Bacon — 17 - Chapter 9A

BACON AS A WRITER.

Bacon's name belongs to letters as well as to philosophy.

In his own day, whatever his contemporaries thought of his _Instauration of Knowledge_, he was in the first rank as a speaker and a writer.

Sir Walter Raleigh, contrasting him with Salisbury, who could speak but not write, and Northampton, who could write but not speak, thought Bacon eminent both as a speaker and a writer.

Ben Jonson, passing in review the more famous names of his own and the preceding age, from Sir Thomas More to Sir Philip Sidney, Hooker, Essex, and Raleigh, places Bacon without a rival at the head of the company as the man who had "fulfilled all numbers," and "stood as the mark and [Greek: akmê] of our language."

And he also records Bacon's power as a speaker.

"No man," he says, "ever spoke more neatly, more pressly, or suffered less emptiness, less idleness, in what he uttered."

"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 ...

the fear of every man that heard him was that he should make an end."

He notices one feature for which we are less prepared, though we know that the edge of Bacon's sarcastic tongue was felt and resented in James's Court.

"His speech," says Ben Jonson, "was nobly censorious when he could _spare and pass by a jest_."

The unpopularity which certainly seems to have gathered round his name may have had something to do with this reputation.

Yet as an English writer Bacon did not expect to be remembered, and he hardly cared to be.

He wrote much in Latin, and his first care was to have his books put into a Latin dress.

"For these modern languages," he wrote to Toby Matthews towards the close of his life, "will at one time or another play the bank-rowte with books, and since I have lost much time with this age, I would be glad if God would give me leave to recover it with posterity."

He wanted to be read by the learned out of England, who were supposed to appreciate his philosophical ideas better than his own countrymen, and the only way to this was to have his books translated into the "general language."

He sends Prince Charles the _Advancement_ in its new Latin dress.

"It is a book," he says, "that will live, and be a citizen of the world, as English books are not."

And he fitted it for continental reading by carefully weeding it of all passages that might give offence to the censors at Rome or Paris.

"I have been," he writes to the King, "mine own _Index Expurgatorius_, that it may be read in all places.

For since my end of putting it in Latin was to have it read everywhere, it had been an absurd contradiction to free it in the language and to pen it up in the matter."

Even the _Essays_ and the _History of Henry VII.

_ he had put into Latin "by some good pens that do not forsake me."

Among these translators are said to have been George Herbert and Hobbes, and on more doubtful authority, Ben Jonson and Selden.

The _Essays_ were also translated into Latin and Italian with Bacon's sanction.

Bacon's contemptuous and hopeless estimate of "these modern languages," forty years after Spenser had proclaimed and justified his faith in his own language, is only one of the proofs of the short-sightedness of the wisest and the limitations of the largest-minded.

Perhaps we ought not to wonder at his silence about Shakespeare.

It was the fashion, except among a set of clever but not always very reputable people, to think the stage, as it was, below the notice of scholars and statesmen; and Shakespeare took no trouble to save his works from neglect.

Yet it is a curious defect in Bacon that he should not have been more alive to the powers and future of his own language.

He early and all along was profoundly impressed with the contrast, which the scholarship of the age so abundantly presented, of words to things.

He dwells in the _Advancement_ on that "first distemper of learning, when men study words and not matter."

He illustrates it at large from the reaction of the new learning and of the popular teaching of the Reformation against the utilitarian and unclassical terminology of the schoolmen; a reaction which soon grew to excess, and made men "hunt more after choiceness of the phrase, and the round and clean composition of the sentence, and the sweet falling of the clauses," than after worth of subject, soundness of argument, "life of invention or depth of judgment."

"I have represented this," he says, "in an example of late times, but it hath been and will be _secundum majus et minus_ in all times;" and he likens this "vanity" to "Pygmalion's frenzy"--"for to fall in love with words which are but the images of matter, is all one as to fall in love with a picture."

He was dissatisfied with the first attempt at translation into Latin of the _Advancement_ by Dr. Playfer of Cambridge, because he "desired not so much neat and polite, as clear, masculine, and apt expression."

Yet, with this hatred of circumlocution and prettiness, of the cloudy amplifications, and pompous flourishings, and "the flowing and watery vein," which the scholars of his time affected, it is strange that he should not have seen that the new ideas and widening thoughts of which he was the herald would want a much more elastic and more freely-working instrument than Latin could ever become.

It is wonderful indeed what can be done with Latin.

It was long after his day to be the language of the exact sciences.

In his _History of the Winds_, which is full of his irrepressible fancy and picturesqueness, Bacon describes in clear and intelligible Latin the details of the rigging of a modern man-of-war, and the mode of sailing her.

But such tasks impose a yoke, sometimes a rough one, on a language which has "taken its ply" in very different conditions, and of which the genius is that of indirect and circuitous expression, "full of majesty and circumstance."

But it never, even in those days of scholarship, could lend itself to the frankness, the straightforwardness, the fulness and shades of suggestion and association, with which, in handling ideas of subtlety and difficulty, a writer would wish to speak to his reader, and which he could find only in his mother tongue.

It might have been thought that with Bacon's contempt of form and ceremony in these matters, his consciousness of the powers of English in his hands might have led him to anticipate that a flexible and rich and strong language might create a literature, and that a literature, if worth studying, would be studied in its own language.

But so great a change was beyond even his daring thoughts.

To him, as to his age, the only safe language was the Latin.

For familiar use English was well enough.

But it could not be trusted; "it would play the bankrupt with books."

And yet Galileo was writing in Italian as well as in Latin; only within twenty-five years later, Descartes was writing _De la Méthode_, and Pascal was writing in the same French in which he wrote the _Provincial Letters_, his _Nouvelles Expériences touchant le Vide_, and the controversial pamphlets which followed it; showing how in that interval of five-and-twenty years an instrument had been fashioned out of a modern language such as for lucid expression and clear reasoning, Bacon had not yet dreamed of.

From Bacon to Pascal is the change from the old scientific way of writing to the modern; from a modern language, as learned and used in the 16th century, to one learned in the 17th.

But the language of the age of Elizabeth was a rich and noble one, and it reached a high point in the hands of Bacon.

In his hands it lent itself to many uses, and assumed many forms, and he valued it, not because he thought highly of its qualities as a language, but because it enabled him with least trouble "to speak as he would," in throwing off the abundant thoughts that rose within his mind, and in going through the variety of business which could not be done in Latin.

But in all his writing it is the matter, the real thing that he wanted to say, which was uppermost.

He cared how it was said, not for the sake of form or ornament, but because the force and clearness of what was said depended so much on how it was said.

Of course, what he wanted to say varied indefinitely with the various occasions of his life.

His business may merely be to write "a device" or panegyric for a pageant in the Queen's honour, or for the revels of Gray's Inn.

But even these trifles are the result of real thought, and are full of ideas--ideas about the hopes of knowledge or about the policy of the State; and though, of course, they have plenty of the flourishes and quaint absurdities indispensable on such occasions, yet the "rhetorical affectation" is in the thing itself, and not in the way it is handled; he had an opportunity of saying some of the things which were to him of deep and perpetual interest, and he used it to say them, as forcibly, as strikingly, as attractively as he could.

His manner of writing depends, not on a style, or a studied or acquired habit, but on the nature of the task which he has in hand.

Everywhere his matter is close to his words, and governs, animates, informs his words.

No one in England before had so much as he had the power to say what he wanted to say, and exactly as he wanted to say it.

No one was so little at the mercy of conventional language or customary rhetoric, except when he persuaded himself that he had to submit to those necessities of flattery, which cost him at last so dear.