(1561-1626)
[Footnote 14: Copyright, 1894, by Selmar Hess.]
Francis Bacon was born in York House, London, on January 22, 1561. Of
this building only the ancient water-gate, fronting the Thames, survives
the waste of time. His father, Sir Nicholas Bacon, was for twenty years
Lord Keeper of the Great Seal under Elizabeth--a famous statesman,
orator, and wit. His mother, Lady Ann Bacon, was the second daughter of
the celebrated Sir Anthony Cooke, formerly tutor of King Edward VI.,
Henry VIII.'s short-lived son. She was a woman of great learning and
many accomplishments, and of a strong, earnest, passionate,
affectionate, and religious nature.
Francis was the youngest of eight children, six of whom were by the
first wife of Sir Nicholas. He belonged to the aristocracy of England,
but not to that ancient, warlike race of battle-crowned warriors, whose
pedigree dated back beyond the Crusades. His father was a lawyer. Both
his father's family and his mother's seem to have risen from the ranks
on the great wave of the Reformation; they belonged to the intellectual
new age, then dawning; rather than to the rude, fighting age which was
about to pass away. Francis was no accident. We can see in him the two
natures of his father and his mother--the commingling of the powerful,
practical, sagacious politician and man of affairs, with the studious,
contemplative, imaginative, affectionate, religious enthusiast.
His birthplace was a palace; the country seat of Gorhamsbury, near Saint
Albans' village, is in the midst of the most charming rural scenery in
England, or in the world. There a great part of his youth and early
manhood was passed.
[Illustration: Francis Bacon. [TN]]
He came into this breathing world when the human race were upon the
threshold of the tremendous development which now surrounds us. He was
born sixty-nine years after Columbus had re-opened the long-closed
pathway from the eastern to the western shores of the Atlantic Ocean;
twenty-seven years after the French took possession of Canada; twelve
years after the Portuguese settled in Brazil; and forty-six years before
the first English colonists landed at Jamestown, Va. The degree of
advancement of the mind of the age will be understood when it is
remembered that it was only one hundred and twenty-five years, at the
date of Bacon's birth, since Guttenberg had invented movable types, in
Germany; and but eighty-seven years since Caxton set up his printing
press at Westminster. No man has ever lived who did more than Bacon to
change the opinions and condition of those who came after him.
It was a "day of little things." England contained less than five
million inhabitants, and of these probably not one-tenth spoke a
language which could be understood to-day by the English-using people of
the world. The mass of the populace were steeped to the lips in
brutality and ignorance. The houses of the peasants were built of
"sticks and dirt;" many of them "without chimneys or glazed windows;"
the habits of the people were "inconceivably filthy;" "scurvy and
leprosy were endemic;" the schools did not, as a rule, teach English;
the amusements of the populace were bear-baitings and dancing naked in
barns; the people of one county could not understand the speech of the
inhabitants of the next county; "the disputes about tithes and
boundaries were usually settled by bands of armed men, and the records
of the Star-Chamber swarm with such cases." Education was at a low ebb.
"In one year, 1570 (Bacon was then nine years of age), the scholars of
Trinity College, Cambridge, consumed 2,250 barrels of beer." Many of the
graduates became beggars; and so extensive was this evil that
Parliament, by an act of 14th Elizabeth, declared that "all scholars of
the Universities of Oxford or Cambridge that go about begging, not being
authorized under the seal of the said universities," are declared
"vagabonds" and punished as such. But even this was an improvement on
Henry VIII.'s time when three hundred men were hanged in London for
soliciting alms.
The only illuminated spot in all this darkness was the Court in London.
Here they talked something which we would to-day call English; here they
caught, through France and Italy, a reflected light from the dying
glories of the ancient Roman civilization; here the travelled wealthy,
"the picked men of countries," brought home some of the culture of more
refined races. Bacon says:
"Courts are but only superficial schools
To dandle fools;
The rural parts are turned into a den
Of savage men;
And where's the city, from foul vice so free,
But may be termed the worst of all the three?"
In this curious, primitive, rude, ensmalled age, grew up the great man
who was to do so much to change it all.
From his early years he manifested that vastly active intellect "which
knew no rest save in motion." He studied, as a child, the nature of
echoes in a tunnel. At fifteen years of age (so his chaplain Rawley and
his biographer Spedding assure us), he had realized the shallowness of
the Aristotelian philosophy and had thought out those principles which
have since revolutionized human society. There are reasons to believe
that he was the child of fifteen, referred to by the Rosicrucians, who
planned the foundation of their society, and, at that early age, wrote
the "Chymical Marriage of Christian Rosencreutz," first published in
1616.
At about twelve years of age he went to Cambridge--to Trinity
College--rooming with his brother Anthony, who was two years his senior.
In June, 1576, he left the university and became an _ancient_ of the
Gray's Inn law-society. On September 25, 1576, he accompanied Sir Amias
Paulet, the English ambassador, to France. Here he witnessed the sixth
civil war of the French people. He followed the court through several of
the French provinces; he resided for three months at Poitiers. About
February 17, 1579, he dreamed that his father's house in the country was
all covered over with black mortar. At the same time his father was
taken sick and died in three days thereafter. He returned home on March
20, 1579, to find himself poor. As he said, he could not "live to
study," but had "to study to live." He became a practising lawyer, but
he did not like the profession. He feared "the bar would be his bier;"
it absorbed time which he thought should be dedicated to better ends. We
think we find the expression of his heart in the lines of the so-called
Shakespeare Sonnet:
"O, for my sake, do thou with fortune chide,
The guilty goddess of my harmful deeds,
That did not better for my life provide,
Than public means, which public manners breeds."
His pecuniary embarrassments were numerous, and continuous. Falstaff
doubtless expresses a thought which often recurred to him: "I can get no
remedy against this consumption of the purse; borrowing only lingers and
lingers it out, but the disease is incurable." More than once he was
thrown into a "sponging-house" for debt. His brother Anthony loaned him
money repeatedly. In 1592 a "hard Jew or Lombard" put him in confinement
for a debt on a bond. Anthony mortgaged his property to pay his debts.
In 1594 Malone believes the play of "The Merchant of Venice" was in
existence, in which Bassanio, being in debt to a hard Jew, his friend,
Antonius, mortgages his own flesh to help him out of his troubles; and
the Jew money-lender is sent down through all the ages the terrible type
and exemplar of the merciless usurer. Bacon continues a "briefless
barrister," with much time at his disposal. He helps in the composition
of the play called "The Misfortunes of Arthur." He writes a Sonnet to
the Queen. About this time, 1592, the Shakespeare plays begin to appear.
Bacon assists in the preparation of several "masks" and "revels," gotten
up by Gray's Inn. "The Comedy of Errors" first appears in the hall of
that society, which still stands in London. The "Venus and Adonis" and
"Lucrece" appear, dedicated to Bacon's intimate friend, Lord
Southampton; and that nobleman in 1594 contributes a large sum to the
construction of the _Globe_ play-house, Bacon having observed that the
stage is a powerful instrumentality to "play on the minds" of the
people; and on this stage a series of historical plays are put forth,
everyone of which represents kings as monsters or imbeciles.
The Shakespeare plays continue to be poured forth, and Bacon suffers
from a siege of "Jews and duns." He describes himself "as poor and sick,
working for bread." "I am purposed," he says, "not to follow the
practice of the law." "It is easier," says Mr. Spedding, Bacon's
biographer, "to understand why Bacon was resolved not to devote his life
to the ordinary practice of a lawyer, than what plan he had to clear
himself of the difficulties which were now accumulating upon him, and to
obtain the means of living and working. What course he betook himself to
at the crisis at which we have now arrived, I cannot possibly say." We
have here the time, the opportunity, the incentive, and the necessity
for the composition of the Shakespeare plays; part of the fruits of the
representation of which made Shakespeare very wealthy.
In January, 1597, the first acknowledged work of Bacon--his
"Essays"--was published. They were ten in number. Bacon said of them he
hoped they would be "like the late new half-pence, which, though the
pieces are small, the silver is good."
Until he was forty-four years of age, Bacon was kept poor and out of
office by his uncle Burleigh, and his cousin Cecil; during the life-time
of Queen Elizabeth he was steadily passed over and suppressed; and even
during the first years of the reign of King James I., the influence of
Cecil, then the Earl of Salisbury, was sufficient to keep him out of
office. In 1605, Bacon published his first great philosophical work,
"The Advancement of Learning;" in 1607, he became Solicitor-General; and
in 1612, Attorney-General, and member of the Privy Council. He was then
fifty-one years of age, and Shakespeare forty-eight. After the
appointment of Bacon as Attorney-General, no more of the Shakespeare
plays appeared; the "Tempest," which is evidently the last of the
series, for in it Prospero declares--
"I'll break my staff,
Bury it certain fathoms in the earth,
And deeper than did ever plummet sound,
I'll drown my book;"
is set down by the commentators, as written between 1609 and 1611. At
that time Shakespeare was forty-five or forty-seven years of age, and
lived for five or seven years thereafter in utter intellectual idleness,
in Stratford.
In 1609 Bacon published "The Wisdom of the Ancients," a prose work of
great poetical beauty. His professional practice was large and his
income princely. In 1617 he succeeded Ellesmere, the Lord Chancellor,
with the title of lord-keeper. In January, 1618, he was created lord
high chancellor, and the same year was raised to the peerage as Baron of
Verulam; and in 1621 he was made Viscount St. Albans. The "Novum
Organum," his great life-work, was printed in October, 1620. His
extraordinary industry is revealed in the fact that it had been copied
and revised twelve times before it took its present shape. The new
philosophy meant the study of nature and the acquisition of the
knowledge of things. In this search the "most common," "base, illiberal
and filthy matters," are not to be overlooked. We find in the plays the
same novel philosophy:
"Some kinds of baseness
Are nobly undergone; and most poor matters
Point to rich ends." (Tempest, iii. 1.)
"Bacon's leading thought was the good of humanity. He held that study,
instead of employing itself in wearisome and sterile speculations,
should be engaged in mastering the secrets of nature and life, and in
applying them to human use. His method, in the attainment of this end,
was rigid and pure observation, aided by experiment and fructified by
induction.... He clearly invented a thermometer; he instituted ingenious
experiments on the compressibility of bodies, and on the density and
weight of air; he suggested chemical processes; he suggested the law of
universal gravitation, afterward demonstrated by Newton; he foresaw the
true explication of the tides, and the cause of colors." ["American
Cyclopedia." Vol. II., p. 204.]
This great work, the "Novum Organum," as often happens, was received by
the majority of readers of his time with laughter and ridicule. Coke
wrote on the title-page of a presentation copy:
"It deserveth not to be read in schools,
But to be freighted in the ship of fools."
The ill-fortune which had so shrouded Bacon's struggling youth, and
which had given way to such a magnificent sun-burst of splendid
prosperity, was again massing its clouds and determined to cover his
old age with shame, gloom and sorrow. He had been Lord Chancellor but
three years, when, on March 15, 1621, a committee of the House of
Commons reported two cases of bribery or corruption against him.
Twenty-two other cases were also soon after presented. The House of
Lords proceeded to investigate these charges, and Bacon defended
himself. It was shown that fourteen of the twenty-four cases were
presents given long after the suits were terminated; three more were
sums of money loaned in the ordinary course of business; another case
was an arbitration where compensation was due him; in another case the
gift was sent back; another present, a piece of furniture, had never
been accepted; another case was a New Year's gift, and in other cases
the money was openly paid to the officers of his court. "Thus," says
Hepworth Dixon, "after the most rigid scrutiny into his official acts,
and into the official acts of his servants, not a single fee or
remembrance, traced to the chancellor, can, by any fair construction, be
called a bribe. Not one appears to have been given on a promise; not one
appears to have been given in secret; not one is alleged to have
corrupted justice."
It must be remembered that the salaries of all the high officers of the
government were at that time paid in gifts and fees. Thus the king gave
the lord chancellor but L81 6_s._ 8_d._ a year, while the place was
worth L10,000 to L15,000; worth in our money to-day $125,000. "The
judges had enough to buy their gloves and robes, not more." The lord
chancellor had to maintain a huge retinue: "his court, his household,
and his followers, gentlemen of quality, sons of peers and prelates;
magistrates, deputy lieutenants of counties, knights of the shire, have
all to live on fees and presents." It is still true that in England the
law will not help a barrister or a physician to recover a fee; their
compensation is, in theory, at least, supposed to be a gratuity for
those they serve.
But it may be urged that Bacon plead guilty to corruption and bribery.
He did nothing of the kind. He acknowledged that he "partook of the
abuses of the times," and that the existing customs should be reformed;
but he solemnly declared to Buckingham, May 31, 1621: "I have been a
trusty and honest and Christ-loving friend to your lordship and the
justest chancellor that hath been in the five charges since my father's
time." Again, he said: "I had no bribe or reward in my eye or thought
when I pronounced any sentence or order.... I take myself to be as
innocent as any babe born on St. Innocent's day in my heart." All
attempts to subsequently reverse his decrees failed, although his
enemies were in possession of power. But King James urged him to make no
defence, "to trust his honor and his safety to the crown.... He pleads
guilty to carelessness, not to crime." He desired to live to finish up
his philosophical works. To resist the king's wishes was to leave
himself at the mercy of his life-long enemy, Coke; he yielded. The king
remitted his fine of L40,000 and released him from the Tower. Bacon goes
back to his books and writes in cipher: "I was the justest judge that
was in England these fifty years; but it was the justest censure that
was in Parliament these two hundred years." He meant thereby, that while
personally innocent of corruption, the sentence would end gift-giving
to judges. His formal confession to Parliament is a justification of
every act complained of, for he relieves it, while acknowledging it, of
those details which imply bribery.
He devoted the last five years of his life to putting forth the greatest
works ever published by man; including the first complete edition of the
so-called Shakespeare plays. Fortunate is it for the world that he was
driven from the task of settling petty squabbles about the trash of the
time, listening to "weary lawyers with endless tongues;" adjudicating
questions of pounds, shillings, and pence between litigants whose very
names have disappeared; and was shipwrecked by the stress of the great
storm that struck him, like _Prospero_, on an island of solicitude, with
books that "he prized above his dukedom," to perform labors in which all
mankind will be interested even to the consummation of civilization on
earth.
His patience, his gentleness, his forbearance were saint-like; still in
his right hand he carried "gentle peace to silence envious tongues." His
appearance, we are told, struck all men who beheld him with a great
sense of awe. Those who were most closely associated with him loved him
most dearly. His purposes were Godlike. They were "the glory of the
Creator and the relief of man's estate." Macaulay says of Bacon's
experimental philosophy:
"It has lengthened life; it has mitigated pain; it has extinguished
diseases; it has increased the fertility of the soil; it has given new
securities to the mariner; it has furnished new arms to the warrior; it
has spanned great rivers and estuaries with bridges of form unknown to
our fathers; it has guided the thunderbolt innocuously from heaven to
earth; it has lighted up the night with the splendor of the day; it has
extended the range of the human vision; it has multiplied the power of
human muscle; it has accelerated motion; it has annihilated distance; it
has facilitated intercourse, correspondence, all friendly offices, all
despatch of business; it has enabled men to descend to the depths of the
sea; to soar into the air; to penetrate securely into the noxious
recesses of the earth; to traverse the land with cars which whirl along
without horses; and the ocean with ships which sail against the wind."
In other words, the brain of this tremendous, this incomprehensible,
this complex man, lies at the base of all our literature and of all our
modern progress and civilization. The world is hardly big enough for his
fame, and the praises of mankind cannot fill the measure of his
greatness.
[Signature of the author.]