Essays are Studies in Time and Motion

‘I must walke with my penne, as I goe with my feete’ (Montaigne, III.295-296).[1] This phrase of Montaigne’s summarizes his writing style as a movement or a journey from point to point which explores rather than attains. According to Morris W. Croll such a style can be termed ‘Baroque’, a form of art in which the main themes were the ‘motions of souls, not their states of rest’.[2] The essay is particularly well adapted to this non-static way of writing, being a short piece primarily involved in taking a theme and then improvising around it, discovering its own nature as it does so. It moves forward in thought and in time, accumulating meaning as it follows the path of the pen and the mind of the writer who wields it. Furthermore, in the writing of Montaigne and Bacon, the essay not only evolved during the authors’ lifetime but continues to directs its reader to actively participate in the journey of discovery, thus extending its motion beyond its own time.

Montaigne was particularly concerned to discover himself in his writing.[3] As he states in his preface, ‘my selfe am the groundworke of my booke’ (The Author to the Reader, I.lx). As he wrote, he found himself engaged in a progression and evolution both of his writing and of his character: ‘I have no more made my booke, than my booke hath made me’ (II.488). A course of self-study was, he believed, essential for a proper understanding of the world:

Your minde and your will, which elsewhere is consumed, bring it unto it selfe againe: you scatter, you stragle, you stray and you distract yourselves: call your selves home againe; rowze and uphold your selves: you are betrayed, you are spoiled and dissipated; your selves are stolen and taken from your selves. III.312

This passage is in its context intended to advise people to concentrate on themselves rather than the world, which consumes the mind for no purpose and detracts from the ideal of self-knowledge. There is a tension however in the way the construction of the sentence is circular and non-progressive. The ‘selves’ move back and forth through the structures of the sentence, but go nowhere. There is a kind of struggle between the writer and the subject, which must constantly be called back only for it to wander off again. Montaigne was well aware of this problem: ‘This mingle-mangle is somewhat beside my text. I stragle out of the path; yet it is rather by licence, then by unadvisednesse: my fantasies follow one another: but sometimes a farre off, and looke one at another; but with an oblique looke’ (III.301). The movement of a mind is wayward and confused, moving at random.

Clearly however he sees a value in what Steven Rendall calls the ‘free-wheeling, insouciant style’ he adopts, given that he allows it by ‘licence’ and does not see it as ill advised.[4] The reason for this is that Montaigne soon ceased to believe that it was possible to come to any conclusion: ‘If I speake diversly of my selfe, it is because I looke diversly upon my selfe’ (II.7). The journey of the essay is of necessity never-ending, just as man’s outlook is never-ending, always on the move. As he puts it, ‘Were my minde settled, I would not essay, but resolve my selfe’ (II.22). A man’s mind is however incapable of settling; there is no solution and no state of rest. It is Montaigne’s aim then to simply follow the trains of his thought wherever they may lead him, describing ‘not the essence, but the passage’ of himself (III.21).

Bacon’s Essays, in contrast, seem smooth and straightforward. There is no rumination on personality, given that he studies the world rather than the self. The aphorisms that tend to open his essays seem to represent a finished idea rather than an attempt to find one. In the essay ‘Of Marriage and Single Life’ he states with apparent confidence that ‘He that hath wife and children hath given hostages to fortune, for they are impediments to great enterprises’, a statement that on the face of it is closed and certain (16).[5] However, Bacon’s essays are also motivated by a sense of exploration, and any resolution of idea is soon left behind. Following the above sentence he departs from the question of whether women and children are impediments and continues:

Certainly the best works […] have proceeded from the unmarried or childless men; which both in affection and means have married and endowed the public. Yet it were great reason that those that have children should have greatest care of future times, unto which they know they must transmit their dearest treasures. Some there are, who though they lead a single life, their thoughts do end with themselves, and count future times impertinences

16-17

The word ‘certainly’, with which this passage begins is progressively demolished till only uncertainty is left. The argument winds back to contradict itself: men without children are more likely to endow the future, yet men with them want the future to be good for their offspring, while some single men think anything beyond their own lives irrelevant. All that remains is a suggestion of various truths, none of which is absolute. As Montaigne comments in an early essay which makes more of an obvious attempt than his later writing to answer a specific question (what a man must do to get mercy), ‘man is a wonderfull, vaine, divers, and wavering subject: it is very hard to ground any directly-constant and uniforme judgement upon him’ (I.4). As Fish has stated, ‘when a discourse is controlled by examples, its form is discovered rather than imposed’.[6] Given that the examples used by Bacon point toward a confirmation of Montaigne’s belief that man is inherently inconstant, his essays tend to explore rather than dictate. They too are governed by the movement of a ‘walking pen’ that throws up conflicting ideas.

Throughout Bacon’s text, the need for motion is stressed. When travelling, men should not ‘stay long in one city or town; more or less as the place deserveth, but not long; nay, when he when he stayeth in one city or town, let him change his lodging from one end and part of the town to another’ (42). When designing a garden, fountains are ‘a great beauty and refreshment; but pools mar all […] the main matter is so to convey the water, as it never stay’ (107). In ‘Of Ceremonies and Respects’ the essay ends with the advice that ‘men’s behaviour should be like their apparel; not too strait or point device, but free for exercise or motion’ (118). There is an insistence on the importance of flexibility that is reflected throughout his writing. This is evident even in those essays that are engaged in more practical than philosophical matters, such as ‘Of Usury’ in which he states ‘few have spoken of usury usefully. It is good to set before us the incommodities and commodities of usury, that the good may either be weighed out or culled out; and warily to provide, that while we make forth to that which is better, we meet not with that which is worse’ (94). The sentence is balanced by the conjoined ideas of better and worse, incommodity and commodity, moving easily from one to the other. Brian Vickers has discussed the way in which Bacon’s writing style is governed by ‘partitio’, a division and opposition similar to ‘distingo’, ‘the most universall part’ of Montaigne’s logic (II.7).[7] A further example or opposing idea is always possible. No conclusions are ever reached.

The essay is therefore not a static form. It nature is discursive, inconclusive, and easy to amend. Both Montaigne and Bacon’s essays evolve over their lifetimes. In 1588, when Montaigne first added a third volume to his collection, he asserted ‘I adde, but I correct not’, explaining that ‘My understanding doth not alwaies goe forward, it sometimes goes also backeward: I in a manner distrust mine own fantasies as much, though second or third, as I doe when they are the first, or present, as past’ (III.251-252). He refuses to discount his earlier writings for all that he is constantly changing his mind. Thus Montaigne’s essays literally display the passage through time, despite the fact that he does not discount his earlier writings. Various critics have attempted to chart the evolution of his ideas and make the book the coherent ‘one’ that he says it is, but the proliferation of ideas and examples that are held together make it difficult.[8] As he himself interpolates between the above two quotations, his writing overall is ‘but uncoherent checky, or ill joined in-laid-worke’ and his additions ‘but over-waights, which disgrace not the first forme’ (III.252). The seemingly random nature of his thought is exacerbated by additions that change the meaning and yet are not supposed to have any greater authority. Montaigne integrates the voices of his old self and his new in the same way that he uses quotations from ancient thinkers in his work, creating a patchwork of many voices from many different times which are held together merely because we know they are all the result of one (changing) mind.[9]

The nature of Bacon’s additions is a tendency to increase the number of qualifications, thus reflecting more obviously the progress of this thought. He moves from the list-like series of aphorisms found in the 1597 edition of his Essays, adding extra ideas that confuse the simplicity of the original statements. In this quotation from ‘Of Studies’, the words in italics appeared after the first edition. ‘Read not to contradict and confute; nor to believe and take for granted; nor to find talk and discourse; but to weigh and consider’ (114).[10] Apart from the reference to ‘talk and discourse’, nothing here is inherently new, but the extended sentence seems somehow more thoughtful, as if Bacon were interested as adding as many details as could possibly be relevant. As he increases the ways in which he expresses his idea, though, he reduces the impression of exactitude. The advice has been undermined from the inside, increasing the burden on the reader to follow the more complicated movement of the thought. Thus the sentence forces on the reader its own advice: it cannot be taken for granted.

The essay aims to enter in what amounts to a dialogue with the reader, encouraging him to actively recreate the movement of the writers’ ideas. Bacon desires to pass on the things he has learned: ‘it is the duty and virtue of all knowledge to abridge the infinity of individual experience […] and to remedy the complaint of vita brevis, ars longa’.[11] The infinity of individual experience that Montaigne testifies to means that ultimately all that can be done is to provide directions. Whoever reads his works, Montaigne claims, will find ‘that either I have said all, or desseigned all. What I cannot expresse, the same I point at with my finger’ (III.282-283). Bacon has a more definite aim: he wishes to force his reader to really think about the topics he is writing on.[12] He uses examples because ‘particulars, being dispersed, do best agree with dispersed directions’ and aphorisms because they represent ‘a knowledge broken’ and so ‘invite men to inquire farther’.[13] Fish (among others) believes that Bacon is deliberately obscure so as to force the reader to make the logical links himself; Terence Cave sees this as true of Montaigne also.[14] According to Shelley, Bacon’s language is ‘a strain which distends, and then bursts the circumference of the reader’s mind’.[15] The reader, in following these writers’ motions, finds he always has to run to keep up, involving himself in a deliberate retracing of their meaning. As Montaigne puts it, ‘It is the unheedie and negligent reader that loseth my subject, and not my [selfe]’ (III.300); therefore the motion of the subject, whether it be the self or the world, passes from the essay into the mind of its audience, altering further as it does so.

The end of ‘On Discourse’ reads: ‘To use too many circumstances ere one come to the matter, is wearisome; to use none at all, is blunt’ (Bacon, 78). The ‘matter’ of an essay is though never fully to be discovered, whether it contains a hundred ‘circumstances’, or none. The minds that discover the nature of their discourse only as they write deny resolution; they cannot decide something once and for all. It is for that reason, Vickers says, that Bacon tends to end his essays are bluntly as he does with ‘On Discourse’: ‘the last word is not, cannot be, spoken’, and this is aimed to stimulate the questions of the reader.[16] The movement of essays extend beyond the mind of their writer and the time of their composition and are intended to do so. As Frame says of Montaigne’s works: ‘The text remains perpetually an open question; the reader embarks on an endless quest’.[17] Essays are studies in the changing mind of their composers, which the reader must attempt to trace. Thus in a sense they travel beyond their own time, moving through the centuries and being both altered by, and attempting to alter, the minds of the reader who rediscovers their form.

[1] Michel de Montaigne, The Essayes of Michael Lord of Montaigne, trans. by John Florio, 3 vols (London: Grant Richards, 1908). Volume and page references will follow quotations in parentheses.

[2] Morris W. Croll, ‘The Baroque Style in Prose’, in Seventeenth Century Prose, ed. Stanley E. Fish (New York: Oxford University Press, 1971), pp. 26-52 (p. 27).

[3] See Charles Taylor, ‘Exploring “L’Humane Condition” ’, in Sources of the Self (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), pp. 177-184.

[4] Steven Rendall, Distinguo: Reading Montaigne Differently (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992), p. 1.

[5] Francis Bacon, The Essays, ed. Brian Vickers (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999).

[6] Stanley E. Fish, ‘Georgics of the Mind: The Experience of Bacon’s Essays’, in Seventeenth Century Prose, ed. Stanley E. Fish (New York: Oxford University Press, 1971), pp. 251-280 (p. 260).

[7]See the second chapter of Brian Vickers, Francis Bacon and Renaissance Prose (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1968).

[9] See Terence Cave, ‘Problems of Reading in the Essais’, in Montaigne: Essays in Memory of Richard Sayce ed. I.D. McFarlane, and Ian Maclean (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1982), pp. 133-166.

[10] The first version of the essay is reproduced in Vickers’ edition, p. 134.

[11] Francis Bacon, as quoted in Anne Righter, ‘Francis Bacon’, in Essential Articles for the Study of Francis Bacon, ed. Brian Vickers (Connecticut: Archon Books, 1968), pp. 300-321 (p. 314).

[12] See Vickers’ introduction to his edition, p. xxxi.

[13] Francis Bacon, as quoted in Ronald S. Crane, ‘The Relation of Bacon’s Essays to his Program for the Advancement of Learning’, in Essential Articles, pp. 272-292 (p. 284).

[14] See Fish, ‘Georgics of the Mind’; Cave, p. 161.