Prose notes

Bacon’s essay moves by short, balanced sentences (aphorism): one thought, then its pair, then a third. Open it in that order so the argument is not a heap of quotations. Studies serve three uses. Delight: private pleasure in retirement. Ornament: the grace of conversation. Ability: judgement in business and affairs. They perfect nature, and are perfected by experience: natural wit is a plant that must be pruned by study; study itself must be bounded by experience, or it becomes a scholar’s dream. Crafty men condemn studies, simple men admire them, wise men use them. Use, not display, is Bacon’s Renaissance ethic.

How to read: not to contradict the author, not to believe blindly, not to find talk, but to weigh and consider. Some books are to be tasted (sampled), others swallowed (read through), some few chewed and digested (read with care and made one’s own). Reading makes a full man; conference (talk with others) a ready man; writing an exact man. Different studies train different powers: histories make men wise; poets witty; mathematics subtle; natural philosophy deep; moral grave; logic and rhetoric able to contend. Each study also repairs a defect of mind, as bodily exercises repair the body. The essay is a civil handbook: books exist to make a person fit for the world, not to hide from it.

Travel, in the younger sort, is a part of education; in the elder, a part of experience. Let a young traveller have some entrance into the language, and a tutor or grave servant. Keep a diary. The places named are the things a civil traveller should observe: courts of princes, courts of justice, churches and monasteries, walls and fortifications, harbours, antiquities, libraries, houses of state, armouries, warehouses, exercises, horsemanship, comedies, treasuries of jewels and robes, cabinets and rarities.

Do not stay long in one city. Change lodging. Do not keep only the company of your own countrymen abroad. Seek acquaintance of secretaries and employed men, and see the best persons of the place. After return, let the travel appear in discourse, not in clothes or gesture; and let the traveller sit still rather than be still travelling in his talk. The counsel is practical Renaissance education: the world is a book to be read with order, not a show to wear on the body.

Montaigne’s essay, in Donald Frame’s translation named by the syllabus, is a French Renaissance meditation on one perfect friendship. Common companionship, father and son, brothers, and marriage all have their uses and their limits. Perfect friendship, for Montaigne, is not utility, kinship, or the marriage bond. It is a fusion of wills. He writes of his dead friend Étienne de La Boétie. The famous reason is not a list of qualities: it was because it was he, because it was I.

Such a friendship cannot be multiplied. Two such souls are rare; a third would crowd them. The friend is another self. After La Boétie’s death the essay becomes an elegy: half of Montaigne’s being is gone. Beside Bacon’s civic, useful sentences, this essay is inward and personal. Both are Renaissance essays; they are not the same temper. Bacon tells you how to use books and travel. Montaigne tells you what one human bond was, and that it cannot be replaced.

The Penguin Classics text named in the syllabus is a Puritan allegory in plain English. An allegory (Unit 1) is a story that makes sense as a journey and, at the same time, as a map of the soul. Christian lives in the City of Destruction, reads that the city will burn, feels a burden (sin) on his back, and leaves — even wife and children — when Evangelist points to the Wicket Gate. He sinks in the Slough of Despond (despair as a bog). Help pulls him out. Mr Worldly Wiseman sends him toward legality and Mount Sinai (being saved by the law instead of by grace); Evangelist turns him back. At the Gate, Good-Will receives him. In the Interpreter’s House he sees emblem-rooms of the spiritual life. At the Place of Deliverance, beside the Cross, the burden falls from his back. That is conversion, told as a physical drop.

Then the road tests him. Hill Difficulty must be climbed, not avoided. Palace Beautiful is rest and instruction among the faithful. In the Valley of Humiliation he fights Apollyon (a devil). The Valley of the Shadow of Death is fear of dying without hope. Vanity Fair is the world’s market: everything is for sale, including faith; Faithful is killed there; Hopeful joins Christian. Giant Despair locks them in Doubting Castle; the key called Promise opens the door — despair is undone by remembering God’s promise, not by a new sword. They see the Delectable Mountains, cross the Enchanted Ground (the danger of spiritual sleep), rest in Beulah, and enter the River of Death. Christian almost drowns in fear; Hopeful holds him. The Celestial City receives them. You do not need every side-character. You do need this chain, and that each name is a meaning.