Page 55 - DENG502_PROSE

Unit 5: Francis Bacon - Of Truth: Critical Analysis

Bacon describes poesy (poetry) in respect of matter, (and not words), as, “one of the principal Notes
portions of learning, and is nothing else but feigned history , which may be styled as well in prose
as verse” —Advancement , p.90. So in the play of As You Like It , “The truest poetry is the most
feigning.” That is to say, the shadow of the lie is only the envelope (Act III. ii) of the inward truth,
or form, imprinted on it.
Schopenhauer called matter “ a false truth,” and in parabolic poetry (which is the “shadow of a lie”),
the vehicle of truth is the veil which shadows forth the truth. Spiritual truths are always
immeasurably greater than their vehicles of utterance, and are those forms, or philosophical ideas,
which are conveyed by means of poetic myth and fable.
“Truth in closet words shall fail, When truth embodied in a tale Shall enter in at lowly doors.”
More than half the force of language, especially of poetical language, consists in its hints,
suggestions, half-lights, which its words do not directly imply, yet habitually convey indirectly.
Self-Assessment
1. Choose the correct options:
(i) Of Truth is a sort of ............... for the poetical veil
(a) Command (b) Shadows
(c) Apology (d) None of these
(ii) The remark ‘that the world was the shadow of God’ made by
(a) Shakespeare (b) Tennyson
(c) Bacon (d) None of these
(iii) The matter called as “ a False truth” by
(a) Tennyson (b) Plato
(c) Schopenhauer (d) None of these
(iv) ‘The Fox and the Grapes is the
(a) Wisdom (b) Truth
(c) Shadow of a life (d) None of these

5.2 Summary

• “Of Truth” raises the interesting problem of our difficulty in defining lies, especially when
we consider theology as a view with a higher and more profound standard of truth than
mere mortal philosophy. More dangerously, he speculates “A mixture of a lie doth ever add
pleasure” (1259). When moving into ordinary language of “civil business” (see the preface
regarding his career!), he turns openly censorious of lies, even though such a world is obviously
full of them.
• In Francis Bacon’s “Of Truth”, why did Bacon say that truth may come to the price of a pearl
instead of a diamond?
• Bacon’s essay Of Truth occupies the first or foremost place in the collection. Also that this
essay opens and concludes with the allusion to our Savior, who was the Way, the Truth, and
the Life.
• Bacon points out, how the judgment is prejudiced by the feelings or affections, and how the
mind is deprived of free judgment by the inclinations of the heart.
• This equally applies to the nature of all human beliefs that are allied by custom with consent
and sentiment —and perhaps most of all to the opposers of the Bacon authorship of the
plays. They, like Pilate, “will not stay for an answer,” or give a “learning patience” to the
problem, and in their hearts declare the theory a heresy, a foolish fad, an impossibility.

LOVELY PROFESSIONAL UNIVERSITY 49