Arthur C. Benson

SOURCE: "On Essays at Large," in The Living Age, Vol. XLVI, No. 3423, February 12, 1910, pp. 408-15.

[Benson was an English educator and author. A prolific poet, novelist, and biographer, he is best known as an essayist. In the following excerpt from an essay originally published in the Cormhill Magazine, Benson approaches a definition of the essay and touches upon the accomplishment of several key writers of the familiar essay, including Lamb, Thackeray, and Stevenson.]

There is no word which it seems harder to define than the word Essay; it seems as difficult to describe as the quality of justice in Plato's "Republic," which turned out to be the one indefinable and essential principle that was left, like Argon, when all the other qualities that go to the making up of the state were subtracted. Similarly, when all other forms of human composition have been classified, the essay is left. Almost the only quality that it seems possible to predicate of it is comparative brevity, and even that is not essential to it, for such a book as the "Anatomy of Melancholy" is little more than a gigantic essay, when all is said. The difficulty is that the word has travelled so far from its original meaning, which implied something tentative and evanescent. Yet if the word can be applied to Macaulay's Essays, the original conception falls to the ground at once, for Macaulay's Essays are certainly neither evanescent nor tentative, but some of the most positive and palpable documents in the archives of literature. The fact is that the word has been wrested from its meaning to cover any species of short study, biographical or historical. We do not, however, presume to plead that the word should be restored to its original meaning: words are our servants and not our masters; usage is more important than derivation, and it is mere pedantry to attempt to maintain the opposite. But for all that it is agreeable, even if it be useless, to discern and disentangle the proper qualities of things, and to play with literary values is as pretty a game as to toy with vintages.

The true essay, then, is a tentative and personal treatment of a subject; it 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. I remember once being in the studio of a great painter. He was at work on a portrait which for personal reasons I had been asked to criticize. After we had discussed the picture, he had taken up his palette and brush, and was adding some little touches. As he did this, he began to talk first about the methods, and then about the aims of art. He spoke as if almost unconscious of the presence of an auditor, in very simple, spontaneous language, as though he were thinking aloud. He suddenly broke off, with a half-blush, and said "These are some of the thoughts that come into my head as I stand at my work; I am ashamed to trouble you with them,"—and I could not induce him to resume. That was, I felt, a real essay in the making. I had seen the very telegraphy of the brain at work, the unseen soul at its business of thought, and I felt too, as I reflected, that I had understood it all perfectly, as I could not have understood a technical treatise; for the real stuff of thought is simple enough—it is the learned mind that complicates and embroiders. The theme itself matters little—the art of it lies in the treatment. And the important thing is that the essay should possess what may be called atmosphere and personality; and thus it may be held to be of the essence of the matter that the result should appear to be natural, by whatever expenditure of toil that quality may need to be achieved. In this sense it may be held that Bacon's Essays are hardly true essays, because they are too aphoristic—the bones are picked too clean, the definition is too superbly lucid and concise. Most essayists could not afford to spin their web as close as that—a single page of Bacon would furnish out themes and climaxes and ornaments for a whole essay of the more leisurely type. For the mark of the true essay is that the reader's thinking is all done for him. A thought is expanded in a dozen ways, until the most nebulous mind takes cognizance of it. The path winds and insinuates itself, like a little leafy lane among fields, with the hamlet-chimneys and the spire, which are its leisurely goal, appearing only by glimpses and vistas, to left or to right, just sufficiently to reassure the sauntering pilgrim as to the ultimate end of his enterprise. But the Essays of Bacon resemble more a series of stepping-stones, rigid, orderly, compact, the progress across which must be wary and intent, admitting but little opportunity for desultory contemplation.

Again, the true essay must be, as we have said, tentative. It must never be authoritative. It must make no pronouncement, and draw no conclusion. The most the essayist may do is to venture to suggest. As a cicerone, he must not discourse professionally of dates and mouldings, but trifle gracefully with an historical association, or indicate an effect of light and shadow on a mellow wall. In fact the campanula that swings its lilac bells upon the broken ledge, or the orange rosettes of lichen on the weathered ashlar are more his concern than the origin and significance of the pile itself. His duty is rather to exhibit his subject from a dozen different points of view, and he must take thought of foreground and distance more than of elevation and perspective. If he convinces at all, it must be by persuasion and example, and not by precept or statute—but indeed his aim is never intellectual conviction, nor the unveiling of error; it is rather to show the poetical value of a thought, its suggestiveness, its gossamer connections, its emotional possibilities; and thus the breeze that stirs the surface of the pool is as important as the pool itself; the reflected images of tree and hill, that blend and waver as much his pre-occupation as the actual forms themselves—indeed more so; for, as I have said, atmosphere is the end of all his devices. Personality, then, is the characteristic of the essay; not necessarily egotistic personality, the mind regarding itself with absorbed delight, repeating and viewing and recording its own motions. That indeed is not forbidden to the essayist, for the essence of his art is zest in his subject; but greater still is the charm of personality unconscious of itself, and merely following its own contemplations with a delighted intentness, like the talk of a child. And here I think lies another characteristic of the true essayist, a certain childlike absorption in his subject. We all of us love trifles at heart; the shapes and aspects of things, the quality of sounds, the savors of food, the sweet and pungent odors of earth. We persuade ourselves, as life goes on, that these things are unimportant, and we dull our observation of them by disuse; but in all the essayists that I can think of, this elemental perception of things as they are is very strong and acute; and half their charm is that they recall to us things that we have forgotten, things which fell sharply and clearly on the perception of our young senses, or bring back to us in a flash that delicate wonder, that undimmed delight, when the dawn lay brightening about us, and when our limbs were restless and alert.

The mysterious quality called charm is thus another of the first requisites of the essayist; and here we are dealing with one of those ultimate and indivisible qualities which defy analysis. It brings us back to the naked principle of all criticism, that we like a thing, after all, because we do like it, and for no other reason; we may train and refine our taste, of course, but we only end by assimilating our taste to the perceptions of more richly endowed, more eager natures. But no artist can ever attain to charm by taking thought. What he can do is to improve and refine his methods, till he arrives at expressing the thought he conceives as closely as possible; he can get rid of clumsiness and hesitancy and obscurity, as the sculptor gets nearer at every stroke to the form concealed in the stone; but even so it is the form that is the ultimate and momentous thing, and not the polish of the surface—indeed that polish can be too high, too mechanical; the dint upon the stone, the rake-marks on the gravel, have an unconsidered charm, for they give the sense of the human hand at work.

It would be an ample task. but one that lies beyond the scope of this paper, to show how the seed of the essay sown by Montaigne in France not only did not flourish there, but was transplanted almost bodily to England, and became one of the chief glories of our literature. At first sight it would seem surprising. It would appear that the essay was a vehicle which would have exactly suited the subtle and suggestive temperament of the French, and was illadapted for the less imaginative if sturdier character of our own nation. Yet so it has been. In the hands of Addison and Steele, of Goldsmith and Johnson, the essay became perhaps the most characteristic product of English eighteenth-century literature, with its refined taste, its gentlemanly philosophy, and with just the touch of nature and sincerity that harmonized the whole. But with the romantic movement came a fresher impulse still; and the three great essayists of the early nineteenth century, Hazlitt, Lamb, and De Quincey, gave the essay both a breadth and an appeal which it had never hitherto known. Hazlitt was a great taster of the savors of life, and though a certain harshness and sombreness of nature made him perhaps more of a guide than a leader, yet the thought which caused him to say on his somewhat desolate death-bed, "Well, I have had a happy life," makes itself heard in his writings. De Quincey no doubt suffered from the hideous profusion in which his necessities and his circumstances impelled him to indulge. Never was there a noble and impassioned writer who so wallows at times in verbosity and ineptitude and yet who rises on the one hand to such authentic presentment of the very stuff of humanity, and on the other hand to such impassioned melody of thought and word. He tried perhaps to make prose do the work of poetry, but for all that he has contrived to baffle all who would clearly define the difference, and to leave among his myriad writings visions, where light and sound seem to blend magically into an essence for which no literary name can be found.

But the writer who, with no pretensions, no sacerdotal claims, winds himself subtly and firmly into the sovereignty of English essayists is Charles Lamb. Strangely enough it was late in life that he found his place. He had no ambitious range of subjects, nor had he the command of the organ-like melody which De Quincey owned. Perhaps this may be the reason why De Quincey, alone of notable critics, persistently descries Lamb's merits, accusing him of want of proportion and variety. But Charles Lamb brought to his work a largeness of heart and a sweetness of temper that survived both acute and wearing sorrows and a deepseated fragility of fame—"Saint Charles!" as Thackeray once said, putting a letter of Lamb's to his forehead. To this was added an extraordinary fineness of observation, and a delicate sensitiveness to the quality of experience that had slowly matured; and he had, too, a humor both whimsical and profound, which, into whatever extravagance it may have betrayed him in convivial moments, was always held in exquisite restraint when he came to write; and thus the essays have that rare balance of emotion, where pathos is kept from sickliness by a virile sense of absurdity, and where emotion preserves humor from the least touch of cynicism. It is not as if the two moods alternated, they co-existed; and a tact which was of the nature of genius kept the proportion exact. It is idle to say that Lamb can never be surpassed; but so perfect an adjustment of special faculties, combined with so limpid a style and so sincere a modesty of presentment, must of necessity be a rarity.

And now, "as in private duty bound" as the old bidding prayer runs, I may be allowed to touch upon a group of essayists who have been particularly connected with the pages of the Cornhill Magazine. It has from the first been the policy of the Cornhill to give prominence to the note of personal expression: and thus it has attracted to itself writers of this quality.

The output of Thackeray was so prodigious and his method so incredibly natural and spontaneous, that it is easy to say he was not an artist, just as pedantic critics used to say that his drawings were very amusing but undeniably amateurish. The truth is that Thackeray defied all rules. His wonderful eye saw everything, and his large heart had room for everything and everybody. He lived, and enjoyed life, with an absolutely unimpaired and childlike zest; and his brave, simple, tender spirit endured to the end. Where other men are connoisseurs of fine flavors and delicate nuances, Thackeray was a connoisseur of the broadest and biggest things of life—its pathos, its absurdity, its courage, its loyalty. As the French proverb says, he is bon comme lepain. His handling of humanity is so liberal that he puts one out of conceit with all uneasy devices, all nice assignments of epithets. He writes as the jovial Zeus of the Iliad might have written about the combats and the loves of men, sympathizing with and experiencing every passion and frailty, yet with a divine immunity from their penalties and shadows.

As Edward FitzGerald wrote of him in 1845—

In the meanwhile old Thackeray laughs at all this; and goes on in his own way, writing hard for half a dozen reviews and newspapers all the morning; dining, drinking, and talking of a night; managing to preserve a fresh color and perpetual flow of spirits under a wear-and-tear of thinking and feeding that would have knocked up any other man I know two years ago at least.

And how characteristic it was of Thackeray that in his later days he could write, he confessed, anywhere better than in his own quiet study—in a club smoking-room or a bar-parlor, where he was in touch with the light and sound and even the scent of life!

The Roundabout Papers are perhaps among the greatest triumphs of the art of the essayist. It is impossible to say what they are all about—what are they not about? Yet the book is irresistible, and not to be laid aside; and, what is the strongest test of all, it is so contagious in style and manner that after reading it one has a fatal tendency to try to imitate it; it produces a kind of mental intoxication, in which one feels capable de tout—of observing and loving and interpreting human nature in the same large and easy way.

Thackeray must have had the special gift of writing exactly as fast as he thought. If a man thinks faster than he writes, the result is abruptness of transition, a disconnected allusiveness, a sense of flying leaps and uneven progress. If he thinks slower than he writes, there is a sense of costive reluctance—he wades, as Tennyson said, in a sea of glue. But with Thackeray the word is the though; it has the sense of fluent talk without self-consciousness or strain.

It would be difficult to find a more complete contrast than that presented by Leslie Stephen to Thackeray. The Hours in a Library contain an immense amount of admirable literary appreciation, stated with a temperate justice and a reasonable candor which is above praise. These criticisms read like legal judgments passed upon writers by a man with a wide knowledge of the subject and distinct preferences of his own, before whom the cause of the writer has been pleaded by an advocate, on the one hand, of indiscriminate admiration and headlong eulogy, and on the other hand by an advocate of confessed hostility and whole-hearted contempt. The two extremes seem to be always in the mind of the presiding judge, and he delivers his decision with logical clearness and an extreme sense of responsibility …

He was a man of very deep emotion and intense loyalty. But his sincerity and his candor deserted him in the presence of emotion. He was so afraid of sentiment, so ashamed of giving himself away, that he hung back at the very moment where his good sense would have been most valuable. No one desires a sacrifice of dignity, or a fatuous display of sentiment; but to deal with books and human beings, and to ignore the emotional framework, is a chilly business. And it is here that Thackeray strides ahead, because he was not ashamed to be known and seen to feel. Yet there is room for both; and Stephen's wholesome, manly, and dispassionate judgments are an excellent corrective of literary extravagance and sentimental preferences.

The essays of Robert Louis Stevenson, many of which appeared in the Cornhill, and were afterwards collected into the volume Virginibus Puerisque, are conceived and executed in a very different vein. They are confessedly and obviously elaborate writing, and the author seems to have worked in the spirit of the advice given by Keats to Shelley, "to load every rift with ore." The tone and temper of the essays are admirable; they are breezy without being boisterous, and brave without being insouciant. Perhaps it may be said of them that they are rather too deliberately buoyant, for there peeps in every now and then a touch of grim philosophy, not, indeed, foreign to the writer's experience, for even when they were written Stevenson had had, as Browning says, "trouble enough for one." It is better, I think, to read them in connection with their title. They are essentially youthful in spirit, but it may be doubted whether a certain maturity of temperament is not an almost necessary qualification in an essay-writer. He must have seen, so to speak, both sides of the coin. Stevenson had lived with zest, and he had begun to suffer, but he had not as yet lost interest in his sufferings: he had not yet begun to walk in that shadowy land, afterwards to become familiar to him, in which weakness takes the fight out of a man. In the early days of illness it is not without a certain lurid interest to have looked a spectre in the face, and to have shut the door upon him. Experience, after all, is always interesting, and the more disagreeable it is, the more zest it gives to hours of relief. To the young men and maidens who have glowed and thrilled over these manly, humorous, full-flavored essays, it adds a pleasant savor to life to peep into its afflicted places, its grated dungeons; and all the more so when one who has sojourned there comes out smiling, and assures his hearers that the dark corners were illuminated with courage and hope. But one grows a little older, and an uneasy suspicion falls upon one that the brisk performer on tabret and pipe is a little sick at heart, and that he is practising what is called in modern phrase "auto-suggestion," which consists in saying, like Mark Tapley, that everything is jolly, in the hope that one may seem a little less dreary than one feels. Still, the courage, the good temper, the determination to be pleased with life, qualities which lay at the very root of Stevenson's nature, here stand out in every page; and what is finer still, the conviction that, if one fails to be interested in life, it is one's own fault, and not the fault of life; and that one does not mend a bad business by whining and pleading exceptional justification for one's stupid and perverse blunders. The essay about the English Admirals, for instance, stirs the heart like the blast of a trumpet, with its splendid patriotism, its unreasonable courage. Still one may, I think, justly prefer Stevenson's letters to Stevenson's essays. In the letters one gets a freshness and spontaneity which one just misses in the essays. In the essays there is a construction of literary ornament; in the letters the construction is ornamented, and no more, by the literary flavor. Yet the essays, too, for all their spicy scent, have the intimacy of the true essay. You hear the talk and look into the eyes of a friend. You feel that nothing but the unhappy accidents of time and space kept you from swearing eternal brotherhood with a brave heart; and you end, as Wils o tenderly o f Walter Scott, b y hating the death that parts you from the beloved.

And here, too, may be mentioned the work of John Addington Symonds, some of whose most finished essays appeared in the Cornhill. He was a great friend of Stevenson's, and they were knit together by unity of temperament and trial. Opalstein and Firefly were the names they gave each other, this for the clouding gleams of fantastic brightness, and that for the swift lapses of lambent flame. Keen as Symonds' delight was in the joys and beauties of earth, quick and exact as his observation was, rich as his resources of language were, he had not quite the personal touch that wins the crown. It was a thwarted life, for all its energy and courage; and thwarted most of all in this, that be could never quite make his art obey his bidding. The passion of the scene, the memory, the experience mastered him; and though he could communicate delight, yet it was done more through a lavish profusion of detail than by the restrained economy of language that leaves the picture clean and firm and true. And this is all the more to be regretted, because Symonds never made the mistake of putting art before life. It was life and experience and emotion of which he was in search, and his writings are an attempt to establish relations, to bridge the gaps of life with confidences, to share his joy with other hearts. Yet the rhetorical vein in him just swept off that finest bloom, that sense of intimacy on which all depends.

And here, too, I may be permitted to add a word about a series of essays—the "Pages from a Private Diary." which claimed the affectionate regard of many readers of the Cornhill. There was no attempt made in them to strike an attitude or wind an adventurous horn; yet out of the simplest materials and the quietest outlook there came a delicately tinted picture of life, which, by its modest sincerity, its tranquil humor, would itself into the heart. And this is, perhaps, the best claim of all, to take a tract of life which is within the reach of everyone—a rustic landscape, a village street melting into orchards and pastures,—and so to render its serene charm, its blended green and gray, its misty distance, that its hidden life becomes audible, its even breath, its beating heart. And, further, to show that in these pastoral solitudes, where the year is marked by the rising of the wheat, the rustling of the leaf, the building of the rick, a life full of reflection and sympathy may be lived as in a firelit glow—this is to broaden the outlook of the heart, and to prove that it is the informing spirit more than the ample incident that makes the richness and the glow of life. It was Virgil's highest praise for the days of old that men were content with little; and it is still the crown of life, and its best hope, when that temper, as well as the adventurous heart, are found in due proportions in a nation's life.

And thus we end where we began, with the perception that of all the displays of art the essay is the most indefinable, the most subtle, because it has no scheme, no programme. It does not set out to narrate or to prove; it has no dramatic purpose, no imaginative theme: its essence is a sympathetic self-revelation, just as in talk a man may speak frankly of his own experiences and feelings, and yet avoid any suspicion of egotism, if his confidences are designed to illustrate the thoughts of others rather than to provide a contrast and a self-glorification. The essayist gives rather than claims; he compares rather than parades. He is led by his interest in others to be interested in himself, and it is as a man rather than as an individual that he takes the stage. He must be surprised at the discoveries he makes about himself, rather than complacent; he must condone his own discrepancies rather than exult in them. "One knocked," says the old fable, "at the Beloved's door, and cried 'Open!''Nay,' said the Beloved, 'I dare not open save to Love and God.' But the voice said 'Open then without fear, for I am both; I am thyself.'"

Francis N. Zabriskie

SOURCE: "The Essay as a Literary Form and Quality," in The New Princeton Review, Vol. IV, No. 5, September, 1887, pp. 227-45.

[In the following excerpt, Zabriskie surveys the prominent English and American writers of the familiar essay.]

In coming to the English essay of the nineteenth century, we dismiss at once an imposing phalanx of British reviewers and critics, whose works are commonly so classed. These masterful and often leonine vivisections of authors, these eloquent orations on paper, these able state papers, these splendid historical tapestries or biographical portraitures, have no more relation to the true essay than a Roman toga or a coat of mail has to a dressing-gown or a peajacket. Of course, we are not including Carlyle nor Professor Wilson. The latter has the essay touch in all he wrote, whether the story of a tramp among the lochs and moors, a swift silhouette of a contemporary, or a critique by wink and shrug and boisterous ha! ha! When Thomas Carlyle became possessed of his familiar spirit, Teufelsdrockh, he became a very Titan of essay. And yet Teufelsdrockh is but the intensified personality of Carlyle, manifesting itself in all his varied criticism of life, whether of men or books, of nations or individuals, of the past or the present, spurning all bondage to rules of logic or dictionaries or punctuation marks, a great intuitive, lightningworded, self-disclosing soul.

Nothing could better illustrate the variety of style and the diversity of gifts which are included in the genius for essay, than the fact that the other great representative English essayist of the nineteenth century is Charles Lamb. Teufelsdrockh is as ungentle as Elia is "gentle." To read the former is like embarking on the rapids of Niagara; to read the latter is like an afternoon's row on the Thames in sight of London Bridge, and with the distant murmur of the Strand and Cheapside in our ears. The range of the former is from hero-worship and prophets to gigs and ballet-girls, from the Book of Job to "Tam O'Shanter," from Christianity to old clothes. Lamb never soars much higher than the chimney-pots of his beloved city, nor strays beyond its limits. He finds scope for his exquisite pathos and poetry, as well as humor, in its beggars and sweeps, its bookstalls and play-houses. And yet you will find this in common between the roar of the one and the dove-note of the other—they are the exact accent and dialect of the man at the moment.

We always associate Hazlitt and Leigh Hunt with Charles Lamb. The former must not be thought of too exclusively as a literary critic, though one of the most charming as well as keenest of book reviewers. The finest and most imperishable aroma of his genius is to be found in such essays as his "On the Want of Money," "Sitting for One's Picture," "Londoners and Country People," "Great and Little Things," and "Living to Oneself." Leigh Hunt is always Horace Skimpole in print. The subject seems to be utterly indifferent to him. It always starts him off on an airy, fanciful, and even fantastic talk on everything in earth and heaven, in Hampstead or at the world's end. He is preeminently the poet-essayist, as Horace Skimpole's Roman namesake was the essay-poet. We group about Lamb also Dr. John Brown, who has created a dogheaven, at least on earth; "Boz," who would be recognized as one of the greatest of essayists if he were not one of the greatest of novelists; Thackeray, who is recognized as one of the greatest of essayists despite his being one of the greatest of novelists. The genius of Landor has restored the dialogue essay of Plato and Xenophon and Fontenelle, and Sir Arthur Helps has transplanted it into the midst of the nineteenth century. Coleridge, in Aids to Reflection and Table Talk, and the Hares in Guesses at Truth, have paralleled the "Pensees" of Seneca and La Bruyere. The great Coleridge had his fits of essay in most of his writings, especially The Friend and Biographia Literaria, and he talked essay by the hour, "sitting on Ludgate Hill" or anywhere else that he could find an auditor.…

Washington Irving wrote his Sketch-Book and Bracebridge Hall under the spell of the Spectator. He once told Mr. Labouchere that he studied style by reading Addison's essays, and then writing them out from memory, and comparing his own phrases with the original. He even undertook, with his friend Paulding, to publish an American Spectator. Irving, however, advanced upon his English prototype by a criticism of life which could take account alike of town and country, of the Old World and the New. He also indicated the American tendency to a closer observation of nature.

N. P. Willis was a sparkling sketcher of the surface aspects both of nature and of society, and exhibits the forced gayety of Christopher North without his robust hilarity, and the sentimentality of Leigh Hunt without his delicacy of touch. Edwin P. Whipple's critical essays are informed with his personality, his observation, and his wit. Hawthorne, in his note-books and in such sketches as "A Rill from a Town Pump," must be reckoned among our essayists. Thoreau inaugurated the peculiarly American school of minute and meditative observers of nature. Emerson is quite alone in the sententious vein, and we have nothing answering to the French "Pensees" unless it be Colton's Lacon.…

But my space is covered. One cannot do more than sweep telescopically the crowded lights of the Milky Way. I must content myself with barely adding the names of Charles Lanman, Horace Bushnell, the late Dr. C. S. Henry, and "Timothy Titcomb," while still others, perhaps equally noteworthy, cannot even be mentioned.

W. E. Williams

SOURCE: "The Essay," in The Craft of Literature, International Publishers, 1925, pp. 140-47.

[In the following excerpt, Williams provides a brief overview of the familiar essay's nature and the key practitioners of the 'pure" essay tradition.]

The didactic essay, or "paper," is a lesser channel of the essay-form; and even during the 19th century it was the non-critical or "literary" essay which left the deepest mark on non-narrative prose. Goldsmith had won a place in literature for the fancy-free style of the informal essay. Lamb consolidated its claim. He practised a kind of essay which is best described as the prose complement of the lyric, or rather, perhaps, of the ode. In an earlier [unexcerpted] chapter some illustrations were given to show how a certain subject-matter, considered by a variety of personalities, evokes a similar variety of lyrical ecstasy. Lamb and the "literary" essayists, working in the less sublime but more extensive medium of prose, react in a similar way to their subject-matter. A first view of an antique town, or the sound of church bells on a winter morning, releases from delicate sensibilities a flood of memories and fancies. The subject is of secondary importance: it is the gust of wind which sets ringing the thousand bits of glass that hang from the ridges of an oriental temple. Free from the strain of plot and characterisation, the essay can discover to its readers those "little things"—the whims, fancies, and turns of thought—which best reveal a personality.

It may (quite wrongly) be imagined that the "literary" essay, so strongly responsive to its writer's momentary mood, tends therefore to be an inconsequential farrago of fancy. The critical essay, it may be thought, developing an argument, must be logically set forth; while the other kind will be invertebrate and without design. An examination of Lamb's essays will destroy this mistaken notion. The Labyrinth of Gnossos is nothing but a maze to Theseus until he gets hold of the thread of silk that guides him to Ariadne. The thread of silk is there in each of Lamb's most labyrinthine essays.

Take, for example, "The Praise of Chimney Sweepers." The essay begins with a panegyric to the "matin lark"—the young sweep. Immediately afterwards, Lamb is recalling the thrill he felt as a boy when he saw a sweep's brush suddenly emerge from a chimney-top. The fifth paragraph is a parenthetic exhortation to the reader to give a penny to a sweep when he sees one. In the next paragraph, the maze takes what seems an incomprehensible turn, for it does nothing but describe a shop which sells sassafras tea; but soon we discover that this is the favourite beverage of sweeps. Then the essay takes a fresh turn, to mention those other stalls where the early workman gets his herbal beer. The following paragraph comes back to the sweep at the stall, where you are invited to stand him a drink and a snack. There we come into a new section of the maze, which begins most disconcertingly: "I am by nature extremely susceptible of street affronts," but which leads us on to consider the mischievous nature of sweeps. No sooner do we feel our way along than we come across a fresh and startling line: "I am by theory obdurate to the seductiveness of what are called, a fine set of teeth,"—but it directs us eventually to a consideration of the possibility that many sweeps are mislaid lordlings. We are led on to a pleasant story of one such romance. On the heels of that, we are without warning introduced to "my pleasant friend, Jem White," who however turns out to be a kind of patron saint of sweeps. One of his annual feeds for them is next described; and, just afterwards, we emerge unexpectedly to find that, Jem now dead, the sweeps lament his lost bounty.

From first to last the thread is there, and the shocks we get as we fancy ourselves lost from time to time, serve to heighten our pleasure at the constant return to the central idea.

Of this nature, as the student may find for himself, is the work of those modern essayists who follow the "pure" essay tradition: Stevenson, Jefferies, W. H. Hudson, Max Beerbohm, Chesterton, Robert Lynd, and E. V. Lucas. The essayist makes any approach he prefers, and pleases himself as to what turns his maze shall take. But a bird'seye view of it reveals always a definite unity from first to last.

Most of the other characteristics of Lamb are shared, too, by the later essayists. The essay affords full scope for idiosyncrasy (Lamb's was a liking for the turns of phrase of Sir Thomas Browne and his fellows: G. K. Chesterton's is a mediaeval zest for an extravagant phrase). It is the happy hunting ground of the whimsical fellows, who looking at life from odd angles, show us the wonder and drollness of it.

Joseph Epstein

SOURCE: "Piece Work: Writing the Essay," in Plausible Prejudices: Essays on American Writing, W. W. Norton & Company, 1985, pp. 397-411.

[An American educator and the editor of the American Scholar, Epstein is considered one of the preeminent modern writers of the familiar essay. In the following excerpt from an essay originally published in the New Criterion in 1984, he defines and discusses the essay inform and intent, discoursing on several of the genre's foremost practitioners.]

There has never been an Age of the Essay, but, in the modern era, there seem always to have been extraordinary essayists. Drawing on the English-speaking writers alone, permit me to read the honor roll: Francis Bacon, Sir Thomas Browne, Daniel Defoe; Addison, Steele, Swift; Oliver Goldsmith, Samuel Johnson, Sydney Smith; Lamb, Hazlitt, Cobbett; Carlyle, Arnold, Emerson; Beerbohm, Chesterton, Virginia Woolf; Mencken, Orwell, Edmund Wilson. This is not to mention—as I shall now do—some of the men and women who dropped in from other genres and fields of intellectual endeavor to work out on the essay: Hume and Mill, Thackeray and George Eliot, Bagehot and Macaulay, Mark Twain and Henry Adams, the brothers James and William Dean Howells, Oscar Wilde and Bernard Shaw, E. M. Forster, and John Maynard Keynes. Both lists could be easily extended, but I believe I have supplied the names of enough serious players to provide a pretty fair chooseup game.

Of all literary forms, the essay has perhaps changed least over the course of its life. Can this be because the form of the essay is itself so protean—because essays themselves have so little form? The formlessness of this very old form is part of its pleasure. A critic, comparing Bacon to Montaigne, who is the father of the essay and the Shakespeare of the genre, remarked that Bacon "never attained the freedom and ease, the seeming formlessness held in by an invisible chain" that is part of the pleasure of reading Montaigne and often distinguishes the essayist at his best. Samuel Johnson wrote rather sniffily of the essay as "an irregular, undigested piece." Aldous Huxley, with Montaigne in mind, once referred to the method of the essay as "free association artistically controlled"—the artistic control clearly being crucial. Rudely inserting myself into this august company, I recall being delighted when a reviewer of a volume of my essays once remarked that they reminded him of the comment that Kandinsky once made about his own method: "I take a line out for a walk."

That same reviewer then went on to lose all the ground he had gained by picturing me as the stereotypical writer of essays—in a phrase, the cliche essayist. We all know that figure: there he stands in plaster of paris, gentle chap, highly cultivated, a lover of nature, a man obviously in touch with the eternal verities. Sheathed in corduroy or tweed, suede patches at his elbows, he puffs reflectively on his pipe. A bit otherworldly perhaps, oblivious to the rush of contemporary events around him, shaped like a Bartlett pear, more full of Shakespeare and Emerson than Bartlett's Book of Familiar Quotations, he is, our cliche essayist, a bookish man to his papier-michM fingertips. In recent incarnations, he might have written under the rubric of "The Easy Chair" or "The Peripatetic Reviewer" or "The Revolving Bookstand." Pipe-sucking, patch-wearing, proud to harken back to the leisurely culture of an older day—that's the good old cliche essayist, altogether out-of-it and not minding in the least.

It is a cliche—to use a cliche—that will not wash. Certainly, it fits none of the great figures of the form. Consider some among them: Charles Lamb, with his stutter and his dreary clerkship at East India House and his mad sister at home; William Hazlitt, with his passion and his sad marriage and his need to grind out a living through endless scribbling; H. L. Mencken, with his energy and his love of lambasting a phony and his joy in life despite his unshakable skepticism about finding the answers to any of its large questions; George Orwell, with his rough-cut cigarettes and his working-class get-up and his ideological battles; Edmund Wilson, with his loneliness during hot summers in his Talcottville stone house and his reading through insomniacal nights and living out his days like the character in "The Cask of Amontillado" imprisoned not by bricks but by books. No, not much evidence of the clichó essayist here.

If there is no standard type for the essayist, neither is there anything resembling a standard essay: no set style, no set length, no set subject matter. The essay is a pair of baggy pants into which nearly anyone and anything can fit. In the college catalogue of this term's offerings, it does not fall under "creative writing"; it is not, strictly speaking, even imaginative, though there has never been a want of imagination among its best practitioners. In range of interest, it is multivarious: there are literary essays, political essays, philosophical essays, and historical essays; there are formal essays and familiar essays. The essay is in large part defined by the general temperament of the essayist. The essayist is—or should be—ruminative. He isn't monomaniacal. He is without pedantry; he is not, as they say in university English departments, "in the profession." The essayist might be found almost anywhere, but the last place one is likely to find him is in the pages of the PMLA.

Along with essays, there are entities known as the article and the "piece"; let us also not forget journalism and criticism. Are these nomenclatural distinctions merely? Perhaps. No hard rules in this domain, where everyone is his own Adam, free to name the creatures about him as he thinks best. For myself, I hold the essay to be a piece of writing that is anywhere from three to fifty pages long, that can be read twice, that provides some of the pleasures of style, and that leaves the impression of a strong or at least interesting character. By this measure F. R. Leavis, though he might be writing at essay length, is always the critic, never the essayist. Max Beerbohm, even when he is writing criticism of the most ephemeral play, is perpetually the essayist.

A certain modesty of intention resides in the essay. It is a modesty inherent in the French verb that gives the form its name—essayer: to try, to attempt, to taste, to try on, to assay. However many words the essayist may avail himself of, he instinctively knows, or ought to know, that the last word cannot be his. If it is the last word an author wants, let him go write books. Not that the essayist need be light, a schmoozer, a kibitzer with a pen in his hand. As Percy A. Scholes, in The Oxford Companion to Music, characterizes Handel, so does the essayist aim to shape himself: "though facile he is never trivial." And sometimes the essayist can be profound. As Beethoven, quoted in the same Oxford Companion to Music article, remarked of Handel: "Go and learn of him how to achieve great effects with simple means."

Who becomes an essayist? What is the training? What aptitudes are required by the job? Nearly thirty years after attending a lecture by Stephen Potter, the one-upmanship man, I remain impressed by the answer Potter provided to a most woodenly phrased question from a graduate student in the audience. "Sir," this young man began, "you are a noted Coleridge scholar, a man of serious standing in the scholarly community, and this being so, I cannot help but wonder what it was that impelled you to write such works as One-upmanship and Gamesmanship—I cannot, sir, understand what strange turn in your intellectual life caused you to compose these most unusual books, whose philosophical implications, though interesting to be sure, are nonetheless puzzling in the extreme. My question, then, sir, not to put too fine a point on it, is, Why did you write these books?" Potter, who was got up for his lecture in the green suit and green tie and wore glasses with a green tint in them, the effect of all of which was to make his lank grayish hair also appear green, cleared his throat with a considerable harrumph and, straightfaced as a goat, replied: "Out of work, you know."

"Out of work, you know" strikes me as quite as good an explanation as any other for why certain highly talented men and women turn to the writing of essays. Many among the great essayists did not set out to become essayists. Hazlitt, we know, wished to be a painter and a philosopher. Matthew Arnold, who began as a poet, stopped writing poetry while still a young man and turned to the essay. Max Beerbohm, though a considerable draughtsman, was an even more considerable essayist. Orwell, had he his druthers, no doubt would have wished to be remembered as a novelist, though today it is for his essays that he is most highly regarded, at least among people whose regard seems to be most valued. My general point is that few people can have set out to be essayists because the essay had never enjoyed the prestige that other genres or forms of art have enjoyed.

The essayist is someone with a strong urge to write and no other place to exercise this urge but the essay. He wishes to leave the stamp of his personality on the page—and, with great good luck, who knows, on the age. But he has discovered that the concentrated language and heightened emotion that is at the heart of serious poetic creation is not for him; nor is the dramatizing imagination that is required, along with a great deal of patience, by the novel. He is probably someone of wide curiosity and sufficient egotism to think that what is curious to him will also be curious to all the world. Not probably but certainly he is someone who desires to exert his will on the life of his times and who demands to have a hand in directing the contemporary traffic in ideas, manners, and morals. All these deficiencies, desires, and demands he is able to pour into that shapeless, bottomless, lovely receptacle, the essay.…

In such essays as "On Familiar Style" and "On the Prose Style of Poets," Hazlitt set out his prescriptions for style in essay writing. "To write a genuine familiar or truly English style," he averred, "is to write as any one would speak in common conversation who had a thorough command and choice of words, or who could discourse with ease, force, and perspicuity, setting aside all pedantic and oratorical flourishes." On more than one occasion, Hazlitt, who with qualification much admired Johnson ("The man was superior to the author"), attacked Johnson's style for its pomp and uniformity. "His subjects are familiar, but the author is always upon stilts." He was prepared to allow the deliberate archaisms of Charles Lamb—"Mr. Lamb is the only imitator of old English style I can read with pleasure"—but for the rest he was for the plain style, in which "every word should be a blow; every thought should instantly grapple with its fellow." Because style and thought are unitary in Hazlitt, those who love the essay revere him to this day.

William Hazlitt was the first truly distinguished writer to earn his livelihood almost exclusively through the writing of essays. Then, as now, it was no easy row to hoe. Filled with strong opinions, political to the bone, never overly prudent about making enemies, Hazlitt took his living where he found it, writing for those papers and journals that could contain his strong views. (He was, after all, the author of an essay entitled "The Pleasure of Hating.") Yet, though much of Hazlitt's writing was done on the run, somehow much of it hangs together nicely: his writing on writers, his art criticism, his drama criticism, his familiar essays on such subjects as "The Fight," "The Indian Jugglers," "My First Acquaintance with Poets," to name only three among my own favorites. It all hangs together because it is all bound together by the glue of a courageous, complex, contentious character who, for all the obstacles life set before him, never ceased to love life. Love of life, in my reading of them, is one of the qualities that all the great essayists hold in common.

With the advent and then the wide spread of periodicals and magazines, the nature and limits of essay writing changed correspondingly. Story writers and poets, though they may write with an eye toward particular journals, are not nearly as hostage as essayists to editors and the confinements of space and time set by their journals. (Although here I am reminded of a writer in a story by George P. Elliott who turned out high-quality work of a perfectly unpublishable length: if memory serves, stories of ninety pages and poems of seventeen.) The essayist works under clear pressures, the pressures of prescribed length, the pressures of deadlines, the pressures of the possible prejudices of editors. One cannot read about the life of Hazlitt without a strong awareness of all these matters weighing down on him as he wrote. When his essays disappoint, which they sometimes do, my guess is that it is often because of the necessity of high production under these various pressures. Virginia Woolf remarked that many of Hazlitt's essays read like "fragments broken off from some larger book." Given the immensity of material Hazlitt produced—twenty-one volumes in the P. P. Howe edition of his collected writings—the wonder isn't that Hazlitt sometimes disappoints but that he is so frequently as good as he is.

It must also be said that these same pressures can have their advantages. The need to write for money may be a mixed blessing, but between writing for money and writing for no money, in my experience, writing for money is better. (Yet writing for larger sums does not necessarily give larger pleasure; there is also the quality of the audience one writes for to be considered.) Deadlines are of course damnable, but without them, as everyone who has written without them knows, less work would get done. Editors may have their prejudices, yet some are biased on behalf of intellectual tough-mindedness and can, in subtle ways, make even veteran writers write better. In this connection I have always been much taken by a passage in a letter Sydney Smith wrote to Francis Jeffrey, his editor at the Edinburgh Review. "I have three motives for writing reviews," Smith wrote. "1st the love of you; 2nd the habit of reviewing; 3rd the love of money—to which I may add a fourth, the love of punishing fraud or folly."

While the Victorians offer a glittering roster of names among practitioners of the essay, the essay itself, during the age of Victoria, became less intimate. It grew longer; it began to address itself directly to serious things. Where it felt the need to become political, in the wider, cultural sense of politics, it did not hesitate to do so—as in the essays of Arnold, Carlyle, Ruskin. In the latter part of the eighteenth century, Gentleman's Magazine initiated a "review of books" section, but it was in the nineteenth century that books became, if not always the subject of, at least the occasion for, essays. Books provided the occasion, certainly, for many of the essays of Macaulay. The length at which such journals as the Edinburgh Review and Blackwood's allowed Macaulay to go on, for the most part cheerfully ignoring the book under review, cannot but be the envy of contemporary essayists, though it must be said of Macaulay's essays, as Johnson once said of Paradise Lost, that no one ever wished them longer.

Virginia Woolf, in an essay entitled "The Modern Essay," remarks on this loss of intimacy among essayists during the Victorian era, and feels that the essay went into exile with the death of Charles Lamb only to emerge again in the person of Max Beerbohm. Beerbohm was of course "Max" to his readers—"the incomparable Max," in Bernard Shaw's phrase—and it was he who brought personality back into the essay. As Virginia Woolf says, "Matthew Arnold was never to his readers Matt, nor Walter Pater affectionately abbreviated in a thousand homes to Wat." Virginia Woolf adored Max Beerbohm—as do I—and rightly gauges his gift: "He has brought personality into literature, not unconsciously and impurely, but so consciously and purely that we do not know whether there is any relation between Max the essayist and Mr. Beerbohm the man." Yet one wonders if "personality" is precisely the word. Beerbohm's great trick, and a fine trick it is, was to be consummately familiar without ever imposing the burden of being personal. This trick is also called charm, and, as Virginia Woolf knew, charm is available in literature only to those who write supremely well.

Charm, though, is given to few, and the intimacy of personality need not be the only voice in which the essayist speaks. None but the most pretentious ass among their admirers would ever think of referring to Orwell as George or Mencken as Henry. Virginia Woolf, in my view, has too pure, too constricted a conception of the essayist. In a lovely essay of hers on Addison, she compares his writing to that of the lutanist, implying, by analogy, that the lute is the perfect instrument of the essayist. This, too, seems too restrictive. Among essayists there have also been the kettle drums of Carlyle, the French horn of Macaulay, the violin of Pater, the cello of Arnold, the trumpet of Mencken, the rich viola of Virginia Woolf herself… but I had better stop before I assemble a full symphony orchestra.…

I have dwelt on [some of] the essayists who have meant most to me—this is, you might say, the essayist's prerogative—and left out at least two American essayists who are elsewhere much revered but to whose virtues I am apparently blind: Ralph Waldo Emerson and E. B. White. (And one other whom I do care about and to whose virtues I do not think I am blind—A. J. Liebling.) Emerson is too vatic for me; in his essays he takes such large bites yet leaves one with so little upon which to chew. He bounds from pronunciamento to pronunciamento, and while his generalities do often glitter, I believe that it is in its particularities that the truth of the essay resides. E. B. White writes a pellucid prose, but his subjects have never engaged me. Gertrude Stein once said about Glenway Westcott that his writing has a certain syrup but it does not pour; for me, the fluent essays of E. B. White pour and pour but no syrup comes out.

While there is not today a general essayist who gives the pleasure of Mencken, or a political essayist of the clean power of Orwell, or a literary essayist of the range of Edmund Wilson (Gore Vidal not long ago nominated himself for the latter post, though no one could be found to second the nomination), as a form the essay nonetheless seems to be flourishing. Here is a partial list of contemporary practitioners, as various in their interests as in their methods: V. S. Naipaul, Tom Wolfe, Joan Didion, Edward Hoagland, Cynthia Ozick, Elizabeth Hardwick, Lewis Thomas, Gore Vidal, Susan Sontag, and Wendell Berry. (In an earlier generation there had been Lionel Trilling, Robert Warshow, and the young James Baldwin.) Some of these are, in an odd sense, almost regional writers: Tom Wolfe is best on the Manhattan status life, Joan Didion is best on the cultures of California, Edward Hoagland is best outside city limits. A number of the writers I have named are also novelists, yet, with the exception of Naipaul, none is anywhere near so good in his fiction as in his essays. Why, one wonders, should this be so?

I wonder if it doesn't have something to do with the fact that the essay as a form is in the happy condition of having no avant-garde tradition. I say happy condition because, great though the benefits of the avant-garde tradition have been in poetry and fiction, this same avant-garde tradition—and I trust no one will think the juxtaposition of avant-garde and tradition is oxymoronic—can exert a tyrannous pull to keep changing, to do it as no one has done it before, to make it, perpetually and (as it sometimes seems) depressingly, new. The essay is under no such tyranny. The idea of an avant-garde essayist, far from being oxymoronic, is merely moronic.

Not that the essayist cannot dazzle, turn you around, knock your socks off. He can. Not that there haven't been radical changes in the way that essays have been written. There have. Yet in even the most experimental essay writing—some of the essays, for example, of William Gass—there is something old shoe about the relationship between the essayist and his reader. "It's just you and me, kid," the essayist implies when he puts pen to paper. "I realize that," the reader in effect responds. "What's your point in this essay, Bub?" However much art there may be in his writing, the essayist cannot hide behind the claim to be an artist. He must stand and deliver. He must provide instruction, entertainment, persuasion, or the reader, like the young woman in the joke about the seducer who took the time to put shoe trees in his shoes, will be gone.

I grew up at a time when the novelist was the great cultural hero, and the novel, if it was written with power or subtlety (or both), seemed the most heroic cultural act. But, for a complex of reasons, the novel seems to be going through a bad patch right now. The essay, though it can never replace the novel, does appear to be taking up some of the slack. It is a form with distinguished predecessors and a rich tradition, and within its generous boundaries one can do almost anything one wishes: report anecdotes, tell jokes, make literary criticisms, polemicize, bring in odd scraps of scholarship, recount human idiosyncrasy in its full bountifulness, let the imagination roam free. Subjects are everywhere, and there is no shortage of cultivated and appreciative readers. Don't spread it around, but it's a sweet time to be an essayist.

Scott Russell Sanders

SOURCE: "The Singular First Person," in The Sewanee Review, Vol. XCVI, No. 4, Fall, 1988, pp. 658-72.

[Sanders is an American educator and essayist. In the following excerpt, he discusses the characteristics and pitfalls of the personal, or familiar, essay.]

The essay is a haven for the private idiosyncratic voice in an era of anonymous babble. Like the blandburgers served in their millions along our highways, most language served up in public these days is textureless tasteless mush. On television, over the phone, in the newspaper, wherever human beings bandy words, we encounter more and more abstractions, more empty formulas. Think of the pablum ladled out by politicians. Think of the fluffy white bread of advertising. Think, lord help us, of committee reports. By contrast the essay remains stubbornly concrete and particular: it confronts you with an oil-smeared toilet at the Sunoco station, a red vinyl purse shaped like a valentine heart, a bowlegged dentist hunting deer with an elephant gun. As Orwell forcefully argued, and as dictators seem to agree, such a bypassing of abstractions, such an insistence on the concrete, is a politically subversive act. Clinging to this door, that child, this grief, following the zigzag motions of an inquisitive mind, the essay renews language and clears trash from the springs of thought. A century and a half ago Emerson called on a new generation of writers to cast off the hand-me-down rhetoric of the day, to "pierce this rotten diction and fasten words again to visible things." The essayist aspires to do just that.

As if all these virtues were not enough to account for a renaissance of this protean genre, the essay has also taken over some of the territory abdicated by contemporary fiction. Pared down to the brittle bones of plot, camouflaged with irony, muttering in brief sentences and grade-school vocabulary, today's fashionable fiction avoids disclosing where the author stands on anything. Most of the trends in the novel and short story over the past twenty years have led away from candor—toward satire, artsy jokes, close-lipped coyness, metafictional hocus-pocus, anything but a direct statement of what the author thinks and feels. If you hide behind enough screens, no one will ever hold you to an opinion or demand from you a coherent vision or take you for a charlatan.

The essay is not fenced round by these literary inhibitions. You may speak without disguise of what moves and worries and excites you. In fact you had better speak from a region pretty close to the heart or the reader will detect the wind of phoniness whistling through your hollow phrases. In the essay you may be caught with your pants down, your ignorance and sentimentality showing, while you trot recklessly about on one of our hobbyhorses. You cannot stand back from the action, as Joyce instructed us to do, and pare your fingernails. You cannot palm off your cockamamy notions on some hapless character. If the words you put down are foolish, everyone knows precisely who the fool is.

To our list of the essay's contemporary attractions we should add the perennial ones of verbal play, mental adventure, and sheer anarchic high spirits. The writing of an essay is like finding one's way through a forest without being quite sure what game you are chasing, what landmark you are seeking. You sniff down one path until some heady smell tugs you in a new direction, and then off you go, dodging and circling, lured on by the songs of unfamiliar birds, puzzled by the tracks of strange beasts, leaping from stone to stone across rivers, barking up one tree after another. Much of the pleasure in writing an essay—and, when the writing is any good, the pleasure in reading it—comes from this dodging and leaping, this movement of the mind. It must not be idle movement, however, if the essay is to hold up; it must be driven by deep concerns. The surface of a river is alive with lights and reflections, the breaking of foam over rocks, but underneath that dazzle it is going somewhere. We should expect as much from an essay: the shimmer and play of mind on the surface and in the depths a strong current.

To see how the capricious mind can be led astray, consider my last paragraph, in which the making of essays is likened first to the romping of a dog and then to the surge of a river. That is bad enough, but it could have been worse. For example I began to draft a sentence in that paragraph with the following words: "More than once, in sitting down to beaver away at a narrative, felling trees of memory and dragging brush to build a dam that might slow down the waters of time.…" I had set out to make some innocent remark, and here I was gnawing down trees and building dams, all because I had let that beaver slip in. On this occasion I had the good sense to throw out the unruly word. I don't always, as no doubt you will have noticed. I might as well drag in another metaphor—and another unoffending animal—by saying that each doggy sentence, as it noses forward into the underbrush of thought, scatters a bunch of rabbits that go rushing off in all directions. The essayist can afford to chase more of those rabbits than the fiction writer can, but fewer than the poet. If you refuse to chase any of them, and keep plodding along in a straight line, you and your reader will have a dull outing. If you chase too many, you will soon wind up lost in a thicket of confusion with your tongue hanging out.

The pursuit of mental rabbits was strictly forbidden by the teachers who instructed me in English composition. For that matter nearly all the qualities of the personal essay, as I have been sketching them, violate the rules that many of us were taught in school. You recall we were supposed to begin with an outline and stick by it faithfully, like a train riding its rails, avoiding sidetracks. Each paragraph was to have a topic sentence pasted near the front, and these orderly paragraphs were to be coupled end-to-end like so many boxcars. Every item in those boxcars was to bear the stamp of some external authority, preferably a footnote referring to a thick book, although appeals to magazines and newspapers would do in a pinch. Our diction was to be formal, dignified, shunning the vernacular. Polysyllabic words derived from Latin were preferable to the blunt lingo of the streets. Metaphors were to be used only in emergencies, and no two of them were to be mixed. And even in emergencies we could not speak in the firstperson singular.

Already, as a schoolboy, I chafed against those rules. Now I break them shamelessly—in particular the taboo against using the lonely capital I. Just look at what I'm doing right now. My speculations about the state of the essay arise, needless to say, from my own practice as reader and writer, and they reflect my own tastes, no matter how I may pretend to gaze dispassionately down on the question from a hot-air baloon. As Thoreau declares in his brash manner on the opening page of Walden: "In most books the I, or first person, is omitted; in this it will be retained; that, in respect to egotism, is the main difference. We commonly do not remember that it is, after all, always the first person that is speaking. I should not talk so much about myself if there were anybody else whom I knew as well." True for the personal essay, it is doubly true for an essay about the essay: one speaks always and inescapably in the firstperson singular.

We could sort out essays along a spectrum according to the degree to which the writer's ego is on display—with John McPhee, perhaps, at the extreme of self-effacement, and Norman Mailer at the opposite extreme of selfdramatization. Brassy or shy, stage-center or hanging back in the wings, the author's persona commands our attention. For the length of an essay, or a book of essays, we respond to that persona as we would to a friend caught up in a rapturous monologue. When the monologue is finished, we may not be able to say precisely what it was about, any more than we can draw conclusions from a piece of music. "Essays don't usually boil down to a summary, as articles do," notes Edward Hoagland, one of the least summarizable of companions, "and the style of the writer has a 'nap' to it, a combination of personality and originality and energetic loose ends that stand up like the nap of a piece of wool and can't be brushed flat." We make assumptions about that speaking voice, assumptions we cannot validly make about the narrators in fiction. Only a sophomore is permitted to ask how many children had Huckleberry Finn. But even literary sophisticates wonder in print about Thoreau's love life, Montaigne's domestic arrangements, De Quincey's opium habit, Virginia Woolf's depression.

Montaigne, who not only invented the form but perfected it as well, announced from the start that his true subject was himself. In his note "To the Reader," he slyly proclaimed:

I want to be seen here in my simple, natural, ordinary fashion, without straining or artifice; for it is myself that I portray. My defects will here be read to the life, and also my natural form, as far as respect for the public has allowed. Had I been placed among those nations which are said to live still in the sweet freedom of nature's first laws, I assure you I should very gladly have portrayed myself here entire and wholly naked.

A few pages after this disarming introduction we are told of the Emperor Maximilian, who was so prudish about displaying his private parts that he would not let a servant dress him or see him in the bath. The emperor went so far as to give orders that he be buried in his underdrawers. Having let us in on this intimacy about Maximilian, Montaigne then confessed that he himself, although "bold-mouthed," was equally prudish, and that "except under great stress of necessity or voluptuousness," he never allowed anyone to see him naked. Such modesty, he feared, was unbecoming in a soldier. But such honesty is quite becoming in an essayist. The very confession of his prudery is a far more revealing gesture than any doffing of clothes.

Every English major knows that the word essay, as adapted by Montaigne, means a trial or attempt. The Latin root carries the more vivid sense of a weighing out. In the days when that root was alive and green, merchants discovered the value of goods and alchemists discovered the composition of unknown metals by the use of scales. Just so the essay, as Montaigne was the first to show, is a weighing out, an inquiry into the value, meaning, and true nature of experience; it is a private experiment carried out in public. In each of three successive editions Montaigne inserted new material into his essays without revising the old material. Often the new statements contradicted the original ones, but Montaigne let them stand, since he believed that the only consistent fact about human beings is their inconsistency. Lewis Thomas has remarked of him that he was "fond of his mind, and affectionately entertained by everything in his head." Whatever Montaigne wrote about (and he wrote about everything under the sun—fears, smells, growing old, the pleasures of scratching) he weighed on the scales of his own character.

It is the singularity of the first person—its warts and crotchets and turn of voice—that lures many of us into reading essays, and that lingers with us after we finish. Consider the lonely melancholy persona of Loren Eiseley, forever wandering, forever brooding on our dim and bestial past, his lips frosty with the chill of the Ice Age. Consider the volatile dionysian persona of D. H. Lawrence, with his incandescent gaze, his habit of turning peasants into gods and trees into flames, his quick hatred and quicker love. Consider that philosophical farmer Wendell Berry, who speaks with a countryman's knowledge and a deacon's severity. Consider E. B. White, with his cheery affection for brown eggs and dachshunds, his unflappable way of herding geese while the radio warns of an approaching hurricane.

White, that engaging master of the genre, a champion of idiosyncrasy, introduced one of his own collections by admitting the danger of narcissism:

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 egoistical; 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.

Yet the self-absorbed Mr. White was in fact a delighted observer of the world, and shared that delight with us. Thus, after describing memorably how a circus girl practiced her bareback riding in the leisure moments between shows ("The Ring of Time"), he confessed: "As a writing man, or secretary, I have always felt charged with the safekeeping of all unexpected items of worldly or unworldly enchantment, as though I might be held personally responsible if even a small one were to be lost." That may still be presumptuous, but it is presumption turned outward on the world.…

On that cocky first page of Walden Thoreau justified his own seeming self-absorption by saying that he wrote the book for the sake of his fellow citizens, who kept asking him to account for his peculiar experiment by the pond. There is at least a sliver of truth to this, since Thoreau, a town character, had been invited more than once to speak his mind at the public lectern. Most of us, however, cannot honestly say the townspeople have been clamoring for our words. I suspect that all writers of the essay, even Norman Mailer and Gore Vidal, must occasionally wonder if they are egomaniacs. For the essayist, in other words, the problem of authority is inescapable. By what right does one speak? Why should anyone listen? The traditional sources of authority no longer serve. You cannot justify your words by appealing to the Bible or some other holy text, you cannot merely stitch together a patchwork of quotations from classical authors, you cannot lean on a podium at the Atheneum and deliver your wisdom to a rapt audience.

In searching for your own soapbox, a sturdy platform from which to deliver your opinionated monologues, it helps if you have already distinguished yourself at making some other, less fishy form. When Yeats describes his longing for Maud Gonne or muses on Ireland's misty lore, everything he says is charged with the prior strength of his poetry. When Virginia Woolf, in A Room of One's Own, reflects on the status of women and the conditions necessary for making art, she speaks as the author of Mrs. Dalloway and To the Lighthouse. The essayist may also claim our attention by having lived through events or traveled through terrains that already bear a richness of meaning. When James Baldwin writes his Notes of a Native Son, he does not have to convince us that racism is a troubling reality. When Barry Lopez takes us on a meditative tour of the far north in Arctic Dreams, he can rely on our curiosity about that fabled and forbidding place. When Paul Theroux climbs aboard a train and invites us on a journey to some exotic destination, he can count on the romance of railroads and the allure of remote cities to bear us along.

Most essayists, however, cannot draw on any source of authority from beyond the page to lend force to the page itself. They can only use language to put themselves on display and to gesture at the world. When Annie Dillard tells us in the opening lines of Pilgrim at Tinker Creek about the tomcat with bloody paws who jumps through the window onto her chest, why should we listen? Well, because of the voice that goes on to say: "And some mornings I'd wake in daylight to find my body covered with paw prints in blood; I looked as though I'd been painted with roses."

Listen to her explaining a few pages later what she is up to in this book, this broody zestful record of her stay in the Roanoke Valley: "I propose to keep here what Thoreau called 'a meteorological journal of the mind,' telling some tales and describing some of the sights of this rather tamed valley, and exploring, in fear and trembling, some of the unmapped dim reaches and unholy fastnesses to which those tales and sights so dizzyingly lead." The sentence not only describes the method of her literary search, but also displays the breathless, often giddy, always eloquent and spiritually hungry soul who will do the searching. If you enjoy her company, you will relish Annie Dillard's essays; if you don't, you won't.

Listen to another voice which readers tend to find either captivating or insufferable:

That summer I began to see, however dimly, that one of my ambitions, perhaps my governing ambition, was to belong fully to this place, to belong as the thrushes and the herons and the muskrats belonged, to be altogether at home here. That is still my ambition. But now I have come to see that it proposes an enormous labor. It is a spiritual ambition, like goodness. The wild creatures belong to the place by nature, but as a man I can belong to it only by understanding and by virtue. It is an ambition I cannot hope to succeed in wholly, but I have come to believe that it is the most worthy of all.

That is Wendell Berry writing about his patch of Kentucky. Once you have heard that stately, moralizing, cherishing voice, laced through with references to the land, you will not mistake it for anyone else's. Berry's themes are profound and arresting ones. But it is his voice, more than anything he speaks about, that either seizes us or drives us away.

Even so distinct a persona as Wendell Berry's or Annie Dillard's is still only a literary fabrication, of course. The first-person singular is too narrow a gate for the whole writer to pass through. What we meet on the page is not the flesh-and-blood author, but a simulacrum, a character who wears the label I. Introducing the lectures that became A Room of One's Own, Virginia Woolf reminded her listeners that "'I' is only a convenient term for somebody who has no real being. Lies will flow from my lips, but there may perhaps be some truth mixed up with them; it is for you to seek out this truth and to decide whether any part of it is worth keeping." Here is a part I consider worth keeping: "Women have served all these centuries as looking-glasses possessing the magic and delicious power of reflecting the figure of man at twice its natural size." From such elegant revelatory sentences we build up our notion of the "I" who speaks to us under the name of Virginia Woolf.

What the essay tells us may not be true in any sense that would satisfy a court of law. As an example think of Orwell's brief narrative "A Hanging," which describes an execution in Burma. Anyone who has read it remembers how the condemned man as he walked to the gallows stepped aside to avoid a puddle. That is the sort of haunting detail only an eyewitness should be able to report. Alas, biographers, those zealous debunkers, have recently claimed that Orwell never saw such a hanging; that he reconstructed it from hearsay. What then do we make of his essay? Or has it become the sort of barefaced lie we prefer to call a story?

I don't much care what label we put on "A Hanging"—fiction or nonfiction: it is a powerful statement either way; but Orwell might have cared a great deal. I say this because not long ago I found one of my own essays treated in a scholarly article as a work of fiction, and when I got over the shock of finding any reference to my work at all, I was outraged. Here was my earnest report about growing up on a military base, my heartfelt rendering of indelible memories, being confused with the airy figments of novelists! To be sure, in writing the piece I had used dialogue, scenes, settings, character descriptions, the whole fictional bag of tricks; sure, I picked and chose among a thousand beckoning details; sure, I downplayed some facts and highlighted others; but I was writing about the actual, not the invented. I shaped the matter, but I did not make it up.

To explain my outrage I must break another taboo, which is to speak of the author's intention. My teachers warned me strenuously to avoid the intentional fallacy. They told me to regard poems and plays and stories as objects washed up on the page from some unknown and unknowable shores. Now that I am on the other side of the page, so to speak, I think quite recklessly of intention all the time. I believe that if we allow the question of intent in the case of murder, we should allow it in literature. The essay is distinguished from the short story not by the presence or absence of literary devices, not by tone or theme or subject, but by the writer's stance toward the material. In composing an essay about what it was like to grow up on that military base, I meant something quite different from what I mean when concocting a story. I meant to preserve and record and help give voice to a reality that existed independently of me. I meant to pay my respects to a minor passage of history in an out-of-the-way place. I felt responsible to the truth as known by other people. I wanted to speak directly out of my own life into the lives of others.

You can see I am teetering on the brink of metaphysics. One step farther and I will plunge into the void, wondering as I fall how to prove there is any external truth for the essayist to pay homage to. I draw back from the brink and simply declare that I believe one writes, in essays, with a regard for the actual world, with a respect for the shared substance of history, the autonomy of other lives, the being of nature, the mystery and majesty of a creation we have not made.

When it comes to speculating about the creation, I feel more at ease with physics than with metaphysics. According to certain bold and lyrical cosmologists, there is at the center of black holes a geometrical point, the tiniest conceivable speck, where all the matter of a collapsed star has been concentrated, and where everyday notions of time, space, and force break down. That point is called a singularity. The boldest and most poetic theories suggest that anything sucked into a singularity might be flung back out again, utterly changed, somewhere else in the universe. The lonely first person, the essayist's microcosmic "I," may be thought of as a verbal singularity at the center of the mind's black hole. The raw matter of experience, torn away from the axes of time and space, falls in constantly from all sides, undergoes the mind's inscrutable alchemy, and reemerges in the quirky unprecedented shape of an essay.