FRANCIS BACON.

Otago Witness, Issue 3912, 5 March 1929, Page 72

FRANCIS BACON.

“No work in the English language,” said. Sir Edmund Gosze, writing of Bacon’s “ Essays,” “ has been praised with more thoughtless extravagance.” That is one view. We find the opposite opinion in the declaration of Frederic Harrison that the essays of Bacon “remain as perennially fresh to us to-day as the dramas of Shakespeare himself.” It seems to me that, by a curious paradox, both opinions are right. The essays are not great essays, but they contain great sentences. If the essays have remained perennially fresh, it is not as a broad pasture of delight,, like Shakespeare’s plays, but because Bacon had a genius for writing isolated sentences that sparkle like jewels—of saying occasional wise and interesting things so tersely and memorably that they have passed like proverbs into the general speech of men.

Bacon was the first English writer to borrow the word “ essay ” from Montaigne, but, though he borrowed the word, he did not borrow the thing itself. His essays are as unlike Montaigne’s as they are unlike Addison’s or Lamb’s. He does not use the essay as a medium of confession: he is no humorist or entertainer. His book is chiefly a book of advice: he gave it the alternative title, “ Counsels, Civil and Moral.” It might be described as a book of advice to young statesmen and courtiers anxious to rise in this world and not to fail in the next. One is tempted to sum it up as a book of the higher etiquette. In the first year edition of 1597—which (contained only ten essays, and these considerably shorter than in their final form—this quality is particidarly noticeable. Most of the essays are on subjects such as Ceremonies and Respect, Followers and Friends, Suitors, Honour and Reputation, Faction, Negotiating. There is not an essay in the book which does not contain advice such as a rich uncle full of worldly wisdom might offer to an ambitious nephew. Even in the oftenquoted essay “Of Studies,” Bacon does not-’ set out to extol the pleasures of books, but rather to recommend the most useful, method of reading them. His advice, to be sure, is excellent, as when he says:—

Read not to contradict, nor to believe, but to weigh and consider ;

but there is here no invitation into the paradise of literature.

As • edition after edition of the “ Essays-” was called for, Bacon enlarged the- book, and wrote not only on new subjects of special interest to young courtiers, but on the great and permanent themes—Love, Death, Friendship, and a dozen others. Tennyson said of the essay “ Of Love ” that this alone was enough to prove that Bacon did not write the plays of Shakespeare, since the man who wrote us Bacon did of love could never have written “ Romeo and Juliet.”

Bacon, indeed, writes of love not as the poets and the novelists' conceive it, but in the mood of a man of the world warning a younger man that an excess of the passion may seriously interfere with the success of his career. From that point of view what could be wiser than the opening of his essay:—

The stage Is mortj beholding to love than the life of man. For, as to the stage, love is ever a matter of comedies, and now and then of tragedies: but in life it doth much mischief; sometimes like a siren, sometimes

like a fury. You may observe that, amongst all the great and worthy persons (whereof the memory remaineth, either ancient or recent) there is not one that hath been transported to the mad degree of love ; which shows that great spirits and great business do keep out this weak passion.

There is nothing Puritanical in this belittlement of love. Bacon is not concerned with the spiritual and moral aspects of love. He dislikes it first and foremost because of its effect on a man’s fortune, and insists that, if it is admitted at all, it must be kept strictly subordinate to business.

Bacon, indeed, might fitly have entitled his “ Essays ” “ Self-Help For Public Men.” No other philosopher ever lived who had so consuming a passion for success in public affairs, and Bacon considers the most precious things in life, not in so far as they are the°most precious things, but chiefly as aids or hindrances to greatness. Thus he begins the essay “ Of Marriage and Single Life ” with the unforgettable sentence:—

He that hath wife and children hath given hostages to fortune; for they are impediments to great enterprises, whether of virtue or mischief.

Stevenson, no doubt, wrote out of much the same philosophy- in the cynicism of youth; but Stevenson’s notion of “great enterprises ” was less materialistic than Bacon’s.

Me must not, however,' Bacon’s interest in the useful at "the expense of the beautiful and the good. He united self-interest with a nobly disinterested love of knowledge, and that he loved beautiful things is clear from his essays “ Of Gardens,” with its opening sentences:—

God Almighty first planted a garden. And indeed it is the purest of human pleasuresand its advice as to the “flowers—the plants that do best perfume the air —

But those which perfume the air most delightfully not passed by as' the rest but being trodden on and crushed, are three: that is, burnet, wild thyme, and watermints. Therefore you are to set whole alleys °f them to have the pleasure when you walk or tread.

Once again, however, it is worth pointing out that the essay is not mainly- a confession of delight in flowers, but is a piece of advice such as might be addressed to a great man eager to learn how he might lay out gardens worthy of his greatness. ■’

Similarly, the essay- “ Of Masques and Triumphs,” with its charming detail, is a courtier’s guide to success in one of thejighter things of social life. Bacon, in dedicating a later edition of his essays to the Duke of Buckingham, said that they were the most popular of his works, because “ they come home to men’s business and bosoms.” And it was principally to man s business that they were addressed—the business of those who wished to succeed in public and social affairs.

Yet, when all this has been said, the fact remains that it is not for useful and worldly-wise advice that we read Bacon’s “ Essays ” to-day. We like him as the first layman who wrote English prose that is at once simple and memorable. We like him because, in phrase after phrase, he had the grand manner and gave us enduring pleasures in words like the great poets:— Men fear death, as children fear to go in the dark.

“ What is truth?" said jesting Pilate, and would not stay for an answer. I had rather believe all the fables in the Legend, and the Talmud, and the Alcoran, than that this universal frame is without a mind.

Revenge is a kind of wild justice ; which, the more man’s nature runs to, the more ought law to weed it out.

We like him, again, because he has revealed to us in his essays, however unintentionally, his character—the character of one of the most extraordinary- minglings of greatness and baseness in human history—the character that Pope summed up as “the wisest, brightest, meanest of mankind.” * * *

Bacon is one of the least attractive characters in literary history, and one of the most fascinating. It is likely that during the next few weeks the world will be excitedly discussing his guilt or innocence once more, as a result of the publication of Mr Lytton Strachey’s new book, “ Elizabeth and Essex.” Did Bacon play the part of a Judas in prosecuting Essex, his old patron and protector, and bringing him to his death with vindictive efficiency? There are Baconians who declare that in this Bacon played the part of a true and loyal subject, but most people agree with Macaulay that what he did was basely to sacrifice his friend to his career.

Again, Baconians have attempted to defend Bacon against those charges of corruption which finally brought him as Lord Chancellor to ruin and disgrace. They admit, as Bacon admitted himself, that he accepted bribes, but they, say that he did not allow the bribes to influence his judgment, but often gave his

decision against the man who had bribed him. But, whatever excuses are made, the best that can be said for Bacon is that he was a very extravagant man, always living beyond his means, who took advantage of his judicial position to add to his income in a rather shady manner.

The most attractive things about him were his style and his unquenchable passion for knowledge. It was his passion for knowledge that finally killed him. Towards the end of March, 1626, he got out of his carriage one snowy day- at Highgate to collect' some snow and stuff a dead fowl with it in order to test the effect of cold in preserving flesh from putrefaction. In doing so he caught a chill, from which he died a week later. This insatiable curiosity, as well as his worldliness, is reflected in the essays. More than his worldliness, I fancy, it has helped to keep them alive for our perpetual delight.—Robert Lynde, in John o’ London’s Weekly.