INTRODUCTION
One of the sure signs that there is something special about Bacon’s Essays is that they look unbelievably easy to write. So easy, that if we try our hand at the Baconian manner, fragments of the imitation may seem to come out quite close to the originals:
The grain of man be like to wood; rubbed the wrong way doth but ruin the finish.
or
Brutes, we see, do strut apace before their betters, but are, by God’s decree, then named: for Adam ruled the beasts by cases vocative, and every player can call a knave.
Yet if we put fakes like these (which I have written) alongside the genuine stuff, it becomes clear at once that there is something inimitable in Bacon’s style. Words like figures in a tapestry, unfolded and spread out, was how one of Bacon’s wise men defined speech,1 and the unrolling of language into needle-sharp clauses, quotations and sunbright sentences is what keeps the Essays as alert and as readable as they were over three centuries ago. It also keeps them ahead of impersonations, as these extracts will show:
There is… great use of ambitious men in being screens to princes in matters of danger and envy, for no man will take that part, except he be like a seeled dove, that mounts and mounts because he cannot see about him.
(Of Ambition)
He that builds a fair house upon an ill seat, committeth himself to prison.
(Of Building)
… number itself in armies importeth not much where the people is of weak courage; for (as Virgil saith) It never troubles a wolf how many the sheep be.
(Of the True Greatness of Kingdoms and Estates)
The fact is that the writing in the Essays took Bacon almost thirty years to perfect, and that by the time he had finished with it (in 1625) it was one of the major achievements in prose to have come out of the Elizabethan academies and courts of law. Contemporary prose writers like Hooker and Nashe and Donne owed much to the universities and the inns of court, but with Bacon the debt was different and more profound, for he went directly to the dying heart of scholasticism, and there made something come alive after centuries of dreariness. Against everything one might expect, Bacon’s style was born of Tudor school text-books, the university curriculum and the notebooks of keen young lawyers. Perhaps this is what makes it so vulnerable to mimicry,2 for its own history is one of study, memorizing and imitation. If Cicero wrote a line thus, or thus, it was for the Elizabethan undergraduate to break down its grammatical structure, to point to its tropes, to memorize its arrangement, and to frame his own Latin accordingly. So with the law student and pronouncements from the Bench. It is in all these things that we must seek the origins of the Essays; that is, in the mental world which Bacon inherited from medieval book learning, disputation and jurisprudence. Only by reading into this world can we grasp just how much he had to do to arrive at that facility of writing which looks so effortless now.
1
The shape of a man’s mind, so Bacon thought, either ventilated or sucked in knowledge. It could make him either full or empty, gassy or rarified. It could be inflated like a balloon, with vain opinions and nonsense, or draw in discoveries from nature, and from gullible chatterers: ‘if a man be thought secret, it inviteth discovery, as the more close air sucketh in the more open’.3 But if ever there was a mind which could open and shut, and change shape, it was Bacon’s own. When he was most closed (if we wish to read him in Karl Popper’s terms), Bacon was an enemy, apprentice among many masters, of the Open Society: yet when fully dilated, no mind could have been freer than his. In one place he wanted the arts repressed;4 in another, music and painting were to be especially honoured in his ideal state.
But how could he change the shape of other men’s minds, that was the question for Bacon. To hand, he had a tradition of rhetoric over two thousand years old, and a rhetoric which, in its play against logic, might be able to persuade men to think aright. The open palm or the clenched fist, that was how the ancients had characterized the difference between rhetoric, manipulating men into truth, and logic, thumping them into it. The open, welcoming hand of persuasion, or the bunched knuckles of philosophical assertion.5 Bacon was to try them both, and together, with varying success. In 1597, for example, along with the first versions of the Essays, he published a series of hackneyed propositions, subjects for school debate, which allowed him to gut and tear at the commonplaces, or deceits, or colours, of the mind. Sometimes the anatomy was a slow and bloody business. In one instance the colour put forward was that ‘what consists of many divisible parts is greater than that which consists of few, because viewing things part by part makes them seem greater. Further, a lot of things put together give the impression of magnitude, but even more so if there is no order to their arrangement, because the mind cannot take them all in at the same time’.6 This is a scholastic enough beginning, but then follow the reasons why an average schoolboy with poor eyesight (and no one else, surely) might find it credible:
This colour seemeth palpable, for it is not plurality of parts without majority of parts that maketh the total greater; yet nevertheless it often carries the mind away; yea it deceiveth the sense; as it seemeth to the eye a shorter distance of way if it be all dead and continued, than if it have trees or buildings or any other marks whereby the eye may divide it. So when a great monied man hath divided his chests and coins and bags, he seemeth to himself richer than he was, and therefore a way to amplify anything is to break it and to make an anatomy of it in several parts and to examine it according to several circumstances.
This is an educative prose for dunces, written on the principle of an abacus, with clauses on wires, but nevertheless there are some real things in it. They become more evident in the elenchus, or refutation of the colour, even though the writing sheds none of its excess weight of verbs and conjunctions. The colour deceives, so we are told, if
the mind of him that is to be persuaded do of itself over-conceive or prejudge of the greatness of anything; for then the breaking of it will make it seem less, because it maketh it appear more according to the truth: and therefore if a man be in sickness or pain, the time will seem longer without a clock or hour-glass than with it; for the mind doth value every moment, and then the hour doth rather sum up the moments than divide the day. So in a dead plain the way seemeth the longer, because the eye hath preconceived it shorter than the truth, and the frustrating of that maketh it seem longer than the truth.
Clearly, with a style like this, anything will seem longer than the truth, especially the time spent reading through its repetitions. At every instant in this unreal Aristotelian domain, the clauses look as though they are about to accumulate to a halt, and yet somehow the writing manages to wind itself up and begin again. Appropriately enough, there is a clock in Bacon’s mind here, as if he were timing our irritation with the prose, or seeing how long he could stay on his feet, like a barrister in front of the judge, or a teacher in front of his pupils. The idiom seems unalterable, even when (as in the next set of examples) there are subjects very close to Bacon’s heart – heaps of money, smart gardens, and a lot of land. The colour deludes us, in this second case, so he persists, if
the matter broken or divided is not comprehended by the sense or mind at once, in respect of the distracting or scattering of it; and being entire and not divided, is comprehended: as a hundred pounds in heaps of five pounds will show more than in one gross heap, so as the heaps be all upon one table to be seen at once, otherwise not; or flowers growing scattered in divers beds will show more than if they did grow in one bed, so as all those beds be within a plot, that they be object to view at once, otherwise not; and therefore men whose living lieth together in one shire, are commonly counted greater landed than those whose livings are dispersed, though it be more, because of the notice and comprehension.
As might be expected, the colour is no less deceptive in a third (and fourth and fifth) respect, but it is noticeable that in these the examples become more literary, or at least are drawn from books and proverbs. To show that one thing is superior to many, Bacon quotes the remark of Jesus (in Luke 10.41–2), Martha, Martha, you are busy about many things, but one suffices, and he dusts off the old fable from Aesop about the fox and the cat: ‘the fox bragged what a number of shifts and devices he had to get from the hounds, and the cat said she had but one, which was to climb a tree’. From this, with the assumed air of an old politic (he was thirty-six), Bacon derives the moral that ‘a good sure friend is a better help at a pinch than all the stratagems and policies of a man’s own wit’. Suddenly with that line we are very close to the late Essays, although the rest of the prose is still like some wobbly and over-large creature without vertebrae and with too many muscles. What we cannot fail to notice is that the writing has barely held out against the subject. We begin with a sophism about size and parts, followed by examples of why the proposal might seem believable, and then other instances that show us how easily it can mislead. Yet what matters here is not the finickiness of schoolroom debate, but the examples Bacon has used as illustration. There is that commonplace about foreshortening a distance with buildings and trees; then the great monied man dividing and laying out his bags and chests; then the sick man watching away the dreary hours of boredom and pain without a clock; then the heaps of money on the table; then the arrangement of flower-beds in some great garden; then the maps of wealth for landowners whose properties are compact and contiguous; and so on. We do not need to be Renaissance logicians to see the sharp end of the stick in this. In a refutation which claims that multiplicity of form and substance, introduced serially to the mind, is what confuses us, these heterogeneous and distinct figures are not at all neutral. They too are divisible parts in a unity, imaginative examples in a single rhetorical debate, and therefore they are also evidence presented within that debate. The rhetorical footwork is a bit cumbersome but we are supposed to see that the greater the difference between each illustration or imaginative specimen, where disunity and separation are more apparent than unity of argument, the more the refutation is suspect, even undermined. We know that Bacon is fully aware of this, because he gives up trying to falsify the proposition almost the moment he begins. When he acknowledges that the eye can be deceived by tricks of perspective, or scale, or a field of sight, he admits plurality of experience if not plurality of truth. If you stand in one position in a garden, then its flower-beds will support your argument; in another position, the eye cannot take in all the beds, and the argument doesn’t hold. There aren’t two truths here, or anything of that kind, but there are two (or more) vantage-points in the garden, and ways of viewing things in the head.
It is no wonder that Bacon’s writing almost gives way at the knee joints in all of this. The clauses are broken up and carried around and around the syntax like some endless luggage belt at an airport until they bang into abbreviated phrases like otherwise not. Nonetheless the very clumsiness of the prose helps us to remember that it is an art form and not an instrument of philosophy, an art which pieces together (however badly) rather than one that takes apart. We may pose the distinction as a question. Is Bacon trying to demonstrate that this proposition about size is duplicitous, indolent and stupid, and should be expelled from the mind, or does his prose, even without a spine, trace out the figures, the perspectives and the (coloured) shapes of thinking itself? Interpreted one way, as a piece of dialectic, there is a choice between truth and falsehood, and a few suggestions on how to detect fraud or error in comparable cases: but read as an art form, a literary one, there is the experience of moving among the contradictions, the clutter, and (in philosophical terms) the accidents of the mind, the indeterminate but unavoidable properties of thought and language. In 1597, the writing is broken and dry, and looped unattractively around its subject, but even here, where his style is at its weakest, Bacon has an eye, one we can’t resist, for restoring what is unnoticed, incidental and forgettable to some prominence in the mind. Our passage is from coins to flower-beds, from a sick-room to a map, from Christ’s annoyance with Martha to a plain without trees. It is a rhetorical progress, although these imaginative bits are still only the flotsam of knowledge and they barely stay above the surface of the prose.
The suggestion that Bacon was concerned with accidents as much as with substantives, with words, rhetoric and the imaginative routes of thought just as much as scientific truth, may still be a heresy among Baconians, if no one else. Bacon himself would probably not have been too pleased at the notion. Year after year, in notebook after notebook, he attacked the Schoolmen, the medieval scholars who wrote their lectures with Aristotle instead of Nature before them, the graduates of an education which required only obedience to the classics, and their commentators, and an inventiveness with words. The very nature of words, so he wrote, being vague and ill-defined, was a source of illusion, for language embalmed in itself the mistakes and vulgar self-deceptions of the past,7 and kept making imaginative wholes, or theories, or even poems in the present. Even so, it is still possible to argue, in spite of Bacon’s insistent repudiation of the Schoolmen, and their fabrications, that his own writing was not always as unimaginative, or as mindless (I mean this exactly), as he proposed it should be. One instance of his attack on the mind, or at least its creative potency, shows just how much he could contradict himself. In The Masculine Birth of Time, which he wrote in Latin in 1603, he makes a father explain to a son how easy it is to conceive:
The human mind in studying nature becomes big under the impact of things and brings forth a teeming brood of errors. Aristotle stands for the tallest growth of one kind of error, Plato of another… Now you would like me to confute them individually… [but] that would be to sin on the grand scale against the golden future of the human race, to sacrifice its promise of dominion by turning aside to attack transitory shadows. The need is to set up in the midst one bright and radiant light of truth, shedding its beams in all directions and dispelling all errors in a moment. It is pointless to light pale candles and carry them about to every nook and cranny of error and falsehood. I would have you learn to hate that for which you ask. Believe me, it is to sin against the light.8
There are two tropes in this. One represents the study of nature as sexual intercourse, gestation, birth and growth to maturity; while the other divides a dark present from a golden future, and a room of obscure ignorance from one lit by understanding. Looked at separately, the tropes are neither unusual nor particularly effective, but when they combine with one another the result is much more disturbing. The formal conjunction is the father’s refusal to be bothered by Plato and Aristotle (‘you would like me to confute them individually’) which links the brood of errors to the danger of sinning on the grand scale, and then to the transitory shadows. From there the images move in sequence through a single light expelling error, through nooks and crannies, and a candle in the dark, and on to sin again, this time against the light itself. The chain of images begins with the mind impregnated and growing big, passes through rooms of shadows and dark corners, and ends with the lights switched on. Even in translation, it is obvious that the two tropes, bonded together like this, are more inventive and interesting than they should be. They almost constitute a subtext, connecting the mind’s fecundity and begetting to unlit rooms and sinful shadows. The rhetoric is probably not subversive enough for that, but it does demonstrate that the creative mind is more than a match for any attempts to curb creativity. Bacon’s views on the imaginative or experiential life of writing are of no importance here. Whether or not, as he saw it, words, language, and the texts of Aristotle had been perverted by medieval writers, and by mankind in general, his own essays, advice and interpretation were still made out of, and are to be judged as, literate experience. Quite late in life Bacon seems to have realized this himself, and the term literate or learned experience (in the Latin, literata experientia) is his own.9 It is applied to various kinds of experiment, rather than kinds of experience and verbal testimony (the Aesop fable, the exemplum of the clock-watching invalid), but it does place some trust in the subtlety of the mind, and its capacity to learn; and it does imply a deferral of mind, a putting off of conclusions, which is relevant to his own writing.
2
There were other types of language about which one could learn. Aphorisms, sententiae, maxims, proverbs – they formed a whole genus of writing which Bacon called broken knowledge.10 They were the building blocks of his writing life, the primary verbal code out of which he made his style. They were so minimal, so atomic, that he was sure there was nothing smaller in language that made its own sense. Building up from these, from their irreducible base, there might be a new beginning. And this broken knowledge was simply everywhere, in the ruins of ancient books, and in the foundations of new ones. Bacon, just as much as anyone else in the Renaissance who read books, and marked them, and tried to use their reading, was constantly on the look-out for new aphorisms, in any language. He didn’t mind making up a few, either. On one occasion he was watching some fishermen casting their nets in the Thames. He offered them a price for their catch before it came in, but they wanted more. When they drew up their net, and it contained only two or three small fish, Bacon told them ‘it had been better for them to have taken his offer. They replied, they hoped to have had a better draught. But, said his lordship, hope is a good breakfast, but an ill supper.’11 In his Essays and other literary writing the sententiae are certainly more polished, rounded, and they strike deeper, like musket-balls, but the metal is just the same, and from the same armoury as hope is a good breakfast, but an ill supper. Compare the velocity and thrust of these: if a man look sharply and attentively, he shall see Fortune: for though she be blind, yet she is not invisible; or Suspicions amongst thoughts are like bats amongst birds: they ever fly by twilight; or extreme self-lovers… will set an house on fire, and it were but to roast their eggs.12 There can be no question but that these vindicate, however indirectly, the hours sweated out by Tudor scholarship, teaching the mind to pack and unpack its words. Yet if all Bacon had done was to strike off a few more sentences and pithy sayings, he would not have added much to the books already stuffed with extracts from ancient authors, the equivalents in the Renaissance to our own crammer notes and guides. What he did that was new, and he seems to have been alone in this, at least in English sources, was to set up one sententia against another and to conceive of the opposition as thesis and antithesis, proposition and counter-proposition.13 In 1623 he published forty-seven sets of Latin sentences split down the middle by a column of white page, a no-man’s land where either, or neither, side of the contraries could be true. Under Cruelty, for example, were these:
For. |
Against. |
None of the virtues has
so many crimes to answer
for as clemency. |
To delight in blood, one
must be either a wild
beast or a Fury. |
Cruelty, if it proceeds
from revenge, is justice,
if from danger, prudence. |
To a good man cruelty
always seems fabulous,
and some tragical fiction. |
He that has mercy on his
enemy has no mercy on
himself. |
|
Bloodlettings are not
oftener necessary in
medicine than executions
in states. |
|
Bacon does not give a very convincing account of why these aphorisms, or Antitheses of Things as he calls them, are parcelled and sewn up like this. He says that he got the idea from the preparatory store of rhetoric, recommended by Cicero, in which the orator was to have commonplaces ready at hand to debate a question on both sides. But where Cicero had devised his system for judicial oratory, Bacon wanted to take in everything. All topics were to be studied and prepared beforehand, in the form of a debate, with the case ‘exaggerated both ways with the utmost force of wit, and urged unfairly, as it were, and quite beyond the truth’.14
Explained like this, Bacon’s scheme sounds painfully threadbare, an old dodge for a hard-pressed and second-rate speaker, and it reminds us of those memoranda that he was forever writing down in his personal notes. Stop breathing too quickly when speaking at the Council table, he tells himself urgently in one note. Have a lake and island dug for a model garden, and impress Lord Salisbury with them, in another. Put together a history of marvels and contraptions, and find out just how much Salisbury is worth, in two more.15 In 1623, in the Antitheses of Things, for everyone, whether lawyer, parliamentarian, moral adviser, scientific counsellor, Lord Chancellor or someone who was simply tempted to kick his dog, there were reels of advice on Cruelty to be memorized strip by strip ready for the occasion. This all seems so pedestrian, so hand-cranking a method, that one wonders if Bacon took the slightest notice of such laboured counsel. His own delivery on and off the Bench seems to have been pure silver. The poet Ben Jonson, not an easy man to please, declared that no one ever spoke ‘more neatly, more pressly [precisely], more weightily, or suffered less emptiness, less idleness’ in his speech than Bacon. His ‘hearers could not cough, or look aside from him, without loss’ and the ‘fear of every man that heard him was lest he should make an end’.16 But even if, after all, Bacon did acquire his volubility and compactness and ready speech from these lists, they were yet still more important to his art of writing. Indeed, many of the Essays begin with and are sustained by the sentences marshalled here. Under the audit of Wife and Children, say, there are five maxims for, and five against. Four of these appear in the essay Of Marriage and Single Life, two from either side of the account:
He that hath wife and children hath given hostages to fortune [against]… the best works… have proceeded from the unmarried or childless men [against]… Unmarried men are… not always best subjects, for they are light to run away [for]… wife and children are a kind of discipline of humanity; and single men… are more cruel and hard-hearted [for].
Once we appreciate that much of Bacon’s writing is compounded from the acknowledged contradictions between such sententiae, then the Essays in particular can be understood as a rhetorical art form rather than a digest of popular philosophy or a set of fireside homilies. If the essay Of Marriage and Single Life is construed as counsel – that is, forensic debate designed to test the strength of a case one way and the other – then it can be distinguished from books giving real advice (like, don’t marry, shoot your wife or invest in your children’s education) and the other countless literary exercises going under the name of essays. This needs to be in our minds all the time if we are to avoid reading Bacon as though he were telling us something new, or verifiable, or as though he had penetrated the mysteries of human behaviour through his reading and close observation. In this same essay he writes that
Chaste women are often proud and froward, as presuming upon the merit of their chastity. It is one of the best bonds both of chastity and obedience in the wife if she think her husband wise, which she will never do if she find him jealous. Wives are young men’s mistresses, companions for middle age, and old men’s nurses.
The most comment that such passages normally attract is that they point up Bacon’s tough reasonableness, or his misanthropy, or his reptilian nature, or his misogyny, or even (more surprisingly) his acuteness. Yet one hardly needs to read an essay by Lord Bacon to divide up a woman’s life or the lives of women into mistress, lady companion and nurse. As for his remarks about chaste women, these should be useful or useless according to their accuracy, and the extent to which they can be tested. Just how one tests for chastity and correlates it with a woman’s pushy behaviour is left to the imagination. Once we ask the really hard questions about marriage and single lives – are they pestered or lonely, savage or over-civilized, smothering or bleak — we will realize what this essay, and its companions, are not trying to do. Instead of having an emotional interior, into which we are invited, it makes a series of rapid intellectual passes across and conjunctions with the verbal knots and ties that have been taken out of books and which are called sententiae. Put it this way: in the Essays, Bacon tries to write a prose, or create a style, which can cross that ditch of blank whiteness between one maxim and its opposing number. The Essays, at their etymological root, are assays, attempts to hold together thesis and antithesis, love and hatred, marriage and single life. But for the most part Bacon doesn’t seem prepared to give away much about marriage, love, or anything else. If we recall the exceptions, it is precisely because they are so rare, and because, in some cases, as Jonson again pointed out, Bacon couldn’t resist a joke, especially at the expense of an enemy (as with the remark, pointing at the hunchbacked Robert, Earl of Salisbury– ‘Deformed persons are commonly even with nature: for as nature hath done ill by them, so do they by nature’17).
Yet still it is true that in the Essays, and other of Bacon’s writings, the imaginative life is vested in a geometry of contradictory utterances rather than in the emotional densities or feelings the thought moves into. Consider another paragraph, in these terms, from Of Friendship:
A principal fruit of friendship is the ease and discharge of the fullness and swellings of the heart, which passions of all kinds do cause and induce. We know diseases of stoppings and suffocations are the most dangerous in the body, and it is not much otherwise in the mind: you may take sarza to open the liver, steel to open the spleen, flowers of sulphur for the lungs, castoreum for the brain; but no receipt openeth the heart but a true friend, to whom you may impart griefs, joys, fears, hopes, suspicions, counsels, and whatsoever lieth upon the heart to oppress it, in a kind of civil shrift or confession.
The line of connection here, the intellectuality poised in movement between one truth and another, crosses a divide between the body, or at least the heart, conceived of as an anatomical gadget, needing mechanical if not medical solvents to rectify its faults, and (in contradistinction) the heart as the meeting-place of spirit, psychology and emotion which can be opened by no medicines, but friendship. The assay in this instance passes between the heart as a vulnerable and physical bag of blood, and the heart as the source of unseen, unphysical but undeniable human energies. If this seems at all primitive to us, seems lost in alchemical half-truths and half-lies, we should remind ourselves just how early a mind Bacon’s is. And more, we should make some allowance for a choice which does not seem to have been available to him. Without choosing to write poetry – or even being sure that poetry wasn’t simply a falsifying of human understanding – he imitates the impossible and implausible connections the mind tries to make between yes and no, black and white, unity and diversity, open and closed.
Tracing back through the published sequence of Essays, from the final edition in 1625 to the one in 1612 and then to the first versions in 1597, we find everywhere a perceptible thinning out of the prose between this or that observation or maxim. In 1597 and 1612, Of Suitors begins ‘Many ill matters are undertaken, and many good matters with ill minds’, but in 1625 the alliterative doubling on many, matters and minds, and the single fulcrum of undertaken is changed into something very fancy indeed:
Many ill matters and projects are undertaken, and private suits do putrefy the public good. Many good matters are undertaken with bad minds; I mean not only corrupt minds, but crafty minds that intend not performance.18
The paragraph ends with performance, as it should, for this is a fugue made out of a simple melody. The words pass over and around and through and across one unchanging and perplexing contradiction: that bad minds can conceive of and accomplish good things. In 1597, in Of Studies, one set of injunctions (a famous one) begins as ‘Read not to contradict, nor to believe, but to weigh and consider’, but in 1625 the first two infinitives split open, and another clause branches its way into the sentence:
Read not to contradict and confute; nor to believe and take for granted; nor to find talk and discourse; but to weigh and consider.
What starts as twelve words, in a brief symmetry of one imperative controlling two positives and two negatives, becomes twenty-four words: still a single imperative, but now four paired infinitives, made asymmetrical in total, three negatives against one positive. Evidently in 1625 it is the scheme of the words, the rhetorical design upon the reader, which interests Bacon. As he himself observed in that colour about divisibility and size, breaking up something can make it seem less, and this is certainly true of stylistic analysis, but in this case it does explain how the Essays changed shape, on occasions out of all recognition, moving away from notebook readings towards reading itself. Moving, in other words, from reading which has finished and is displayed in a literary mortuary (where men have thought this aphorism, or that, or that; and they have left it dead or rootless) to readings which cannot be finished because the writing can’t cross the interstices so finally that these conflicting aphorisms, maxims and other verbal authorities are reconciled. In 1625, the Essays are like an expanding universe, moving outwards, filling space so as to be able to join up within what is irreconcilable matter: the conjunctions striven for are impossible, but the words continue to flow in. So much so, in some instances, that the prose can become heavily literary, or even flatulent. There is no 1597 text of the essay Of the True Greatness of Kingdoms and Estates, but even by itself the 1625 version (twice the length of 1612) makes this point about the plenitude, if not surfeiting of words. It opens with:
The speech of Themistocles the Athenian, which was haughty and arrogant in taking so much to himself, had been a grave and wise observation and censure, applied at large to others. Desired at a feast to touch a lute, he said, He could not fiddle, but yet he could make a small town a great city. These words (holpen a little with a metaphor) may express two differing abilities in those that deal in business of estate. For if a true survey be taken of counsellors and statesmen, there may be found (though rarely) those which can make a small state great, and yet cannot fiddle: as, on the other side, there will be found a great many that can fiddle very cunningly, but yet are so far from being able to make a small state great, as their gift lieth the other way – to bring a great and flourishing estate to ruin and decay.
In this everything depends on the aphorism, quarried from Plutarch, He could not fiddle, but yet he could make a small town a great city. The sentence is exact and quite self-evident, yet the prose massages it as if it were some conundrum or mystery of language. Playing the fiddle, or fiddling the state, or having fingers to make nations but not draw the bow, are phrases which bristle to get out and sting the reader, but Bacon slows everything down because he wants to show how lubricious his style has become. The rhymes are one sign of decadence (state/great, great/estate, way/decay), as is the pedantry about needing help from a metaphor, and the pairings, more for the ear than the sense, counsellors and statesmen, haughty and arrogant, observation and censure. Fortunately, in the late Essays Bacon does not falter very often, but where he does it is because he has failed to distinguish between sentences and sententiousness, between a style approaching judgements, and the mannerisms of the judge. The last is a phoney, an assumed gravitas which tries to usher the reader past a problem (here, that some statesmen can make a kingdom, and others unmake it). By contrast, in, say, the essay Of Ceremonies and Respects, there is a style made out of literata experientia, the experience of learning, of making up and remaking one’s mind with subtle and elegant qualification:
Not to use ceremonies at all is to teach others not to use them again, and so diminisheth respect to himself (especially they be not to be omitted to strangers and formal natures); but the dwelling upon them and exalting them above the moon is not only tedious but doth diminish the faith and credit of him that speaks. And certainly there is a kind of conveying of effectual and imprinting passages amongst compliments, which is of singular use, if a man can hit upon it.
3
Bacon’s education in words and things, and how to put them together, began early. In the long gallery of his family home at Gorhambury, in Hertfordshire, were tall windows in which were set stained-glass figures of beasts, trees, plants and flowers from the four known continents. On the walls and wooden panelling between each window there would have been, as in most Elizabethan great houses, a set of portraits, and perhaps mythological paintings, and just possibly a continental landscape. At Gorhambury, though, there was something else, for above each panel, painted on to a wooden frieze, were Latin inscriptions, the maxims and sententiae which Bacon’s father had culled from Seneca and Cicero. Sometimes single, sometimes paired, on fortune, law, ambition, injustice, benefits, and poverty and riches, the inscriptions were as predictable and as laconic as ever. In one place, De Amore was squeezed into Amor, insana amicitia: illius affectus: istius ratio, causa: at ea sola amicitia durat, cui virtus basis est.19 We have seen already that the truth of these mottoes was not of the first significance. As the Bacon family walked the length of their gallery, all sides of the chamber posed for them the difficulty of the inwardness and veracity of things, pictures and words. What substance was there, other than paint, to the figures and surfaces on the walls – were they more deceitful and vain than the Latin phrases, retrieved from the past and made to crown each part of the woodwork? Language and pictures, each medium was impenetrable, but there were also those windows, shot through with light, in which the whole world’s natural history might be displayed. Portraits in oils, words in gold lettering on dark wood, glass images of nature lit from behind by daylight: the panelled room at Gorhambury, by no means exceptional, was a Tudor allegory of the mind’s perplexity, and of its longing to get into things, and language, and make them reveal their inner truths. There was an urgency to this, even a nervousness, grabbing at understanding, with which the room collaborated. Not a space on the walls to be wasted, not a moment of leisure squandered in mere promenading. Every inch, and every moment to be educative: inscriptions to be verified against representations of nature, and man, from one alcove to the next. Whether or not this was exactly how the young Francis’s mind was formed is not all that important, but that gallery and its long panels and windows are emblematic of the way his thought was to develop, reading and testing the words of antiquity against the light within and from outside solid bodies. This is as true of his rhetoric, shapes of words to name and create words, as of his science.
Light, as much as time and space, bends so much in the universe envisaged for us by Einstein that it scarcely seems worth asking what Bacon made of it, whether light for him was alert or inert, a dead or a live substance. In our century unimaginable equations have made infinitude and its retreating and curving perimeters so incomprehensible that Bacon’s notion of light as a divine revelation, or as an instrument of discovery, has now become suspect. Yet even now in our uncertainties the sundering of darkness by light still figures for us the triumph of truth over falsehood, of wisdom over ignorance, of good over bad. For Bacon, four centuries ago, the light in men’s heads had begun as pure knowledge (God had put it there), but it was also a physical substance, porous and capable of being stained by fear and sloth. Our understanding, he explained in the Novum Organum,
is no dry light; it is drenched and steeped in our will and feelings… We turn away from things hard to discover because we cannot bear the pains of research, we turn away from what is cooling to the imagination because it narrows our hopes, away from the deeper secrets of Nature because we have superstitious fears, away from the light that comes from doing experiments because we are too arrogant and proud to allow the mind to be occupied by low concerns… In a thousand ways… our minds are dyed and stained by our feelings.20
Writing like this, Bacon is most distant and closest to us at one and the same moment. His pleas for experimental research have certainly been answered in the centuries that separate us, but if we think for an instant too long of the physiological explanations here, the whole proposition dissolves into a mush of pre-Galenic absurdity. It appears by this that the imagination can be cooled down by the friction of research (where the work of experiments apparently restricts and counteracts energy of mind), while light passes in and out of the head through a wash of feelings, and is saturated in the process. It won’t do to suggest that Bacon is only writing figuratively here, because he isn’t. In the fourth book of The Advancement of Learning, he complains that light has not been studied scientifically, and that it has been extruded too quickly from physics. He rejects confused theories that arise from attributing false origins to what are its unstudied physical properties, and he proposes that men of science inquire into what it is that ‘is common to all lucid bodies; in other words, into the Form of Light. For see what an immense difference of body there is… between the sun and rotten wood, or even the putrefied scales of fish’.21 Scientists should also ask ‘why some things take fire and throw out light when heated, and others not’. On a hot night at sea, what causes the water on the oars to glitter and shine, why do glow-worms and fireflies give off light, and why do the eyes of certain animals glow in the dark? The questions are interesting, but they begin with a premise, endemic in the Renaissance and before, that light is emitted by all substances, whether human or animal, liquid or solid, alive or decaying. What is to be identified is the factor of light in every material structure, not (as we might now ask) what are the reflective properties of a substance as it receives visible emissions, or electromagnetic radiation from the sun or firelight or an electric bulb. When he writes of the light of understanding Bacon is describing a property within the human body, located within the head, constituted by the physical activity of human organs (worked upon by the sensible soul, itself the agent of the rational soul, inspired into man by God).
Is this a scientific naming of light, then, or at least a show of how science might name something like light? Before we make up our minds, it is worth noting that Bacon’s idea of dry light is based not on any observation or measurement (other than glancing at the scales on a dead fish), but on yet another piece of ancient writing, this time an apophthegm from Heraclitus, the pre-Socratic philosopher who lived five hundred years before Christ:
Heraclitus the Obscure said; The dry light was the best soul. Meaning, when the faculties intellectual are in vigour, not wet, nor, as it were, blooded by the affections.22
To us this may be valuable or misleading (especially as a first principle for a science), but it was a remark that Bacon couldn’t leave alone. In The Advancement of Learning he wrote that ‘Heraclitus the profound said, Lumen siccum optima anima’,23 and in the essay Of Friendship he could find no higher praise for a friend’s advice than, once more, the enigma, ‘Dry light is ever the best’, because the light a man receives in ‘counsel from another is drier and purer’ than that from his own judgement. According to Bacon this saying is from a source profound, obscure and enigmatic, the very opposite of dry light, and this if nothing else should make us suspicious. The pure light of understanding appears to come out of a dark well of thought. We must not dismiss this as confused thinking. The remark from Heraclitus conceals something which Bacon wants to draw up out of it, to make his science strong and holy.24 What we must recognize is that this involves a rhetorical activity as much as a scientific one, the naming of things unimaginable (or unrevealed) as much as the description of real things. Bacon worried at this distinction for years, but although he kept them apart in theory, rhetoric and science were always in collusion in his writing.
There are names for non-existent objects as well as for real things, he argues in the Novum Organum, and some objects are nameless because they have not yet been identified. But some unreal figments of the imagination ‘are treated as if they were real and named as such. Some names refer to real things but they do it in a confused way. Some definitions of qualities are based on aspects not permanently characteristic of real objects. Examples of the former sort are Fortune, the Prime Mover, Planetary Orbits, the Element of Fire, and such-like fancies based on meaningless or false theories’. These last, the rhetorical names for unreal things, can be dismissed easily, he claims, if only we are rigorous enough in challenging them. But it is more difficult to undo mistakes in naming real things. For example, humidum, the Latin word for moist or wet, stands for too many different things:
It is applied, firstly, to whatever flows easily round another body; secondly, to what has no fixed shape or consistency; thirdly, to what yields to pressure from any direction; fourthly, to what is easily divisible and is easily scattered; fifthly, to what readily joins up and forms into a continuous substance; sixthly, to what readily flows and is easily set in motion; seventhly, to what easily sticks to and wets the surface of another body; eighthly, to what is easily liquefied and melts easily.25
When each of these properties has a separate name assigned to it, men will be able to eliminate absurdities of definition (whereby a flame can be humid, as well as glass and fine dust). So much for the scientific naming, but we should not miss the rhetorical one which accompanies it. What links all of these things together is not just the surcharged word humidum, but the unwritten words liquidity of form. Bacon knocks humidum on the head, but he can’t stop all these things making another coherence, in which each substance is measured in terms of its internal freedom, its capacity to stick, flow, resist pressure, reshape, react, melt, join up and liquefy. Certainly this is not good science, but it shows how irrepressible Bacon’s words are in making unreal (or at least unrevealed) categories, even when he is trying most vigorously to scotch them. Despite himself, he arranges these (allegedly) disparate elements in a rhetorical figure which compares their inner resistance.
This is a clue for understanding the apophthegm about dry light, and its place in the mind. In the passage from the Novum Organum quoted above (p. 30), Bacon tells us that human understanding is light suffused and defiled by will and feelings. Because we dislike hard work we avoid ‘the pains of research’, because we have big ambitions we keep away from the narrower horizons of science, and because we are timid and superstitious we shun ‘the deeper secrets of Nature’. In all, we hide from ‘the light that comes from doing experiments’. This barely registers as a scientific account of intellectual activity compromised by emotion, but its rhetorical shape is much more visible. It figures impatience, pride, fear, a longing for knowledge, pain and hard work, and a light from which we turn – in short all the elements of the story of sin and disgrace in Genesis. The unwritten words this time are Man’s Fall in the Garden of Eden, and the passage is a trope, or rhetorical transformation, which brings forward the Biblical story of disobedience and lost purity, and roots it in Bacon’s new way of thinking, the new organon. But the past is part of the Baconian future as well as the present, because the old pure light which Adam knew in Eden is also the goal of the new science.
This is not an easy notion, and to understand it we need to know something of Bacon’s theory of rhetoric. In this, the mind can be thought of as a balance, on one side the affections, on the other reason, with the pivot, the imagination. Mental health is achieved when the scales are in equilibrium, but there is a fundamental difference between the weights, because the
affection beholdeth merely the present; reason beholdeth the future and sum of time. And therefore the present filling the imagination more, reason is commonly vanquished; but after that force of eloquence and persuasion [i.e. rhetoric] hath made things future and remote appear as present, then upon the revolt of the imagination reason prevaileth.26
Rhetoric makes the future, the not yet real or even imaginable ‘appear as present’: it corrects the deficiency of reason, which can envisage only the future (and sum of time) and corrects the affections, which are immobile in the present. When Bacon writes of dry light and fallen man’s search for knowledge, and fear of it, his rhetoric is a trope for the unimaginable. What he is imagining is purity of thought, dry light in Adam’s mind, lost in Eden but which science will bring back to man. (Just how distant this purity has become is the subject of the essay Of Truth, also grounded in Genesis. See the discussion below, pp. 43–4.) The future is only a name here, something which cannot even be depicted, but it is no less real than the things which scientists are to describe and measure. Indeed, Bacon’s literary understatements, meaning beneath the surface, prefigure what science cannot yet deal with. What he only half perceives and intuitively responds to is traced in rhetorical outlines before the science of measurement, observation and tabulation can even begin. In this sense rhetorical tropes are very close to scientific hypothesis, the faculty of theory which Bacon is often accused of having undervalued.27 As he put it himself in 1603, ‘the knowledge which we now possess will not teach a man even what to wish for’.28 The device of rhetoric, a proleptic naming, was to supply exactly that deficiency.
In the Essays, too, in subjects not normally thought of as at all scientific, there is evidence of words anticipating things. In the essay Of Riches, the things themselves are of limited practical value:
Of great riches there is no real use, except it be in the distribution; the rest is but conceit. So saith Solomon, Where much is, there are many to consume it; and what hath the owner but the sight of it with his eyes?
You can pick up gold bars, or look at them, or count coins into bags, or weigh them, or put them into strong boxes or on tables, or move them upstairs or from one side of the room to the other, but there is little else to riches as tangible objects. So few other practical uses have they, that most of the essay is given over to the various ways, good and bad, of obtaining, augmenting and accepting riches. It concerns itself with the transactions of wealth, the activity of men passing money between themselves, and the most efficient ways of doing it.
The improvement of the ground is the most natural obtaining of riches, for it is our great mother’s blessing, the earth’s; but it is slow. And yet where men of great wealth do stoop to husbandry, it multiplieth riches exceedingly. I knew a nobleman in England, that had the greatest audits of any man in my time: a great grazier, a great sheep-master, a great timber-man, a great collier, a great corn-master, a great lead-man, and so of iron, and a number of the like points of husbandry: so as the earth seemed a sea to him, in respect of the perpetual importation.
The real things are soon put aside here. The earth and man working with it, a natural alliance, give way to an earth transmogrified into the sea, bringing in (importing) rather than giving out from the roots. The sleight of hand that achieves this is in the phrase ‘men of great wealth do stoop to husbandry’, because this stooping has nothing to do with bending one’s back and planting, but taking time to look in ledger books, diversify investment and outpace the return of the land. This nobleman’s activity is not in rearing, mining, growing, smelting and selling, nor in wood, metal or wool. It is in the intangible audits and planning and management of the estate. What Bacon glimpses here, as elsewhere in the essay, is that wealth is a calibration of human relationships rather than bags of money piled up in a treasury or corn stored in a barn. Even the language of service and labour, real enough in Jacobean England, gives way to jargon, and wheeling and dealing:
… the gains of bargains are of a… doubtful nature, when men shall wait upon others’ necessity, broke by servants and instruments to draw them on, put off others cunningly that would be better chapmen, and the like practices, which are crafty and naught. As for the chopping of bargains, when a man buys not to hold, but to sell over again, that commonly grindeth double, both upon the seller and upon the buyer.
Grinding, chopping, waiting on, holding, putting off, drawing on – the verbs remind us of their physicality, but are at once submerged into the language of commerce and sharp dealing in the marketplace. It is a vocabulary quickly slipping from the real to the invisible. The smooth operator doesn’t buy to possess, doesn’t deal directly with his customers or rivals, doesn’t touch the realness of money or merchandise. What is anticipated here is a time – our own – when all the substance of riches, metals and grain, will have disappeared into bank statements and rates of exchange.
Bacon is not always as prescient as this about money matters. In Of Usury he is still stuck with medieval ideas of wealth as a fixed commodity, a predetermined total to be divided among a set of players (king, government, merchants and financiers). All the same, in Of Riches he clearly recognizes that, say, market values can be manipulated by moving and delaying capital: ‘when a man’s stock is come to that, that he can expect the prime of markets, and overcome those bargains which for their greatness are few men’s money… he cannot but increase mainly’. In total, the essay makes its way rhetorically towards the relational or social science of economics even when (as at the beginning and end) it is still weighed down with respectable junk about avarice, classical advice about begging inheritances, and pious notes on charities. It is not by chance that Bacon begins the essay with riches as impedimenta, or baggage, for his own thought and speculation is as encumbered by their clumsiness as the army itself. What he cannot quite make out, and neither could most of his contemporaries, is how sharing risks, or doubling bargains by not touching the purchase, merely buying or selling it, links the individual to the army, the one to the many, as the secret of generating wealth. He lived before registered banks, limited liability, and the Keynesian Multiplier, so this is not all that surprising. But the enterprise of his English nobleman, the accelerated profits on these primitive stock markets, and the multiplication that comes from dividing up and distributing money, all suggest that Bacon is writing ahead of what he knows, and that he is finding words for the unimaginable science of economic activity.
4
We might have guessed that Queen Elizabeth, the most parsimonious and unforgiving of Renaissance princes, would never really take to Francis Bacon, young or middle-aged, sycophant or loyal critic, lawyer or prophet of science. He had the nerve to want to spend her money (on schemes for a zoo, a laboratory and a natural history museum29), and he opened his mouth too much, and too early, as a backbencher in the Parliament of 1593. She never forgot his smart protests against increasing taxes for that year, and despite all his efforts, and those of his patron, the Earl of Essex, he never quite made it into Eliza’s charmed court circle. Looking back, some of her judgements about him seem cruel and even impertinent: for one thing, she said he was shallow in the law, which he certainly was not. But she also said, and he relished it, that he was her watch-candle, because he burnt continually.30 This was an acute, if a rather over-pretty conceit. Throughout his life Bacon wrote and worked steadily, and was awake at all times, waiting to illuminate his monarch’s darkness and measuring the passing of time. But there was also in him a tendency to be extinguished after a while, to be snuffed out or simply to go out if he didn’t make headway in his career. It is true that he had more than his fair share of disappointments, but he was a man of genius, and he knew it, and some of his dithering points to a feebleness of will. At least twice he resolved to give up public life, and return home to study philosophy, and yet somehow he hung on at court, waiting for the main chance, avoiding the big decision about an active or a contemplative life. In 1607 he got what he wanted (he was made Solicitor-General), and he burned brightly enough after that until Parliament finally did the choosing for him, by excluding him from public office.
To accuse Bacon of inconstancy to his own greatness may be unfair: but to suggest it of his work in the Essays would be a gross injustice. In them, as in nothing else that he wrote, there is the compulsion to make whole, to finish the design of something, to perfect it. W. B. Yeats was right enough when he said that a man had to decide between perfection of the life or of the work, but Bacon nearly failed to get either of them right. He messed up the end of a great career, and he didn’t complete one major philosophical, historical or scientific plan. For all his brilliance, and industry, so much of what he had started had to be finished by others. Only in the Essays was there a constancy of his genius. He called them his ‘recreations’ of his ‘other studies’,31 as if to slight their importance, but he meant what he said: they were attempts to remake or recreate, from sentences and syntax, the lines which held together body and mind. For someone like Bacon, with no mathematics and very little practical experience, his genius could only really fulfil itself in words, by reading or translating the outer motions of the body into the inner motives of the mind. Confronted by a deformed man or woman, he is not interested in what is wrong with their joints, or backbone, but in the language which tries to join up exterior and interior:
Certainly there is a consent between the body and the mind, and where nature erreth in the one, she ventureth in the other: Ubi peccat in uno, periclitatur in altero. But because there is in man an election touching the frame of his mind, and a necessity in the frame of his body, the stars of natural inclination are sometimes obscured by the sun of discipline and virtue.32
Whatever consent or agreement there is between the Baconian body and mind, it is not one described explicitly in this passage. Instead, what brings them together are the symmetries in vocabulary and phrasing: erreth against ventureth, election against necessity, man against nature, the quotation in Latin against its translation; and so on. The frame here is not so much in the mind or body, but in the writer’s determination to be regular, to construct a perfect surface. It is not a beautiful shape, but then all that matters is that it avoid being deformed. Bacon holds on to the symmetry until almost the final line, but then what was merely a bit dainty becomes ornamental and leaden: ‘the stars of natural inclination are sometimes obscured by the sun of discipline and virtue’. There is neither life nor wit in this analogy, only a fetish for congruity. Bacon is simply paying too much attention to the shape of the line. To say that its meaning is metaphoric makes no difference. No matter whether the stars are the engines of fate, or the sun the source of inner light, this conjunction is still only a dead limb fastened into place to make the passage look right.33 The subject of the essay is the malformed body, and how the mind responds to it, but in this case Bacon’s writing itself makes no concession to irregularity and disproportion. The words remain figurative, able to make a way into more words, but not into the substance, or the body of meaning.
From a number of sources, including the essay Of Regiment of Health, we know that Bacon was intensely interested in his own body, and its regularity. He suffered fainting fits at every eclipse of the moon, he reckoned his health to be most vulnerable at around four o’clock in the afternoon, and he experimented with all kinds of potions, ointments and diets.34 He was not unusual in this, nor in his persistent efforts to keep his bowels open. The thing he dreaded was a stoppage, a closing up of the body, which would shut in the humours and ferment them as in a vat. So he administered purge after purge, and was surprised at how weak he felt. All of this was what any Elizabethan physician could have prescribed for him. What is strange, given how little he knew about his own insides and those of most of the physical structures around him, is that he chose to describe the Essays (in a Latin translation) as interiora rerum, 35 the insides of things. Normally when he spoke about being inside or looking into things, it was with despair. The senses unaided were so ineffectual and so insensitive that men were as good as blind and deaf. When we cease to see, he observed, we cease to think. Our eyes are unable to see into the invisible workings within tangible bodies, and so we miss the more subtle changes of form that are taking place.36 The alimentary canal, the urinary ducts, the veins, the capillaries, these are what Bacon wants to see, and beyond, to the corpuscles, bone marrow and nucleic acids. Yet if he is shut out from these, for want of a microscope, what kind of insides can he be thinking of for the Essays, what interiors are there to masques, custom, envy, death or love?
The question is tricky because they can’t have any inner space or meaning that isn’t made by Bacon’s mind, and the very vocabulary he invites us to use – spaces, interiors, insides – is the language of bodies, perimeters drawn around two—or three-dimensional areas. In the Essays, books enter the body through the digestive system, envy radiates out through the eyeball, litigation is spewed out through the courts, ambition gnaws into the stomach, merchants are veins of blood to the liver, and speech seeps through the head into the mind.37 Everywhere, words and names penetrate the body or are projected out of it. The insides, the interiora rerum, are spaces of language forced in among the bones, flesh and viscous humours. The physicality of opening up or sealing or even eating the body disgusts Bacon, but this is the way to true meanings:
Philip of Macedon dreamed he sealed up his wife’s belly, whereby he did expound it, that his wife should be barren: but Aristander the soothsayer told him his wife was with child, because men do not use to seal vessels that are empty.38
Her womb was full, but no fuller with child than with a meaning to be interpreted and delivered. This was even more obvious to Bacon in the myth of how Jupiter gave birth to Pallas, goddess of wisdom:
… they say, after Jupiter was married to Metis [goddess of counsel], she conceived by him and was with child, but Jupiter suffered her not to stay till she brought forth, but ate her up; whereby he became himself with child, and was delivered of Pallas armed out of his head. Which monstrous fable containeth a secret of empire: how kings are to make use of their council of state.
Bacon domesticates the story into a parable of wise government, but the real ‘secret’ is that counsel was taken into the body through the mouth and that it swelled into meaning in Jupiter’s insides. Deep within the body there are some meanings so obscure and so frightening that they cannot be tamed at all. In Of Friendship, probably the greatest of the Essays, Bacon comes very close to saying that words lacerate the body, wound it, eat it within when it refuses to disclose meaning:
The parable of Pythagoras is dark, but true: Cor ne edito, ‘Eat not the heart.’ Certainly, if a man would give it a hard phrase, those that want friends to open themselves unto are cannibals of their own hearts.
To read into one of these essays, which Bacon calls the interiors of things, should be to reach into a body, into an inner presence of meaning. Not that this has anything to do with Bacon’s own body, or his inner self. Quite the opposite, for his corporeal being is almost entirely absent from the writing, as if he wanted to ignore the sensations in his fingertips and the tastes in his mouth. We have only to compare him with Montaigne to realize just how much he keeps hidden. In a few pages of his essay On Experience,39 Montaigne informs us that the insides of his ears are sometimes itchy, that he prefers unsalted bread, that he likes his meats rare and his fish tender, and that he has a habit of polishing his teeth with a napkin, both in the morning and before and after meals. Needless to say we are also told that the teeth are in excellent condition, given his age. There is nothing at all like this in Bacon, and what is revealed in the Essays appears by chance, and not by design. In Of Building, Bacon tops out a plan for a house with an upper floor to be reached by an open spiral staircase. His only caution is that none of the lower rooms be made into a dining place for servants. ‘For otherwise you shall have the servants’ dinner after your own: for the steam of it will come up as in a tunnel’. Good enough advice perhaps, but for Bacon there is more to it than that. His nose is deeply offended. In court dances, when the company begins to sweat and small a little, he considers that ‘sweet odours suddenly coming forth without any drops falling’ would be things of great refreshment. When he writes of a good name as unguenti fragrantis, a fragrant ointment, he recalls that ‘the odours of ointments are more durable than those of flowers’. When he lays out a path in a garden, even an imaginary one, he smells the scents of burnet, thyme and water-mint, perfuming the air as they are walked upon and crushed into fragrance.40 John Aubrey said that Bacon’s sense of smell was so acute (or over-nice) that none of his servants dared ‘appear before him without Spanish leather boots; for he would smell the neat’s leather, which offended him’.41 His sight is almost as sharp and fastidious. He notices that diamonds cut with facets give ‘the quickest reflection’, and he is choosy about colour and how it is arranged. In court entertainments, the ‘colours that show best by candle-light are white, carnation, and a kind of sea-water-green’: in needleworks and embroideries, ‘it is more pleasing to have a lively work upon a sad and solemn ground, than to have a dark and melancholy work upon a lightsome ground’. He is just as discriminating about the shapes of things. A face is not to be judged by a painter’s rules, because there is ‘no excellent beauty that hath not some strangeness in the proportion’.42 But if sight and smell can be traced in the Essays, this is not so with the other senses. There are one or two comments about music and singing, but the sensations of tasting and feeling are only literary. When bread is eaten it is in the sweat of one’s face, in a line from Genesis, ‘in suiore vultus tui comedes panem tuum’,43 and even the most explicit physical agony is derived from a book, with only the briefest coda from Bacon himself:
You shall read in some of the friars’ books of mortification that a man should think with himself what the pain is if he have but his finger’s end pressed or tortured, and thereby imagine what the pains of death are when the whole body is corrupted and dissolved; when many times death passeth with less pain than the torture of a limb; for the most vital parts are not the quickest of sense.44
The vitals proper – lungs, heart, brain and liver – are not the quickest of sense: but in the Essays neither are the limbs, skin and genitalia. No, the eyes and nose are the parts most vital to Bacon, the organs most alive, most quick with sense. For Bacon is a hunter, whose primary need is to follow a scent, and watch, and wait, and conceal himself. It comes as no surprise that his own doctor said that he had viper’s eyes. 45
The body is present in the Essays, then, but it is not Bacon’s body – which is an odd displacement of authorial presence, and which contributes to a sense of numbness, of thought without feeling, of a brain unconnected to the nerves and senses. L. C. Knights was on to this when he accused Bacon of cutting the instincts away from the intellect, a lobotomy which ended for good and all the integrity of mind and matter. But there were also theological and philosophical implications to this absenting of his own body. He tried to evade them, but they are unmistakable in the essay Of Truth:
What is truth? said jesting Pilate, and would not stay for an answer.
The sentence has been quoted so often that it has worn thin on examination papers and in academic chat but it is not at all the faded abstraction we have made of it. It alludes to nothing less than the essaying or trial of Christ, the trial by man under Roman law of man’s Saviour, the Son of God, the embodiment, the body of Truth.
It begins a sequence of essays, which in their root sense are concerned with testing, or assaying, making trial of metals, valuing their purity, trying the metal of men. In Of Truth this is the first sentence of man against Christ, and it is matched by a last sentence, where Christ on the Day of Judgement returns to earth to test men, to try their faith:
Surely the wickedness of falsehood and breach of faith cannot possibly be so highly expressed, as in that it shall be the last peal to call the judgements of God upon the generations of men; it being foretold that when Christ cometh, He shall not find faith upon the earth.
The essay begins in legality, a Roman trial of a Jew, where Christ is prosecuted by man, and it ends in a supralegality where the Creator, in His Son, brings man to judgement. Truth is theological and philosophical and even ‘of civil business’ in the essay, yet it is always hedged in or justified by law. Furthermore, the sentence passing judgement by refusing to listen must for Bacon in 1625 have had other resonances. As Attorney-General, and chief prosecutor and adviser to the Crown, Bacon himself – in trials as fixed as the one before Pilate – had sent down royal favourite after royal favourite. He had deserted the Earl of Essex, and helped to send him to the block, and he had fitted up the Earl of Somerset – and in the end, four years before the essay was published, he himself had been tried and convicted because King James couldn’t, or wouldn’t, stick by him when he was charged with taking bribes. Banging inside his head, day after day, in the courts of princes must have been that contemptuous question, what is truth? He knew the answer, though – truth was Christ’s body, the flesh sacrificed for the sins of old Adam. It was the other body, not Bacon’s, and in Of Truth it showed up in the vocabulary: veins, blood in them, devil’s wine, naked daylight, God’s making of man in the Garden, the serpent going on its belly, love-making, man giving God the lie, challenging and deceiving his Maker. This is the language of man losing paradise in Eden, and the occasion for the divine body to be substituted, sacrificially, for the human one. In the essay Of Truth itself, for all its intelligence, Bacon fails inwardly because, in the same way, he puts another body in place of his own. He edges out of the writing and leaves a surrogate flesh and blood, a presence which isn’t his. It is the same in a good many of the other Essays. The Christian theology of redemption – another man bears my guilt – allows him to swerve from his own being, to evade the here and now of his flesh and senses. And in the centuries of rationalism to follow, not even that other body will survive. By the end of the nineteenth century, the Essays will be praised for their abstractions and philosophical loftiness, and the language of the body, its mess and movement, will be ignored or unnoticed.46
Perhaps this is what C. S. Lewis was getting at when he described the Essays as sterile. No one doubts that they are alive, in spite of their beginnings in pedantry, rote-learning and superfine rhetoric, because Bacon made them tensile. They are strong but able to stretch out beyond themselves, and beyond this or that received wisdom or seemingly unshakeable truth. But they don’t have any generative powers, they don’t offer anything from within to their successors, to writers (or readers) who might want to learn from them, or learn how to write. It is possible to catch at their manner, or even to imitate them, but what they say would never make or break our lives. There are no secret joys in them, to recall Bacon’s own remark about parents and their children. It may be that where there is so much intelligence, and nothing felt, the mind, contracted to its own bright eyes, simply feeds on its flame and consumes itself.
