[In the following excerpt, Williams cites the hurried, deadline-driven modern world as the source of the familiar essay's decline, seeing little hope for the genre's resurrection.]

So often with [our modern essayists] a good idea is spoiled by hasty thought and hasty composition, or they are obviously striving to raise fruit from a barren inspiration. They are compelled—and we are all to blame for it—to write a specified number of words at specified intervals, and, seeing that the greedy public makes no distinction between their best and their worst, act humanly upon this painful fact, and gaily collect this taskwork of theirs at the end of the year into pretty little books that save us the trouble of looking for Christmas presents.

In fact, the enormous demand for what is called occasional journalism has destroyed the essay as a work of art. Writers must live, and since "articles" that attract jaded readers for five minutes are well paid for, it is natural that few should spend hours polishing an essay that needs leisure and a cultivated mind for its enjoyment, when the result of their labour is certain to be rejected by any editor as not being topical or as wanting human interest. The huge development of journalistic enterprise to-day has its advantages, nor is it to be deplored that the best equipped writers of an age should contribute to the newspapers, but, the paramount influences in editorial offices being what they are, it is hopeless to look to journalism for permanent works of art. The editor's sole concern is with what his readers are thinking of now: the past is nothing to him, the extreme limit of his future is next week. His success lies in catching the particular; the universal spells ruin. If a man has in him an idea that hits the moments he must drag it out and fling it down in an hour or so, crude and ragged, or its season has passed for ever. The late Richard Middleton put the case well at the beginning of his little book Monologues, when he wrote, deploring the decay of the essay:

The fact is, that essays are bad journalism in the literal sense of that elastic word, because they take no count of time, while it is the function of journalism to tear the heart out of to-day. A good essay should start and end in a moment as long as eternity; it should have the apparent aimlessness of life, and, like life, it should have its secret purpose. Perhaps the perfect essay would take a lifetime to write and a lifetime to comprehend; but, in their essence, essays … ignore time and negate it. They cannot be read in railway trains by travellers who intend to get out at a certain station, for the mere thought of a settled destination will prevent the reader from achieving the proper leisurely frame of mind. Nor can they be written for a livelihood, for a man who sits down to write an essay should be careless as to whether his task shall ever be finished or not.

These words were written by a man who had in him both an essayist and a poet, yet failed to make a livelihood: and they are true. Writing is now too highly organized a trade for occasional incursions to be encouraged, and now that reading is regarded far more as a narcotic than a stimulus, readers have no discrimination. If an elderly administrator sat down to imitate Montaigne to-day he would have to publish at his own risk and to his certain loss, no matter how great his art, while any ancient numbskull who can string together tedious "Memoirs of a Busy Life," with anecdotes of a few prominent persons, is sure of a large library circulation. And what magazine would accept the "Essays of Elia" to-day? Lamb would be told that he was far too obscure and elusive, and that if he had anything of interest to say about the old South-Sea House, it must be written in a "chatty" manner without exclamation marks. As for "Mackery End" or "Old China" or "Thoughts on Books and Reading," nobody would look at them. Newspapers and periodicals do not want discursiveness, whence it follows that the essay is not to be sought in them, and since it is difficult to get essays published the impulses of the potential essayist are inevitably checked.

A revival of the true essay would have many advantages. It would purge other forms of literature of their humours, it would maintain the fine standard of English prose style which is in sad danger of declining, and it would perpetuate a particularly English form of literary art which is of the highest intrinsic value. But it is to be feared that in this case hope can derive small encouragement from present circumstance. Readers are too restless, writers have become too agile. Life, which was once reckoned by days, is now reckoned by moments which the future threatens with still further subdivision. As the image of a continuous flow of water, when projected through a shutter revolving with intense rapidity, appears on the screen to fall in single drops, so the continuous stream of time in our day appears a jerky procession of unconnected particles. Under such conditions the essay cannot come to being. In Mr. Wells' latest Utopia men, being absolutely free from material struggle, again find leisure to fight duels for a woman's beauty. In that day, perhaps, the essay may be born again.