IN Bacon’s “Essays Civil and Moral” an intellect of the highest order expresses itself with an art so subtle that it does not seem to be art at all. Literary form is lost sight of and the thought engrosses attention to the exclusion even of admiration for the greatness of the mind which conceived it. Admiration is excited only in the presence of what seems higher than our own level. It is the peculiarity and the touchstone of all great art, that admiration for it comes only as an afterthought. Its first office is that of sympathy. It expresses what is strongest and truest in us as if it were wholly our right to have it expressed. We feel no sense of obligation to it, but rather of comradeship with it, as if, by some process too simple and natural to be even surprising, we had regained consciousness of a higher life in us than we had suspected,—of a life which belongs to our common lives as much as it does to the highest genius of earth or to the healthiest and most natural souls in whatever state of natural healthiness of soul is to constitute hereafter our heaven. When from this high future that is to be ours, some great soul comes to us as Bacon does, it is always in the simplicity of good neighborliness. He goes in and out among us, speaking our every-day language and ministering to our every-day needs, and we do not feel his superiority until he has gone. Then we look among ourselves and back through the ages of civilization to find his equal, learning thus for the first time to admire him as we had not thought to do before.
To read twenty lines into one of the most commonplace of his essays is to come into the presence of one of the most potent forces of the world—an intellect of childlike directness of expression and an almost superhuman strength of conception. No one who has written since his day has done anything that will compare in force, in comprehensiveness, in terse compactness of expression, with any one of a score of his short essays. In these respects they call for reverence, and where they express the lower part of his nature, the cunning of the courtier, the lack of scruple of the weak and time-serving politician, loving virtue in theory, but not brave enough in practice to make a stand for it, then the strength of intellect, which is so great a merit in essays expressing his higher mind, makes the baseness of his thought when it is base, formidable to the last degree. When Bacon is giving bad advice, no man can give worse, or give it in a way more calculated to degrade.
He stands alone among writers of prose essays, but Alexander Pope who resembled him physically and mentally in so many ways, has written essays in verse which are hardly inferior in compactness of expression and in their far-reaching insight into human nature. Pope has the art of turning a phrase so that it sticks in the mind forever. Shakespeare has it also. He is the only writer of English who is superior to Pope in this respect. Bacon does not rank with either of them in it. The strength of his essays lies in the immediate effect they are capable of producing, and in the bent they unconsciously create. The reader who is influenced by Pope, ten years after reading one of his poems will know it to be his by recalling some such lines as the couplet:—
| “What can ennoble sots or slaves or cowards? | |
| Alas, not all the blood of all the Howards.” |
Bacon is the highest type of the essayist because his is, in its method, the highest type of intellect. To study his methods of expression is to have opportunity to see how childlike great genius is. It is the mind of the inferior order which complicates a question so that only experts can understand it. The great mind makes it so plain that a child can understand, if he will only take the trouble to try. To understand Bacon—to understand any one else whose mind really belongs to the highest class—it is only necessary to be willing to think as a child does in learning its letters.
A great linguist, a master mechanic in the craft of expression, Bacon has a secret of higher strength than any art can give. He held his intellect ad utilitates humanas, for the service of mankind. While others before him had cultivated philosophy in the hope of becoming superior to humanity, he sought to serve the every-day needs of humanity through philosophy. “Let him that is greatest among you be your servant” is the sentence which inspired his “Novum Organum”—his “new method” of using the intellect. The old philosophy sought to make an exclusive class of spiritual and intellectual aristocrats. Bacon sought to liberate the universal mind of man from its shackling inefficiency.
“To sum up the whole,” says Macaulay, “we should say that the aim of the Platonic philosophy was to exalt man into a god. The aim of the Baconian philosophy was to provide man with what he requires while he continues to be man. The aim of the Platonic philosophy was to raise us far above vulgar wants. The aim of the Baconian philosophy was to supply our vulgar wants. The former aim was noble, but the latter was attainable. Plato drew a good bow, but, like Acestes in Virgil, he aimed at the stars; and therefore, though there was no want of strength or skill, the shot was thrown away. His arrow was indeed followed by a track of dazzling radiance, but it struck nothing:—
| ‘Volans liquidis in nubibus arsit arundo | |
| Signavitque viam flammis, tenuisque recessit | |
| Consumuta in ventos.’ |
“Bacon fixed his eye on a mark which was placed on the earth and within bowshot, and hit it in the white. The philosophy of Plato began in words and ended in words—noble words indeed—words such as were to be expected from the finest of human intellects exercising boundless dominion over the finest of human languages. The philosophy of Bacon began in observations and ended in arts.
“The boast of the ancient philosophers was that their doctrine formed the minds of men to a high degree of wisdom and virtue. This was indeed the only practical good which the most celebrated of those teachers even pretended to effect; and undoubtedly if they had effected this, they would have deserved the greatest praise. But the truth is, that in those very matters in which alone they professed to do any good to mankind, in those matters for the sake of which they neglected all the vulgar interests of mankind, they did nothing, or worse than nothing. They promised what was impractical; they despised what was practical; they filled the world with long words and long beards; and they left it as wicked and as ignorant as they found it.
“An acre in Middlesex is better than a principality in Utopia. The smallest actual good is better than the most magnificent promises of impossibilities. The wise man of the Stoics would, no doubt, be a grander object than a steam engine. But there are steam engines, and the wise man of the Stoics is yet to be born. A philosophy which should enable a man to feel perfectly happy while in agonies of pain may be better than a philosophy which assuages pain. But we know that there are remedies that assuage pain; and we know that the ancient sages like the toothache just as little as their neighbors.”—Essay on “Bacon.”
Bacon was born at York House on the Strand, January 22d, 1561,—a date which is consequently the gnomon of the real beginning of modern times. He had all human weaknesses and when he died April 9th, 1626, he had illustrated them in a life which but for them we could not surely recognize as human, so great was the intellect which transfigured it,—which, in spite of every weakness incident to his humanity, wrought through him the beginning of that “novus ordo sæculorum,” which has embodied the results of the crucifixion in the Christianity of the steam engine and the electric motor.
