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trial of Lord Sanquhar, and his cruel ingratitude to his friend Yelverton,1 all point in the same direction, revealing an absence of healthy moral instinct, a deficiency which-one might have expected-Bacon's immediate dependents and friends would not have been slow to detect. Again, his servile submission to the Favourite in a matter in which he professed to believe himself in the right and the Favourite in the wrong; his deliberate and persistent attempts to lower the reputation of Hobart, the Attorney-General; his advice to the King to delude Somerset, when on his trial, by promises never intended to be kept are all faults of the same kind, appearing to indicate a cold, passionless, we may almost say crooked, nature ; such as could not excite any enthusiasm in those who knew it well. On his confession that he had received gifts from suitors in cases pending before him, not much stress need be laid, regard being had to the customs of the times. Even the much more serious case of judicial dereliction in which Bacon reversed a decision in compliance with Buckingham's dictates, may possibly (though very improbably) have been an isolated act of injustice. Nevertheless these irregularities contribute to our difficulty in understanding how the man who was responsible for them can have presented to such intimate associates as Rawley, Boëner, and Toby Matthew, a character of ideal " virtue."

But the problem does not stop here. We have not merely to explain how a man could occasionally creep like a snake in public, and pose as an angel in private; we have further to explain how he could do a great number of doubtful and dishonourable actions, and yet always retain so high an opinion of himself, that self-respect is too weak a name for it. Many a man does all sorts of bad things, and persuades others that he is good, but it is seldom that a man (unless under the domination of some religious superstition) can do bad things and yet believe in his own peculiar goodness. Again, many men do base things unpremeditatedly, on the spur of self-interest, and with more or less of unwillingness, and forget them, or try to forget them afterwards. They do them, but are ashamed of doing them. But Bacon did them deliberately, and gave the best proof that he looked them in the face before doing them, by setting them down on paper.

1 See p. 278.

Take, for example, his paragraphs in his Commentarius Solutus, mentioned above (p. 153), and headed "Hubbard's Disadvantage." It is just possible that in our own days a lawyer or other professional man may now and then not be deterred by feelings of delicacy from expressing unfavourable opinions of some rival in his profession, occupying a superior position which he himself desires to obtain; nay, that he may even do this habitually whenever an occasion presents itself; but it is hardly conceivable that any one should deliberately set down on paper terms of "disparagement" intended to be dropped, as if ex tempore, in course of conversation. Or take the paragraph in the same note-book referring to Bacon's relations with Cecil at the Council-board. That Bacon, against his better judgment, should support his cousin's and patron's propositions, is wrong, but intelligible; but it is almost unintelligible that he should set down on paper a determination to abuse his position at the Council-board: "At the Council-table chiefly to make good my Lord of Salisbury's motions and speeches, and for the rest, sometimes one, sometimes another: chiefly his that is most earnest and in affection." Or again, take his note with reference to Suffolk: "To furnish my Lord of Suffolk with ornaments for public speeches. To make him think how he should be reverenced by a Lord Chancellor, if I were." How is it possible that a man should thus write himself down a flatterer, and yet speak and think of himself as "born for the service of mankind," and in his moments of deepest contrition, when confessing his sins to God-deplore, not his servility nor his self-seeking, but chiefly his misuse of God's "gracious talent of gifts and graces," which he had misspent in things for which he was least fit?

A most inadequate explanation has been offered for Bacon's faults in the suggestion that they arose from want of money: "Carelessness about money was probably the root from which all Bacon's errors and misfortunes sprang. And the want of money led him to seek preferment more openly and more keenly than we in these days, when we are more given to mask our ambitions, should regard as consistent with dignity." 1 It is indeed true that, in Bacon's earlier life, want of money caused need of office, and need of office drove him to strenuous and scarcely dignified office-seeking. But this cause will not explain the systematic flattery and place-seeking sketched out in the Commentarius Solutus. Those notes were written in July, 1608, when Bacon was Solicitor-General, with an income of nearly £3,000 a year (his Solicitorship being reckoned at only £1,000) and nine days before he began to write, the death of the Clerk of the Chamber, and Bacon's succession to the Clerkship, had added £2,000 a year to his income, making a total of nearly £5,000 a year, or about £20,000 of our money. Yet it was after this recent accession to his income that Bacon sat down to write out schemes for disparaging the Attorney-General, and for ultimately becoming Lord Chancellor. These simple facts dispose of the excuse that at this period of his life Bacon was driven to seek preferment by want of money.

Pope's epigram on "the wisest, brightest, meanest of mankind," and the usual commentaries on the epigram, are equally beside the mark as explanations of the point at issue. For we are not questioning the compatibility of scientific excellence, or political insight, or even patriotic spirit, with grave moral deficiency. Our problem is to explain how the so-called "meanest of mankind"-who certainly stooped at times to conduct that would in ordinary persons be called despicably "mean"-not only persuaded others who were on intimate terms with him and had opportunities for knowing him well, that he was a pattern of "virtue," but also to the last retained a high self-respect.

§ 44 BACON'S CHARACTER: THE SOLUTION

Bacon's own letters and works suggest a very different and much more complicated explanation of his career than the simple solution of "want of money." All men lead double lives, a private and a public; but, if we may believe his own account about himself and it agrees with many casual and

1 Francis Bacon, by Professor Fowler, p. 28.

Y

unpremeditated indications in his writings-he was a man in whom the two lives were to an extraordinary degree separable; not however that in his case we should divide the public from the private, but rather the public from the scientific.

Bacon considered himself, so he has told us in the Proem to the Interpretation of Nature,1 born for the service of mankind, and especially to serve men by extending their dominion over Nature. Birth and education, and the importance of the political crisis, diverted him for a time to politics; but even then he was stimulated by the hope that if he rose to eminence in the State he should have a larger command of industry and ability to help him in his philosophic work. Some may dispute the sincerity or the deliberateness of the very similar avowal made to Burghley (1592); but I do not see how those who give any credit at all to Bacon's professions, can withhold their belief from the statement in the Proem, written when he was over forty years of age (at a time when he thought he had forsworn all pursuits but Philosophy, so that he could dispassionately review the political distraction of his earlier manhood), and supported as it is by many similar autobiographical statements, made at different periods of his life. The importance of this evidence is increased, not diminished, by the fact that Bacon cancelled the passage later in life, when he had suffered himself a second time to be allured into the political vortex. And it is confirmed by the private notes in the Commentarius Solutus, which exhibit Bacon still planning how to use his influence and position for the purpose of drawing in great and learned men among his contemporaries, as recruits in the army of Science.

But as the Philosopher plunged deeper and deeper into the excitements of civil life, he began to love place and pomp and power more and more for their own sakes. The formidable and unexpected difficulties which he found barring the way to immediate scientific success, co-operated with the importance of the political crisis and the charms of office to throw Science more and more into the background. The claims of politics pressed themselves on his attention with increasing strength. Here was a King ignorant of Parliaments, but wise in statecraft, willing to 2 See above, pp. 30-32.

1 See above, p. 27.

be advised; on the other side, a democratic feeling "creeping on the ground;" a disposition on the part of an irresponsible assembly of country gentlemen and lawyers, variable, unorganised, and untrained in politics, to interfere with government; and between the two stood, in his own imagination, the Philosopher as a mediator, the faithful servant of the King, but the trusted friend of the Commons, able to advise the former and to manage the latter, and hopeful that suavibus modis he might reconcile the two in such a way as to strengthen and amplify the monarchy without exciting the active discontent of the people. Did not patriotism itself dictate that, in these exceptional circumstances, he should break the letter of his ascetic resolution, and tear himself away from Philosophy in order to do his duty to his country? And might not Science herself reap some benefit from this temporary desertion, if her gospel were soon afterwards preached from the steps of the throne by the confidential adviser of the King?

"Good thoughts, though God accept them, yet towards men are little better than good dreams, except they be put in act, and that cannot be without power and place." 1

The temptation must be admitted to be great; and one moral to be deduced from Bacon's life appears to be this, that a man who desires to preserve his self-respect, and who is conscious of a too supple, self-deceiving, self-indulgent nature, in deciding between the two Voices which would lead him in opposite directions, should make a rule-wherever he finds the considerations on either side almost exactly balanced-of choosing that course by which he will not make most money. So deciding, he may still go astray on the paths of ambition, fanaticism, Phariseeism, and in countless other ways: but on the whole, for a weak, moral nature, with good intentions, but a tendency to worldliness, it seems safe advice.

When the choice of a political life had once been made, the rest inevitably followed. If, for the sake of Philosophy and the interests of his country, success in civil life was to be attained, Bacon believed that he must not despise the ordinary means of attaining it. It is absurdly inconsistent, he says, or

1 Essays, xi. 34-40.

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