Bacon | Page 2

out his purposes. All his life long his first and never-sleeping
passion was the romantic and splendid ambition after knowledge, for
the conquest of nature and for the service of man; gathering up in
himself the spirit and longings and efforts of all discoverers and
inventors of the arts, as they are symbolised in the mythical Prometheus.
He rose to the highest place and honour; and yet that place and honour
were but the fringe and adornment of all that made him great. It is
difficult to imagine a grander and more magnificent career; and his
name ranks among the few chosen examples of human achievement.
And yet it was not only an unhappy life; it was a poor life. We expect
that such an overwhelming weight of glory should be borne up by a
character corresponding to it in strength and nobleness. But that is not
what we find. No one ever had a greater idea of what he was made for,
or was fired with a greater desire to devote himself to it. He was all this.
And yet being all this, seeing deep into man's worth, his capacities, his
greatness, his weakness, his sins, he was not true to what he knew. He
cringed to such a man as Buckingham. He sold himself to the corrupt
and ignominious Government of James I. He was willing to be
employed to hunt to death a friend like Essex, guilty, deeply guilty, to
the State, but to Bacon the most loving and generous of benefactors.
With his eyes open he gave himself up without resistance to a system
unworthy of him; he would not see what was evil in it, and chose to call
its evil good; and he was its first and most signal victim.
Bacon has been judged with merciless severity. But he has also been

defended by an advocate whose name alone is almost a guarantee for
the justness of the cause which he takes up, and the innocency of the
client for whom he argues. Mr. Spedding devoted nearly a lifetime, and
all the resources of a fine intellect and an earnest conviction, to make
us revere as well as admire Bacon. But it is vain. It is vain to fight
against the facts of his life: his words, his letters. "Men are made up,"
says a keen observer, "of professions, gifts, and talents; and also of
themselves."[2] With all his greatness, his splendid genius, his
magnificent ideas, his enthusiasm for truth, his passion to be the
benefactor of his kind; with all the charm that made him loved by good
and worthy friends, amiable, courteous, patient, delightful as a
companion, ready to take any trouble--there was in Bacon's "self" a
deep and fatal flaw. He was a pleaser of men. There was in him that
subtle fault, noted and named both by philosophy and religion in the
[Greek: areskos] of Aristotle, the [Greek: anthrôpareskos] of St. Paul,
which is more common than it is pleasant to think, even in good people,
but which if it becomes dominant in a character is ruinous to truth and
power. He was one of the men--there are many of them--who are
unable to release their imagination from the impression of present and
immediate power, face to face with themselves. It seems as if he carried
into conduct the leading rule of his philosophy of nature, parendo
vincitur. In both worlds, moral and physical, he felt himself
encompassed by vast forces, irresistible by direct opposition. Men
whom he wanted to bring round to his purposes were as strange, as
refractory, as obstinate, as impenetrable as the phenomena of the
natural world. It was no use attacking in front, and by a direct trial of
strength, people like Elizabeth or Cecil or James; he might as well
think of forcing some natural power in defiance of natural law. The first
word of his teaching about nature is that she must be won by
observation of her tendencies and demands; the same radical
disposition of temper reveals itself in his dealings with men: they, too,
must be won by yielding to them, by adapting himself to their moods
and ends; by spying into the drift of their humour, by subtly and
pliantly falling in with it, by circuitous and indirect processes, the fruit
of vigilance and patient thought. He thought to direct, while submitting
apparently to be directed. But he mistook his strength. Nature and man
are different powers, and under different laws. He chose to please man,

and not to follow what his soul must have told him was the better way.
He wanted, in his dealings with men, that sincerity on which he insisted
so strongly in his dealings with nature and knowledge. And the ruin of
a great life was the