Essays

Overview

The Essays are a hundred and twenty pages and fifty-eight pieces, most of them three or four pages long, and they grew over nearly thirty years. The first edition of 1597 had ten, short and almost note-like. The second of 1612 had thirty-eight. The third of 1625, the year before Bacon died, has fifty-eight, many of them substantially rewritten and expanded. It is worth knowing which version you are reading; the early ones are terser and drier, and the late ones have the images.

Bacon called them dispersed meditations and said the word essay was late but the thing was ancient, citing Seneca’s letters. The acknowledgement of Montaigne is implicit and the difference is total. Montaigne’s subject is Montaigne; he digresses, contradicts himself, changes his mind on the page, and tells you about his kidney stones. Bacon’s subject is the world, he never appears in the essays except as an observer, and he does not digress at all. A Montaigne essay wanders; a Bacon essay is a sequence of detonations.

The style is the reason to read them. Each is built from sentences that are trying to be proverbs, and many succeeded: a great number of phrases in ordinary English come from this book. The compression is such that a paragraph often contains three or four separable arguments, laid side by side without connectives, and you have to slow down to notice how much is being claimed.

The argument

There is no argument across the collection, and Bacon did not intend one. What there is instead is a consistent stance, and it is the interesting thing about the book.

On how people actually behave. Bacon assumes self-interest and works from it. Of Simulation and Dissimulation grades three degrees of concealment, closeness, dissimulation and outright feigning, and treats the question of which to use as a practical one, concluding that the best composition is to have openness in fame, secrecy in habit, dissimulation in seasonable use and the power to feign if there is no remedy. Of Cunning is a catalogue of manipulations, described with enough precision to be instructions. Of Revenge opens by calling it a kind of wild justice and then argues against it on the practical ground that a man who studies revenge keeps his own wounds green.

This is what disturbs readers. Bacon describes how influence and advancement work rather than how they ought to, and much of the advice is usable by anyone regardless of their ends.

On public life. Of Great Place is the centre of the collection and the essay most obviously written from experience. Men in high position are servants three times over: of the sovereign, of reputation, and of business, and they have no freedom in their persons, their actions or their time. The rising to it is by a winding stair. The standing is slippery and the regress is either a downfall or an eclipse, which is a melancholy thing. And the power to do good is the true and lawful end of aspiring, since merely wishing well is a good dream unless it is put into act.

Of Judicature, Of Counsel, Of Seditions and Troubles and Of Empire are the work of a man who sat in Parliament from his twenties and knew how the machinery ran. The essay on seditions contains a real political analysis: the causes are much poverty and much discontent, the materials are prepared by dearth and heavy taxes, and the remedy is to remove the matter rather than to suppress the noise.

On private life. These are the essays people love and they are not soft. Of Marriage and Single Life opens by observing that a man with a wife and children has given hostages to fortune, and notes that the best works have come from unmarried or childless men. Of Parents and Children, Of Love, which treats it as a thing fit for the stage rather than for life, Of Friendship, which is the warmest thing Bacon wrote and argues that the principal fruit of friendship is the ease and discharge of the fullness of the heart, since a man who has no friend may quit the stage and eat his heart.

On himself, obliquely. Of Adversity, Of Ambition, Of Riches and Of Honour and Reputation read differently once you know the life. Bacon rose to Lord Chancellor, was impeached in 1621 for taking gifts from litigants, confessed, was fined forty thousand pounds and imprisoned briefly in the Tower, and spent his last five years writing. The 1625 essays were finished in that period. Nothing in them is confessional, and several are about what it is like to fall.

The famous short ones. Of Truth opens with jesting Pilate. Of Death argues that men fear it as children fear the dark, and that the ceremonies around it are more terrible than the thing. Of Studies is four pages and contains more quoted sentences per line than anything else in English prose.

How to read it

Read them one or two at a time and reread the good ones. They are designed to be dipped into and they are exhausting in bulk, because nothing is padding.

Start with Of Studies, Of Truth, Of Death, Of Great Place, Of Friendship and Of Marriage and Single Life. That gives you the range from the warm to the cold.

Read slowly and notice the compression. Bacon habitually states a position, an objection and a distinction in three consecutive sentences with nothing joining them, and the reader is expected to supply the connections. Anyone reading at ordinary pace will take away aphorisms and miss the arguments.

Get an annotated edition. The essays are thick with Latin tags, classical anecdotes and unattributed quotations, and Vickers’ notes in the Oxford Major Works make the difference between following the argument and admiring the sentences.

Read a few of Montaigne’s afterwards, which is the fastest way to see what Bacon chose not to do. And read Of Great Place next to Machiavelli, whom Bacon admired openly and praised for writing what men do rather than what they ought to do.

Questions it raises

• Is this a book about how to live well or how to get on? Bacon rarely separates them, and the essays on cunning and dissimulation make the question unavoidable.
• He praises Machiavelli for describing what men do rather than what they should. Is that praise for honesty, or for a method with no place for ought?
• Of Great Place says the power to do good is the true end of ambition. Does the rest of the collection support that, or undercut it?
• The essays were finished by a man disgraced for corruption. Does the life discredit the counsel, illustrate it, or neither?
• Montaigne examines himself and Bacon examines everyone else. Which produces more self-knowledge in the reader?
• Bacon’s sentences are built to be quoted. Does the aphoristic form make a claim easier to accept than it should be?