Bacon has been judged with merciless severity. But he has also been
defended by an advocate whose name alone is almost a guarantee for the
justness of the cause which he takes up, and the innocency of the client
for whom he argues. Mr. Spedding devoted nearly a lifetime, and all the
resources of a fine intellect and an earnest conviction, to make us
revere as well as admire Bacon. But it is vain. It is vain to fight
against the facts of his life: his words, his letters. "Men are made
up," says a keen observer, "of professions, gifts, and talents; and
also of _themselves_."[2] With all his greatness, his splendid genius,
his magnificent ideas, his enthusiasm for truth, his passion to be the
benefactor of his kind; with all the charm that made him loved by good
and worthy friends, amiable, courteous, patient, delightful as a
companion, ready to take any trouble--there was in Bacon's "self" a deep
and fatal flaw. He was a pleaser of men. There was in him that subtle
fault, noted and named both by philosophy and religion in the [Greek:
areskos] of Aristotle, the [Greek: anthrôpareskos] of St. Paul, which is
more common than it is pleasant to think, even in good people, but which
if it becomes dominant in a character is ruinous to truth and power. He
was one of the men--there are many of them--who are unable to release
their imagination from the impression of present and immediate power,
face to face with themselves. It seems as if he carried into conduct the
leading rule of his philosophy of nature, _parendo vincitur_. In both
worlds, moral and physical, he felt himself encompassed by vast forces,
irresistible by direct opposition. Men whom he wanted to bring round to
his purposes were as strange, as refractory, as obstinate, as
impenetrable as the phenomena of the natural world. It was no use
attacking in front, and by a direct trial of strength, people like
Elizabeth or Cecil or James; he might as well think of forcing some
natural power in defiance of natural law. The first word of his teaching
about nature is that she must be won by observation of her tendencies