Here's an essay I just finished for my Seventeenth Century Prose and Poetry class on Francis Bacon's Essays. During my last two years of college, I attempted to relevantly cite H.S. Bender's The Anabaptist Vision in every paper I wrote as a joke. This practice makes a rare cameo here.
On Bacon’s Blogging
The 1625 edition of Francis Bacon’s Essays reminds me of blog entries. Of course the biggest difference between the Essays and blog entries is that Bacon’s pieces were revised and expanded over a period of twenty-eight years, whereas blog entries are often not revisited by their authors once they are posted. But if we set aside this dissimilarity, reading the Essays is like entering the early seventeenth century blogosphere.
The first characteristic of the Essays which reminds me of a blog is their seemingly random order. When writing a personal blog (as opposed to a thematic blog that just treats one topic), it is common for the author to discuss a variety of subjects, to write about whatever happens to be on her or his mind that day. Sometimes succeeding entries will treat related matters, and other times two consecutive posts will be on completely different issues. I see this same pattern in the Essays. For example, essays seven and eight, “Of Parents and Children,” and “Of Marriage and Single Life,” respectively, each deal with topics in the domestic sphere, so it makes sense that one follows the other. One day, Bacon was thinking about parenthood and wrote number seven, and soon afterward, he thought to himself, “Well, but before you can talk about parenthood, don’t you have to first think about whether or not to have a partner with whom you can have the children?,” or something along those lines, so he sat down and wrote about it. But on the other hand, essays such as number ten, “Of Love,” and number fifty-seven, “Of Anger,” which are related in that they treat opposites, are forty-seven entries apart. And further, the essays that follow these two, “Of Great Place,” and “Of Vicissitude of Things,” respectively, seem unrelated to their predecessors. So Bacon lets his thoughts give his pen direction like today’s bloggers do rather than receiving direction from a formal structure – the Essays are an episodic narrative, not a five-paragraph essay.
On a related note, it is common for blog readers to only read the entries on topics that interest them. An example of this is found in the case of my blog. I love sports, and often blog about them, but many of my friends who read my blog are not interested in sports at all, and constantly complain to me that I should write about topics that interest them all the time instead of just here and there. Likewise, I find some of Bacon’s essays to be quite fascinating or memorable – I will remember the phrase “But enough of these toys” (176) from essay thirty-seven for as long as I live – and find others to be utterly unremarkable.
The second characteristic of the Essays which reminds me of a blog is that Bacon is writing to an audience of acquaintances and friends. When someone begins a blog, he or she will send text-messages or e-mails to friends saying something like “Hey! Check out my new blog! Here’s the link, put it on your MySpace page.” Similarly, just like authors today when they publish a book, Bacon must not have been shy about letting his friends at Court know that a new edition of the Essays was coming out, and telling them to pass the news around. Although the Essays do not appear to discuss Bacon’s personal life, Bacon’s first readers would have read the Essays while thinking about what events in Bacon’s life might have inspired or influenced them. Therefore the Essays contain both a public and a personal element, just like personal blogs are very public in that they can be accessed by anyone on the internet, but have special meaning for those who know the author.
I am going to take time now to respond to three of Bacon’s essays that especially caught my eye, just as though I were a blog reader posting comments about an entry.
Essay three, “Of Unity in Religion,” struck me when I first read it because towards the end Bacon asserts that it is dangerous for commoners to wield the sword for religious causes, and says that this “monstrous” practice should “be left unto the Anabaptists” (70). In his gloss of this passage, John Pitcher claims that the Anabaptists were “Protestant sectarians [...] whose history had been violent” (70 n. 32). As someone who was raised in one of the three main Anabaptist-descended groups who are still in existence as a Mennonite (the other two being Amish and Hutterites), I am saddened by Bacon’s misconception of the Anabaptist movement (not to mention Pitcher’s misleading note – historians have accepted that the sixteenth-century Anabaptists were overwhelmingly nonviolent since at least 1944 when Harold S. Bender published The Anabaptist Vision; Pitcher could fix his problematic phrase by writing something like “whose history included some violent episodes” instead).
The large majority of Anabaptists during the sixteenth century were non-violent, and by the time of Bacon’s writing all of the surviving Anabaptists groups were peaceful. But Bacon is only thinking of the Münsterite strain of Anabaptism when he worries about commoners participating in religious violence. Historian Cornelius J. Dyck writes that the Münsterites were led by the Anabaptist prophets Jan Matthijs and Jan van Leiden, who claimed in 1534 that Jesus was going to return very soon to set up the new Jerusalem in the German city of Münster. The Jans said it was necessary for their followers to violently seize the city in order to prepare it for Jesus’s return. The authorities recaptured the city in 1535 and executed the remaining Anabaptists there (99-101). While it is understandable that the Münsterite episode would have been troubling to Bacon as someone who was very interested in keeping the commoners docile to preserve his titled position, I wish that he would have used a more precise word choice, substituting “Münsterites” for Anabaptists. Being too lazy to properly research your subject is never an acceptable excuse for inaccurate writing, even in 1625.
Essay twelve, “Of Boldness,” is interesting to me as an avid chess player because Bacon uses a chess metaphor to explain himself. In describing how the bold react when they are “out of countenance,” Bacon writes that “they stand at a stay, like a stale at chess, where it is no mate but yet the game cannot stir” (95). Stalemate occurs when it is a player’s turn and he or she cannot make any legal moves. According to modern rules, a game is drawn if stalemate occurs. However, according to David Hooper and Kenneth Whyld, the rule in England until 1807 was that the player who stalemated her or his opponent lost the game, because giving stalemate was viewed as a “dishonourable,” unsporting act (388). So Bacon’s use of stalemate as a metaphor includes the notion of there being a winner and a loser.
To give stalemate today is a terrible blunder because the player who gives it is usually winning, but makes a mistake and allows his or her opponent to escape with a draw instead of a loss. Chess books constantly warn their readers to make sure they do not stalemate their opponents in won positions. For instance, Jeremy Silman’s Complete Endgame Course alerts readers about stalemate dangers at least six times (6, 115, 117, 166, 180, 191). With these warnings in mind, think of how much more of a blunder it was to give stalemate in Bacon’s day, when the giver of stalemate lost the game instead of settling for a frustrating draw. This knowledge gives Bacon’s twenty-first century reader further insight into how forceful Bacon’s condemnation of the bold is. Just prior to the stalemate passage, Bacon opines that the bold “are a sport to behold,” and contain elements “of the ridiculous” when their bold boasts have “failed most shamefully” (95). Although Bacon uses the stalemate metaphor to describe the faces of the bold when they fail, the reader can infer that Bacon chooses this metaphor rather than something like “their faces are like statues showing no expression” to reinforce his position that the bold are foolish. They are like those who give stalemate, blunderers who turn their presumed victory into defeat.
Essay thirty-seven, “Of Masques and Triumphs,” also fascinates me, mostly because of Bacon’s downplaying of the importance of his topic at either end of the essay. He starts out by apologizing that “These things are but toys” (175), and finishes sneeringly with the abrupt “But enough of these toys” (176). It is commonly taught that the worse action to take when beginning a speech is to apologize to the audience about something. Likewise, when I teach writing, I always tell my students that it is necessary to use assertive language throughout their papers to make a convincing argument. With this advice in mind, it appears on the surface that essay thirty-seven is badly written because Bacon apologizes to the reader for the argument he is about to make, and then ends the essay in a way that makes the reader feel that Bacon thinks he wasted his time by writing it, and therefore the reader wasted her or his time by reading it.
But Bacon’s dismissive declamations of his topic actually have the opposite rhetorical effect. His dismissal of the essay’s topics is so forceful that the reader cannot forget it, and therefore the essay sticks in the reader’s mind even though it is about seemingly trivial subjects. The reader cannot get “Of Masques and Triumphs” out of their head, and thus cannot help but considering Bacon’s ideas expressed therein. I remember virtually nothing about some of the essays with more serious topics such as number two, “Of Death,” or number thirty-six, “Of Ambition,” but “Of Masques and Triumphs” keeps coming into my mind.
Works Cited
Bacon, Francis. The Essays. 1625. Ed. John Pitcher. London: Penguin, 1985.
Bender, Harold S. The Anabaptist Vision. Scottdale, PA: Herald, 1944.
Dyck, Cornelius J. An Introduction to Mennonite History: A Popular History of the Anabaptists and the Mennonites. 3rd ed. Scottdale, PA: Herald, 1993.
Hooper, David, and Kenneth Whyld. The Oxford Companion to Chess. 2nd ed. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1992.
Silman, Jeremy. Silman’s Complete Endgame Course: From Beginner to Master. Los Angeles: Siles, 2007.
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