BACON
FIR.ST and before all things, Francis Bacon,' Lord Verulam, was a great philosopher. In saying this we make no pretension to estimate the value of his philosophy, regarded as an exposition of truth. But it is the acknowledged fa6t that he is the founder, the fojis et origo, of that utilitarian school of philosophy which is peculiarly English. We do not say that without him we should have had no Scottish school of philosophy; no Hume, no Bain, no Reid; that without him we should have had no Locke, no John Stuart Mill, no Herbert Spencer — who, though very different from the utilitarian school, is nevertheless essentially English, and could not have arisen without the various English philosophers (whether stri6lly English or Scottish) who had preceded him. That school was in the air, and was bound to come. It is perhaps only in the case of a Shakespeare that we can say a whole literature — nay, almost a whole nation — would have been different if he had not appeared. But as things have been arranged, the whole temper of the British school of philosophy looks back to Bacon as its starting-point. ■?>
Far more, in our opinion, must it be said that the whole of English physical science must acknowledge Bacon as its very Adam and progenitor. Not because Bacon was himself a great if>hysical investigator; but because he first j pointed out the aims and the temper of the 1 physical investigator. Cowley stated the truth, iwith the usual perspicacity of the poet. Bacon did not enter the Promised Land, but he had the vision of it, and pointed the w^ay to it. His whole aim was to start a new philosophical school, which should antithesize the philosophy of the scholastics and the ancients by proceeding from without inwards, instead of from within outwards; from phenomena to essence, not from essence to phenomena. Physical investigation was but a branch of this new departure, as he conceived it. Yet, in laying down this principle, he unwittingly became the patriarch of our modern scientists. Huxley was bred from his loins, and men greater in physical science than Huxley. This, we unhesitatingly aver, seems to us a greater achievement than the authorship of the British school of philosophy. Already there is a reaction towards the recognition of that very scholastic school which Bacon, the philosopher, lived only to destroy and bring into contempt. But there is not, nor ever will be, any readlion from the temper of physical research which he first inculcated. Other views may arise as to the value of the principle he laid down in regard to philosophy. There can be no other view as to the value of the principle he laid down in regard to physical science.
Here, however, we are not concerned with him on these grounds. We are concerned with him solely as one of the explorers in English prose. And here his name is not so great. He wrote many things, including the not very successful attempt to follow the path of Plato and Sir Thomas More, in the New Atlantis. But he survives chiefly by his Essays. They mainly show Bacon the chancellor, the courtier, and man of the world. They are full of very shrewd wisdom, of a devious and not overprincipled kind. No attempt is there in them at deep truths, such as you might expe6l from a philosopher. Not truth, but expediency; the truth of self-interest and worldly consideration, is their aim. They show Bacon as an opportunist of the first water, a respe6lable British Machiavel. If to be a sage in the art of ' getting on ' constitutes greatness, then, and not otherwise, they are great. As regards their style, they are doubtless what he would himself call very pithy, pregnant, and sententious. The sentences are short, clear, well-knit, unsuperfluous. But there is no attempt at the more complex evolutions of style; and the succession of short barks (so to speak) is apt to get as tiresome as the utterances of a dog, though he barked like the hoariest sage in kenneldom. There is one exception; and that (if we remember rightly) is the first essay in the collection. But though the earliest (or almost the earliest, if our memory should deceive us) in the book, it is stated by editors to be the latest written. We can well believe it. For here Bacon ascends to an altogether higher level in subjedmatter; and naturalh', therefore, to an altogether higher level in style. In the sustained dignity of its sentences, as in the sustained dignity of its thought, it is altogether worthy of Sir Thomas Browne, and might not unhappily be taken for the work of that later and greater master of prose.
Otherudse, even as regards the terseness and weight of wisdom in individual sentences (the excellence in which Bacon excels), the palm must be given to his philosophical works, in spite of their ahen language. For example:
Present justice is in your power; for that which is to come you have no security.
Men believe that their reason governs words. But it is also true that words, like the arrows from a Tartar bow, are shot back, and react on the mind.
And yet again (though it is a precept which has its exceptions, in the case of intuitional minds):
Let every student of Nature take this as a fact, that whatever the mind seizes and dwells on with peculiar satisfaction is to be held in suspicion.
Consider also this most practical maxim:
In attempts to improve your character, know what is in your power and what beyond it.
Or finally, the saying in the De Amicitia, which we quote in the original language on account of its superior terseness:
Magna civitas, magna solitudo.
It might be a saying from Seneca or St Augustine, so pregnant and sparse in wording is it. And if we have somewhat deprecated the excessive praise usually given to Bacon as a writer of prose, let it be acknowledged that, compared with the average modern writer, he is fine and full of matter indeed. It is only by comparison with the great writers of the seventeenth century that he appears less a master of his art. But then, he preceded them; and perhaps even Sir Thomas Browne learned something from him.
MILTON
THE most apocalyptic of English poets was appropriately a ' John '; more inappropriately, one of the richest of all poets was a Puritan. The facts of his life are common history. He is almost the sole great poet we recolleft who was a strid: Londoner; being born in that city, of a scrivener, on December 9, 1608. He was educated at Christ's College, Cambridge — the beauty of the reserved and haughty student procuring him the name of ' the lady of Christ's.' All things considered, he was one of the most truly precocious of English poets; for in his twenty-first year he wrote the Hymn on the Nativity — in spite of some too ingenious and ' conceited ' stanzas, as grand a lyric as was ever penned. Perhaps Rossetti, with his Blessed Damozel at nineteen, is the nearest parallel; for a fine stanza or two at an early age cannot be paralleled with this sustainedly consummate achievement. In 1637 was pubhshed the Comus, and in the same year the Lycidas, which from its subjeft should seem to belong to his college years. These, with UAlUgro^ II Penseroso, and the Arcades marked him in his youth for one of the most perfe£t lyrical geniuses ever born.
How, after a tour in Italy, where he won golden opinions from the ItaHan literati, he thenceforward devoted himself to the defence, in prose, of the Puritan cause, holding a position as Latin Secretary to the Council of State, is well known; nor was it until the Restoration that he gave himself again wholly to poetry. Twenty-four years of prose drudgery, immortalized only through a genius which turned to gold whatever it touched, is a record of self-command not matched in the history of poets, or matched only partially by Goethe. In 1658, when the Latin Secretaryship was divided with Marvell, he began Paradise Lost. It is the custom to think of this as a work carried on steadily at intervals throughout the bulk of Milton's later life; but, as a matter of fa61:, it was the work of seven years — a brief enough time for the magnitude of the task. Published in 1665, it met with an instant success. Thirteen hundred copies were sold in two years. Pra6lically, his contemporaries — let it be recorded to their credit — pronounced the verdict of posterity. Six years later he closed his record with Paradise Regained and Samson Agonistes. In 1674 he died; having been bhnd for the last twenty-two years of his life.
Of his three wives, and his relations with them^ enough has been written. It was a hard thing to be Milton's wife or Milton's daughter. He was stern, he was austere, he was selfcentred; his impeccable strength was purchased by a sublime and monotonous egoism — which is the name they give to selfishness in poets. Very chill must have been the life of his girls in that Purit.in house, reading to the inwrapped Puritan father from languages they did not understand, and taking down from his lips poetry they understood still less. Milton found them undutiful. Poor little ' undutiful ' daughters! Fathers had terrible conceptions of duty in those days. Did anyone ever want to know Milton? Did anyone ever not want to know Shakespeare? Doubtless there are readers of the Exeter Hall class who would have yearned for the godly company of the ' great Christian poet.' But, on the whole, how thankful one should be that Shakespeare was not a ' Christian poet '! ' Les vrais artistes sont toujours un peu paiens,' said poor Stephen Heller to Sir Charles Halle; in no invidious sense, for was he not a CathoHc writing to a Catholic?
But, in truth, this Sunday-school tradition apart, Milton was more than ' un peu paien.' An extraordinary melange of Hebrew and heathen, this Milton — something of Job, something of ^schylus, not a little of Plato, with an infusion of the Ancient Fathers to ' make the gruel thick and slab.' That ' Dorique delicacy ' which ravished Sir Henry Wotton in the lyrics of Comus was indeed a gift from the Greeks; yet even in // Pcmcroso one comes across a fragment from St Athanasius. All learning was fuel to this fire; and what fire it was that could fuse all learning into such poetry! A like burthen of knowledge clogged even Goethe; but, with occasional exceptions, Milton moves under it freely as in festal garlands. As he borrowed from all learning, so he took from all poets. In particular, to an extent not fully reahzed, the style of Comus is based on Shakespeare. In strudure, Co?7ius is obviously indebted to Fletcher and the Elizabethan masque-writers. But its diftion and the very music of its blank verse follow Shakespeare with a superb and unique fehcity, which excludes no jot of Milton's own genius. Shakespeare's magic here, at least, is copied. Such a passage as this has the very ring of Shakespeare's softer style in versification:
Some say, no evil thing that walks by night, In fog or fire, by lake or moorish fen, Blue meagre hag, or stubborn unlaid ghost That breaks his magic chains at curfew-time; No goblin, or swart faery of the mine, Hath hurtful power o'er true virginity.
Never, since the middle summer's spring,
Met we on hill, in dale, forest, or mead,
By paved fountain or by rushy brook,
Or on the beached margent of the sea,
To dance our ringlets to the whistling wind,
But with thy brawls thou hast disturbed our sport.
And one expression, ' the porch and inlet of each sense,' is suggested by ' the porches of my ears ' in Hamlet. But not in Shakespeare's self is there such a distillation of sheer beauty, combined with perfe6l form and stately philosophy, as in this wonderful masque. With the monumental Lycidas and the other minor poems, it makes an achievement which Milton has not surpassed in kind. The ' bowery loneliness ' of Paradise Lost is less lovelily beautiful. The special greatness of that epic is, first and last, sublimity — unmatched outside the Scriptures. It widened the known bounds of the sublime. De Quincey has described how, in his opium-dreams, the sense of space was portentously enlarged. Such a tyrannous extension of the spatial sense presides over Paradise Lost. But the source of sublimity is not in mere vastness. Henry Vaughan has at once expounded and exemplified it in two lines:
There is in God, some say,
That is not only sublime — it Is sublimity. Mystery impelling awe is the fountain of this quality. Accordingly, Milton's imagery is not simply spacious, but undefined. The immediate suggestion of the image we grasp; but the associations stirred by it ascend and descend through interminable reverberations.
Mr Coventry Patmore considered Milton even a greater thaumaturge in words than Shakespeare. It is disputable; but to those who, like Mr Patmore, lean rather towards the classic and Greek than towards the romantic and Gothic school, it may be conceded that Milton is unapproachcd for his union of Gothic richness with the sculpturesqueness of classic form. Mr Patmore, who was himself a reconciler of yet more impossible opposites, might well incline a little to Milton. It is impossible to question another opinion of his, that the three chief fountains of wonderful diftion are Spenser, Shakespeare, and Milton. ' What a mine he is of words! ' he once exclaimed, regarding Spenser; and Milton himself ' mined for words ' in both his predecessors, most of all, we think, in Spenser.
Mr Patmore remarks truly that from Spenser Milton derived even some of the metres thought to be peculiarly his own — for example, the metre of Lycidas. To a minor extent he used more primitive sources, as in ' the swinked hedger ' of Comus. As with all great poets, no soil came amiss to him in prospering for diftion; in spite of his ruling tendency towards the exotic, the polysyllabic, the grandiose, he could use * hom.espun Saxon ' with an enchantment not surpassed by Shakespeare. This needs the more insistence, because his contributions to (as apart from what he drew out of) the treasury of English are notoriously latinized and stately. The successful, the wonderful latinisms of Shakespeare have been grossly overlooked. ' All the abhorred births below crisp heaven '; ' The replication of your - ■ ■ - 200 sound? made in his concave shores '; ' The intertissued robe of gold and pearl '; ' Not all these, laid in bed majestical '; here is but a random handful of the supreme latinities, some become current, others unimitatcd in poetry,^ which are first found in Shakespeare. But it is Milton who has been the great lapidary of I.atin splendours in the English tongue; solemnities of diftion, indeed, so exotic that for the most part they remain among the unprofaned insignia of poetry when she goes forth in state; words never journalized by the ' base mechanical hand ' of prose. In Comus alone can we justly compare him with his great dramatic predecessor, and there we find this essential contrast in the matter of diction; the words of Shakespeare seem to flower from the line, while the Miltonic line is inlaid with rich and chosen words. The distinftion may seem — but we think is not — fanciful.
Of his blank verse two men alone could have written with full perception; both have left but slight and casual utterances. One was De Quinccy, the other Coventry Patmore. Were the critic fool enough to iiisli in where the most gifted have feared to tread, not in a journalistic summary could he analyse its colossal harmonics. Paradise Lost is the treasury and supreme display of metrical counterpoint. It is to metre what the choruses of Handel are to music.
A poet (to conclude, where we have ventured little more than a prelude) for sheer accomplishment not equalled in our language; in youth capable of luxuriant beauty, in age of * severe magnificence,' yet in youth or age without humaneness or heart-blood in his greatness; of overawing sublimity, yet not ethereal; of concrete solidity, yet not earthly; a poet to whom all must bow the knee, few or none the heart; ' the second name of men * in English song, who had gone near to being the first, if his grandeurs, his majesties, his splendours, his august solemnities, had been humid with a tear or a smile. The most inspired artificer in poetry, he lacked, perhaps (or was it a perfe6ling fault?), a little poetic poverty of soul, a little detachment from his artistic riches. He could not forget, nor can we forget, that he was Milton. And, after all, one must confess it was worth remembering. An art so conscious and consummate was never before joined with such plenitude of the spirit.