Dope

Limited Inc has been in operation for almost a year now. And we've discovered that our readers want bold stands. They want LI out there on the barricades. They want no shirking. They want LI to march, martyr-like, into the burning issues of the day -- into the very heart of the pyre. This is why so many of you have written in -- flocks of you, herds of you, you know how you congregate out there, in the darkness, a murder of readers, sometimes we wake up and feel you out there, sometimes we really do -- written in to ask us point blank: was Macauley right about Francis Bacon?

You are, of course, referring to Macaulay's hundred page "review" of Basil Montague's edition of the works of Francis Bacon. Macaulay wrote it in Calcutta, and saw it published by the Edinburgh Review in July, 1837. Like many other of Macaulay's essays, it had an electric effect after it was published. The Victorians always did things on an imperial scale: While LI is happy if we have 1000 words to tussle with a book, Macaulay was given 100 pages to review, essentially, a preface. The next editor of Bacon's works, a man named Spedding, wrote a nine hundred page refutation of Macaulay's essay. This is the same logic that conquered most of Africa and half of Asia.

In John Clive's biography of Thomas Macaulay, he devotes the last chapter, a sort of epilogue, to surveying the Victorian response to the Bacon essay (And no, no, LI has not read the refutation of Macaulay published by Spedding; we have a habit, around here, of taking nine hundred page refutations written in the 1870s on trust). Clive's point is that one can use Macaulay's essay to measure a fracture in the Victorian mind between the rampant positivism which infused the attitude of the Whig power structure, with its strong hold on the merchant and business class, and the Conservative reaction to capitalism. Marx, of course, thought that capitalism was a revolutionary force dissolving the tough integument of traditional ties, unconsciously but efficiently carrying out the labor of the the Weltgeist. Of course, by and by, when all the ties were dissolved and the key to wealth was unlocked, history's favored class, the proletariat, would sit in the faux palaces of the bourgeoisie, and we'd all become literary critics in the morning, do a little bit of steel producing in the afternoon, and some fishing on the weekends. The Conservative critique, however, was much more on the screen for the the Victorian poobahs, who only gradually realized that the working class was beginning to feel itself as a class. In the early Victorian period, that critique took its bearings from Coleridge. Clive identifies Coleridge as the third man in Macaulay's enemy, the force behind Montague. Coleridge had already promoted Bacon as the English Plato. (See this essay by Harvey Wheeler on Coleridge's claim on the constitution org site) As a Plato, Bacon could be used against the force that was transforming the traditional form of property, and the hierarchy built upon it, because that force was perceived to be against every cultural value worth keeping. The Whiggish assault on the conventions of the rural landholders, on religion, was to its professional mourners (from Carlyle to Ruskin) the Dunciad writ large -- dullness as a social force, philistinism as a cultural dominant, the rush into some vast darkness within which one could hear, faintly, the reverberation of gunfire. From Emerson to Newman to Arnold, all the 19th century poobahs agreed that the philistine attitude had a charter, a Magna Carta, and it was the Bacon essay.

Emerson, in the English Traits, is referring to that essay when he shrewdly sums up Macaulay:

"The brilliant Macaulay, who expresses the tone of the English governing classes of the day, explicitly teaches, that _good_ means good to eat, good to wear, material commodity; that the glory of modern philosophy is its direction on "fruit;" to yield economical inventions; and that its merit is to avoid ideas, and avoid morals. He thinks it the distinctive merit of the Baconian philosophy, in its triumph over the old Platonic, its disentangling the intellect from theories of the all-Fair and all-Good, and pinning it down to the making a better sick chair and a better wine-whey for an invalid; --this not ironically, but in good faith; -- that, "solid advantage," as he calls it, meaning always sensual benefit, is the only good. The eminent benefit of astronomy is the better navigation it creates to enable the fruit-ships to bring home their lemons and wine to the London grocer. It was a curious result, in which the civility and religion of England for a thousand years, ends, in denying morals, and reducing the intellect to a sauce-pan."

So, let's sum up before the next post: the Macaulay essay was considered, on the one hand, to be a vicious caricature of Francis Bacon's character by a whole line of Bacon enthusiasts; and on the other hand, to be an extension of the unpleasantly practical side of Bacon's character by those who saw the practical turn in philosophy, and its social consequences, as the downfall of the best and the brightest. To quote a historian quoted by Clive, the essay was the "locus classicus of Victorian anti-intellectualism."

Since these forms are still with us, and these forces still rage underneath our feet, LI feels entitled to survey, at luxurious length, M.'s essay. Until the next post, children, adieu.