Alexander Smith

SOURCE: "On the Writing of Essays," in A Book of Essays, edited by Blanche Colton Williams, D. C. Heath and Company, 1931, pp. 243-61.

[Smith was a respected nineteenth-century Scottish poet and familiar essayist. In the following excerpt from an essay included in his Dreamthorpe: A Book of Essays Written in the Country (1863), he writes from a rustic retreat of the familiar essayist's subject matter and wide-ranging habit of mind.]

Giddy people may think the life I lead here staid and humdrum, but they are mistaken. It is true, I hear no concerts, save those in which the thrushes are performers in the spring mornings. I see no pictures, save those painted on the wide sky-canvas with the colours of sunrise and sunset. I attend neither rout nor ball; I have no deeper dissipation than the tea-table; I hear no more exciting scandal than quiet village gossip. Yet I enjoy my concerts more than I would the great London ones. I like the pictures I see, and think them better painted, too, than those which adorn the walls of the Royal Academy; and the village gossip is more after my turn of mind than the scandals that convulse the clubs. It is wonderful how the whole world reflects itself in the simple village life. The people around me are full of their own affairs and interests; were they of imperial magnitude, they could not be excited more strongly. Farmer Worthy is anxious about the next market; the likelihood of a fall in the price of butter and eggs hardly allows him to sleep o' nights. The village doctor—happily we have only one—skirrs hither and thither in his gig, as if man could neither die nor be born without his assistance. He is continually standing on the confines of existence, welcoming the newcomer, bidding farewell to the goeraway. And the robustious fellow who sits at the head of the table when the Jolly Swillers meet at the Blue Lion on Wednesday evenings is a great politician, sound of lung metal, and wields the village in the taproom, as my Lord Palmerston wields the nation in the House. His listeners think him a wiser personage than the Premier, and he is inclined to lean to that opinion himself. I find everything here that other men find in the big world. London is but a magnified Dreamthorp.

And just as the Rev. Mr. White took note of the ongoings of the seasons in and around Hampshire Selborne, watched the colonies of the rooks in the tall elms, looked after the swallows in the cottage and rectory eaves, played the affectionate spy on the private lives of chaffinch and hedge-sparrow, was eavesdropper to the solitary cuckoo; so here I keep eye and ear open; take note of man, woman, and child; find many a pregnant text imbedded in the commonplace of village life; and, out of what I see and hear, weave in my own room my essays as solitarily as the spider weaves his web in the darkened corner. The essay, as a literary form, resembles the lyric, in so far as it is moulded by some central mood—whimsical, serious, or satirical. Give the mood, and the essay, from the first sentence to the last, grows around it as the cocoon grows around the silkworm. The essay-writer is a chartered libertine, and a law unto himself. A quick ear and eye, an ability to discern the infinite suggestiveness of common things, a brooding meditative spirit, are all that the essayist requires to start business with. Jaques, in As You Like It, had the makings of a charming essayist. It is not the essayist's duty to inform, to build pathways through metaphysical morasses, to cancel abuses, any more than it is the duty of the poet to do these things. Incidentally he may do something in that way, just as the poet may, but it is not his duty, and should not be expected of him. Skylarks are primarily created to sing, although a whole choir of them may be baked in pies and brought to table; they were born to make music, although they may incidentally stay the pangs of vulgar hunger. The essayist is a kind of poet in prose, and if questioned harshly as to his uses, he might be unable to render a better apology for his existence than a flower might. The essay should be pure literature as the poem is pure literature. The essayist wears a lance, but he cares more for the sharpness of its point than for the pennon that flutters on it, than for the banner of the captain under whom he serves. He plays with death as Hamlet plays with Yorick's skull, and he reads the morals—strangely stern, often, for such fragrant lodging—which are folded up in the bosoms of roses. He has no pride, and is deficient in a sense of the congruity and fitness of things. He lifts a pebble from the ground, and puts it aside more carefully than any gem; and on a nail in a cottage-door he will hang the mantle of his thought heavily brocaded with the gold of rhetoric. He finds his way into the Elysian fields through portals the most shabby and commonplace.

The essayist plays with his subject, now in whimsical, now in grave, now in melancholy mood. He lies upon the idle grassy bank, like Jaques, letting the world flow past him, and from this thing and the other he extracts his mirth and his moralities. His main gift is an eye to discover the suggestiveness of common things; to find a sermon in the most unpromising texts. Beyond the vital hint, the first step, his discourses are not beholden to their titles. Let him take up the most trivial subject, and it will lead him away to the great questions over which the serious imagination loves to brood—fortune, mutability, death—just as inevitably as the runnel, trickling among the summer hills, on which sheep are bleating, leads you to the sea; or as, turning down the first street you come to in the city, you are led finally, albeit by many an intricacy, out into the open country, with its waste places and its woods, where you are lost in a sense of strangeness and solitariness. The world is to the meditative man what the mulberry plant is to the silkworm. The essay-writer has no lack of subjectmatter. He has the day that is passing over his head; and, if unsatisfied with that, he has the world's six thousand years to depasture his gay or serious humour upon. I idle away my time here, and I am finding new subjects every hour. Everything I see or hear is an essay in bud. The world is everywhere whispering essays, and one need only be the world's amanuensis. The proverbial expression which last evening the clown dropped as he trudged homeward to supper, the light of the setting sun on his face, expands before me to a dozen pages. The coffin of the pauper, which today I saw carried carelessly along, is as good a subject as the funeral procession of an emperor. Craped drum and banner add nothing to death; penury and disrespect take nothing away. Incontinently my thought moves like a slow-paced hearse with sable nodding plumes. Two rustic lovers, whispering between the darkening hedges, are as potent to project my mind into the tender passion as if I had seen Romeo touch the cheek of Juliet in the moonlight garden. Seeing a curly-headed child asleep in the sunshine before a cottage-door is sufficient excuse for a discourse on childhood; quite as good as if I had seen infant Cain asleep in the lap of Eve with Adam looking on. A lark cannot rise to heaven without raising as many thoughts as there are notes in its song. Dawn cannot pour its white light on my village without starting from their dim lair a hundred reminiscences; nor can sunset burn above yonder trees in the west without attracting to itself the melancholy of a lifetime. When spring unfolds her green leaves I would be provoked to indite an essay on hope and youth, were it not that it is already writ in the carols of the birds; and I might be tempted in autumn to improve the occasion, were it not for the rustle of the withered leaves as I walk through the woods. Compared with that simple music, the saddest-cadenced words have but a shallow meaning.

The essayist who feeds his thoughts upon the segment of the world which surrounds him cannot avoid being an egotist; but then his egotism is not unpleasing. If he be without taint of boastfulness, of self-sufficiency, of hungry vanity, the world will not press the charge home. If a man discourses continually of his wines, his plate, his titled acquaintances, the number and quality of his horses, his men-servants and maid-servants, he must discourse very skilfully indeed if he escapes being called a coxcomb. If a man speaks of death—tells you that the idea of it continually haunts him, that he has the most insatiable curiosity as to death and dying, that his thought mines in churchyards like a 'demon-mole'—no one is specially offended, and that this is a dull fellow is the hardest thing likely to be said of him. Only, the egotism that over-crows you is offensive, that exalts trifles and takes pleasure in them, that suggests superiority in matters of equipage and furniture; and the egotism is offensive, because it runs counter to and jostles your self-complacency. The egotism which rises no higher than the grave is of a solitary and hermit kind—it crosses no man's path, it disturbs no man's amour proper. You may offend a man if you say you are as rich as he, as wise as he, as handsome as he. You offend no man if you tell him that, like him, you have to die. The king, in his crown and coronation robes, will allow the beggar to claim that relationship with him. To have to die is a distinction of which no man is proud. The speaking about one's self is not necessarily offensive. A modest, truthful man speaks better about himself than about anything else, and on that subject his speech is likely to be most profitable to his hearers. Certainly, there is no subject with which he is better acquainted, and on which he has a better title to be heard. And it is this egotism, this perpetual reference to self, in which the charm of the essayist resides. If a man is worth knowing at all, he is worth knowing well. The essayist gives you his thoughts, and lets you know, in addition, how he came by them. He has nothing to conceal; he throws open his doors and windows, and lets him enter who will. You like to walk round peculiar or important men as you like to walk round a building, to view it from different points, and in different lights. Of the essayist, when his mood is communicative, you obtain a full picture. You are made his contemporary and familiar friend. You enter into his humours and his seriousness. You are made heir of his whims, prejudices, and playfulness. You walk through the whole nature of him, as you walk through the streets of Pompeii, looking into the interior of stately mansions, reading the satirical scribblings on the walls. And the essayist's habit of not only giving you his thoughts, but telling you how he came by them, is interesting, because it shews you by what alchemy the ruder world becomes transmuted into the finer. We like to know the lineage of ideas, just as we like to know the lineage of great earls and swift race-horses. We like to know that the discovery of the law of gravitation was born of the fall of an apple in an English garden on a summer afternoon. Essays written after this fashion are racy of the soil in which they grow, as you taste the lava in the vines grown on the slopes of Etna, they say. There is a healthy Gascon flavour in Montaigne's Essays; and Charles Lamb's are scented with the primroses of Covent Garden.

The essayist does not usually appear early in the literary history of a country: he comes naturally after the poet and the chronicler. His habit of mind is leisurely; he does not write from any special stress of passionate impulse; he does not create material so much as he comments upon material already existing. It is essential for him that books should have been written, and that they should, at least to some extent, have been read and digested. He is usually full of allusions and references, and these his reader must be able to follow and understand.

E. H. Lacon Watson

SOURCE: "The Essay Considered from an Artistic Point of View," in The Westminster Review, Vol. CXLI, No. 5, May, 1894, pp. 559-65.

[In the excerpt below, Lacon Watson outlines the pleasuregiving, defining features of the familiar essay.]

In the history of the world, as in the history of individual man, each age will have its own especial type of literature. The favourite may co-exist with several others, but it will none the less be the favourite. At the present time it is clear that the commonest mode of expression is in the novel, and I suppose that the age—in England at all events—is gradually drifting in the direction of lyric poetry, conjoined with the short sketch or story. The epic and the drama may be safely regarded as tranced, or even dead. History has a fair hold on the educated. The essay, in its various forms, still breaks out sporadically now and again, stray flowerets from a seedling long discontinued, or like the rare sparks flying from a burnt-out firebrand.

I confess to a more than sneaking kindness for the Essay, in most of her moods. A book of these detached thoughts makes no too pressing demands upon the reader; he may take it up for a spare half-hour or so, and leave it with unconcern to attend to other matters, with no harassing anxiety as to finding the place when he returns. For in a book of this kind there is no continuity of thought, no definite plan. It will go hard with us if we cannot pick out one or two essays out of two dozen that give some pleasure, or that have some message for us. So that it is better, to my mind, for the subjects to be varied as much as possible, and the treatment. I am no great friend to this modern style, introduced by Macaulay, of lengthy book reviews and historical disquisitions. They are good reading, but a trifle too solid for the times when one would fain turn to some delicate, yet not worthless, trifling. As good read a volume of history or a biography as some of these. There are seasons when the reader instinctively lays his hand upon Montaigne, or Lamb, or Stevenson's Virginibus Pucrisquc, and lazily, with pipe in mouth, listens to their quaint conceits and moralisings. Even a Lowell may be too serious for us at times, too full of information. A model essay should contain its fair proportion of useful knowledge, but it should be concealed so delicately; like the onion in the salad, it should be unseen, but permeate the whole. Defoe had a good notion of this, who said, "Thus may we wheedle men into knowledge of the world, who rather than take more pains would be content with their ignorance." The substratum of fact should be there, like the trellis-work on which a creeper grows, but the flowering luxuriance of fancy should clothe it so completely that we hardly guess its presence.

The idea of an essay was, with Bacon, the elaboration of a single thought. But though this is strictly in accordance with the meaning of the word—essay is identical with assay, and should signify merely a careful weighing or examination—yet it is not our conception of the real thing. Montaigne is the true founder of the essay proper, and the early writers in the Tatler, Spectator, Rambler and so forth were his disciples. Like a good talker, he roams from subject to subject, led by some chance association, and by this means we get the delicate play of his fancy on various points: each discourse is a diamond glittering with a thousand focets, and we are not wearied by too sustained argument upon any one theme. It is this that now and again the wearied student longs for—this delightful inconsequence. When we pick up a volume of his, or of Lamb's, we have left the beaten road and wandered into some charming maze of inextricable forest paths. Dry and dusty facts are left behind, or covered over with the green turf. Here is the place to lounge in on a summer's day, and we stroll along none too hurriedly, resting, as the mood takes us, against the trunk of some giant tree of thought. It is the touch of egotism that marks the ideal writer in this form—a touch, however, that should not be overdone. I doubt whether Thackeray allowed quite sufficient of himself to appear in his Roundabout Papers, and it is possible that Leigh Hunt showed a trifle too much. Like the lyric poem, the essay should contain a suspicion of the writer's personality, and should also have the look of careless ease, but the look merely, like a thin glittering sheet of ice over deep waters. It should be desultory, but not too desultory; there should be some slight thread of connection running through the whole, to lead us insensibly from point to point. For it is annoying in the highest degree to meet on a sudden with some abrupt change of thought for which no reason is discoverable. It jars the mind, and puts the reader out of conceit with himself, as if in strolling along our woodland path he should strike his foot against some hidden rock. The author should gossip, but there should be purpose in his seeming divagations. He may decorate with arabesques the line on which he travels, but there must be a line, even though the shortest and slenderest. Indeed, the slenderest peg will serve for the true essayist to hang his disquisition upon. The subject should be not too narrowly defined. In good hands a book or an author will be no mere dull review; but for the less practised writer, the more ordinary craftsman, it were perhaps safer to take some more general subject as his starting-point. I like best in Lamb those rambling discourses where he makes some imaginary acquaintance the text for his sermon, as with Captain Jackson in his cottage on the Bath Road, or the redoubtable Sarah Battle, tutelary goddess of the whisttable. Indeed, a touch of character-drawing, though not perhaps strictly proper to the style, has been ever found a useful adjunct. Addison, of course, has his worthy knight and his satellites, and Johnson, in his Idler, would occasionally introduce imaginary friends to the public, as his Drugget and Minim. And it is noticeable that this does, in fact, give a lighter tone, and that the commonly heavy doctor does attain to some degree of sprightly vivacity in the employment of this machinery, that distinguishes these sketches plainly enough from their more ponderous companions.…

The ideal essayist, I imagine, has yet to be evolved, the man who shall combine in his own person the original power of Bacon, the grace of Addison, the transcendental insight of Emerson, the gay fancy of Charles Lamb, with any unconsidered trifles that he may chance to pick up from other essayists. But, until we see his work, we may well be content with his component parts, which, after all, may possibly afford us more pleasure separately than they would in ever so cunning a combination.…

It gives an agreeable sensation to feel that our time is not being altogether spent on mere relaxation. It is for this reason also that a certain amount of useful information should be sprinkled over the pages of the essayist, to the end that the reader may feel that he is insensibly acquiring knowledge, sucking it in, as it were, through every pore. It is true that the general essay is not over-popular just now. Of book reviews and criticism of all sorts we have a sufficiency; but the old fanciful dissertations of Lamb have few successors. It is characteristic of the true essayist that he can write pleasantly upon any subject. The common house-fly will furnish him with a theme expanding under his treatment to unimaginable heights. It matters not in the smallest degree from what point he starts, his province is none the less the wide unmeasured heaven of imagination. He takes the whole arena of knowledge as his lawful kingdom, and nothing of the varied complexities of human life is foreign to him. I confess that I should like to see more of this true catholicity in range of subject among our essayists of to-day. For, after all, books and the authors of books do not make up the whole sum of human life, and there are other aspects of the world to be noticed besides those which are seen from Fleet Street or the Strand. Dickens and Thackeray have been discussed enough, even the perennial fount of Johnsonian criticism is running muddy towards its close. I would respectfully suggest to all British essayists of the present day to leave these worthy gentlemen in peace, and try their hand in a somewhat wider field.

Carl Van Doren

SOURCE: "A Note on the Essay," in Essays of Our Times, edited by Sharon Brown, Scott, Foresman and Company, 1928, pp. 396-98.

[Van Doren is considered one of the most perceptive critics of the first half of the twentieth century. He worked for many years as a professor of English at Columbia University and served as literary editor and critic of the Nation and the Century during the 1920s. A founder of the Literary Guild and author or editor of several American literary histories, Van Doren was also a critically acclaimed historian and biographer. In the following excerpt, he defines the unique nature of the familiar essay.]

The sonnet has a standard form very much as a man has. Leave off the sestet of your sonnet and you do about what a god does when he leaves the legs off a man. The drama has a standard form very much as a rendezvous has. Write a drama in which no spark is exchanged between the audience and the action, and you have done what fate does when it keeps lovers from their meeting. The novel has a standard form very much as a road has. You may set out anywhere you like and go wherever you please, at any gait, but you must go somewhere, or you have made what is no more a novel than some engineer's road would be a road if it had neither beginning, end, nor direction. But the essay! It may be of any length, breadth, depth, weight, density, color, savor, odor, appearance, importance, value, or uselessness which you can or will give it. The epigram bounds it on one side and the treatise on the other, but it has in its time encroached upon the territory of both of them, and it doubtless will do so again. Or, to look at the essay from another angle, it is bounded on one side by the hell-fire sermon and on the other by the geometrical demonstration; and yet it ranges easily between these extremes of heat and cold and occasionally steals from both of them. It differs from a letter by being written to more—happily a great many more—than one person. It differs from talk chiefly by being written at all.

Having to obey no regulations as to form, the essay is very free to choose its matter. The sonnet, by reason of its form, tends to deal with solemn and not with gay themes. The drama, for the same reason, tends to look for intense and not for casual incidents. The novel tends to feel that it must carry a considerable amount of human life on its back. The essay may be as fastidious as a collector of carved emeralds or as open-minded as a garbage-gatherer. Nothing human, as the platitude says, is alien to it. The essay, however, goes beyond the platitude and dares to choose matter from numerous non-human sources. Think of the naturalists and their essays. Think, further, of the range of topics for essayists at large. Theodore Roosevelt in an essay urges the strenuous life; Max Beerbohm in an essay defends cosmetics. De Quincey expounds the fine art of murder, Thoreau the pleasures of economy, William Law the blisses of prayer, Hudson the sense of smell in men and in animals, Schopenhauer the ugliness of women, Bacon the advantages of a garden, Plutarch the traits of curiosity, and A. C. Benson the felicity of having nothing much in the mind. All, in fact, an essayist needs to start with is something, anything, to say. He gets up each morning and finds the world spread out before him, as the world was spread out before Adam and Eve the day they left paradise. With the cosmos, past, present, and future, to pick from, the essayist goes to work. If he finds a topic good enough he may write a good essay, no matter how he writes it.

He may. There is still, however, the question of his manner. Thousands of dull men have written millions of true things which no one but their proof-readers, wives, or pupils ever read. If each essayist could take out a patent on each subject into which he dips his pen, and could prevent any other pen from ever dipping into it after him, he might have better luck. But there are no monopolists in this department. Would research find in all the hoards of books or all the morgues of manuscripts a single observation which has never been made twice? Competition in such affairs is free and endless. The only law which gives an essayist a right to his material is the law which rules that the best man wins. The law does not say in what fashion he must be best. Any fashion will do. Let him be more sententious, like Bacon; or more harmonious, like Sir Thomas Browne; or more elegant, like Addison; or more direct, like Swift; or more hearty, like Fielding; or more whimsical, like Lamb; or more impassioned, like Hazlitt; or more encouraging, like Emerson; or more Olympian, like Arnold; or more funny, like Mark Twain; or more musical, like Pater; or more impish, like Max Beerbohm; or more devastating, like Mencken. Let the essayist be any of these things and he may have a copyright till someone takes it away from him. What matters is the manner. If he has good matter, he may write a good essay; if he has a good manner he probably will write a good essay.

An essay is a communication. If the subject of the discourse were the whole affair, it would be enough for the essayist to be an adequate conduit. If the manner were the whole affair, any versatile fellow might try all the manners and have a universal triumph. But back of matter and manner both lies the item which is really significant. The person who communicates anything in any way must be a person. His truth must have a tone, his speech must have a rhythm which are his and solely his. His knowledge or opinions must have lain long enough inside him to have taken root there; and when they come away they must bring some of the soil clinging to them. They must, too, have been shaped by that soil—as plants are which grow in cellars, on housetops, on hillsides, in the wide fields, under shade in forests. Many kinds of men, many kinds of essays! Important essays come from important men.

William M. Tanner and D. Barrett Tanner

SOURCE: An introduction to Modern Familiar Essays, edited by William M. Tanner and D. Barrett Tanner, Little, Brown, and Company, 1927, pp. 3-11.

[In the following excerpt from an essay originally published in 1927, the critics provide a brief overview of the familiar essay's elements.]

In the evolution of literary types the essay, like lyric poetry, appears late. The essayist follows the epic poet, the dramatist, the story-teller, and the historian. It is not his function to chronicle actions and events, real or imaginary, but to interpret as much as he can of life and human conduct and to comment on the significance of what he discovers in himself and in those about him. He is an interested observer, a leisurely, meditative thinker. No "special stress of passionate impulse" actuates him to write, for, unlike the epic poet and the dramatist, he does not seek to produce in his readers and hearers a strong emotional response. His appeal is to those persons who enjoy using their memories, their minds, and their imagination, and who recognize in him an entertaining companion in contemplative thinking. He creates little, but appraises what men have done and felt and thought and said. He needs, therefore, as part of his material, the work of his predecessors and contemporaries. Besides his understanding of people, he possesses an easy familiarity with literature and other of the fine arts, and he presupposes a like understanding and familiarity in his readers. For this reason the essayist does not develop in a primitive society. He demands as his proper environment "a certain ripeness of civilization, a certain growth of culture." It is not surprising, then, that the essay, as a recognized literary type, dates back hardly more than three centuries to Montaigne in France and Bacon in England.

The history and the development of the essay have so often been traced that it seems unnecessary to do more than call to the attention of the reader a few of its more important characteristics as a literary genre. Broadly defined, an essay is a relatively short piece of meditative writing, expository in nature and usually prose in form. It is a tentative and personal treatment of a subject. It is not an exhaustive treatise elaborately composed in accord with the principles of strict logic, but is rather the personal expression of the author's thoughts, moods, fancies, and opinions concerning his subject.…

The familiar essay has for its immediate purpose the entertainment of the reader, though it may, as it often does, contribute indirectly to his information. It is addressed to the senses, the memory, the emotions, and the imagination, as well as to the intellect. The personality of the familiar essayist, the mood he creates, the conversational intimacy of his style, and the individuality of his diction are of much greater importance than are subject matter, theme, and structure. The familiar essay, said the late Mr. A. C. Benson, "is a kind of improvisation on a delicate theme; a species of soliloquy, as if a man were to speak aloud the slender and whimsical thoughts that come into his mind when he is alone on a winter evening before a warm fire, and, closing his book, abandons himself to the luxury of genial reverie." Examples of the familiar essay are to be found in the writings of such earlier essayists as Montaigne, Abraham Cowley, Addison, Steele, Samuel Johnson, Goldsmith, Lamb, Leigh Hunt, William Hazlitt, Thackeray, Stevenson, and Oliver Wendell Holmes. The present collection contains familiar essays from a large number of representative British and American authors of our own time.

The familiar essay is essentially personal writing. The point of view is usually that of the first person. The subject, the theme, the material, and the mood are all personally chosen. Individuality of thought and originality of expression, together with the revelation of pleasing literary personality, are the chief characteristics of the familiar essay. "The point of the essay is not the subject, [writes Benson] for any subject will suffice, but the charm of personality.… The essential thing is that the writer shall have formed his own impression, and that it shall have taken shape in his own mind. The charm of the essay depends upon the charm of the mind that has conceived and recorded the impression." By personality in the familiar essay is not meant an obtrusive egotistic personality but rather one that is unconscious of itself.

Essayists are intensely interested in themselves [writes Charles Leonard Moore] and in everything that happens to them. Why is it that such egotism does not revolt us? They fling themselves upon our interest with the most naive confidence, and we receive them with open arms. The more they tell us the more we want to know.…To unbosom oneself seems to be a short cut to the affection of the world, which likes to play the part of a priest in a confessional and hearken to sins and peccadilloes, vauntings, and vaporings. That is the secret of the perennial charm of memoris … The great essayists mingle their egotism with modesty and geniality and humor. It is their enormous enjoyment of life that they communicate to us.

Certainly no reader has failed to find pleasure in the charm of personality as it is expressed in the inimitable Essays of Elia. Likewise, he has enjoyed the confidential selfrevelation that forms so great a share of the appeal of lesser writers who trace their lineage from Montaigne and Lamb, many of whom are represented in the present volume. Though essays and essayists vary in the degree of personality that they reveal, the real art of the familiar essayist lies in his personal treatment of his subject.

Closely allied to the charm of personality is the mood that characterizes the familiar essay. It represents the author's attitude of mind, his mental or emotional point of view, and it determines the vein in which he writes. In the reader he attempts to create a similar mood as an aid to pleasurable communication. In a sense, a familiar essay, like a lyric poem, is moulded by a central mood, which helps to give it unity or completeness. The moods of essayists vary as freely as do the moods of men and women in real life: in dealing with one subject the mood may be serious; with another, humorous; with another, whimsical; with another, mildly satirical; and so on. To a very great extent the individual temperament of the author and his immediate purpose in writing will determine the mood that he employs in presenting his ideas.…

Rarely have familiar essayists other than Charles Lamb, in whose literary personality humor and seriousness were admirably blent, exhibited more than a single mood in an essay.

The coherent structure of a familiar essay, as well as its scope, is mainly determined by the theme or the one central idea that the writer develops. The title, which serves as a name for the essay, may suggest the theme, but rarely does it state it specifically. The theme is the subject, the nucleus, or the core of meaning, of the essay. The formality of structure required in the didactic essay is not in accord with the mood, the discursive treatment, and the conversational style of the familiar essay. Hence, the impression of unity that a reader gets from an informal essay is the result of oneness of mood, singleness of theme, and relevancy of material. Though the familiar essayist is privileged to pursue a desultory meandering course and to digress freely, he is careful to see that all he includes bears some relationship to the theme. Seldom do we find that the author has stated his theme, but it is implied at least and pervades the entire essay. It is usually possible to state it clearly in one's own words, often in a single sentence. For example, it is easy to discover the theme of Mr. [Henry Seidel] Canby's "Red Brick Literature": The writers of red brick literature suffer from a lack of air, space, light, repose, meditation, and solitude as a result of living the artificial and rather sordid life of the modern large city. The theme of Mr. Benson's "On Growing Older" is this: The advantages of growing older outweigh the disadvantages. That of Mr. [Don] Marquis's "Preface to a Book of Fishhooks" is expressed by the author: In fishing, I prefer to put all the exertion up to the fish.

"Just as we may say there is a lyric tongue, which the true poets of that kind have contributed to form," observes Mr. Ernest Rhys, "so there is an essayist's style or way with words—something between talking and writing." Such a style may almost be called "a talking mode of writing," but its ideal is the best kind of conversation. "The essay does not achieve genuine success," says Mr. Edmund Gosse, "unless it is written in the language spoken to-day by those who employ it with the maximum of purity and grace. It should be a model of current cultivated ease of expression and a mirror of the best conversation." The familiar essay, in its easy naturalness and refined intimacy of expression, resembles the letters of cultured people. Its style is personal, informal, discursive, and confidential. In the essays of such writers as Montaigne, Charles Lamb, Mr. E. V. Lucas, Mr. A. C. Benson, and Mr. Charles S. Brooks we find such a style admirably illustrated. The great essayists exhibit a nice adaptation of style to personality, mood, and theme. They seem hardly conscious of writing, but express themselves in simple, spontaneous language, almost as if they were thinking aloud. The impression of spontaneity they communicate through their apparent zest in their subjects and the gusto with which they write. We feel that they have greatly enjoyed writing, so easily and naturally do they express themselves, though in reality they may have expended great toil in achieving such ease and naturalness. In the familiar essay there should be no hint of laborious effort or self-consciousness on the part of the author, no matter how long and painstakingly he has worked in the process of composition. A genial personality revealed through a pleasingly individual style constitutes the chief appeal of the familiar essay, and in this type of literature, more than in any other, style is the man. The familiar essayist's style, as Mr. Ernest Rhys has truly said, "is partly a question of art, partly of temperament; and indeed, paraphrasing Steele, we may say that the success of an essay depends upon the make of the body and the formation of the mind, of him who writes it."

The art of the familiar essayist has been well summed up in the paragraph here quoted:

I have little doubt in my own mind that the charm of the familiar essayist depends upon his power of giving the sense of a goodhumored, gracious, and reasonable personality and establishing a sort of pleasant friendship with his reader. One does not go to an essayist with a desire for information, or with an expectation of finding a clear statement of a complicated subject; that is not the mood in which one takes up a volume of essays. What one rather expects to find is a companionable treatment of that vast mass of little problems and floating ideas which are aroused and evoked by our passage through the world, our daily employment, our leisure hours, our amusements and diversions, and above all by our relations with other people—all the unexpected, inconsistent, various, simple stuff of life; the essayist ought to be able to impart a certain beauty and order into it, to delineate, let us say, the vague emotions aroused in solitude or in company by the sight of scenery, the aspect of towns, the impressions of art and books, the interplay of human qualities and characteristics, the half-formed hopes and desires and fears and joys that form so large a part of our daily thoughts.

The essayist ought to be able to indicate a case or a problem that is apt to occur in ordinary life and suggest the theory of it, to guess what it is that makes our moods resolute or fitful, why we act consistently or inconsistently, what it is that repels or attracts us in our dealings with other people, what our private fancies are. The good essayist is the man who makes a reader say: "Well, I have often thought all those things, but I have never discerned before any connection between them, nor got so far as to put them into words." And thus the essayist must have a great and far-reaching curiosity; he must be interested rather than displeased by the differences of human beings and by their varied theories. He must recognize the fact that most people's convictions are not the result of reason, but a mass of associations, traditions, things halfunderstood, phrases, examples, loyalties, whims. He must care more about the inconsistency of humanity than about its dignity; and he must study more what people actually do think about than what they ought to think about. He must not be ashamed of human weaknesses or shocked by them, and still less disgusted by them; but at the same time he must keep in mind the flashes of fine idealism, the passionate visions, the irresponsible humors, the salient peculiarities, that shoot like sun rays through the dull cloudiness of so many human minds, and make one realize that humanity is at once above itself and in itself, and that we are greater than we know; for the interest of the world to the ardent student of it is that we most of us seem to have got hold of something that is bigger than we quite know how to deal with; something remote and far off, which we have seen in a distant vision, which we cannot always remember or keep clear in our minds.

The supreme fact of human nature is its duality, its tendency to pull different ways, the tug-of-war between Devil and Baker which lies inside our restless brains. And the confessed aim of the essayist is to make people interested in life and in themselves and in the part they can take in life; and he does that best if he convinces men and women that life is a fine sort of a game, in which they can take a hand; and that every existence, however confined and restricted, is full of outlets and pulsing channels, and that the interest and joy of it is not confined to the politician or the millionaire, but is pretty fairly distributed, so long as one has time to attend to it, and is not preoccupied in some concrete aim or vulgar ambition. Because the great secret which the true essayist whispers in our ears is that the worth of experience is not measured by what is called success, but rather resides in a fulness of life; that success tends rather to obscure and to diminish experience, and that we may miss the point of life by being too important; and that the end of it all is the degree in which we give rather than receive.

G. K. Chesterton

SOURCE: "On Essays," in Come to Think of It.… Dodd, Mead & Company, 1931, pp. 1-6.

[Regarded as one of England's premier men of letters during the first half of the twentieth century, Chesterton is best known today as a colorful bon vivant, a witty essayist, and as the creator of the Father Brown mysteries and the fantasy The Man Who Was Thursday (1908). His essays are characterized by their humor, frequent use of paradox, and chatty, rambling style. In the following essay, originally published in 1929 in the Illustrated London News, Chesterton touches upon the essays of Robert Louis Stevenson and William Hazlitt to illustrate his belief that the essay as a genre, a development of the modern age, lends itself to inexactitude and the propagation of pleasant-sounding untruths, unlike its medieval counterpart, the thesis.]

There are dark and morbid moods in which I am tempted to feel that Evil re-entered the world in the form of Essays. The Essay is like the Serpent, smooth and graceful and easy of movement, also wavering or wandering. Besides, I suppose that the very word Essay had the original meaning of "trying it on." The serpent was in every sense of the word tentative. The tempter is always feeling his way, and finding out how much other people will stand. That misleading air of irresponsibility about the Essay is very disarming through appearing to be disarmed. But the serpent can strike without claws, as it can run without legs. It is the emblem of all those arts which are elusive, evasive, impressionistic, and shading away from tint to tint. I suppose that the Essay, so far as England at least is concerned, was almost invented by Francis Bacon. I can well believe it. I always thought he was the villain of English history.

It may be well to explain that I do not really regard all Essayists as wicked men. I have myself been an essayist or tried to be an essayist; or pretended to be an essayist. Nor do I in the least dislike essays. I take perhaps my greatest literary pleasure in reading them; after such really serious necessities of the intellect as detective stories and tracts written by madmen. There is no better reading in the world than some contemporary essays, like those of Mr. E. V. Lucas or Mr. Robert Lynd. And though, unlike Mr. Lucas and Mr. Lynd, I am quite incapable of writing a really good essay, the motive of my dark suggestion is not a diabolic jealousy or envy. It is merely a natural taste for exaggeration, when dealing with a point too subtle to permit of exactitude. If I may myself imitate the timid and tentative tone of the true essayist, I will confine myself to saying that there is something in what I say. There is really an element in modern letters which is at once indefinite and dangerous.

What I mean is this. The distinction between certain old forms and certain relatively recent forms of literature is that the old were limited by a logical purpose. The Drama and the Sonnet were of the old kind; the Essay and the Novel are of the new. If a sonnet breaks out of the sonnet form, it ceases to be a sonnet. It may become a wild and inspiring specimen of free verse; but you do not have to call it a sonnet because you have nothing else to call it. But in the case of the new sort of novel, you do very often have to call it a novel because you have nothing else to call it. It is sometimes called a novel when it is hardly even a narrative. There is nothing to test or define it, except that it is not spaced like an epic poem, and often has even less of a story. The same applies to the apparently attractive leisure and liberty of the essay. By its very nature it does not exactly explain what it is trying to do, and thus escapes a decisive judgment about whether it has really done it. But in the case of the essay there is a practical peril; precisely because it deals so often with theoretical matters. It is always dealing with theoretical matters without the responsibility of being theoretical, or of propounding a theory.

For instance, there is any amount of sense and nonsense talked both for and against what is called medievalism. There is also any amount of sense and nonsense talked for and against what is called modernism. I have occasionally tried to talk a little of the sense, with the result that I have been generally credited with all the nonsense. But if a man wanted one real and rational test, which really does distinguish the mediaeval from the modern mood, it might be stated thus. The mediaeval man thought in terms of the Thesis, where the modern man thinks in terms of the Essay. It would be unfair, perhaps, to say that the modern man only essays to think—or, in other words, makes a desperate attempt to think. But it would be true to say that the modern man often only essays, or attempts, to come to a conclusion. Whereas the mediaval man hardly thought it worth while to think at all, unless he could come to a conclusion. That is why he took a definite thing called a Thesis, and proposed to prove it. That is why Martin Luther, a very medieval man in most ways, nailed up on the door the theses he proposed to prove. Many people suppose that he was doing something revolutionary, and even modernist, in doing this. In fact, he was doing exactly what all the other mediaeval students and doctors had done ever since the twilight of the Dark Ages. If the really modern Modernist attempted to do it, he would probably find that he had never arranged his thoughts in the forms of theses at all. Well, it is quite an error to suppose, so far as I am concerned, that it is any question of restoring the rigid apparatus of the medieval system. But I do think that the Essay has wandered too far away from the Thesis.

There is a sort of irrational and indefensible quality in many of the most brilliant phrases of the most beautiful essays. There is no essayist I enjoy more than Stevenson; there is probably no man now alive who admires Stevenson more than I. But if we take some favourite and frequently quoted sentence, such as, "To travel hopefully is better than to arrive," we shall see that it gives a loophole for every sort of sophistry and unreason. If it could be stated as a thesis, it could not be defended as a thought. A man would not travel hopefully at all, if he thought that the goal would be disappointing as compared with the travels. It is tenable that travel is the more enjoyable; but in that case it cannot be called hopeful. For the traveller is here presumed to hope for the end of travel, not merely for its continuance.

Now, of course, I do not mean that pleasant paradoxes of this sort have not a place in literature; and because of them the essay has a place in literature. There is room for the merely idle and wandering essayist, as for the merely idle and wandering traveller. The trouble is that the essayists have become the only ethical philosophers. The wandering thinkers have become the wandering preachers, and our only substitute for preaching friars. And whether our system is to be materialist or moralist, or sceptical or transcendental, we need more of a system than that. After a certain amount of wandering the mind wants either to get there or to go home. It is one thing to travel hopefully, and say half in jest that it is better than to arrive. It is another thing to travel hopelessly, because you know you will never arrive.

I was struck by the same tendency in re-reading some of the best essays ever written, which were especially enjoyed by Stevenson—the essays of Hazlitt. "You can live like a gentleman on Hazlitt's ideas," as Mr. Augustine Birrell truly remarked; but even in these we see the beginning of this inconsistent and irresponsible temper. For instance, Hazlitt was a Radical and constantly railed at Tories for not trusting men or mobs. I think it was he who lectured Walter Scott for so small a matter as making the mediaeval mob in Ivanhoe jeer ungenerously at the retreat of the Templars. Anyhow, from any number of passages, one would infer that Hazlitt offered himself as a friend of the people. But he offered himself most furiously as an enemy of the Public. When he began to write about the Public he described exactly the same many-headed monster of ignorance and cowardice and cruelty which the worst Tories called the Mob. Now, if Hazlitt had been obliged to set forth his thoughts on Democracy in the theses of a mediaval schoolman, he would have had to think much more clearly and make up his mind much more decisively. I will leave the last word with the essayist; and admit that I am not sure whether he would have written such good essays.

Hilaire Belloc

SOURCE: "By Way of Preface: An Essay upon Essays upon Essays," in One Thing or Another, edited by Patrick Cahill, Hollis & Carter, 1955, pp. 11-14.

[At the turn of the century, Belloc was considered a provocative essayist and one of England's premier men of letters. His characteristically truculent stance as a proponent of Roman Catholicism and economic reform—and his equally characteristic clever humor—drew either strong support or harsh attacks from his audience. In such collections as On Nothing (1908) and On Everything (1909), Belloc proved that he could write convincing and forceful essays on nearly any subject, as either controversialist or defender of the status quo, in a prose style marked by clarity and wit. In the following excerpt from an essay originally published in the New Statesman in 1929, he rebuts the critical charge that the familiar essay is flooding English periodicals with triviality.]

There has been a pretty little quarrel lately—it will probably be forgotten by the time this appears, but no matter—a quarrel between those who write essays and those who have written an essay or two to show that the writing of essays is futile. These last seem to be particularly annoyed by the foison of essays in the present generation. They say it has burst all restraint and is choking us under a flood.

Of old, the essay appeared here and there in some stately weekly paper. Then it dignified once a week some of the more solemn of the daily papers. Then it appeared in another, and another more vulgar. Then, not once a week, but twice a week, in these last: finally, every day. And now (say they) it is everywhere. And the enemies of the essay—or at least of this excess of essays, this spate of essays, this monstrous regiment of essays—are particularly annoyed by the gathering of the same into little books, which they think a further shocking sin against taste. It is bad enough (they say) to drivel away week by week, or even day after day, for your living, but you may be excused (poor devil!), for a living you must get. What is quite unpardonable is to give this drivel the dignity of covers and to place it upon shelves.

The enemies of the modern essay go on to say that it cannot possibly find sufficient subject-matter for so excessive an output. And so on.

Now here let me break modern convention at once, and say that I am a good witness and in a good position also to plead in the matter. I have written this sort of essay for many weary years. I know the motive, I know the method, I know the weakness, but also all that is to be said for it. And I think that, upon the whole, the modern practice is to be supported.

I certainly do not say that with enthusiasm. It would be better for literature, no doubt, and for the casual reader (who reads a great deal too much), if the output were less. It would certainly be better for the writer if he could afford to restrict that output. But I know that, in the first place, the level remains remarkably high in this country (where there are a dozen such things turned out to one in any other), and that it does so remain high is an argument in favour of the medium. For a sufficient standard maintained in any form of writing should be proof that there is material and effort sufficient to that form: that there is a need for that form to supply, and that it is supplied.

These modern essays of ours may be compared to conversation, without which mankind has never been satisfied, which is ever diverse (though continually moving through the same themes), and which finds in the unending multiplicity of the world unending matter for discussion and contemplation. It lacks the chief value of conversation, which is the alternative outlook—the reply. That cannot be helped. But I fancy the reader supplies this somewhat in his own mind, by the movements of appreciation or indignation with which he receives what is put before him. Indeed, sometimes his indignation moves him to provide free copy in protest; though I am afraid that the corresponding pleasure does not get the same chance of expression. I do indeed note, especially in the daily papers nowadays, continual letters from correspondents approving (usually) the more horribly commonplace pronouncements, or those which have been put in to order, as part of some propaganda or other undertaken by the owner of the sheet. These letters I suspect. I believe they are arranged for. But the letters of indignation are certainly genuine, and editors get a good many more than they print. When such letters are written in disapproval of what I myself have written, I nearly always agree with them.

I can also claim to give evidence as a reader of other people's essays. For I can read this kind of matter with less disgust than any other in the modern press. Yes, I prefer it even to murders. And I cannot tell you how much I prefer it to ignorant comment upon the affairs of Europe or conventional rubbish upon affairs domestic: the presentation of little men as great, of falsehood as truth, of imaginaries as realities.

As for a dearth of subject, I see no sign of it at all. If I consider any one man of that half-dozen or so whom I read regularly, my colleagues in this same trade, I can name no one except myself who tends to repetition. And there is no reason why a fairly well-read man, still active and enjoying occasional travel, let alone the infinite experience of daily life, should lack a subject. Stuff is infinite. The danger lies not in the drying up of matter but in the fossilization of manner. Nor do I find much trace of that in my contemporaries.

G. Douglas Atkins

SOURCE: "In Other Words: Gardening for Love—The Work of the Essayist," in Estranging the Familiar: Toward a Revitalized Critical Writing, The University of Georgia Press, 1992, pp. 18-33.

[In the following essay, Atkins discursively examines the essayist's craft as that of a gardener of words and affirmer of life.]

Essayists, teachers, or both, we typically, indeed unavoidably, use various metaphors in attempting to describe this baggy, perhaps unwieldy, seemingly (but only seemingly) shapeless, in any case lovable, thing, the essay. We keep trying to capture it in words, this slippery, elusive shape, though as Elizabeth Hardwick says, it's a little like trying to catch a fish in the open hand. That we keep trying, posing new metaphors, putting the matter in other words, says something, though I'm not sure quite what, besides that a virtual subgenre exists of essays on the essay. "In other words": essayists put it otherwise—that's what essayists do, when, so often, they write about the essay, trying on one, then another metaphor in an effort to describe, to capture, its handsome, comely, beckoning, teasing, essence. It is impossible to do, of course, and that is one reason, a major one, for the continuing, happy, respectful effort. I am obviously implicated in the attempt, this essay in one sense acknowledging the failure of the previous chapter. "In other words": I'm adding mine to the conversation, to the stream of voices that have spoken for so long so well about the form they love.

It's hard to do better than Joseph Epstein, in "Piece Work: Writing the Essay," collected in his Plausible Prejudices and significantly positioned last in that volume of essays on American writing. At the risk of simplifying and reducing the importance of his rich and informed if somewhat surly account, I want only to suggest how much is packed into Epstein's title, which even he doesn't fully exploit: "piece work." How appropriate for the essay, for, thinking of its openness and amiableness, I hear "peace work"; and of course "piece work" alludes to everything from the irregular and poorly paying, temporary jobs sometimes available in factories and print shops to the art and craft of quilting, the province of women in the last century and continued, by women, largely in rural areas in this century as at once an outlet for their artistic skills and often a necessity for survival. Essay writing is certainly irregular and poorly paying work; in a number of ways the form seems (to me at least) feminine, and writing it resembles the piecing together of rags and remnants from hither and yon, discarded, thought to be no longer of any use. As in so much else concerning the essay, Montaigne led the way, cleared the path, asking in "Of Friendship," "And what are these things of mine, in truth, but grotesque and monstrous bodies, pieced together of divers members?" and elsewhere (in "Of Vanity") referring to his essais as "only an ill-fitted patchwork." The essay often seems, in fact, more a crazy quilt than an organic growth (which may help to account for its disfavor during the heyday of the New Criticism). And like quilting, the essay dropped out of fashion (though I sense that quilting too is enjoying a renascence, surviving mainly as a self-conscious craft and appearing in such phenomena as Whitney Otto's bestselling novel How to Make an American Quilt).

Applied to essays, the metaphor of piece work as quilting points up just how dependent these things are on quotation, cut from the full cloth of other text(ile)s. Here William H. Gass, philosopher-novelist-essayist, is best:

Born of books, nourished by books, a book for its body, the essay is more often than not a confluence of such little blocks and strips of texts. Let me tell you, it says, what I have just read, looked up, or remembered of my reading. Horace, Virgil, Ovid, Cicero, Lucretius meet on a page of Montaigne. Emerson allows Othello and Emilia words, but in a moment asks of Jacobi, an obscure reformer and now no more than a note, a bigger speech. A strange thing happens. Hazlitt does not quote Shakespeare but Henry VI, whose voice is then lined up to sing in concert with the rest: the living and the dead, the real and the fictitious, each has a part and a place. Virginia Woolf writes of Addison by writing of Macaulay writing of Addison, of whom Pope and Johnson and Thackeray have also written. On and On. In this way the essay confirms the continuity, the contemporaneity, the reality of writing. The words of Flaubert (in a letter), those of Madame Bovary (in her novel), the opinions of Gide (in his Journal), of Roger Fry, of Gertrude Stein, of Rilke, of Baudelaire (one can almost imagine the essay's subject and slant from the racy cast of characters), they form a new milieu—the context of citation. And what is citation but an attempt to use a phrase, a line, a paragraph, like a word, and lend it further uses, another identity, apart from the hometown it hails from?

Like those once-familiar things, quilts, essays offer comfort and warmth.

Continuing with Gass: the essay, he says, in the way it pieces together quotations "convokes a community of writers" and "uses any and each and all of them like instruments in an orchestra." (Metaphors abound.) The essayist plunders texts—like a quilter rummaging around in a treasured bag of remnants, scraps left over or cut from other serviceable items: shirts and sheets, pants and tablecloths, dresses and curtains, the fabric in which we live our daily lives. Why? why do essayists plunder texts? "Precisely because they are sacred." Thus the essayist's work of quoting (or quilting) needs to be distinguished from that of the article writer, who also quotes. The method of the essayist, "we are essay-bound to observe," writes Gass,

is quite different from that of the Scholastics, who quoted authorities in order to acquire their imprimaturs, or from that of the scholar, who quote[s] in order to provide himself with a set of subjects, object lessons, and other people's errors, convenient examples, confirming facts, and laboratory data. However, in the essay, most often passages are repeated out of pleasure and for praise; because the great essayist is not merely [!] a sour quince making a face at the ideas of others, but a big belly-bumper and exclaimer aloud; the sort who is always saying, "Listen to this! Look there! Feel this touchstone! Hear that!" "By necessity, by proclivity,—and by delight, we all quote," Emerson says. You can be assured you are reading an excellent essay when you find yourself relishing quotations as much as the text that contains them, as one welcomes the chips of chocolate in those celebrated cookies. The apt quotation is one of the essayist's greatest gifts, and, like the good gift, congratulates the giver.

Quoting … quilting—they do sound somewhat alike, don't they?

Remembered, picked up, and dropped or sewed in, these bits and pieces, these strips and shards, of texts may, Gass seems to suggest, grow, even take on a life of their own, not overwhelming an essay the way weeds take over a flower bed or untended land, but nonetheless sometimes coming to be relished almost as much as the text in which they have been planted. The language thus shifts; our metaphors turn, almost in spite of ourselves, like flowers toward the sun (heliotropes), toward nature as ground. If the essay seems pieced and patched together like a quilt, it also seems natural—in several important ways. It appears at once as both a natural growth and a constructed thing. It is, in more than one respect, a threshold being, an "inbetween" thing, hanging indeterminately—but not unhappily—between knowledge and art, creation and cognition, thought and things, writing and living, nature and cultivation, involving a little of both and all. Maybe that's one reason why it evades our grasp, is so difficult to describe. Could it also help to account for its staying power, its appeal?

A couple of years ago a lady friend gave me a book entitled Gardening for Love: The Market Bulletins. The book, handsome in design and full of rich surprises, is a posthumously published collection of the writings of one Elizabeth Lawrence on a variety of topics having to do with gardening, compiled by Allen Lacy, himself the author of such books as Ground Work: A Gardener's Miscellany. Lawrence writes, simply but often gracefully, of her love affair with plants, of the "market bulletins" she eagerly sought (a product of another age, these are classified ads in which gardeners hawk their herbs and ornamental perennials), of the letters she received in response to her replies to those ads.

Not until several months had passed, the seeds perhaps having had time to germinate, did I really come to appreciate the title of Elizabeth Lawrence's book. And then all at once it struck me that "gardening for love" nicely describes the work of the essayist: the essayist's labor resembles gardening in part because both proceed from love, bodied forth in their very manners. Alice Walker makes the point movingly in the passage from "In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens" that I adduced as an epigraph. And I think, too, of Sir William Temple's tender "Upon the Gardens of Epicurus; or, of Gardening, in the Year 1685," a virtually paradigmatic essay on gardening.

Love links gardening and essay writing. You don't rush love—we, at least many of us, have the scars about our hearts to prove it. Tiresome platitudes concerning "love at first sight" and romance versions of tempestuous "love" notwithstanding, love, which certainly involves hormonal response though without being identified with it, takes time, develops over time, requires time for hearts, minds, and not least bodies to become finely attuned, atoned, atoned. It grows "slowly, precariously," not unlike the tender peach trees I grew up with in South Carolina, susceptible to early frosts that can destroy an entire crop. In a relationship between two people, always fragile and far more delicate than we care to admit to each other and to ourselves, chance or accident is important: some relationships blossom and grow to maturity, others fade, wither, and die. We all know that. Love requires not only time but also nurture and cultivation: it doesn't just develop on its own, free of attention and work. You don't maintain and develop a relationship, any more than you grow full-bodied, variegated, and delicately scented American Beauty roses, by ignoring the coloration of response to your caress, the almost-imperceptible whisper of need, the appearance of dis-ease, or signs of boredom, the strength of attachment, the nature and depth of roots. Lovemaking, so central to love even if slighted in our contemporary (over-)emphasis on sex, figures the problem (and opportunity): slow, careful nurturing, marked by attention, concern, and response, produces the best yields. Time matters: it bodies forth respect—for the other. You have to take the time, be patient, and love. Love is incommensurate with haste, inseparable from nurture. The same may be said of the essay.

Nature and nurture: they belong together as much as quilting and quoting. What is there about the essay as form that links it to nature? Many of the great nature writers, of course, have been essayists, many of the great essayists nature writers: I think not just of Emerson and Thoreau, John Muir and John Hay, and before any of them William Bartram, but also of Noel Perrin, David Rains Wallace, Ann Zwinger, Wendell Berry, Peter Matthiesen, Barry Lopez, Sue Hubbell, Gretel Ehrlich, Robert Finch, David Quammen, Edward Abbey, Edward Hoagland, John McPhee, Annie Dillard—the list is not endless but certainly long and distinguished. Sometimes technical, this nature writing is also artful (I think too of Richard Selzer, writing about that aspect of nature that is the human body under conditions of surgery); it is, as a matter of fact, as respectful of the reader, language, and form as it is of the earth and the creatures that populate it. There is, in other words, represented in much of this writing stewardship of both land and language.

To repeat: What is there about the essay that links it to nature?

In The Observing Self: Rediscovering the Essay Graham Good opens a path toward an answer. Good distinguishes four "principal types" of the essay: the travel, the moral, the critical, and the autobiographical, which, he admits, are neither mutually exclusive nor exhaustive categorizations. Corresponding to these types or forms are "the main essayistic activities: traveling, pondering, reading, and remembering." Often the travel essay, notes Good, simply narrates a walk, and he goes on to claim that "the essay is essentially a peripatetic or ambulatory form. The mixture of self-preoccupation and observation, the role of chance in providing sights and encounters, the ease of changing pace, direction, and goal, make walking the perfect analog of 'essaying.'" The history of commentary on the essay, by essayists (whose opinions weigh heavily), confirms Good's thesis.

Unhurried, taken by all the flora and fauna fortunately come upon, more interested, in fact, in the journey, in journeying, than in any destination finally reached, the essay is a walk (and at the same time a garden of delights made of its adventures). Hazlitt's "On Going a Journey" is a classic example of the peripatetic nature of the essay, an account of a walk that itself meanders, that truly offers the reader the experience of journeying. In a Sewanee Review celebration of the essay, a tribute collectively entitled "Sallies of the Mind," William Howarth elaborates on this notion (and motion). Though all texts are journeys, Howarth suggests, without quite saying it, the essay seems paradigmatic, even quintessential writing. At any rate, the essay's itinerancy is a matter of process, indeed natural process, subject to the vicissitudes of chance, entailing accident and thriving on serendipity. Such writing—according to Howarth, who has written so well elsewhere of McPhee's writing way—is "motion, a journey through constantly recurring cycles. The circuit spins repeatedly, through steps of gathering material, compiling and arranging it, then synthesizing a draft. Successive revisions follow, a learning process that reveals what to say and how to find a form—often a form that rehearses the writing journey. This faith in continuity values loose and imprecise forms, devoted to an ecological web of relationships rather than strict hierarchies." Constituted by movement, the essay is related to the cycles of nature, rooted in an awareness of the ebb and flow of life, constructed in accordance with seasonal change, planting seeds here, carefully nurturing saplings there, harvesting at some point, lying peacefully limp and fallow at another. It paces, but the essay also knows about pace, how to pace itself. Probably thought of most often as an autumnal, even mature creature, the essay is not always bursting with life, it is true, yet alive it certainly is, redolent of the stages and processes of natural growth and the life cycle.

Discussing Montaigne's "originating" efforts, Graham Good shrewdly notes, "The starting-point of the essay was the mind's natural desire for knowledge. The task is to bring that desire back to Nature in a wiser and more accepting condition. To do this, thought has to stay close to life, rather than constituting a separate world." Rooted in the world, the essay is anti-Gnostic: thought "has to be reapplied to the experience in which it originates and of which it is a part. Thought should enhance the process of living rather than erode or ignore it." Since Montaigne, the essay has been physical, material, taking the body very much into account. For Montaigne, of course, "the body's existence in time is the very basis of existence.… Montaigne rejects asceticism or any other view" that Gnostically "emphasizes the split in man between divine and earthly, rational and irrational, virtuous and sinful."

Let me try to make all this a little clearer, the link between nature and the essay a little more socure. I will do so via Wordsworth and Geoffrey Hartman's understanding of the poet whose early career (leading up to The Prelude in 1805) represents an attempt to understand the relation of mind or imagination and nature. By the time of his great autobiographical poem, according to Hartman, Wordsworth "took literally the concept of culture as cultivation," having moved beyond a certain radicalism, having returned, in fact, "from revolutionary schism to the idea of a ground out of which things grew slowly, precariously; where accident was important, some grew and some didn't, but where there were, for humanity generically considered, infinite chances of birth and rebirth. The literalism of 'Fair seed-time had my soul' (Prelude I 301) shocks us into a view of culture as nature." In describing this relation to nature, Hartman uses the Hebraic term akedah, which literally means "binding" and which he opposes to the (Christian) notion of "apocalypse." The latter term denotes the haste and impatience manifest in the uncultivated mind or imagination.

Implied, maybe even made explicit, by "culture as nature" is the idea of slow growth, careful and responsive nurturing—what has to be respected, then, because it deserves no less, and cultivated: fertilized, weeded, watered, caressed, even pampered, brought along at its own pace, which must be discovered and can only be by a heart responsive, a soul prepared. For Hartman, such ideas link up with the essence of the humanities, with due process, and with what he calls "delay time," voided in our mad rush toward communication, meaning, and intimacy. He says it best, I think, in Easy Pieces. Describing the humanities as "always in 'slow motion' compared to the sciences or to the immediate demands of the practical world," Hartman writes of their "calendar" as might the Farmer's Almanac of the seasons: the humanities calendar, he says, "allows the store of experience to come before us once again, as we incline—fast and forgetful—into the future. Here and there contact is made between these calendars or wheels moving at different speeds; and the meshing that occurs, which can be very powerful indeed, not only at the point of contact but as it provides a design for mutual and coordinated work, is what we call experience." As usual, Hartman has reference to Wordsworth, and as we read, him, we may find springing to mind such contemporary naturalists or, better, environmentalists as Wendell Berry, Wes Jackson, and Gary Paul Nabhan. Wordsworth attacked, writes Hartman, "in what he named lyrical ballads, the very concept of the newsworthy event, composing lyrics that were anything but sensational. They displaced the avid reader's attention from the unusual or fantastic incident to the sensitive response that an ordinary life might elicit. His almost plotless ballads are our first instance of minimalist art. But they are not yet abstract like that art: they surround familiar thoughts and happenings with an imaginative aura. The strange subtlety of Wordsworth's poems was intended to retain ear, eye, and imagination, to wean them from the age's degrading thirst after 'outrageous stimulation.'"

Enter, then, the quotidian or "ordinary," familiar existence. At the heart of Wordsworthian realism lies what? Respect for time, the capacity to abide time, and so the ability to find in everyday life the materials of romance. No vampish rush after immediate gratification, either. It's a negative capability, like what Keats described as the ability to abide "uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason" and therefore to rest content "with half knowledge." The impulse clearly resembles that which prompts the realistic novel. In perhaps the locus classicus of apologies for that effort, George Eliot (in Adam Bede) allegorically expresses her preference for Dutch "genre" paintings: "I turn without shrinking," she writes, "from cloud-borne angels, from prophets, sibyls, and heroic warriors, to an old woman bending over her flower-pot, or eating her solitary dinner, while the noonday light, softened perhaps by a screen of leaves, falls on her mob-cap, and just touches the rim of her spinningwheel, and her stone-jug, and all those cheap common things which are the precious necessaries of life to her." Graham Good, who quotes this passage, comments as follows: "The sensibility described here, with its ability to find significance and beauty in the detail of a small world and little-regarded people and things, is often found in the essay, which also turns aside from the grand design and the imposing statement for minor truths." Minor truths perhaps from some transcendent perspective, but major ones for those of us embroiled in the inevitable pains and frequent pleasures of day-to-day living.

Lacking the muscle, strength, girth, and power of a novel or the wound tightness and intensity of a poem, the essay is modest, unpretentious, often all too willing to acknowledge, even to accept, what E. B. White called its secondclass citizenship. Which is not to say that it gives up on being artful. On the contrary, the essay is secure enough in its own being to be artful on its own terms, in its own admittedly limited, fragile way, of inviting its readers to share in its artistry, not marvel at or stare in awe and amazement, but instead to feel reassured that its maker was an artisan who, precisely in the lack of show, showed her art. That's part of what is meant, I gather, by the term "familiar essay": not only are its subjects ordinary, quotidian, but its tone and mode of address, the nature of the voice heard in the narrative and along the rise and fall of the sentences, are such that you know a good deal about that of which the essayist speaks. He or she speaks to you, moreover, as someone known, recognized, familiar. The familiarity bred is, however, neither quick nor vampish: as in all good, effective, loving relationships the essayist preserves an identity while allowing you yours; the essayist engages in conversation with you and though, like Edward Hoagland, 'Phillip Lopate, and—even more—Nancy Mairs, he or she can be open, candid, and at times brutally frank, there is usually no lust for intimacy. If it comes, fine, but only after you've gotten to know each other. Rather than in bed, you feel more like in a garden, walking and talking with someone you know, like, and respect, teasing a little, perhaps flirting some, but also discussing situations and ideas and perhaps admitting emotions that matter to you in both your everyday and your inner life.

Whether or not it is quite yours, the essayist's garden through which you both stroll, sometimes arm in arm (the essay is a dia-logue), the garden that is the essay is marked by those qualities Alexander Pope famously prescribed for gardens (and writing!)—utility rather than show, and "naturalness," not excessive order or signs of manipulated diversity and apertures. "Unaffected simplicity"—that was Pope's goal (and achievement in both his own garden at Twickenham and his best poetry), and it is the goal of the essay as well as its achievement in the hands of those who well (at)tend the form. This is Pope "On Gardens" in the Guardian no. 173 (29 September 1713), edited by the essayist Joseph Addison: "There is certainly something in the amiable Simplicity of unadorned Nature, that spreads over the Mind a more noble sort of Tranquility, and a loftier Sensation of Pleasure, than can be raised from the nicer Scenes of Art." In stark contrast, Pope claims, to such simplicity "is the modern Practice of Gardening; we seem to make it our Study to recede from Nature, not only in the Tonsure of Greens into the most regular and formal Shapes, but even in monstrous Attempts beyond the reach of the Art it self: We run into Sculpture, and are yet better pleas'd to have our Trees in the most awkward Figures of Men and Animals, than in the most regular of their own." The garden is, thus, artful precisely in its imitation of nature. It is a product of cooperation between us forked creatures and nature, not so unlike the way the essay appears as both a natural and a constructed thing.

Listen to E. B. White on the essayist. He's writing in the foreword to his collected essays. In what he says, you can hear many of the themes threading their way through the foregoing account. White exemplifies, in fact, the work of the essayist. Catch the rhythm of the thought, the cadence of his sentences. Note how White lingers over notions, caresses them in the structure of his language, stays with language, in fact. He's in no hurry: he's gardening for love. "The essayist is a self-liberated man, sustained by the childish belief that everything he thinks about, everything that happens to him, is of general interest. He is a fellow who thoroughly enjoys his work, just as people who take bird walks enjoy theirs. Each new excursion of the essayist, each new 'attempt,' differs from the last and takes him into new country. Only a person who is congenitally selfcentered has the effrontery and the stamina to write essays." Perhaps, we say in response to White's quietly joyful and perambulating self-criticism, which is quite attractive, if not positively seductive. It is affirmative, perhaps egotistical, in its very criticism of self-centeredness. What a strange effect! What a wonderful thing, the essay!

Continuing, not exactly rambling on, White turns to the work of the essayist, meaning himself, of course. "There are," he begins, "as many kinds of essays as there are human attitudes or poses, as many essay flavors as there are Howard Johnson's ice creams. The essayist arises in the morning and, if he has work to do [!], selects his garb from an unusually extensive wardrobe: he can pull on any sort of shirt, be any sort of person, according to his mood or his subject matter—philosopher, scold, jester, raconteur, confidant, pundit, devil's advocate, enthusiast." Immediately White becomes more personal, all the more engaging—the turn from the general to the personal is neither sharp nor modulated and is, therefore, exemplary. "I like the essay," he writes (and then proceeds to indict himself for imposing his love, even as he details the effects of that love), "have always liked it, and even as a child was at work, attempting to inflict my young thoughts and experiences on others by putting them on paper. I early broke into print in the pages of St. Nicholas. I tend still to fall back on the essay form (or lack of form) when an idea strikes me, but I am not fooled about the place of the essay in twentieth-century American letters—it stands a short distance down the line." And it does, of course, still does, but since White wrote in 1977 the essay has advanced some distance in popularity and prestige, even as Howard Johnson's myriad flavors of ice cream have given way to Baskin-Robbins as a cultural landmark.

Still, White is clear-sighted, not really plaintive, certainly not resentful of the essay's status. It is, after all—or so it pretends, as White does here so beautifully—a slight thing, almost a trifle. Thus the essayist, "unlike the novelist, the poet, and the playwright, must be content in his self-imposed role of second-class citizen. A writer who has his sights trained on the Nobel Prize or other earthly trumphs," advises White, "had best write a novel, a poem, or a play, and leave the essayist to ramble about, content with living a free life and enjoying the satisfactions of a somewhat undisciplined existence."

White goes on to claim—"argue" is not quite the right word—that what matters most is the essayist's honesty.

There is one thing the essayist cannot do, though—he cannot indulge himself in deceit or in concealment, for he will be found out in no time. Desmond McCarthy … observes that Montaigne "had the gift of natural candour.…" It is the basic ingredient. And even the essayist's escape from discipline is only a partial escape: the essay, although a relaxed form, imposes its own disciplines, raises its own problems, and these disciplines and problems soon become apparent and (we all hope) act as a deterrent to anyone wielding a pen merely because he entertains random thoughts or is in a happy or wandering mood.

The candor we experience in essays, including White's here, is a matter of integrity, of being honest with and faithful to what one is writing. The honesty is artistic, and the ironic self-deprecation is that virtually endemic to the essay—it is already there in Montaigne, and it persists through the centuries, though with modifications in form. In Edward Hoagland's words: "an essayist soon discovers that he doesn't have to tell the whole truth and nothing but the truth; he can shape or share his memories, as long as the purpose is served of elucidating a truthful point." And that fact advances somewhat, at least in my judgment, the essay's status along the line of art forms.

At the end of his brief account, White circles back to what has exercised him from the beginning, the matter of the essayistic ego. Whether he did then, White now understands how much it is precisely a question of the essayistic ego, even if he does not (of course) use that rather unessayistic term. If he remains critical of his own selfinvolvement, the presumption appears in perspective; the essayistic now seems special, as indeed it is—both modest and presumptuous, self-denying and affirming, critical of self and thereby assertive of self. A delicate balance is needed, and justice is nothing if not a complex and problematic thing:

I think some people find the essay the last resort of the egoist, a much too self-conscious and selfserving form for their taste; they feel that it is presumptuous of a writer to assume that his little excursions or his small observations will interest the reader. There is some justice in their complaint. I have always been aware that I am by nature self-absorbed and egotistical; to write of myself to the extent I have done indicates a too great attention to my own life, not enough to the lives of others. I have worn many shirts, and not all of them have been a good fit. But when I am discouraged or downcast I need only fling open the door of my closet, and there, hidden behind everything else, hangs the mantle of Michel de Montaigne, smelling slightly of camphor.

The voice we hear here, and in essays generally, may be a construction rather than the unalloyed representation of the flesh-and-blood human being, but still, something genuinely good, warm, human and humane, generous of spirit, and good-hearted can be heard in that voice, felt in the prose. No matter how created the pose, you want to believe the man or woman wears it comfortably. Who but one attentive to others and interested in people, affairs, feelings, geese, a dying pig, yellow roses, Kansas sunsets (had he the privilege of observing them), the sun, the moon, and the stars can be so critical as White is of not attending enough to the lives of others? The essayist is so involved in life—Joseph Epstein says, "love of life … is one of the qualities that all the great essayists hold in common"—so sensitive to the balance that makes it good that he or she feels intensely when the scale is tipped ever so slightly and so must attempt to redress the balance, even if the terms of the attempt seem to us, who are less sensitive, unbalanced.

In "Being Familiar" Sam Pickering joins the effort to describe the essay, suggesting that it is a product of both wander and wonder: "Scholarly writing and the familiar essay are very different. Instead of driving hard to prove a point, the essay saunters, letting the writer follow the vagaries of his willful curiosity. Instead of reaching conclusions, the essay ruminates and wonders. Rather than being right or informative, it is thoughtful. Instead of being serious, it is often lighthearted, pondering subjects like the breeding habits of beetles, and, alas, of people. Of course as a person ages it becomes increasingly difficult to be scholarly or definitive." Of course, "being definitive" is the goal of article writing; "being familiar," the heart, never merely the goal, of essay writing. Pickering goes on: "Truth seems beside the point, or at least amid the many doings of a day it seems to have progressively less to do with living. Years have passed since I have read a study advertised as definitive. Being definitive, and perhaps even clever, is an activity for youth. Certainly it was in my case." "Being definitive" is also a matter of reaching conclusions. It contrasts with the skepticism and what I have called the "negative capability" of the essay. Being particular in the way the essayist is, Pickering helpfully illustrates: "Not long ago a university press that just reprinted an academic book I wrote in fresher days rejected a new manuscript. 'You don't reach enough conclusions,' the editor explained; 'writing essays seems to have affected your scholarship.' The editor was right; I now have trouble reaching conclusions. Instead of cudgeling stray dogs along the route I travel… I stop and pet them. If they could talk, I'd probably sit down, start chatting, and forget about the race."

Reading Sam Pickering, I recall E. B. White describing an ideal reader of Walden, probably the quintessential nature book in our literature. As Susan Allen Toth has written in her tribute to White, included in How to Prepare for Your High-School Reunion, his essay "A Slight Sound at Evening" works because, a mix—I might say, a quilt as well as a garden—of Thoreau, Walden, and White, it embodies the commentator's excitement about the author and his work and in so doing provides reason sufficient why "our hearts beat faster when we read him." White's response to Thoreau is human—that's what it comes down to.

Here is White on Walden's ideal reader, one who has approached perhaps Sam Pickering's "negative capability": "I think it is some advantage to encounter the book at a period in one's life when the normal anxieties and enthusiasms and rebellions of youth closely resemble those of Thoreau in that spring of 1845 when he borrowed an ax, went out to the woods, and began to whack down some trees for timber. Received at such a juncture, the book is like an invitation to life's dance, assuring the troubled recipient that no matter what befalls him in the way of success or failure he will always be welcome at the party—that the music is played for him, too, if he will but listen and move his feet." The essay may be for those who have achieved some age, maturity, and judgment (many commentators think so), for whom "outrageous stimulation" is neither required nor desired. (If it is, and I doubt that the essay's real appeal is limited to us middle-aged folk, but if it is, then we're obviously and sadly mistaken in making it the cornerstone of freshman comp.) In any case, and age is no necessary prerequisite for maturity, the essay persists as "an invitation to life's dance." It represents, in other words, neither quiescence nor acquiescence in the face of increasing age, sagging breasts, and graying hair. It is, instead, a celebration and a thanksgiving, figured by both May and November: an invitation to life's dance.

"Invitation" also deserves emphasis, for essays smile. Being familiar, they welcome, enjoin you. They are not always happy, of course (think of Dr. Johnson's Rambler essays or, differently, Hazlitt's), though they manage, somehow, to remain affirmative, affirmative in the way Keats's "negative capability" is affirmative: that affirmation, if not joy, derives from and perhaps only by means of experienced pain. The essay is thus experienced, though—pace Sam Pickering—not sad. It recalls the Wordsworthian knowledge that "lies too deep for tears."

I repeat: essays smile. The skin around the eyes crinkles (a sign of age?); the eyes, soft and warm (probably brown), may not dance, though they can twinkle. And the smile appears genuine; the face makes you feel comfortable. It offers recognition, and you feel positively invited to respond.

Whether or not they make you smile in turn, essays can make you feel good, comfortable, at ease. They're familiar and personal. It's impossible to be with them long and remain tight or glum. You want, in fact need, to spend time with them, more and more time. You can become dependent. It's like with a lover.

You and essays: a relationship develops. If, as has often been claimed, the essayist is an amateur, it is surely in the root, the most basic sense of the word: the essayist is one who loves, who understands the value of nurture and cultivation. The smile that creases the face of the gardeneressayist betokens love.