Bacon's DictionaryAppendices

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The exhibits and miniatures of which are found in this section, are designed to assist the serious student and reader in following the path of the Authorship Controvesy that has been so laboriously persued by many authors and researchers during its commence.

These exhibits have been placed here as not to interrupt the flow of reading in the Baconian Dictionary sections, being a finding list of Bacon’s works, his history, his thoughts and his aims, which are a subject of study and discussion.

Bacon’s Prose

Bacon’s Essays have always been, as he himself says, the “most current” of his works. In substance the very quintessence of the worldly wisdom of his age, they have been most influential in the history of English prose. They have fixed the form of one of our chief kinds of prose writing in essay. Bacon’s Essays are sometimes spoken of as if they were models of good prose for all purposes; but this, as Bacon himself would have been the first to discern, is an indiscriminate praise that is virtually a detraction, inasmuch as it obscures the adaptation of the expression to the design. We miss in them the luminous sequence that we find in his exposition of more definite themes, the close coherence that made Ben Jonson say of his speeches that “his hearers could not cough or look aside without loss.” The Essays are, as he said himself, “dispersed meditations,” detached thoughts on such topics as Studies, Friendship, Ambition, Cunning, Praise, written down as they occurred, without any other connection than their general relevance to the topic. In the original edition of ten, this was indicated by prefixing to each separate meditation the now obsolete mark. Mr. Arber’s careful Harmony of the various editions printed in parallel columns shows how he added to these reflections and illustrated them here and there by happy anecdotes and quotations at each revision. It was a natural incident of this dispersed way of writing that the expression of each thought should have a felicity of its own, independent of its relation to the others; and the author did not mar this by trying to force them into a sequence such as they might have had if one had risen out of another in a continuous stretch of thought. If we forget this, we are apt to do another injustice to Bacon, and to suspect him of a wilful and artful contravention of one of his own precepts.

In a passage which is quoted from the Advancement of Learning, Bacon deprecates “hunting more after words than matter,” and after “the choiceness of the phrase” and “the illustration of the work with tropes and figures,” rather than “weight of matter, width of subject, and depth of judgment.” The words and the matter are certainly well matched in Bacon’s Essays, but, as we can well suppose that it was the casual occurrence of a happy phrase or an apposite figure that moved him to take out his tablets and set his thoughts down, so it is really the choiceness of phrase and figure that has kept his wisdom from perishing. In weight of matter, and depth of judgment, Burghley’s Precepts to his Son are at least equal to Bacon’s Counsels, Civil and Moral; without the saving grace of wit in expression, Bacon’s wisdom might have sunk like his kinsman’s. And yet he could easily have defended himself from a charge of not “recking his own rede” against “hunting more after words than matter.” These Essays are really not so much set compositions as collections of thoughts that have happily shaped themselves in epigrammatic and ornate phrase, that have flowered, as it were, spontaneously. Their diction has much in common with Lyly’s Euphuism, which was the literary fashion of his youth, only there is more body in Bacon’s epigrams, and his similitude, while often equally far-fetched, are not so unscrupulously fantastic and flimsy.

Bacon is distinguished on the one hand from Lyly by his incomparably greater weight of matter and depth of judgment, just as he is distinguished on the other from Burghley by his being an artist in choiceness of phrase. How dearly Bacon loved a brilliant phrase or an ingenious conceit in spite of his protest against hunting after words, is seen by the care with which he gathered and stored in his Essays any flower of speech that incidentally came to him. In reading his State Papers and private letters we often encounter felicities which have been thus carefully garnered. But it would be a mistake to suppose that the style of the Essays is Bacon’s only style. For the reasons we have indicated, this is much more thickly ornamented, much more alive with epigram and ingenious fancy, and much more inconsecutive than when he wrote with a definite end in view.

In his Advancement of Learning, where he maps out and describes the provinces of knowledge, in his State Papers, where he has a policy to recommend, and in his pleadings, where he has a complicated base to present for judgment, what principally strikes us is the compact grouping of details and the luminous order of the whole. It is when we read these works of his that we understand the full force of Ben Jonson’s famous eulogium: “He was full of gravity in his speaking. His language, when he could spare or pass by a jest, was nobly censorious. No man ever spoke more neatly, more prosily, more weightily, or suffered less emptiness, less idleness in what he uttered. No member of his speech but consisted of his own graces. His hearers could not cough or look aside from him without loss. He commanded when he spoke, and had his judges angry and pleased at his devotion. No man had their affections more in his power. The fear of every man that heard him was lest he should make an end.”

A good way of appreciating the different styles that this wonderful wit had at command for different purposes is to compare his Essay, Of the True Greatness of Kingdoms and Estates, with the paper, Of the True Greatness of the Kingdom of Britain, which he presented to King James at his accession. “If his wit be not apt to distinguish or find differences,” Bacon says in the Essay Of Studies, “let him study the Schoolmen.” In his own set expositions he defines, divides, and subdivides with all the ferial precision of a Schoolman, but his strong, ever present sense of the necessity of keeping to a point saves him from becoming tedious. Thus his influence on expository prose told in the direction of what Jonson calls neatness and “prestness,” and against superfluous finicking and irrelevant disquisition. And always anxious as he was to drive a clear impression home, his prose is much less involved in structure than that of many of his contemporaries. He does not, like Hooker, pile clause on clause; he shows a much sounder judgment of what a reader can take in without confusion. He does not seem to have had Hooker’s ear for the music of long periods, which often betrayed the great churchman into intricacy of syntax. Thus, on the whole, Bacon’s prose helped the tendency to avoid cumbrous and involved structure, the tendency that was finally confirmed by Dryden. (Minto). 1 [Also see Part IV: Bacon’s Works].

No one of us, indeed, can deny the existence of a wide chasm between Bacon’s prose and Shakespeare’s poetry. The two sets of works seem at first sight to differ, not in degree only, but also in kind. They are as unlike as the caterpillar and the butterfly, now walking the earth and then mounting on wings into the air. In like manner the true poetic spirit implies a state of being very different from that in which the mind is ordinarily exercised. The poet is a man “beside himself” almost a second personality. Here, then, are two spheres in which every human soul may have a dual being. The seers of our race are those who inhabit both; that is, who look upon life with two angles of vision Reason and Imagination. Of men eminent at once in both of them, Milton, Goethe, and Poe are conspicuous examples. Milton’s Areopagitica is a “cloth of gold,” worthy of the author of Paradise Lost, or better still (according to some critics) of Paradise Regained. Goethe’s mind worked in poetry and prose with equal power. He could soar into the highest regions of creative thought at one moment, and with trained scientific eyes detect a vertebra in a sheep’s skull at another. Poe’s lyric genius was the greatest America has given to the world of literature, but it did not prevent him from giving to it also, in feats of analytical legerdemain, most extraordinary and enduring effects in prose. The question now arises, was Bacon one of these rare spirits?

One commentator in the 1900’s set the “dry light of intellect” in Bacon over against the “warm sunshine” of Shakespeare; another declared that the differences between the two minds are radical, the powers of one being analytical and those of the other synthetical. These two criticisms fairly illustrate the prevailing ignorance of Bacon’s intellectual character. As to the first that Bacon’s intellect was not affected by his heart nothing could possibly be at wider variance with the truth. Even Abbott, a severe critic, says in his Life of Bacon, that the “leading peculiarity of his style is its sympathetic nature.” Whipple also testified to the same effect as follows: “Perhaps the finest sentence in his writings, certainly the one which best indicates the essential feeling of his soul, as he regarded human misery and ignorance, occurs in his description of one of the fathers of Solomon’s House. ‘His countenance,’ he says, ‘was as the countenance of one who pities men.’” 2 Ellis, one of the editors of Bacon’s Works, associated with Spedding, tells us after a prolonged and dispassionate study of Bacon’s writings, that a “deep sense of the misery of mankind is visible throughout all that he wrote. He has often been called a utilitarian, not because he loved truth less than others, but because he loved men more.” It is often said that Bacon could not have written the Shakespearean dramas because, in paraphrasing the Psalms of David, he converted them into doggerel. But Milton also paraphrased the Psalms of David into English verse, and in doggerel as bad as Bacon’s. To the list of testimonies, given by scholars and critics of high standing to Bacon’s poetic powers:

• All his works, his essays, his philosophical writings, commonly so called, and what he has done in history, are of one and the same character, reflective, and, so to speak, poetical. What then is his glory? In what did his greatness consist? In this, we should say: that an intellect, at once one of the most capacious and one of the most profound ever granted to mortal, was in him united and reconciled with an almost equal endowment of the imaginative faculty. (Craik).
• Bacon, like Sidney, was a warbler of poetic prose. No English writer has surpassed him in fervor and brilliancy of style, in force of expression, or in richness and significancy of imagery. (Chambers).
• The poetic faculty was powerful in Bacon’s mind. (Macaulay).
• No one who reads the Essays with care can fail to see that he was gifted with a wonderful reproductive imagination. The house he builds is a real house; we could make a plan of his gardens. Even abstractions, like envy, ambition, vain glory, deformity, are animated by his touch, and move before us like living characters. (Store & Gibson) 3
• Bacon is almost Shakespeare in philosophic garb, so resplendent is his imagination and so versatile his genius. (Edinburgh Review, 1854).
• It has been well said that Bacon’s Essays seem like scraps escaped from Shakespeare’s desk. (Ruggles).
• Another virtue of the book [Bacon’s Essays] is one which is not frequently found in union with the scientific or philosophical intellect; viz., a poetical imagination. Bacon’s similes, for their aptness and their vividness, are of the kind of which Shakespeare, or Goethe, or Kichter might have been proud. (Blackie).
• To this Bacon would bring something of that high poetical spirit which gleams out at every page of his philosophy. (Knight).
• Reason in him works like an instinct; the chain of thought reaches to the highest heaven of invention. (Hazlitt).
• What he conceives as a poet he utters as a prophet. (West).
• We have only to open the Advancement of Learning to see how the Attic bees clustered above the cradle of the new philosophy. Poetry pervaded the thoughts, it inspired the similes, it hymned in the majestic sentences of the wisest of mankind. (Lytton).
• The truth is that Bacon was not without the fine frenzy of the poet. Had his genius taken the ordinary direction, I have little doubt that it would have carried him to a place among the great poets. (Spedding).
• Lord Bacon was a poet. (Shelley).

The following poem was put to music by John Dowland (1562–1626) English composer, virtuoso lutenist, and skilled singer. Between 1609 and 1612 he entered the service of Theophilus, Lord Howard de Walden, and in 1612 he was appointed one of the “musicians for the lutes” to James I. Mrs. Potts, in her Promus, states that the poem was probably written by Francis Bacon.

The Retired Courtier

By

Francis Bacon

His golden locks hath Time to silver turned;

O time too swift! O swiftness never ceasing!

His youth against time and age hath ever spurned,

But spurned in vain; youth waneth by increasing.

Beauty, strength, youth, are fl owers but fading seen,

Duty, faith, love, are roots, and ever green.

His helmet now shall make a hive for bees,

And lovers’ sonnets turn to holy psalms,

A man-at-arms must now serve on his knees,

And feed on prayers which are age’s alms;

But though from court to cottage he depart,

His saint is sure of his unspotted heart.

And when he saddest sits in homely cell,

He’ll teach his swains this carol for a song:

Blest be the hearts that wish my sovereign well!

Curst be the soul that thinks her any wrong!

Goddess, allow this aged man his right,

To be your beadsman now that was your knight.