A Serving of Bacon

Ah! Bacon! What could be better? Nothing so nourishing, satisfying, salty and sustaining as Bacon. Before the food-fad fascists of the nanny state set loose the calorie-coppers, let me explain that I write not of that confessedly delicious pig-meat, but of Francis Bacon (1561–1626); he held high office (eventually Lord Chancellor) under the last Tudor monarch (Elizabeth I) and under the first Stuart king (James I of England).

This change of dynasty occurred at one of the most pregnant junctures of history, when the modern world began to take its shape: the discovery, exploration and settlement by Europeans of unknown lands; the ferment of the Renaissance in Europe; the publication in England of the Authorised (“King James”) Bible; the elucidation of the new scientific method, which enlarged our knowledge of the natural world, producing the technology on which so much of today’s civilisation rests. At the head of this last philosophical revolution stands Bacon.

Not the least of his achievements was the development of a literary style of great clarity, plainness and force. Geoffrey Grigson calls it “accurate prose, a short, hard, thin-lipped prose”. And so it is; yet under the genius of Bacon’s pen it can encompass sublimity readily enough. Bacon and his French contemporary Montaigne may be called the founders of the “essay”, and a great service it was; the essay’s brevity and concentration enable mankind to absorb an immense corpus of humane knowledge in (horrid phrase!) “bite-size” pieces.

Matthew Arnold called the essay a “dialogue of the mind with itself”. Not everyone has been so indulgent. In his Dictionary, Doctor Johnson (no slouch as an essayist himself) defines essay as a “loose sally of the mind; an irregular indigested piece; not an orderly composition”. The dangers of differing with Johnson remain well known, but that definition is not good enough.

Bacon’s fifty-eight Essays or Counsels Civill and Morall, published in 1625, have been through countless new editions and remained firmly in print ever since. Leaving aside archaic spelling and some quaint old turns of phrase, they might have appeared only last week, except that they are so superbly written.

We could spare ourselves nowadays all those wordy effusions of economists and treasuries about the need to “maintain general spending power”. Listen to Bacon’s ten terse words from 1625: “Money is like muck [manure]: not good except it be spread.” What more is to be said?

The essays purport largely to be a guide to proper behaviour at all levels, both in great affairs of state and in personal life. They are certainly not mild parsonical platitudes from the sheltered world of the pulpit. “Morall” they may call themselves, but they are the work of a man deeply acquainted with the real world, and with all its wickedness. They drew from William Blake an indignant snort: “good advice for Satan’s kingdom”. And he added: “The Devil is a gentleman and not a man: he is a Lord Chancellor.” Bacon himself more than once acknowledges debts to his predecessor Machiavelli.

Few lives have been so dedicated as Bacon’s; dedicated, that is, with an almost religious fervour to the getting on in this world of Francis Bacon. No caterpillar crawled more cravenly than Bacon seeking a favour or a promotion.

From Cambridge University he went to the Bar, and then as a lawyer got himself elected to the House of Commons. Is this career path starting already to sound familiar in modern ears? By sucking up to Elizabeth’s chief minister, Lord Burghley, he tried to wangle for himself the post of Solicitor-General, and failed. He failed also in his slightly off-colour enterprise to outdistance his innumerable creditors by marrying a rich widow.

Disappointed by Burghley, Bacon then switched support to the Queen’s then “favourite”, the Earl of Essex. It proved a rash move, for Essex was charged with treason. Bacon deserted his patron, and rushed to save his own skin by giving evidence against Essex, who was beheaded. The general moral tone of Elizabethan politics was caught for us by a contemporary wit: 

What treason is, and what did Essex kill,
Was not true treason, but treason handled ill:
He said she stunke, and men might not have said
That she was olde, before that she was dead. 

In 1618, under King James, Bacon reached the dizzy height of Lord Chancellor; in 1621 he was charged with taking bribes from litigants, was expelled from Parliament and from the Bench, fined £40,000 (a stupendous sum) and sentenced to indefinite imprisonment in the Tower of London. What a fall!

But even then “the fix” was worked in his favour: he paid not a penny of his fine, and spent only a few days in prison. He retired—albeit a little sheepishly—and devoted his talents to science and to writing, including his famous essays. All this—unlike his smelly political life—was of enduring benefit to us all. He died in 1626, killed by a chill caught while stuffing a hen with snow, as part of his pioneering experiments in refrigeration.

How shall we judge the “morall” worth of this extraordinary man of intellect? Regular readers of this column know how scrupulously I try to avoid resort to indelicate language. I am obliged therefore to borrow for Bacon the words of my friend Auberon Waugh (alas lately dead). Referring to a British politician of recent times, he called the man “a bumlicker and a shit”. That fits Bacon.

Re-reading the “essayes” recently, I was startled afresh by their total modernity: “All power is reached by a winding stair.” You bet it is! (These days we call it “spin”.)

As I write, the Labor Party federal conference is to be held in a few days time. I wonder if many of the delegates will have read Bacon’s Essay No. 51, baldly titled “Of Faction”. Probably not, but they might well have written it for themselves.

In our political parties, each group of chief movers and shakers can be likened only to a snake-pit, filled with reptile bodies slithering and writhing. From time to time, one serpent head or another will rise briefly from the creeping mass and strike or, more frequently, just hiss. It is all a wearisome exercise in déjà vu for anyone who has read Bacon; or for those who prefer a modern Australian translation, Paul Hasluck’s brilliantly revealing volume The Chance of Politics.

Even Bacon’s personal history offers, up to a point, a template for our once-famous Lionel Murphy. This regrettable senator was never a gentleman, not even in Blake’s sarcastic characterisation; not even one of nature’s gentlemen. Whenever the Senate was sitting after dinner, the Parliamentary Librarian found it prudent to roster for duty a couple of extra male library staff; their presence helped to discourage the senator from groping their female colleagues. (Not that such an engaging trait would have been Bacon’s bag!)

But across the span of some 350 years, it remains a singular parallel that two celebrated chief law officers of the Crown should be shaken upon their later high benches, and charged with serious crimes. Bacon, though much diminished, survived. Murphy died in 1986, while a commission of inquiry was investigating his conduct. The commission’s papers will emerge from their presently sealed archives a few years from now.

Australia’s degraded politics take us increasingly back to the days of Bacon, or to the stiletto-style of the Italian city-states. As a prime minister clings frantically to power at whatever cost to her credit, and as one stabbed political body slumps heavily after another, jocular references to Lucrezia Borgia increase.

At such a time we might almost be tempted to doubt the capacity of democracy to govern us well. To this temptation we must not yield. Oddly, across so very many years, the voice of Winston Churchill offers advice: “Democracy is the worst form of government—except all the others.” And (under wartime weariness): “All we can do is just keep buggering on.” Australia may face another two years of just that. But we must emerge in the end from Gillard’s gruesome tunnel with our democracy and the Westminster system intact.