Samuel Johnson | Life of Cowley

 

Abraham Cowley
(1618-1667)

Samuel Johnson as a biographer and critic with reference to Life of Cowley

Question: Discuss Samuel Johnson as a biographer and critic with reference to “Life of Cowley”.

Introduction

Samuel Johnson (1709 -1784) is an English writer who has made lasting contributions to English literature as a literary critic and biographer. He had once told a Scottish biographer James Boswell, “The biographical part of literature is what I love most.” Here Samuel Johnson is presented as a biographer and critic with reference to his essay “Life of Cowley.”

Samuel Johnson as a biographer

A biography is a story of a person’s life written by someone else. It has long been one of the most popular forms of prose writing. Writing a good biography is one of the most challenging tasks. It follows some basic rules.

Maintenance of objectivity and balance

Dr. Samuel Johnson has always attempted to be objective and balanced while writing a biography. His tactful narrative skill satisfies the reader’s curiosity and creates a thirst for reading to gain further understanding. “Life of Cowley” follows a three-part plan such as Johnson’s accounts, Cowley’s suggestive and evocative biography, and a summary of the main features of his writings. Thus, Johnson maintains objectivity and balance as a landmark biographer.

Representation of facts

A good biographer presents facts about a person’s life. This information includes how the writer influenced his literary period that is why Johnson mentions that Cowley was influenced by John Donne and influenced his period with the metaphysical concepts though the biographer does not hesitate to find faults. As Abraham Cowley is a real character of English literature, Johnson’s presentation of facts about the life and writings of Cowley out and out bears the sign of the best biographer.

Interpretative nature

Most biographies are interpretative, and Dr. Johnson’s life of Cowley is no exception. Johnson not only presents facts but also explains what those facts mean. In his essay on Cowley, Johnson has defended Cowley’s neutrality as a captive. But in defending Cowley, Johnson never loses his objectivity and balance although there was a scarcity of research material.

Narrative force

The narrative force along with psychological reality provides a lively flavor. Johnson’s “Life of Cowley” has the magical narrative force of a good novel. Critics have categorized Johnson as a classical biographer. At the very outset of the essay, Johnson defines genius and describes the process of how Cowley became “irrecoverably a poet”. Such aphoristic expressions provide a classical status to this piece of biography.

Reference of other writers

Johnson’s essay “Life of Cowley” is a part of the great volume “The lives of the Poets” which comprises forty-two lives. “The Lives of the Poets” exhibits Johnson’s critical power and prejudices. In his essay, Johnson mentions Milton, Dryden, and Pope who are the most substantial poets of English literature. He closely considers the poems of Donne too. So, as a biographer, Johnson is not only perfect but also influential.

Johnson as a critic

Literary criticism is the discussion of literature including description, analysis, interpretation, and evaluation of literary works. To put it differently, Literary criticism means the art or practice of judging and commenting on the qualities and character of literary works. In the essay “Life of Cowley”, Johnson talks about the metaphysical poets followed by an examination of Cowley’s major works.

Cowley as a metaphysical poet

Johnson first tries to categorize Cowley as a metaphysical poet because Cowley in his poems has used simile, metaphor, conceit, and other styles which are like the metaphysical poets.

“Wit like other things, subject by their nature to the choice of man,

has its changes and fashions, and, at different times, takes different forms.”

Finding faults

Finding faults for evaluation and judgment is an important aspect of literary criticism. Johnson as a critic has not given a discount to William Shakespeare let alone Cowley. He defines metaphysical poetry with fault.

“The most heterogeneous ideas are yoked by violence together”.

Besides, Johnson asserts that the metaphysical poets have failed to attain the sublimity of art. According to Johnson, the metaphysical poets never tried to understand the greatness of thought. The conceit used by them is packed up with drawbacks. In the modern age, Johnson is vehemently opposed by T. S. Eliot.

Positive sides

Literary criticism does not discover only the negative sides of the literary works. Positive sides are equally asserted. Johnson praises Cowley as a love poet and compares him with Petrarch, an Italian poet, and sonneteer. A love poet Cowley is able to play the role of psychologist.

Conclusion

Now we can conclude that Johnson as a biographer and critic has enhanced the potential of English literature. As a critic, Johnson is such a genius that nobody can reject his opinions completely. Even T. S. Eliot has shown respect for Johnson’s evaluation of the metaphysical poets.

 

The Metaphysical Poets by T S Eliot

The Metaphysical Poets by T S Eliot

About T. S. Eliot

Thomas Stearns Eliot (1888-1965) is regarded as one of the most important and influential poets of the twentieth century, with poems like ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’ (1915), The Waste Land (1922), and ‘The Hollow Men’ (1925) assuring him a place in the ‘canon’ of modernist poetry.

Modernist poets often embraced free verse, but Eliot had a more guarded view, believing that all good poetry had the ‘ghost’ of a metre behind the lines. Even in his most famous poems we can often detect the rhythms of iambic pentameter – that quintessentially English verse line – and in other respects, such as his respect for the literary tradition, Eliot is a more ‘conservative’ poet than a radical.

Nevertheless, his poetry changed the landscape of Anglophone poetry for good. Born in St Louis, Missouri in 1888, Eliot studied at Harvard and Oxford before abandoning his postgraduate studies at Oxford because he preferred the exciting literary society of London. He met a fellow American expatriate, Ezra Pound, who had already published several volumes of poetry, and Pound helped to get Eliot’s work into print. Although his first collection, Prufrock and Other Observations (1917), sold modestly (its print run of 500 copies would take five years to sell out), the publication of The Waste Land in 1922, with its picture of a post-war Europe in spiritual crisis, established him as one of the most important literary figures of his day.

He never returned to America (except to visit as a lecturer), but became an official British citizen in 1927, the same year he was confirmed into the Church of England. His last major achievement as a poet was Four Quartets (1935-42), which reflect his turn to Anglicanism. In his later years he attempted to reform English verse drama with plays like Murder in the Cathedral (1935) and The Cocktail Party (1949). He died in London in 1965.

Summary

Eliot’s article on The Metaphysical Poets is actually a review of a new anthology, Herbert J. C. Grierson’s Metaphysical Lyrics and Poems of the Seventeenth Century. Eliot uses his review of Grierson’s anthology, however, as an opportunity to consider the value and significance of the metaphysical poets in the development of English poetry.

Although the metaphysical poets were a distinctly English ‘movement’ or ‘school’ (Eliot uses both words, while acknowledging that they are modern descriptions grouping together a quite disparate number of poets), Eliot also draws some interesting parallels between the seventeenth-century English metaphysical poets and nineteenth-century French Symbolist poets like Jules Laforgue, whose work Eliot much admired.

Eliot begins by reminding us that it’s difficult to define metaphysical poetry, since there is a considerable difference in style and technique between those poets who are often labelled ‘metaphysical’. We have explored the issue of defining metaphysical poetry in a separate post, but the key frame of reference, for us as for Eliot, was Samuel Johnson’s influential denunciation of the metaphysical poets in the eighteenth century.

Eliot quotes Johnson’s line about metaphysical poetry that ‘the most heterogeneous ideas are yoked by violence together’. Eliot’s response to Johnson’s censure, however, is to point out that all kinds of poets – not just the metaphysicals – unite heterogeneous or different materials together in their poetry. Indeed, Eliot quotes from Johnson’s own poem, The Vanity of Human Wishes:

His fate was destined to a barren strand,
A petty fortress and a dubious hand;
He left a name at which the world grew pale,
To point a moral or adorn a tale.

Eliot argues that, whilst such lines as these are different in degree from what the metaphysical poets did in their own work, the principle is in fact the same. Johnson is ‘guilty’ of that which he chastised Abraham Cowley, John Cleveland, and other metaphysical poets for doing in their work.

Eliot then goes on to consider the style of numerous metaphysical poets. He points out that, whilst someone like George Herbert wrote in simple and elegant language, his syntax, or sentence structure, was often more complex and demanding. Key to Herbert’s method is ‘a fidelity to thought and feeling’, and it is the union of thought and feeling in metaphysical poetry which will form the predominant theme of the remainder of Eliot’s essay.

Eliot next considers what led to the development of metaphysical poetry: reminding us that John Donne, the first metaphysical poet, was an Elizabethan (Donne wrote many of his greatest love poems in the 1590s, when he was in his early twenties), Eliot compares Donne’s ‘analytic’ mode with many of his contemporaries, such as William Shakespeare and George Chapman, who wrote verse drama for the Elizabethan stage.

These playwrights were all influenced by the French writer Montaigne, who had effectively invented the modern essay form in his prose writings. (We can arguably see the influence of Montaigne, with his essays arguing and considering the various aspects of a topic, on the development of the Shakespearean soliloquy, where we often find a character arguing with themselves about a course of action: Hamlet’s ‘To be, or not to be’ is perhaps the most famous example.) The key thing, for Eliot, is that in such dramatic speeches – the one he cites is from George Chapman’s drama – there is a ‘direct sensuous apprehension of thought’, i.e. reason and feeling are intrinsically linked, and thought is a sensory, rather than a merely rational, experience. This is where we come to his thesis concerning the ‘dissociation of sensibility’ which occurred in the seventeenth century.

‘Dissociation of sensibility’

The idea of the ‘dissociation of sensibility’ is one of T. S. Eliot’s most famous critical theories. The key statement made by Eliot in relation to the ‘dissociation of sensibility’ is arguably the following: ‘A thought to Donne was an experience; it modified his sensibility.’ Or, as he had just said, prior to this, of the nineteenth-century poets Tennyson and Browning: ‘they do not feel their thought as immediately as the odour of a rose.’

In other words, whereas poets like Donne, in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth century, felt their thoughts with the immediacy we usually associate with smelling a sweet flower, later poets were unable to feel their thought in the same way. The change – the ‘dissociation of sensibility’, i.e. the moment at which thought and feeling became separated – occurred, for Eliot, in the mid-seventeenth century, after the heyday of metaphysical poetry when Donne, Herbert, and (to an extent) Marvell were writing.

This watershed moment, this shift in poetry, is represented, for Eliot, by two major poets of the later seventeenth century: John Milton and John Dryden. Both poets did something consummately, but what they did was different. Dryden’s style was far more rational and neoclassical; Milton’s was more focused on sensation and feeling. (It is worth noting, although Eliot doesn’t make this point, that the Romantics – whose work rejected the cold, orderly rationalism of neoclassical poets like Alexander Pope and, before him, John Dryden – embraced Milton, and especially his Paradise Lost. Wordsworth references Milton in several of his sonnets, while Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein is steeped in Milton.)

Eliot concludes ‘The Metaphysical Poets’ by drawing some comparisons between the metaphysical mode and nineteenth-century French Symbolists, to demonstrate further that the ‘metaphysical’ was not some entirely distinct variety of poetry but that it shares some core affinities with other schools of poetry. He then returns to Johnson’s criticism of the metaphysical poets’ techniques and metre, and argues that, whilst we should take Johnson’s critique seriously, we should nevertheless value the metaphysical poets and look beyond poets like Cowley and Cleveland (who are Johnson’s chief focus).

In conclusion, Eliot’s essay was important in raising the profile of the metaphysical poets among his own readers: people who looked to Eliot for discerning critical judgement and viewed him as a touchstone of literary taste were inclined to go and reread the metaphysicals. This led to a tendency among critics of Eliot’s work to identify him as a latter-day metaphysical poet, a view which, as the poet-critic William Empson pointed out, isn’t borne out by reading Eliot’s work. Prufrock, the speakers of The Waste Land, and the Hollow Men don’t really speak to us in the same way as Donne or Marvell do: there aren’t really any elaborate and extended poetic conceits (central to the metaphysical method) in Eliot’s work.

So, this connection between Eliot’s own work and the work of Donne, Herbert, and others has been overplayed. (Empson was well-placed to point this out: his own poetry clearly bears the influence of Donne in particular, and Empson is rightly called a modern metaphysical poet for this reason.) However, Eliot himself encourages such a parallel at one point in ‘The Metaphysical Poets’, when he writes that poets writing in modern European civilization must be difficult because the civilization is itself complex and various, and so the poet, to do justice to this complexity and variety, must become ‘more comprehensive, more allusive, more indirect, in order to force, to dislocate, if necessary, language into his meaning’. Certainly, this statement is equally applicable to Andrew Marvell and T. S. Eliot.

 

  

Terry Eagleton’s Prose Style in Rise of English

 

Question: Discuss Eagleton’s Prose Style.

Introduction

The style is not mere decoration. It is rather a way of searching and explaining the truth. Its purpose is not to impress, but to express. Since Terry Eagleton is the most renowned critic of modern English literature, his critical writing has a number of prominent features.

Dialectical Style

One of the key features of Eagleton’s critical prose is the brilliant inverse logical style. He intelligently considers social and cultural conflicts and raises the opposing arguments so strongly in the conflict that they burst and suddenly some unexpected insight or vision is revealed. In this way, the readers feel seemingly ridiculous and far-fetched assumptions. But immediately they discover how precise and reasonable the arguments are.

“In eighteenth-century England, the concept of literature was not confined as it sometimes is today to ‘creative’ or ‘imaginative’ writing.”

The above sentence may be seemed positive but expresses the limited concept of literature since it was not creative and imaginative in the 18th century. Thus, the dialectical style is the soul of his prose style.

Lightening Opacity

Absolute ambiguity is one of the most permanent and attractive qualities in Terry Eagleton’s writings. It has helped him to be one of the most colorful and controversial figures in cultural politics today. When we examine his critical writings, we can see that no one explains critical theory with greater clarity than he does. The appeal of his work stems from the bold inquiry. He has introduced the origins and aims of English studies. This is meant that the function of criticism relates to the closely related and equally relentless questions. So, Eagleton’s style is unclear due to the riddle of the question. But whenever questions are solved, his idea shines. His “The Rise of English” is the paradigm of sheer audacity.

Historical References

Eagleton is an outspoken critic of his generation. His best-selling publication “Literary Theory: An Introduction” published in 1983 reflects the breadth of his theory of knowledge. In this book the second chapter entitled “The Rise of English” contains many historical references of literature. His knowledge includes criticism not only of British critics but of Europe, Russia, and America. It is important that Eagleton himself is not a historian but his concept of literature excels the historians. Therefore, he studies how English studies went through changes from adorable drawing rooms of the aristocracy to the venerable middle class and how it replaces religion to perform the ideological platform to enforce social bonding. This approach is certainly unique and has been dispatched in the dialectical style of Eagleton.

Humor

Most of the reversal comments in “The Rise of English” are humorous. In this work, Eagleton offers scathing assessments of various currents of criticism. While discussing the concept of value-judgment, he notes:

“Nobody would bother to say that a bus ticket was an example of inferior literature, but someone might well say that the poetry of Ernest Dowson was”.

This is a grossly overdone statement, but one should, by no means, ignore the educational or pedagogical problems of Eagleton’s style.

The Satirical Reversal In Arguments

Another technique often employed by Eagleton is the Swift-like satirical reversal in arguments. He describes in detail a seemingly plausible case only to knock it down unexpectedly with a penetrating observation and expose it with faults. This technique is used to create a great effect in “The Rise of English”. When the critic satirizes the English short-lived poet and politician Ernest Dowson, it creates the Swift-like satirical reversal in arguments.

Tiresome Extent

Pointless is not the staple of Eagleton’s prose. In fact, his style is clearer than most of the formal methods. But long stretches of text can be tiring. In spite of the tedious limitations, there is something different in his prose that can regenerate the text and the readers separately and independently.

Conclusion

Thus, writing in a style is accessible. Eagleton has specifically argued in the field of literary theory. His rhetorical skills are perhaps unequaled by contemporary critics. These are something that many critical theorists could benefit from studying.

 

Rise of English by Terry Eagleton

 

The Rise of English”- by Terry Eagleton

 

In eighteenth-century England, literature was considered to be that which conformed to the standards of ‘polite letters’, meaning that which embodied the values and tastes of the upper classes (usually).  After the bloody civil war of the previous century, literature became even more important in bringing the middle classes into unity with the upper classes.

 

Literature, in the modern sense, really emerged around the nineteenth century during the Romantic period; the idea that literature is something imaginative or inventive while prosaic writing is dull or uninspiring is a relatively new concept in history.

 

During the Romantic period, types of literature like poetry no longer were simply a technical way of writing, they had significant social, political, and philosophical implications (many major Romantic poets were political activists themselves).  The stress upon the sovereignty and autonomy of the imagination was another emphasis finding its way into the concept of literature.  The rise of the ‘symbol’ also came towards the end of the eighteenth century; with it, various contradictory concepts could finally be captured together.

 

Literature, as defined by Eagleton earlier, IS an ideology.  Eagleton suggests that the growth of English studies in the later nineteenth century was caused by the failure of religion, something he believes was a very simple yet powerful form of ideology that was above all else a pacifying influence.  Apparently, English literature worked as a suitable replacement.  English became a subject used to cultivate the middle class and infuse them with some values of the leftover aristocracy; thus, English literature became the new way to pacify the working and middle classes.  Literature would convey timeless truths and distract the masses from their present commitments and c0nditions; it was also a way to experience things or events that were not possible to experience in a person’s life.  English as an academic subject was nothing more than the poor man’s Classics.  In addition, English became the new vehicle for transferring the moral law, which was no longer taken from religion.

 

Because English was not exactly considered a ‘real’ subject, it was often given to the ladies of higher learning institutions when were now grudgingly admitting women; however, as the century drew on, English took on more of a masculine aspect.  It still took a while for the study of English to be taken seriously, but finally English literature came into power, mostly because of wartime nationalism.  The new subject was created by the offspring of the bourgeoisie, rather than those who currently held social power.

 

Now the study of English was ‘in’, and people may have wondered how it had ever been otherwise.  Deep and intense questions became subject to the most intense scrutiny.  Literature was also perhaps the only place where creative language was allowed to flourish.  In addition, those studying felt that they were a part of a larger movement that was moving civilization back to the way it should have been, as in the seventeenth century.

 

“Scrutiny” didn’t seek to change society in any way; rather, their goal was to withstand it.  Teaching children about the corrupt culture they lived in was very important, instead of making them memorize pointless passages of literature.  Eagleton said that the Scrutiny project was “hair-raisingly radical and really rather absurd.”  In the end, Scrutiny was simply a project of the elitists.  The ‘organic’ society desired by Scrutiny was unobtainable, nothing more than a lofty desire to reclaim the golden days of the past.

 

Some types of English were considered more English than others, which ironically reminds one of the types of arguments given by the upper class before.  When T.S. Eliot came to England, he upgraded the status of the poets and dramatists while toppling Milton and the Romantics.  Literature becomes that which has the Tradition flowing through it; all poetry may be literature, but not all poetry may be Literature.  Eliot thought that middle-class liberalism had failed in light of the war, and a poet must develop a new type of sensory language in poetry that would speak to a person’s senses rather than their intellect.  Many contradictions began showing up in the ideas that the ‘big wigs’ of Literature of that day came up with.

 

Practical criticism meant a method that was unafraid to take a text apart, but also assumed that you could judge literary greatness by focusing on pieces of poetry or prose isolated from their cultural contexts.  Close reading also mean detailed analytic interpretation, but also seemed to imply that former methods of criticism read only three words per line.  Also assumed that any literary work could be understood in isolation from its context.

 

Richards, an advocate of modern science, felt that, even though he himself felts questions such as ‘what?’ or ‘why?’ were not valid, if pseudo-answers were not given to such pseudo-questions, society would fall apart.  Poetry’s role is to supply such answers.

 

American New Criticism was deeply marked by the doctrines that organizing lawless lower human impulses more effectively will ensure the survival of the higher finer ones (not too dissimilar from the old Victorian belief that organizing the lower classes will ensure the survival of the upper ones).  New Criticism was not too different from Scrutiny: it reinvented in literature what it couldn’t find in reality.  They came up with something called the Great Man theory of literature, which says that even if the author’s intentions in writing were recovered, they were of no relevance to the interpretation of his or her text.  At the same time, neither could the emotional responses of readers be confused with the poem’s true meaning.  Ultimately, reading poetry in the New Critical way meant committing yourself to nothing, a rejection of anything in particular.

Executive summary “The Rise of English” is an outstanding essay where Eagleton surveys how the concept of literature as we understand today has developed, how its studies have begun academically and how literary criticism in English has evolved. He discloses the capitalist motif behind using English as an academic discipline in British colonies. As a post-modern theorist, Eagleton elaborately discusses the drawbacks of New Criticism and paves the way forward to look at the literary texts with newer insight. However, in the essay “The Rise of English” he criticizes the theoretical development in the English up to the New Criticism phase.

 

Linguistics Suggestions

 

Study Area for Final exam of Linguistics:

 

(Following topics will be studied for the brief/short questions only)

 

Phonetics, phonology, Lenis, Fortis, Elision, Fricatives, Speech organs

Ferdinand De Saussure, Prague School of Linguistics, Syntax, Deep and Surface structure,

NP- Movement, Diglossia n Bilingualism, Passivation, Sociolinguistics, LAD

ZPD, Pidgin, Creole, Code-Switching, Dialect, Register, Acronym, Elision, Assimilation, Minimal Pairs, Number of monophthongs in English, Isogloss, Inflections, Schema, IPA, Aphasia, triphthongs, Allomorph, Pitch, Stress, Tone, Saussure, Idiolect, SLA, Active and Passive articulators. 

Zero Allomorph, Voicing, Duality, Phonetics, Presupposition

Draw an illustration of the speech organ

 

Basic Concepts of Linguistics:

 

(Following topics will be studied for Broad and Short questions)

 

1.What are the differences between langue and parole?

2.What are the basic concepts of linguistics? How are they interrelated to each other?

3. What do you mean by Syntagmatic and Paradigmatic relationship of language?

4. What is language? What are the different characteristics of language?

5) Define linguistic performance and linguistics competence.

6) What is Ferdinand de Saussure’s contribution on syntagmatic and paradigmatic relations in language?

7) Find out the differences and relationship between Paradigms and Syntagms.

8) What is the innatist view of language acquisition? Define with examples.

9.What are the three fundamental features used to describe vowel? Draw and label a vowel quadrilateral showing the primary and secondary cardinal vowels.

10. How can a knowledge of phonetics help us improve our own pronunciation?

11. Which organs are considered speech organs? What are the basic mechanisms of speech production?

12) What are the features which make Phonetics different from phonology?

13) What is a cardinal vowel? Describe the cardinal vowels of English and show their positions in a diagram.

14) Define phonetics and phonology. Discuss the features which make phonology different from phonetics.

15) What is articulation? Classify the consonant sounds of English according to place of articulation.

16) Define phonetics and phonology. Discuss different branches of phonetics.

17) What is a diphthong? Describe English diphthongs.

18) Describe the mechanism of speech process. Show the different organs of speech with the help of a figure.

19) what is IC analysis? Exemplify IC with a tree diagram.

20. Give a brief description of Sapir-Whorf hypotheses.

21. Discuss different stages of child language development.

22. What are the major word formation process in English? Give examples.

23. What is Syntax? Discuss the major syntactic processes.

24. Discuss different varieties of socio-linguistics

25. What is semantics? Provide an analysis of major lexical relations.

26. Discuss the manner of articulation in details.

27. Discuss the place of articulations in details.

 Write short notes on the following:

 

i) Glottal stop ii) Phones and allophones iii) Elision iv) Affricates v) Vowel sounds vi) Allophone vii) Voiced and unvoiced sounds viii) IPA ix) Assimilation x) Diphthong xi) Fortis xii) Plosive xiii) Phoneme xiv) Glottis xv) Bilingualism xvi) Langue xvii) Parole xviii) Internalized rules xix) Paradigm xx) Syntagm xxi) Ferdinand de Saussure

 

Transcribe the following English words in IPA symbols:

Wednesday, think, change, major, town, girl, vision, sexual, move, car, department, ability, production, university, consider, strength, digest, attitude, zoo, academy, color, exhibition, grammar, language, communicate, student, beautiful, basic, decision, tale, communicate, girl, bookish, about, extreme, home

 

 

 

Of Truth | Francis Bacon | Summary

Bacon begins this essay by quoting Pilate who questions what truth is. Bacon says that truth is a belief that affixes the mind and hinders free will in thinking and acting. The Greek philosophers who questioned the possibilities of human knowledge are no longer there, but there are still some people who question the same. Men undergo various difficulties to learn the truth but once he does so it imposes a restriction on his thought, and he wants to revert to lies. Bacon says that the love is a corrupt yet natural tendency in human beings. Like the Greek philosopher Lucian, Bacon wonders what makes a man love lies for it does not give delight as it does in poetry or does not allow profit as in business.

Truth is like daylight, but it throws only as much light on the fallacies of the world as a candlelight. Truth is like a pearl which shows best in daylight, but it cannot be like a diamond or carbuncle that can shine in the dark. That means truth is unable to show itself in the face of a lie just as a pearl cannot be seen in the dark.

A mixture of lie with truth adds pleasure. Here Bacon speaks about imagination. If a man hangs on to the absolute truth and does not allow fancy, hopes or even doubt, he will be a melancholy person. Poetry has often been accused of being false as it is filled with imagination. But it is only a shadow of a lie, a reflection of reality which reflects the ideal. But it is not the lie that passes over the mind but the lie that deeply sinks into the mind that hurts.

Despite man’s efforts and judgements, it is only truth that can truly define itself. The quest for truth, the love of truth and the belief in truth is the only free will of human nature. Bacon compares truth to light and brings in the biblical example of the god’s creation of light. On the first day God created light and on the sixth day he created man whom he gifted the “light of reason”. Bacon quotes a poet who said, “no pleasure is comparable to the standing upon the vantage ground of Truth, and to see the errors and wanderings ….in the vale below.” Bacon adds that such a man would looks upon the “errors and wanderings” with pity and not with pride. If a man’s mind can “move in charity, rest in providence, and turn upon the poles of truth” he will certainly find heaven on earth.

Truth is of utmost importance in civil life and in business. A bit of lie mixed with the truth is like making an alloy of copper and gold or silver. It makes it easier to work with these metals but at the same time makes it impure. Bacon compares falsehood to a snake crawling on its belly rather than walking on its feet. There is no activity more shameful than being false and treacherous. In this context Bacon quotes Montaigne who said that a liar is a man who is brave towards God and a coward towards men. Bacon emphasizes on the wickedness of falsehood and treachery by saying that these are the qualities that will be the cause of calling upon the judgement of God upon mankind.

 

 

Of Marriage and Single Life | Francis Bacon | Summary

In this essay Bacon speaks about the differences that mark a married man from a single one and the advantages and disadvantages of a married or single life. A man who is married and has wife and children is unable to risk his money for noble purposes. They are obstacles to any endeavour either good or bad. The best works which are the best for the public have often come from unmarried men. These are the men who have “married” the public, that is, devoted their lives entirely to a public cause. Men who have children care a great deal about the future and make various important pledges and promises regarding the future. However, there are also some single men who think only about themselves and they too account for the future. Some people consider wives and children as items of expense. Some foolish and greedy men take pride in having no children. They believe that they will remain richer if they do not have any children because they might have heard people say that so and so is a great, rich man but he has the burden of children suggesting that children are a hindrance on the growth of fortunes. However, most men choose to remain single for the sake of liberty that a single life allows. These people think of marriage as imprisonment.

Bacon enlists the positive and negative qualities of a single man. Unmarried men make the best friends, the best masters, and the best servants. But they do not make the best citizens as they have so great a sense of freedom that they tend to run away from responsibilities. The single life is better suited for a clergyman because he can be more charitable as he does not have any needs to satisfy. For judges and magistrates, the situation is indifferent because if they are corrupt it makes them servants who are worse than wives. For soldier it is often an emotional support to think of wives and children before going into battle. That is why Bacon says that the dislike of marriage among the Turks makes the vulgar soldiers even more so. Single men are often more charitable because they have less expenses. But at the same time, they also tend to be cruel and hard hearted as they do not have a wife or children to invoke the tenderness within them.

A grave man with traditional beliefs is often a loving husband. Women are often proud of their chastity and a wife will always remain chaste and obedient if she thinks that her husband is wise and not jealous. For a young man a wife serves the purpose of a mistress, in the middle age she is a companion and to the old man she is a nurse. Therefore, a man can reasonably decide when he would like to get married. Bacon here quotes a philosopher and mathematician who answered the question of when a man should marry and said – “a young man not yet, an elder man not at all”.

Bacon observes that bad husbands often have good wives. He says that this may be because it makes the husband’s kindness more valuable or because the wife takes pride in her patience in dealing with him. Bacon however says that given the chance these bad husbands would make sure to correct their own mistake. 

 Francis Bacon – “Of Plantations”

In this essay on colonies Bacon rather skirts over the issue of what should be done about the natives, instead just writing that he prefers starting with a clean slate (i.e., where there are no people) and that you should be nice to natives but also be on your guard, and maybe send some of them to the metropolis so that they are suitably impressed and report favorably on it when they come back. Otherwise, the essay is mostly concerned with practicalities, such as what one should plant or what animals should be brought, and it’s full of commonplaces such as that you should not establish your plantation in a wet place for health reasons. Interestingly enough, Bacon advises to start with planting not corn but less labor-intensive crops such as beans “because they serve for meat as well as bread”. Despite the fact that he uses the word “meat” in the sense “main dish”, I almost thought he recognized its high content of vegetable protein, except that in the next sentence he claims rice is “meat” too. And even though “of rice likewise cometh a great increase”, I am not sure it’s as easy to produce as Bacon seems to believe. The land should be held in common, with some small plots set aside for private gardening, and the colony should be ruled by one governor with a wide range of powers and with a help from some kind of a council. Overall, Bacon’s views go in the direction: do not be greedy, do not expect a quick return (that’s why he advises the colony to be financed by noblemen, not merchants), send their qualified workforce rather than criminals and do not forsake the colonists when they are in difficulties because “it is the sin fullest thing in the world”.

Published in 1625 as part of a collection of 58 essays, “Of Plantations” is part of Francis Bacon’s Essays.  Originally published in English, the collection was later translated into Latin as well.  Though the essay as a genre was very much a new form of literature in Bacon’s time, they gained popularity because they covered a wide range of topics that were relatable to the reader through straightforward language and observations.  Bacon published his Essays three different times (1597, ten essays; 1612, thirty-eight essays; and 1625, fifty-eight essays), each edition containing revised versions of the previously published essays as well as new ones.  It was not until the last edition was published in 1625 that “Of Plantations” was included.

Bacon’s Essays were praised by his contemporaries for both their style and content.  He wrote about things that were important not only to his life, but to people in general.  His Essays were simply titled and discussed ideas that everyday men could relate to.  (This applies to “Of Plantations” in that there was an ever-increasing interest in Bacon’s time of colonizing America and establishing plantations.)  

“Of Plantations” was significant during the time period in which it was published because it illustrates the interest in English colonization in America.  One of the main reasons for the English settlements in the New World, particularly the first in Jamestown (beginning in 1607), was to profit off of the land.  However, only several years after they arrived, both famine and drought had taken its toll on the settlers.  Without sufficient knowledge about how to plant and cultivate and only livestock to eat, many of them starved to death.  They needed to learn how to survive by utilizing the land, therefore creating plantations.  But plantations were not just about food.  They were about the settlers’ interest in and need to establish a strong foundation of community.  Overall, this essay exemplifies what the colonists were striving for, which was a successful start in the New World.