Recent Reading: Essays by Francis Bacon

Essays by Francis Bacon.

My reading of this was in a very nicely produced pocket hardback volume, from just before WWI. It runs to just under 250 pages, with a reasonable set of notes, albeit somewhat erratic in coverage by modern standards: although the editor is pretty consistent about translating the abundant Latin passages, some of his assumptions about common knowledge don’t match up to modern readers, or at least this modern reader.

Bacon is famous for his Essays: short pieces which in this edition can run from 2 pages up to 10-15, covering all sorts of subjects that a seventeenth century gentleman or courtier would find useful. Many are specifically about court or national politics, but other pieces of general philosophy would not be out of place in a self-help guide, and others are more practical: ‘Of Houses’ or ‘Of Gardens’ for example.

The first thing to say is that Bacon is very quotable: he has an elegant, neat and memorable turn of phrase. No doubt this is one reason he has stayed in current memory for so long; if you want a bon mot with which to begin an essay or newspaper column, or to head a chapter in your book, then if Bacon has written on the subject or anywhere adjacent, he’ll have what you need. ‘Children sweeten labours, but they make misfortunes more bitter’; ‘A man that hah no virtue in himself ever envieth virtue in others’; ‘They that deny a God destroy a man’s nobility.’

He’s also concise. His essays are of a length which makes them easy to read in an odd moment, a break in between other activities, and especially to rereading.

Is there more to Bacon than that? Well, there are a few elements, some recurring, which make the façade wobble rather like a dodgy piece of stage scenery, allowing you to see behind the elegant style and question the actual substance.

Firstly, some rather dubious assumptions. For example, in ‘Of Marriage and the Single Life’, he writes: ‘Certainly the best works, and of greatest merit for the public, have proceeded from the unmarried or childless men’. I think that is certainly contestable, in many cases, and in certain cases by contemporaries of his. Perhaps he was inclined to look rather to much to his own case, and assume that to be optimal?

Secondly, his quotations. He casts around a fair bit of Latin from ancient authors, and I’m not ashamed to admit I have to get a bit of aid from the editor’s translations here. I wouldn’t be at all worried by an author that condensed or smoothed out a line in order to preserve the original meaning while making it punchier, or to fit tidily within his framework, but when the note explains that the original writer actually wrote something different, and not infrequently something which was that exact opposite of the argument Bacon is using the line to support, then I start to look a bit harder. Perhaps he misremembered – but to specifically edit something that would contradict him to something that would endorse him… As someone acclaimed as well read in his time, perhaps he just depended on people taking his word for it.

Thirdly, consistency of view point. Again, it’s not unreasonable to give, or at least consider, a spectrum of views on a subject, looking at strengths and weaknesses and arguments for and against, but too often Bacon tries to argue all sides. It’s as if the argument is more important than the side he chooses; or that he’s set his pen down, come back to the essay some time later, and forgotten which side he was on; or that, like an astrologer or tarot reader, he’s laying out the different thoughts for the reader to take whatever he was inclined to want from the essay when he began reading. Consider ‘Of Counsel’, somewhat condensed: don’t ask advice from anyone, because they’ll tell you what they want you to hear. Unless they have your best interests at heart, which they may, or not. So don’t ask advice from anyone, unless you really need to, in which case only ask one person. Or two at most. Never more than two. Unless you need more advice, in which case ask as many people as you want to. That’ll be fine.

Finally – and I appreciate this is not a problem to many of his readers, particularly in his own time – Bacon is utterly dependent on a religious foundation for his arguments. The Bible, and through it God, is the arbiter of everything, the philosophical lever and fulcrum through which he moves the earth.

Overall, enjoyable reading, and some nice lines – but I personally get more philosophy, and more consistency, from a good Shakespeare soliloquy.