Imágenes de páginas
PDF
EPUB

ship of Van Ende's brilliant and learned daughter; his retired, frugal, and simple habits; his quiet and tender manners; his grinding optical glasses for his daily bread; his honorable poverty; his indifference to wealth or patronage; his hatred of personal, pecuniary, or mental dependence; his patience under suffering; his meekness against persecution; his moveless adherence to his sense of truth and right; his scorn of falsehood, evasion, or prevarication; and, to crown the whole, his lonely, his almost solitary death; - these would seem to furnish matter even for a romance; but we forget them all when we recall Spinoza as a philosopher, and his sublime, stern, and remorseless logic. Kant was much else than the analyzer of our mental faculties; he was a mathematician, a natural philosopher, a natural theologian, a powerful and eloquent writer and lecturer, and for more than forty years a learned, versatile, admired teacher in the University of Königsberg: but the world only knows Kant as the founder of the Critical or Transcendental Philosophy, and as such be has had an influence only less than Plato or Aristotle.

It is thus that, in sublime and original organizers of thought, all that is incidental to the time and the individual fades into obscurity, and the thinker alone stands clearly and openly in the light. Contrary to what we might expect, the greatest thinkers hold an equal race in time with the greatest poets; for if the poets have advantage at the start, the thinkers, in the long run, overtake, and sometimes pass them. The thinkers may never at any one period have large audience, but always they continue to have students; at last, even the poets themselves cease to be popular, and the thinkers have one circumstance in their favor, they can be more easily translated than the poets. It is probable that Plato and Aristotle find at present more readers in translation than Eschylus, Euripides, or even Homer, find in the original; and the translated thinker is likely to give more of his thought to the reader than the translated poet can give of his passion, imagination, pathos, music, and beauty.

It was, we fancy, as a thinker that Bacon at last felt he would have done to him the widest and the most lasting jus

tice. In the turmoil of ambition, he may not have seen this, or he may have left it out of sight; but in the retirement and calm reflection of his closing years it must have occurred to him that it would be mainly as a thinker and philosopher the world would regard him with its most unanimous gratitude and admiration. He could not on other grounds have been certain of an unquestionable verdict from posterity. However undeserved he may have deemed the odium which tarnished his reputation in the later portion of his life, however unjust he may have considered the treatment he received from some of his contemporaries, no illusion of self-regard- not even the conviction of innocence - could have hindered him from knowing that some parts of his conduct must always and everywhere appear to be at least of doubtful meaning. Viewed as a whole, he did not fear that his character would fail of charitable and candid judgment; and he was sure that, when once men were clear from local and temporary passions, they would do the fullest justice to his merits. But in any such expectation he must have depended largely on the potency of his thought, on the greatness of his intellectual claims; and it is on such, we believe, he must have placed his prophetic confidence when he wrote that famous and pathetic passage in his will: "My name and memory I leave to foreign nations, and to my own countrymen after some time be passed over." His confidence has been justified; for if there are some who cannot hold him to have been innocent, there are none who hold that any such guilt was his as to deprive him of his title to the fame of ages and the praise of nations.

The most sure, the most indisputable, and the most undoubted title to these, Bacon has in his genius, and it is on this genius that we propose to offer some general observations.

In contemplating Lord Bacon's genius, the first and most direct impression which we receive is that of its wonderful magnitude. It is not that Bacon's genius has all the mental dimensions of height and depth and scope, but it has them in enormous measure; not as the cube with its sharply defined surfaces, lines, and angles, but as the sphere, with its centre of unity and its harmonious wholeness. For this

reason the genius of Bacon wants what we call intensity. The vehemency and force of it are therefore comparatively lost to us, not alone in its vastness, but also in the perfectly ordered relations of its faculties among themselves. It is very difficult for a common mind, or even for an extraordinary mind as compared with a common mind, to conceive adequately the compass of such a mind as Bacon's. We have no subjective standard or analogy that can sufficiently help us. We look into it, and think we look through it; we think that we discern the circumscription of its boundary, but we mistake; it is only the limit of our own horizon that we really see. This earth is encased in a globe of atmosphere forty-five miles in. depth. That is but an atom compared with the sphere of stars beyond, which shapes itself in the circle of the eye. The image in the eye gives no positive conception to the mind of the actual reality. No man takes within the grasp of his conception the planetary system, or even the sun, the central object of it. No man takes within the grasp of his whereon he lives, not even the ocean. what we call its immensity of waters, he about eight miles in one direction, and this would give him a circle of less than fifty miles. This seems, as indeed it is, magnificent; it is so, not by the visible space, but by suggestion, by the excitement of imagination, and by the illusion that the visible finite is embosomed in the unseen infinite. Yet even the Pacific Ocean is a measurable limitation; but the horizon of the strongest and clearest sight can aid no man to a conception of it, a conception, that is, which embraces the whole reality. The same may be said of a mountain range, or indeed of all the mighty objects and workings of nature. There are minds that seem almost as much out of measure with our intellect, as nature is out of measure with our senses, minds which by their harmony and repose deceive us as to their scale of faculty and activity.

conception the earth When he is out upon can see, at most, only

Bacon's was in a remarkable degree such a mind. It does not at first astonish or excite; it is only to long and patient reflection it reveals its greatness. So it is with every mind that is grandly and deeply thoughtful, and in the degree that thought is its predominating attribute. Intense genius is the

-

soonest felt, and for the time interests the greatest number. In the degree that genius acts less and less on the nearer instincts and emotions, it becomes less and less salient and pungent, and will have fewer charms for the miscellaneous public; in the degree also that it deals largely with the whole. nature of man, it will lose those narrow specialties which so easily excite the classes who generally read only for excitement. This was not consistent with the genius of Bacon. He was the great intellectual prophet of the future, and his mission was to direct men's steps into the ways of practical and helpful science. All nature was his domain; he sought to know all its properties and uses, and this with an amplitude and grandeur of which no other man had ever dreamed. The more we dwell on Bacon's genius, the more marvellous its grandeur becomes to us. The scale of its activity seems almost superhuman. His glance was truly from earth to heaven, and from heaven to earth. The vision of his mind. must have been of more than natural clearness, rapidity, and expansion. Thought must have resembled inspiration, and ideas seemed as revealed realities. Reasoning with him, as compared with other men, was like intuition, and the processes hardly separable from the results. The comprehension of such a mind, in its contemplation of the universe of man, of life, of the actual and the possible, must have involved such a gigantic energy of thought as makes ordinary thinking mortals appear like dwarfs. like dwarfs. With such measure of faculty, plasticity, and strength, his power of acquiring and retaining stores of knowledge that would have oppressed or crushed any weaker mind becomes easily intelligible: if not clear by our experience, it is sure as an inference. For small acquirements most men have to labor hard and long; but all that time had to give of knowledge cost to Bacon no slavish drudgery, but only a freeman's toil. For spontaneity and grandeur there is but one genius that we can put on Bacon's level, and that, of course, is Shakespeare's. Both are stupendous, and each is distinguished as much by mental ease as by mental greatness; and these qualities appear in whatever each of them has done, not only in seriousness, but in sport. On whatever either touched he left the mark of unapproachable

power. No man but Shakespeare could have created such a constable as Dogberry; no man but Bacon could have put so much thought, wit, and wisdom into a miscellany intended merely for amusement, as he put into his collection of “ Apophthegms."

The next quality in the genius of Bacon which strikes us is its magnificent versatility. Versatility does not usually belong to great and decided genius. More commonly it is the attribute of high talent, than it is of marked, destined, inborn, and creative mind. Talent is a more manageable and elastic sort of power than genius, because genius, being a primal force, having generally an inherent tendency in a given direction, can seldom work to any purpose, or with any sure effect, out of that direction. Talent, being merely facility and plastic aptitude improved by art and practice, is at the will of its possessor, can be turned to whatever object he chooses, provided his desire is strong enough to become zeal, and his zeal constant enough to inspire industry. Genius is supreme in its own sphere, and stamps its creation with an uncopiable impression of its own distinct originality. Talent may attain indefinite degrees of excellence, but it is never supreme, and is always imitable.

It is rare, therefore, that a person is at once a man of genius and a man of talent, at least, that he is both consummately. Exceptions, we know, can be mentioned, as, for instance, Leonardo da Vinci and Goethe; but our statement makes allowance for such exceptions. Moreover, in that in which a person is a man of talent he is seldom a man of genius, for we do not confound with talent the artistic instinct of form, which is of genius itself an essential element. And we repeat what we have already intimated, that genius does not often have variety of direction. We feel that Beethoven could have only been a musician, and Raffael only a painter. We feel that Newton must have thought in mathematics, and Shakespeare in the poetic and impassioned regions of actual and ideal life. We feel that such men as Demosthenes, Chatham, Erskine, Grattan, Curran, Patrick Henry, Mirabeau, were by genius orators, and were by genius nothing else. We feel that John Hunter was born for anatomy, Faraday for

« AnteriorContinuar »