Documente Academic
Documente Profesional
Documente Cultură
He
was a keen and intelligent observer of man and his life. He took the outward form
of the essay from the French writer and philosopher Montaigne in as much as his
own essays are brief and incomplete in the sense that they explore only a few
aspects of a subject and do not pretend to be thorough, systematic and exhaustive.
He means by the word essay (as he says) certain brief notes set down rather
significantly than curiously. A man of such discursive interests, who took all
knowledge for the province, he used the essay form as a receptacle for detached
thoughts. He calls them disperse meditations
Of course, Bacon does not stray away from the subject that he places before
himself. There are no digressions or divagations in his essays, nothing irrelevant or
unrelated to the theme. He does not allow his mind or fancy to loiter and roam. But
we cannot describe his essays as well-knit compositions because there are no tight
connections between the various ideas, and the ideas do not seem to flow from one
another. We cannot claim that an essay by Bacon is a structural unity. Ideas have
been put together in his essays almost at random. And what is more remarkable is
that in the interests of brevity and condensation of thought, even conjunctions and
other logical connections are sometimes left out.
His earlier essays are very brief in length. The ideas have not been developed. The
sentences are all crisp, short and sententious. Each sentence stands by itself, the
concentrated expression of weighty thought. There is so much of condensation that
each sentence could easily be developed into a paragraph. This is not to say that
each sentence does the work of a paragraph but that it contains matter that could be
elaborated into a paragraph. As Hugh Walker remarks these essays (such as Of
Studies) read like running analysis of paragraphs. Bacon does not treat the subject
fully; he expresses an idea in a few words and then passes on to the next idea, to be
expressed in equally terse terms.
In the light of above said, we can say that it would not be possible to put all the
essays of Bacon in the category of dispersed meditations, or to say that all of them
are brief notes. His earlier essays indeed resemble notebook jottings-condensed,
pithy statements strung together with no apparent connection except in their relation
to the subject. But in his later essays he has taken trouble to enrich his style. These
essays deal with a variety of subjects but they are no longer aphoristic. There is an
attempt to bring out some connection and continuity in the ideas and thought
expressed. They are still meditations. But not quite so dispersed