"Pruning by study": Self-cultivation in Bacon's Essays

Papers on Language and Literature, Fall 1995 by Miller, John J

Most of the rest of this essay is devoted to enumerating "the inconveniencies of counsel, and...the remedies" (VI: 424). These "inconveniencies" are three: the difficulty of maintaining secrecy, the threat to authority described in the "Fable," and the more specific threat posed by "unfaithful" or self-interested counsellors. In each case counsel represents a threat to the process of maintaining power; absent is any mention of the benefits of counsel.

This, it turns out, is the subject addressed in the 1625 revision of "Of Friendship. In 1612, this topic generated only a brief, highly aphoristic essay, one of the shortest in the collection. The revised version retains the flavor of the earlier essay only in its opening paragraph. The rest details the three "fruits" of friendship. This metaphor echoes figural language used in both the essays on domestic life and those on education. As in those, her the concern is exclusively with the fruits which grow on the boughs of the self. The first and most completely discussed o: these "fruits" sets the tone for all the rest:

A principal fruit of friendship is the ease and discharge of the fulness and swellings of the heart, which passions of all kinds do cause and induce. We know diseases of stoppings and suffocations are the most dangerous in the body; and it is not much otherwise in the mind; you may take sarza to open the liver, steel to open the spleen, flower of sulphur for the lungs, castoreum for the brain; but no receipt openeth the heart, but a true friend; to whom you may impart griefs, joys, fears, hopes, suspicions, counsels, and whatsoever lieth upon the heart to oppress it, in a kind of civil shrift or confession. (VI: 437-38)

Thus the "principal fruit of friendship" is based on the model of the self sketched out so far, on both the necessity of giving its energies proper outlets and the attendant jealousy with which those energies ought to be husbanded. The ideal friend is a confessor: an anonymous receptacle of potentially dangerous passions, into which the overflowings of the self are vented and in which they are contained in secrecy. Like the ends of education, the function of a "true friend" is not understood to exist in any benefits beyond those to the self, but only in terms of his ability to help safely direct and secure the creative--and thus potentially disruptive--forces of the self.

The second and third fruits of friendship are no less selfish. The second fruit arises from conversation, the benefit of which proceeds not from the combination of two perspectives or opinions but from hearing one's own ideas aired:

...certain it is that whosoever hath his mind fraught with many thoughts, hi wits and understanding do clarify and bread up, in the communicating and discoursing with another; he tosseth his thoughts more easily; he marshalleth them more orderly; he seeth how they look when they are turned into words: finally, he waxeth wiser than himself; and that more by an hour's discourse than by a day's meditation. (VI: 440)