Abbildungen der Seite
PDF
EPUB

I

BACON

FROM THE

BEST ENGLISH ESSAYS

BACON:

MASTER OF CONDENSATION

F all English prose writers, Bacon is the most condensed. His successive sen

tences approach the condensation of the proverb and the aphorism. In the essay "Of Studies" there are half a dozen sentences any one of which a modern writer might take as a text and expand into a good-sized volume. Moreover, it is very interesting to note how he attains this unusual condensation, namely, in the simplest way that condensation can be attained. He does no more than state a simple truth in the most direct and simple language imaginable. A child may do that; but the difference between a child and Bacon is that Bacon's simple truth has such profound and far-reaching applications. When a man has spent a lifetime in investigation of a subject, so that it is as familiar to him as his A B C's, nothing could be easier or simpler for him than to put his finger on the central point, the heart of the whole subject. If he displays

any peculiar literary skill, it is chiefly in refraining from doing anything beside putting his finger on the point of interest in his subject. The profundity of Bacon's knowledge, the accuracy and comprehensiveness of his thought, are the essential things in his essays. Little as he suspected it when he wrote them, these essays afford us a key to the conclusions regarding life of one of the profoundest thinkers, one of the keenest observers, and one of the most learned men the world has ever produced.

As Bacon is our first essayist, the history of his essays is interesting. As a brilliant conversationist he was in the habit of jotting down in his notebook any terse or suggestive saying he heard, or any particularly good sentence that occurred to him in the ordinary rounds of his life and studies. In 1597 he published a dozen groups of these notes. They formed only a few pages in a book that contained other matter. Nearly every sentence was marked with the sign of the paragraph, showing that Bacon presented them merely as a collection of epigrammatic sentences. By far the best of these ten original essays was the one called "Of Studies." The book as a whole, however, was popular, and in 1612 a new edition was published, in which nearly all the original essays were enlarged and the disjointed notes were more closely welded together. Many essays were added. In 1625 the final edition, as we now have it, appeared, and the collections of notes had

« ZurückWeiter »