[In the following excerpt, Drew traces the development of the familiar essay from Montaigne and Bacon through the periodical essayists of the eighteenth century and on to the era of Robert Louis Stevenson.]

The essay is the simplest of all forms of literature, but with it we enter that world where we shall remain throughout the rest of this book, the world of the conscious art of writing. From the lowest to the highest, from the simplest to the most complex kinds of literature, we shall find henceforth that the enjoyment of it is always twofold. There is the pleasure we receive from the conscious stimulus of certain recognizable parts of our being: to our curiosity about the stories and situations of other human beings, to our emotions, to our intellectual faculties, to our moral nature, to our senses. The pleasure of sharing the adventures of Robinson Crusoe, of meeting Elizabeth Bennet, of being stirred by Milton or enraptured by the sheer music of The Eve of St. Agnes. Here we know clearly what it is that pleases us; we recognize both the cause and the effect of the sense of satisfaction. But in the other kind of pleasure which literature creates, we are clearly conscious only of its effect. Form works upon the consciousness as a whole; it stimulates the consciousness as a whole; it satisfies it as a whole. If it is there, the sensitive reader recognizes it at once without analysis: the whole thing is 'right,' and the reason of its rightness is not questioned. But if perfection of form is absent, if the thing is 'wrong,' the reader is conscious that something vital is lacking. Detached faculties may still receive pleasure, human curiosity may be provoked, the mind quickened, the senses stirred, but that fusion of all faculties into one general sense of satisfaction in which the whole man is involved, is not there. Just as in a ballet the individual movements may be supple, the individual poses superb, the individual dexterity amazing, the decor perfect, but if the whole has not been bound together, fused, unified by one general spirit of rhythm, the harmony is not complete. What distinguishes the real artist from the amateur, says Goethe, is that power of execution which creates, forms and constitutes the whole.

What is an essay? It is impossible not to agree with J. B. Priestley that the simplest and safest definition of the essay is that it is the kind of composition produced by an essayist. The term is indeed so wide that it is meaningless. If we try to bring Locke's Essay on the Human Understanding and Lamb on "Old China" within the limits of a single definition it obviously cannot be done. The essay may be a dissertation, a piece of rhetoric, an argument, a discussion. It may deal with a religious, economic, historical, sociological, scientific or philosophical subject, or any other kind of subject. But it is clear that there is something very much narrower in definition which we really mean when we speak of the essay in any general discussion of literature. We mean a form of writing which aims definitely at certain literary values: that is, it aims at using language as a medium to present life in a way of its own.

Of all forms of literature, the essay is the one which least calls for the use of long words. The principle which controls it is simply that it should give pleasure; the desire which impels us when we take it from the shelf is simply to receive pleasure. Everything in an essay must be subdued to that end. It should lay us under a spell with its first word, and we should only wake refreshed with its last. In the interval we may pass through the most varied experiences of amusement, surprise, interest, indignation … but we must never be roused. The essay must lap us about and draw its curtain across the world.

'So great a feat is seldom accomplished,' Virginia Woolf continues, 'though the fault may well be as much on the reader's side as on the writer's. Habit and lethargy have dulled his palate.' This may be so, and yet, if the truth must be told, the reader has a good deal of excuse, for as a student he has generally been surfeited with essays, and unless the essay is superlatively good it is the dullest form of all reading. A soliloquy is a most difficult form to sustain, and the essay is all soliloquy. The essayist has so few baits with which to catch and hold the reader's attention. He has no story to arouse his curiosity and no rhyme to charm his ear: his space is so limited that he has but little room for movement, for changes of tone and pace. He cannot afford to make any mistakes. If he write tediously or carelessly or foolishly, the essay at once capsizes and sinks; the pleasure cruise is at an end, the reader is bored.

It is because of this razor edge between charm and boredom which so many essays balance on, that we might quarrel with Virginia Woolf's declaration that the essay should never arouse us, and declare instead that on occasions it does and should. Perhaps this is only true if we admit oratory and rhetoric into essay-writing, but if speeches be written to be read as well as to be heard, it is difficult to see how they can be excluded from this whole class of writings. Burke's speeches are superb essays, and so is Milton's Areopagitica, that great plea for the liberty of speech which, indeed, for the delight of direct intellectual and emotional and moral stimulus, in some of the most supple and sonorous cadences in the English language, remains unsurpassed. If I were to choose one sentence in the English language which is to myself the most kindling in its passion, and its idea and its expression, it would be one from the Areopagitica.

I cannot praise a fugitive and cloister'd virtue, unexercis'd and unbreath'd, that never sallies out and sees her adversary, but slinks out of the race, where that immortal garland is to be run for, not without dust and heat.

The quality of that is the quality of the whole, and as a further taste of it, I quote the famous passage on the life of books.

I deny not, but that it is of greatest concernment in the Church and Commonwealth, to have a vigilant eye how Books demean themselves as well as men; and thereafter to confine, imprison, and do sharpest justice on them as malefactors: For Books are not absolutely dead things, but do contain a potency of life in them to be as active as that soul was whose progeny they are; nay, they do preserve as in a vial the purest efficacy and extraction of that living intellect that bred them. I know they are as lively, and as vigorously productive, as those fabulous Dragon's teeth; and being sown up and down, may chance to spring up armed men. And yet on the other hand, unless wariness be us'd, as good almost kill a Man as kill a good Book; who kills a Man kills a reasonable creature, God's Image; but he who destroys a good Book, kills reason itself, kills the Image of God, as it were in the eye. Many a man lives a burden to the Earth; but a good book is the precious life-blood of a master spirit, embalm'd and treasur'd up on purpose to a life beyond life.

It is true, however, that the class of writings which we usually mean when we speak of essays, does not have the rousing and animating quality of Burke or Milton. Its aim is much milder, its achievement quite different. The supreme art of the essay proper, that special type of writing which was originated and invented by Montaigne, and dates from the first publication of his Essais in March, 1571, is to communicate personality. The essay (the word was used by Montaigne simply to denote experiments in a new form of writing), is the most direct form of prose communication between author and reader: it is deliberate egotism and self-revelation. Montaigne wrote the epigraph for all essayists, 'these are fancies of my own, by which I do not pretend to discover things, but to lay open myself.' As Lamb said of him, 'his own character pervades the whole, and binds it sweetly together,' and it is significant that Coleridge said of Lamb himself, 'Charles Lamb has more totality and individuality of character than any other man I know.'

That is the character the perfect essayist requires. He says with Sir Thomas Browne: 'the world that I regard is myself; it is the microcosm of my own frame that I cast my eye on. For the other I use it but like my globe, and turn it round sometimes for my recreation.' The novelist or the dramatist requires to be detached from his own personality. He may be David Copperfield or Jane Eyre or Hamlet, but he must also be Dick Swiveller or Paul Emmuanuel or Lady Macbeth. But the essayist must never be more than one character. The personality with which he writes may not be entirely his own, but it must be a complete personality. Elia is not the whole of Charles Lamb, nor the Spectator the whole of Joseph Addison, but they are each a completely recognizable person. We can walk round them and feel we know them in the most actual and tangible way. And we must have this sense of intimacy with the essay-writer, it is the essential of his peculiar and difficult art. He must always be the same person, and we must never be out of his company. Whatever other personality or situation or circumstance he presents, whatever book or picture or actor he is discussing, he is at pains to remind us all the time that it is his vision of them we are sharing. The main interest is always shifted subtly from the subject of the essay, to the kind of mind and being—the personality—which is writing of that subject. Creative egotism is the secret of the essayist, an egotism which appears, in the hands of an artist, as if it were the most simple and natural thing in the world, while in reality it is never successful unless it is presented with supreme skill. Just as his subject matter appears desultory and meandering, and is really the most carefully conceived and constructed of unities.

Alexander Smith, a minor writer of the mid-nineteenth century, who wrote a good essay, "On the writing of essays," in a volume called Dreamthorpe, says that the essay resembles the lyric in that both are molded by some central mood, whimsical, serious or satirical. 'Give the mood, and the essay, from the first sentence to the last, grows round it as a cocoon grows round the silk-worm.' This is a good image of the essayist's art, and is a better starting point for the illustrating of essays than a mere history of the subject. But a few chronological landmarks are perhaps helpful.

Montaigne died in 1592, and the first ten of Bacon's essays appeared in print five years later, and were the first essays to be published in England. He increased the number to thirty-eight in the edition of 1612, and to fifty-eight in the final edition of 1625. But although Bacon must have taken the idea of the essay from Montaigne, nothing could be more different than the 'moods' from which each of the two spins his thread. Montaigne must always remain the perfect example of the essayist temperament—sympathetic, humorous, unexpected, lovable, passionately curious in his search after psychological truth—while Bacon takes this new instrument for writing of the world as it is seen through the eyes of a temperament, and manages to turn it into something completely inhuman. Montaigne is a warm flesh and blood figure, sitting at ease at his study writing-table underneath the beam on which is carved I do not understand, I pause; I examine. Bacon is a chilly statue of Wisdom, commenting on human life in the manner of a great judge in his robes and ermine, with the greatest brilliance and the greatest detachment. The subject is always perfectly planned and presented, but it is all entirely external and general. It has all been thought, never felt.…

It was not until Cowley's essays were published in 1668 that the tone of Montaigne crept into the English essay. Cowley's talent is a small one, his personality is not interesting or varied enough to bear very much exploitation of it: the vein is very soon worked out, but what there is of it is gold. In his essay "Of Myself" there is the true flavor—that intimacy and warmth of spirit, that fresh simplicity and apparent artlessness. It creates its own charm as it flows along: it is nothing, and yet it is delightful.…

Some of the essays of Sir William Temple (Dorothy Osborne's husband) have this same note, but it was the coming of the periodical newspaper which really established the essay in popularity. It created a market for it, which it has never lost, so that it was not only aristocratic dilettantes who could afford to practise it; and it developed that easy, friendly manner which comes from the essayist's sense that he is writing for a familiar circle of readers who are in sympathy with him. It also encouraged the essayist to write on the subjects which make the best essays—incidents of daily life about him, the immediate, the personal, the tangible, not the abstract and indefinite. On April 12th, 1709, the first number of the Tatler, one little folded sheet of paper, appeared at the breakfast tables of the aristocracy and in the coffee-houses of the town, and from then onwards the eighteenth century was deluged with essays. To our modern taste, the majority of these essays are completely unreadable, except in small extracts, and indeed, the capacity of the reading public of the eighteenth century for swallowing pills in jam is one of the most surprising things about it. Why, with the example of that century before us, we continue to regard the Victorian age as the great age of moral lessons in literature, is a mystery. We are apt to think of the eighteenth century as a gay and wicked age, though it is difficult to know why. Perhaps because its greatest writers were satirists and its novelists much concerned about the sexual impulse in young men and the consequent danger of young women losing their virtue. But at no time did the daily and weekly reading of the majority concern itself so much with the moral conduct of life as it did in the eighteenth century.… The essay became the vehicle of platitude rather than of experience: the essayists will not let themselves be themselves because they are all so busy feeling they must be the Censor. And as a result, though it would be easy to make an anthology of first-rate passages from the eighteenth-century essayists, it is not surprising that the heart of the average student sinks when he is told that if he wants to write good prose he must give his days and nights to the study of Addison. Addison is a very dull writer, and the volumes of the Tatler and the Spectator are dull volumes, and there are many equally good writers of prose.

And yet it is not really because the eighteenth century is so concerned about problems of conduct that it is dull: it is because of the way in which the writers treat of them. We are all, as a matter of fact, interested in ethical questions and in reading about them, but we are not interested in having a purely conventional and general code of social and personal morality applied to every subject. It is that which stifles the individuality which is the breath of life to the essayist. Dr. Johnson's opinion of Addison fits many more than Addison: 'he thinks justly, but he thinks faintly.' There is nothing vigorous, energetic or personal in the moral values of these men. If, however, moral feeling be an essential part of the mood in which the essay is conceived—instead of being merely tacked on as an adjunct—it becomes an essential part of its total quality and effect, and we would not wish it otherwise. Ethical feeling can lap us round as securely as any other mood.

It is no longer the fashion now to read Robert Louis Stevenson. His vogue during his life and immediately after his early death was so great and glowing that a reaction was bound to set in. But his popularity will inevitably return. He was a second-rate novelist, for his creative gift was never substantial enough to write great novels, but he is a first-rate essayist. And the mood of all, or almost all, of his essays is an ethical one; he spins its thread around some problem of conduct or some tenet of his own individual faith. Stevenson had to struggle all his life with an incurable disease: he did his work unflinchingly against appalling odds. But the strange thing about his extraordinarily vivid personality was that it produced an attitude to life which, instead of being one of splendid stoical endurance of suffering, managed to be one of positive exhilaration. He justifies life because it is a battle: he loves positive values as much as Milton: 'To avoid an occasion for our virtues is a worse degree of failure than to push forward pluckily and make a fall.' It is only over-prudence and timidity which he finds paralyzing: 'There are some to whom never to forget their umbrella in a long life, is a higher and wiser achievement than to go smiling to the stake.' 'Youthful enthusiasm may be foolish, but it is better to be a fool than to be dead.'

Whether we regard life as a lane leading to a dead wall, or whether we think of it as a vestibule or gymnasium, where we wait our turn and prepare our faculties for some more noble destiny;… whether we look justly for years of health and vigour, or are about to mount into a bath chair as a step towards the hearse; in each and all of these views and situations there is but one conclusion possible: that a man should stop his ears against paralysing terror, and run the race which is set before him with a single mind.. As courage and intelligence are the two qualities best worth a good man's cultivation, so it is the first part of intelligence to recognise our precarious state in life, and the first part of courage to be not at all abashed before the fact. A frank and somewhat headlong carriage, not looking too anxiously before, not dallying in maudlin regret over the past, stamps the man who is well armoured for this world.

Here we are very far removed from the bony conventional morality of the eighteenth century. We are in the company of a clear-cut, witty, courageous, sensitive personality, and we are in the presence of an artist in prose. Stevenson's confession that he learned his craft by playing 'the sedulous ape' to other writers has sometimes been taken to mean that his own use of language always remains imitative. Nothing is more untrue. His early work is inclined to be a little thin and mannered and over-ornamented, but his later essays—such essays as "Pulvis et Umbra," "The Lantern Bearers" or the once famous "A Christmas Sermon"—are the work of a complete and warmly-colored personality, communicating itself in a forthright, strong and warmly-colored prose. They lay us under a spell with the first word, and we wake refreshed with the last.

The moods in which the problems of human conduct are of supreme importance can therefore be the basis of the essayist's art as much as any other moods. But it is true that they very seldom do make thoroughly successful essays. If a personality is passionately concerned with such questions, it is ten to one that his calling will not be that of an essayist; he will be expressing his personality in some more immediately practical way. We may safely say that but for the accident of ill-health Stevenson would not have been content to write essays. The essay which the man of such a temperament writes is seldom as we say 'pure literature.' It has an ulterior aim: it seeks to convert or persuade, to argue, to discuss, to analyze, to explain. It goes over into history or politics or criticism, like Macaulay or Carlyle or Arnold. But the pure essayist, as Virginia Woolf says, seeks only to give pleasure, and we read him with no ulterior aim ourselves. His own occupations and his own acquaintance are his subject matter, and we ask for nothing of more public or general importance.