employment. Vicissitudes of fortune are commonplaces of history. Many a man once seemingly pinnacled on the top of greatness has "shot from the zenith like a falling star," and become a proverb of the fickleness of fate. Some are torn down by the very traits of mind, passion, or temper, which have raised them: ambition which overleaps itself, rashness which hazards all on chances it cannot control, vast abilities not great enough to achieve the impossible. The plunge of Icarus into the sea, the murder of Caesar, the imprisonment of Coeur de Lion, the abdication of Napoleon, the apprehension as a criminal of Jefferson Davis, each was a startling and impressive contrast to the glory which it followed, yet each was the natural result of causes which lay in the character and life of the sufferer, and made his story a consistent whole. But the pathos of Bacon's fall is the sudden moral ruin of a life which had been built up in honor for sixty years. An intellect of the first rank, which from boyhood to old age had been steadfast in the pursuit of truth and in the noblest services to mankind, which in a feeble body had been sustained in vigor by all the virtues of prudence and self-reverence; a genial nature, winning the affection and admiration of associates, hardly paralleled in the industry with which its energies were devoted to useful work, a soul exceptional among its contemporaries for piety and philanthropy--this man is represented to us by popular writers as having habitually sold justice for money, and as having become in office "the meanest of mankind."