Bacon | Page 9

and
irreparable overthrow, while it seemed as if he was only measuring his
strength against the rival ambitions of the day, in the same spirit and
with the same object as his competitors, the true motive of all his
eagerness and all his labours was not theirs. He wanted to be powerful,
and still more to be rich; but he wanted to be so, because without power
and without money he could not follow what was to him the only thing
worth following on earth--a real knowledge of the amazing and hitherto
almost unknown world in which he had to live. Bacon, to us, at least, at
this distance, who can only judge him from partial and imperfect
knowledge, often seems to fall far short of what a man should be. He
was not one of the high-minded and proud searchers after knowledge
and truth, like Descartes, who were content to accept a frugal
independence so that their time and their thoughts might be their own.
Bacon was a man of the world, and wished to live in and with the world.
He threatened sometimes retirement, but never with any very serious
intention. In the Court was his element, and there were his hopes. Often
there seems little to distinguish him from the ordinary place-hunters,
obsequious and selfish, of every age; little to distinguish him from the
servile and insincere flatterers, of whom he himself complains, who
crowded the antechambers of the great Queen, content to submit with
smiling face and thankful words to the insolence of her waywardness
and temper, in the hope, more often disappointed than not, of hitting
her taste on some lucky occasion, and being rewarded for the accident
by a place of gain or honour. Bacon's history, as read in his letters, is

not an agreeable one; after every allowance made for the fashions of
language and the necessities of a suitor, there is too much of insincere
profession of disinterestedness, too much of exaggerated profession of
admiration and devoted service, too much of disparagement and
insinuation against others, for a man who respected himself. He
submitted too much to the miserable conditions of rising which he
found. But, nevertheless, it must be said that it was for no mean object,
for no mere private selfishness or vanity, that he endured all this. He
strove hard to be a great man and a rich man. But it was that he might
have his hands free and strong and well furnished to carry forward the
double task of overthrowing ignorance and building up the new and
solid knowledge on which his heart was set--that immense conquest of
nature on behalf of man which he believed to be possible, and of which
he believed himself to have the key.
The letter to Lord Burghley did not help him much. He received the
reversion of a place, the Clerkship of the Council, which did not
become vacant for twenty years. But these years of service declined
and place withheld were busy and useful ones. What he was most intent
upon, and what occupied his deepest and most serious thought, was
unknown to the world round him, and probably not very intelligible to
his few intimate friends, such as his brother Antony and Dr. Andrewes.
Meanwhile he placed his pen at the disposal of the authorities, and
though they regarded him more as a man of study than of practice and
experience, they were glad to make use of it. His versatile genius found
another employment. Besides his affluence in topics, he had the
liveliest fancy and most active imagination. But that he wanted the
sense of poetic fitness and melody, he might almost be supposed, with
his reach and play of thought, to have been capable, as is maintained in
some eccentric modern theories, of writing Shakespeare's plays. No
man ever had a more imaginative power of illustration drawn from the
most remote and most unlikely analogies; analogies often of the
quaintest and most unexpected kind, but often also not only felicitous
in application but profound and true. His powers were early called upon
for some of those sportive compositions in which that age delighted on
occasions of rejoicing or festival. Three of his contributions to these
"devices" have been preserved--two of them composed in honour of the

Queen, as "triumphs," offered by Lord Essex, one probably in 1592 and
another in 1595; a third for a Gray's Inn revel in 1594. The "devices"
themselves were of the common type of the time, extravagant, odd, full
of awkward allegory and absurd flattery, and running to a prolixity
which must make modern lovers of amusement wonder at the patience
of those days; but the "discourses" furnished by Bacon are full of fine
observation and brilliant thought and wit and happy illustration,