Arthur Christopher Benson

SOURCE: "The Art of the Essayist," in Types and Times in the Essay, edited by Warner Taylor, Harper & Brothers Publishers, 1932, pp. 3-12.

[Benson was an English educator and author. Although he was a prolific poet, novelist, and biographer, he is best known for such volumes of essays as The Upton Letters (190S), From a College Window (1906), and Beside Still Waters (1907). In the following essay, Benson offers an overview of the characteristics of the essay form.]

There is a pleasant story of an itinerant sign-painter who in going his rounds came to a village inn upon whose signboard he had had his eye for some months and had watched with increasing hope and delight its rapid progress to blurred and faded dimness. To his horror he found a brand-new varnished sign. He surveyed it with disgust, and said to the inn-keeper, who stood nervously by hoping for a professional compliment, "This looks as if someone had been doing it himself."

That sentence holds within it the key to the whole mystery of essay-writing. An essay is a thing which someone does himself, and the point of the essay is not the subject, for any subject will suffice, but the charm of personality. It must concern itself with something "jolly," as the schoolboy says, something smelt, heard, seen, perceived, invented, thought; but the essential thing is that the writer shall have formed his own impression, and that it shall have taken shape in his own mind; and the charm of the essay depends upon the charm of the mind that has conceived and recorded the impression. It will be seen, then, that the essay need not concern itself with anything definite; it need not have an intellectual or a philosophical or a religious or a humorous motif; but equally none of these subjects are ruled out. The only thing necessary is that the thing or the thought should be vividly apprehended, enjoyed, felt to be beautiful, and expressed with a certain gusto. It need conform to no particular rules. All literature answers to something in life, some habitual form of human expression. The stage imitates life, calling in the services of the eye and the ear; there is a narrative of the teller of tales or the minstrel; the song, the letter, the talk—all forms of human expression and communication have their anti-types in literature. The essay is the reverie, the frame of mind in which a man says, in the words of the old song, "Says I to myself, says I."

It is generally supposed that Montaigne is the first writer who wrote what may technically be called essays. His pieces are partly autobiographical, partly speculative, and to a great extent ethical. But the roots of his writing lie far back in literary history. He owed a great part of his inspiration to Cicero, who treated of abstract topics in a conversational way with a romantic background; and this he owed to Plato, whose dialogues undoubtedly contain the germ of both the novel and the essay. Plato is in truth far more the forerunner of the novelist than of the philosopher. He made a background of life, he peopled his scenes with bright boys and amiable elders—oh that all scenes were so peopled!—and he discussed ethical and speculative problems of life and character with vital rather than with a philosophical interest. Plato's dialogues would be essays but for the fact that they have a dramatic colouring, while the essence of the essay is soliloquy. But in the writings of Cicero, such as the De Senectute, the dramatic interest is but slight, and the whole thing approaches far more nearly to the essay than to the novel. Probably Cicero supplied to his readers the function both of the essayist and the preacher, and fed the needs of so-called thoughtful readers by dallying, in a fashion which it is hardly unjust to call twaddling, with familiar ethical problems of conduct and character. The charm of Montaigne is the charm of personality—frankness, gusto, acute observation, lively acquaintance with men and manners. He is ashamed of recording nothing that interested him; and a certain discreet shamelessness must always be the characteristic of the essayist, for the essence of his art is to say what has pleased him without too prudently considering whether it is worthy of the attention of the well-informed mind.

I doubt if the English temperament is wholly favourable to the development of the essayist. In the first place, an Anglo-Saxon likes doing things better than thinking about them; and in his memories, he is apt to recall how a thing was done rather than why it was done. In the next place, we are naturally rather prudent and secretive; we say that a man must not wear his heart upon his sleeve, and that is just what the essayist must do. We have a horror of giving ourselves away, and we like to keep ourselves to ourselves. "The Englishman's home is his castle," says another proverb. But the essayist must not have a castle, or if he does, both the grounds and the living-rooms must be open to the inspection of the public.

Lord Brougham, who revelled in advertisement, used to allow his house to be seen by visitors, and the butler had orders that if a party of people came to see the house, Lord Brougham was to be informed of the fact. He used to hurry to the library and take up a book, in order that the tourists might nudge each other and say in whispers, "There is the Lord Chancellor." That is the right frame of mind for the essayist. He may enjoy privacy, but he is no less delighted that people should see him enjoying it.

The essay has taken very various forms in England. Sir Thomas Browne, in such books as Religio Medici and Urn-Burial, wrote essays of an elaborate rhetorical style, the long fine sentences winding themselves out in delicate weft-like trails of smoke on a still air, hanging in translucent veils. Addison, in the Spectator, treated with delicate humour of life and its problems, and created what was practically a new form in the essay of emotional sentiment evoked by solemn scenes and fine associations. Charles Lamb treated romantically the homeliest stuff of life, and showed how the simplest and commonest experiences were rich in emotion and humour. The beauty and dignity of common life were his theme. De Quincey wrote what may be called impassioned autobiography, and brought to his task a magical control of long-drawn and musical cadences. And then we come to such a writer as Pater, who used the essay for the expression of exquisite artistic sensation. These are only a few instances of the way in which the essay has been used in English literature. But the essence is throughout the same; it is personal sensation, personal impression, evoked by something strange or beautiful or curious or interesting or amusing. It has thus a good deal in common with the art of the lyrical poet and the writer of sonnets, but it has all the freedom of prose, its more extended range, its use of less strictly poetical effects, such as humour in particular. Humour is alien to poetical effect, because poetry demands a certain sacredness and solemnity of mood. The poet is emotional in a reverential way; he is thrilled, he loves, he worships, he sorrows; but it is all essentially grave, because he wishes to recognise the sublime and uplifted elements of life; he wishes to free himself from all discordant, absurd, fantastic, undignified contrasts, as he would extrude laughter and chatter and comfortable ease from some stately act of ceremonial worship. It is quite true that the essayist has a full right to such a mood if he chooses; and such essays as Pater's are all conceived in a sort of rapture of holiness, in a region from which all that is common and homely is carefully fenced out. But the essayist may have a larger range, and the strength of a writer like Charles Lamb is that he condescends to use the very commonest materials, and transfigures the simplest experiences with a fairy-like delicacy and a romantic glow. A poet who has far more in common with the range of the essayist is Robert Browning, and there are many of his poems, though perhaps not his best, where his frank amassing of grotesque detail, his desire to include rather than exclude the homelier sorts of emotion, his robust and not very humorous humour, make him an impressionist rather than a lyrist. As literature develops, the distinction between poetry and prose will no doubt become harder to maintain. Coleridge said in a very fruitful maxim: "The opposite of poetry is not prose but science; the opposite of prose is not poetry but verse." That is to say, poetry has as its object the kindling of emotion, and science is its opposite, because science is the dispassionate statement of fact; but prose can equally be used as a vehicle for the kindling of emotion, and therefore may be in its essence poetical: but when it is a technical description of a certain kind of structure its opposite is verse—that is to say, language arranged in metrical and rhythmical form. We shall probably come to think that the essayist is more of a poet than the writer of epics, and that the divisions of literature will tend to be on the one hand the art of clear and logical statement, and on the other the art of emotional and imaginative expression.

We must remember in all this that the nomenclature of literature, the attempt to classify the forms of literary expression, is a confusing and a bewildering thing unless it is used merely for convenience. It is the merest pedantry to say that literature must conform to established usages and types. The essence of it is that it is a large force flowing in any channel that it can, and the classification of art is a mere classification of channels. What lies behind all art is the principle of wonder and of arrested attention. It need not be only the sense of beauty; it may be the sense of fitness, of strangeness, of completeness, of effective effort. The amazement of the savage at the sight of a civilised town is not the sense of beauty, it is the sense of force, of mysterious resources; of incredible products, of things unintelligibly and even magically made; and then too there is the instinct for perceiving all that is grotesque, absurd, amusing, and jocose, which one sees exhibited in children at the sight of the parrot's crafty and solemn eye and his exaggerated imitation of human speech, at the unusual dress and demeanour of the clown, at the grotesque simulation by the gnarled and contorted tree of something human or reptile. And then, too, there is the strange property in human beings which makes disaster amusing, if its effects are not prejudicial to oneself; that sense which makes the waiter on the pantomime stage, who falls headlong with a tray of crockery, an object to provoke the loudest and most spontaneous mirth of which the ordinary human being is capable. The moralist who would be sympathetically shocked at the rueful abrasions of the waiter, or mournful over the waste of human skill and endeavour involved in the breakage, would be felt by all human beings to have something priggish in his composition and to be too good, as they say, to live.

It is with these rudimentary and inexplicable emotions that the essayist may concern himself, even though the poet may be forbidden to do so; and the appeal of the essayist to the world at large will depend upon the extent to which he experiences some common emotion, sees it in all its bearings, catches the salient features of the scene, and records it in vivid and impressive speech.

The essayist is therefore to a certain extent bound to be a spectator of life; he must be like the man in Browning's fine poem "How it strikes a Contemporary," who walked about, took note of everything, looked at the new house building, poked his stick into the mortar.

He stood and watched the cobbler at his trade,
The man who slices lemons into drink,
The coffee-roaster's brazier, and the boys
That volunteer to help him turn its winch;
He glanced o'er books on stalls with half an eye,
And fly-leaf ballads on the vendor's string,
And broad-edge bold-print posters by the wall;
He took such cognizance of men and things!
If any beat a horse, you felt he saw—
If any cursed a woman, he took note,
Yet stared at nobody—they stared at him,
And found less to their pleasure than surprise,
He seemed to know them, and expect as much.

That is the essayist's material; he may choose the scene, he may select the sort of life he is interested in, whether it is the street or the countryside or the sea-beach or the picture-gallery; but once there, wherever he may be, he must devote himself to seeing and realizing and getting it all by heart. The writer must not be too much interested in the action and conduct of life. If he is a politician, or a soldier, or an emperor, or a plough-boy, or a thief, and is absorbed in what he is doing, with a vital anxiety to make profit or position or influence out of it; if he hates his opponents and rewards his friends; if he condemns, despises, disapproves, he at once forfeits sympathy and largeness of view. He must believe with all his might in the interest of what he enjoys, to the extent at all events of believing it worth recording and representing, but he must not believe too solemnly or urgently in the importance and necessity of any one sort of business or occupation. The eminent banker, the social reformer, the forensic pleader, the fanatic, the crank, the puritan—these are not the stuff out of which the essayist is made; he may have ethical preferences, but he must not indulge in moral indignation; he must be essentially tolerant, and he must discern quality rather than solidity. He must be concerned with the pageant of life, as it weaves itself with a moving tapestry of scenes and figures rather than with the aims and purposes of life. He must, in fact, be preoccupied with things as they appear, rather than with their significance or their ethical example.

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 good-humoured, 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 import 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 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 recognise the fact that most people's convictions are not the result of reason, but a mass of associations, traditions, things half-understood, 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 humours, the salient peculiarities, that shoot like sunrays 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 game, in which they can take a hand; and that every existence, however confined or 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.

The poet perhaps is the man who sees the greatness of life best, because he lives most in its beauty and fineness. But my point is that the essayist is really a lesser kind of poet, working in simpler and humbler materials, more in the glow of life perhaps than in the glory of it, and not finding anything common or unclean.

The essayist is the opposite of the romancer, because his one and continuous aim is to keep the homely materials in view; to face actual conditions, not to fly from them. We think meanly of life if we believe that it has no sublime moments; but we think sentimentally of it if we believe that it has nothing but sublime moments. The essayist wants to hold the balance; and if he is apt to neglect the sublimities of life, it is because he is apt to think that they can take care of themselves; and that if there is the joy of adventure, the thrill of the start in the fresh air of the morning, the rapture of ardent companionship, the gladness of the arrival, yet there must be long spaces in between, when the pilgrim jogs steadily along, and seems to come no nearer to the spire on the horizon or to the shining embanked cloudland of the West. He has nothing then but his own thoughts to help him, unless he is alert to see what is happening in hedgerow and copse, and the work of the essayist is to make something rich and strange of those seemingly monotonous spaces, those lengths of level road.

Is, then, the Essay in literature a thing which simply stands outside classification, like Argon among the elements, of which the only thing which can be predicated is that it is there? Or like Justice in Plato's Republic, a thing which the talkers set out to define, and which ends by being the one thing left in a state when the definable qualities are taken away? No, it is not that. It is rather like what is called an organ prelude, a little piece with a theme, not very strict perhaps in form, but which can be fancifully treated, modulated from, and coloured at will. It is a little criticism of life at some one point clearly enough defined.

We may follow any mood, we may look at life in fifty different ways—the only thing we must not do is to despise or deride, out of ignorance or prejudice, the influences which affect others; because the essence of all experience is that we should perceive something which we do not begin by knowing, and learn that life has a fulness and a richness in all sorts of diverse ways which we do not at first even dream of suspecting.

The essayist, then, is in his particular fashion an interpreter of life, a critic of life. He does not see life as the historian, or as the philosopher, or as the poet, or as the novelist, and yet he has a touch of all these. He is not concerned with discovering a theory of it all, or fitting the various parts of it into each other. He works rather on what is called the analytic method, observing, recording, interpreting, just as things strike him, and letting his fancy play over their beauty and significance; the end of it all being this: that he is deeply concerned with the charm and quality of things, and desires to put it all in the clearest and gentlest light, so that at least he may make others love life a little better, and prepare them for its infinite variety and alike for its joyful and mournful surprises.

J. B. Priestley

SOURCE: "In Defence," in The Saturday Review, London, Vol. 148, No. 3853, August 31, 1929, pp. 235-37.

[Priestley was the author of numerous popular novels that depict the world of everyday, middle-class England. His most notable critical work is Literature and Western Man (1960), a survey of Western literature from the invention of movable type through the mid-twentieth century. In the following essay, Priestley makes a plea for the essay as a serious literary genre.]

It is not often that we essayists are attacked. This does not mean that our portion is praise. It is the custom to ignore us, and it is a mystery to me why we go on or why editors and publishers trouble to throw a few guineas our way. The large public demands that an essayist shall have been dead a long time or, alternatively, be an American journalist writing easy slop about the Open Road, before it condescends to buy and read him. The smaller and more intelligent public calls us charming fellows and then promptly thinks about something or somebody else. "Ah, yes," they say, "I saw a nice little thing of yours in the Saturday the other week. It was—er—about what-the-calling-it, you know, that thing." And when the volume arrives they bring out the small type and yawn through the same old tepid praise—"Variety of subjects—sense of humour—pleasant fancy—readable." For two weeks, sometimes three in a stirring season, the publisher puts your book in his advertisements—"Another charming volume," he says, wistfully. A schoolmaster in Newcastle and a retired civil servant in Dorset write to point out one or two mistakes in grammar. Six months later, an assistant professor in Saskatoon writes to ask if he may include the worst essay in the book in an anthology he is preparing. The rest is silence.

Being a vain man, I would rather be attacked than ignored, rather be thrown out than left unnoticed. Therefore I was glad to discover Mr. Stonier, who apparently contributes a literary causerie to the Clarion, the last number of which was sent to me the other day. This is not the Clarion I remember—it seems centuries ago—the penny weekly that was written by innumerable Blatchfords and had a passion for cycling clubs. (Many a time have I seen the Clarion enthusiasts streaming out, on fine Sunday mornings, in the West Riding of my childhood.) It is now a six-penny monthly, quite handsome, and more dignified, though still rather dashing in the old cycling-club style. I read it all through and enjoyed it. But we must return to Mr. Stonier, who, in the course of a review of an "omnibus" book of essays, made the following observations:

The conventional idea of an essay is this whimsical, childish-charming play with fancies. Almost all living essayists adopt this pose (sometimes successfully); with slight variations they present the same picture of an absent-minded, untidy, rambling, talkative but lovable amateur rather resembling Mr. Horace Skimpole. They write on the same topics without apparent effort every week in the literary reviews and book columns of newspapers. If only they had one word which they really felt bound to say, if only they did not spend all their time in practising a way of saying it! Mr. Belloc once wrote a book of essays which he called On Nothing, and though I have not read it, I am prepared to believe that the title described the book. There has been too much table-talk in recent essays, not enough of the pulpit or the soap-box. In short, what these writers lack is sincerity …

Well, there is one essayist who has at last one word he feels bound to say, and that is "Boo!" And if this only calls up yet another "childish-charming fancy," namely, that Mr. Stonier is perhaps a goose, I cannot help it.

Let us first examine this pose that our critic says nearly all living essayists adopt. With one or two of the adjectives we cannot quarrel. It is true that we all pretend to be talkative. There may be essayists who pretend to be very taciturn, but of course we do not know anything about them, because their pose forbids them to write at all. As for being "lovable," the pretence, such as it is, is all the other way. Thus, Messrs. Belloc, Chesterton, Beerbohm, Lynd seem to me lovable men who are all pretending in their essays to be less lovable than they actually are. For the rest, I have not noticed Mr. Belloc's attempt to persuade us he is absent-minded, or Mr. Beerbohm's that he is untidy. But that, of course, is only the beginning. We must now face the charge expressed in the third sentence, in which, by the way, Mr. Stonier makes the mistake of assuming that essays appear in the book columns of newspapers. The charge is that we write on the same topics every week. Now that, it seems to me, is precisely what essayists do not do. Indeed, they are the only contributors to the Press or contemporary literature who do not write for ever on the same topics. Members of Parliament, leader-writers, women novelists, foreign correspondents, dramatic critics, stern young Socialists, retired Indian Army officers, clergymen, publicists, general busybodies, all these people can be discovered every day writing on the same old topics. But not the essayists. Heaven only knows what Mr. Chesterton or Mr. Lynd will be writing on next. The editor of this paper does not know what will be my next subject. I do not know myself. If Mr. Stonier knows, I wish he would drop me a line before next Tuesday.

He is prepared to believe that Mr. Belloc's title, On Nothing, describes the book. If so, he is prepared to believe anything. He tells us, with a frankness that does him credit (he must be new to the game), that he has not read this particular volume of essays. I find it difficult to believe that he has read any volume of essays by Mr. Belloc. If you wanted to suggest that men who write essays are vague-minded triflers, with no opinions, no beliefs, of their own, mere butterflies, could you find, in all the assembled literatures of Europe, a worse example, a more damning instance, than Mr. Belloc? Here is an essayist whose dense mass of opinion, whose arrogant conviction, almost crush the reader, and who affects at all times to be severely objective and concrete, and he of all men is singled out as an example of having nothing to say. I should have thought it obvious that a writer of some experience who dared to call a book On Nothing knew very well—and assumed his readers knew very well—that he had something quite definite to say on nearly every subject under the sun. I have read books that really were on nothing, but they always bore such titles as 'The Decentralization of the Unconscious' or 'The Awareness of Graduality.' And no essayist ever wrote one.

To say there is too much table-talk in recent essays is to complain that there is too much meat in recent sausages. The essay, as we understand the essay nowadays, is table-talk in print. If Mr. Stonier does not like table-talk, then he does not like essays; and there is an end of it. Apparently, he favours the introduction of the pulpit and the soapbox. Here, he may congratulate himself, for he is with the majority. Most people prefer the pulpit and the soap-box in print to the dinner-table, and that is why essays are so comparatively unpopular and why some other kinds of writing pay so well. The popular Press has now said goodbye to the essay and the essayists, but it welcomes the preacher and the tub-thumper every morning. If an editor wants to have more than a million readers, he takes care to set up a pulpit and a soap-box on his leader-page. He also takes care to keep the table-talker out of the office. Is this because the table-talker, the essayist, is so insincere? Is the essayist insincere?

It is Mr. Stonier's word, this sincerity, and not mine. Perhaps because I have so little of the quality myself, perhaps for other and sounder reasons, I mistrust this word. It should be handled as carefully as dynamite. If the essayists, talking freely about themselves, their habits, their tastes, their hopes and fears, their weaknesses and little vanities, lack sincerity, what writers have it? Is it the possession of the philosophers, the critics, the historians, the biographers, the romancers? Why, they are even beginning to suspect the very prophets. Who has it, this sincerity? He that died o' Wednesday.

It is true that we essayists, even on Mr. Stonier's showing, have achieved something, for though, as he complains, we spend all our time practising a way of saying our nothings (sedulous apes to a man), yet, as he says, we write every week "without apparent effort." This means that we are very clever fellows, unless there happens to be a flaw in Mr. Stonier's logic, and it is not the business of one of your whimsical, fanciful, childish-charming laddies to suggest such a thing. But Mr. Stonier, I take it, is a man who likes philosophy, opinions, beliefs, a point of view, in a writer, and he misses these things in the essayists. But because he misses them he must not jump to the conclusion that they are not there. He has been in too much of a hurry, perhaps; a trifle deafened, it may be, by those pulpit and soap-box orations that he prefers. Table-talk has its own manner, and sometimes its nonsense is the sanest sense, just as the gravest or most passionate sense of the pulpit and the soap-box sometimes contrives, after being carried home to the table, to turn into the silliest nonsense.

H. Belloc

SOURCE: "An Essay upon Essays upon Essays," in New Statesman, Vol. XXXIV, No. 862, November 2, 1929, p. 123.

[At the turn of the century Belloc was one of England's premier literary figures. 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, but critics have found common ground for admiration in his poetry. W H. Auden called Belloc and his longtime collaborator G. K Chesterton the best light-verse writers of their era, with Belloc's Cautionary Tales (1907) considered by some his most successful work in the genre. In the following essay, Belloc defends the proliferation of modern essays.]

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: at last, 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 fossilisation of manner. Nor do I find much trace of that in my contemporaries.

I have, indeed, the contrary fault to find with the English essay to-day, and that is the restriction of matter. There are whole departments of the highest interest to man which are, by convention, avoided. For instance, until quite lately (when the ice was courageously broken by one group of newspapers) a discussion of the ultimate truths and of whether those truths could be discovered or stated—in other words, a discussion of what is generically called "Religion"—was forbidden. Now that the ice has been broken, editors have discovered—a little to their astonishment, I think—that the pioneer was right: that there is nothing for which the public has a stronger appetite than theology.

Another form of restriction is the absence of a devil's advocate; and that absence is more clearly marked and of worse effect here than abroad. The really unpopular, or the really unusual, point of view cannot get stated in pages of general circulation. And that means the absence of creative friction; for conflict is the mother of all things.

The opposition is, indeed, allowed to appear in small, obscure sheets which are devoted to nothing else. But that is of no great public service. What would be of public service would be eager and general discussion, and the perpetual presentation of argument and fact which the public are not allowed to have.

Take such a simple point as that of Communism. It is a very living issue in our time. It is an active threat in the French commonwealth, a triumphant one in the Russian; it is a subject of immediate anxiety to every Government in Europe, and though it has less place here than in any other industrial country, it does indirectly leaven a wide area of thought even here.

But to get it stated—to have said in its favour all that can be said in its favour—one must turn to small publications which are ignored by the principal newspapers and reviews. In these last you never get the Communist position fully and strongly put. You get it vaguely if violently abused—but without definitions and without concrete details; you feel that it is always there in the background, and yet you are never allowed to see it.

Let no one flatter himself that opposition can be heard because certain points of view supposedly unpopular are sometimes put in what are called "daring" or "paradoxical" essays. These are never true opposition. They are always either a jest or that worst form of demagogic flattery which consists in telling people what they really think but what they have not hitherto dared to say. Of true opposition in English letters we have to-day none. And English letters are badly the worse for the lack of it.

Simeon Strunsky

SOURCE: "The Essay of Today," in English Journal, Vol. XVII, No. 1, January, 1928, pp. 8-16.

[In the following review of Essays of 1925, edited by Odell Shepard, Strunsky delineates the defining characteristics of the modern essay.]

Confronted with the task of defining the novel, you might do much worse than say that a novel, as a rule, is something that is written by a novelist. The generality of mankind is not very well informed on the laws of plot, character, situation, and the inner life; but we know Dickens, Tolstoy, and William Dean Howells when we see them. Similarly, it is possible, in the absence of a thorough acquaintance with the textbooks from Aristotle down, to define drama as something written by a dramatist, and poetry as something offered for sale by a poet, and a picture as something committed by a painter. People will understand, and nine times out of ten will not go astray.

But now look at the essay. Among a dozen writers brought together by Odell Shepard in Essays of 1925, I find one United States senator, three journalists, two or three journalists who have attained the dignity of publicists, one poet and novelist, one literary critic. In the dozen names I find just two which at first sight connote the essay; they are E. S. Martin and Zephine Humphrey. This is not intended to suggest that there is anything in the Constitution of the United States or in the jurisdictional rules of the essayists' labor union to prevent anybody from trying his hand at Montaigne's trade. That there is no such labor organization in this particular field is precisely the point with which I have set out. Freedom from every sort of restriction on immigration from other domains of literature has characterized the essay almost from the beginning. It is particularly true of the contemporary essay.

Nevertheless, Mr. Shepard foresees an air of bewilderment on his reader's face, and he hastens to explain. It appears that he really holds much more rigorous views on the essay than the present writer does:

Really excellent humorous writing is hard to find in the magazines of the year. What is more important, there is little play of mind for its own sake, little amiable and graceful trifling of the kind inherited by English writers from Charles Lamb.… I may as well record that one man at least, while reading his way through the nonfictional prose of recent magazines, has often sighed for more frequent oases of urbane and civilized laughter, little zones of leisure remote from the drum-fire of argument.

Plainly, Mr. Shepard feels that topics like government regulation of business, or prohibition and the Ku Klux, or international peace, or the career of William J. Bryan are not essay topics. It simply happened that 1925 was a poor year. If better essays had been made in 1925 he would have collected them.

What is this ideal essay form which Mr. Shepard has only approximated in the absence of the real thing? It is the thing which Addison and Charles Lamb wrote. It is the thing which Christopher Morley has in mind when he says, in his introduction to the first series of Modern Essays, that "the essay is a mood rather than a form." It is the thing which others have in mind when they speak of the essay as "meditation." It is the aggregation of qualities of which most of us think when we think of the essay, though we would turn pale at any peremptory request to define the word. It is the short expository prose that is informal, urbane, tolerant, pedestrain, reverent, quietistic, tentative, concerned with spiritual or emotional values or translating physical circumstance into personal values—Mr. Morley's "mood." It is intuition, speculation, reverie, whimsy, and in every instance easy going. What the essay, as we usually conceive it, must never do is kill its subject. The essayist is a man who does not know where he is going, but is happy to be on his way. Or if he does have some dim sense of the compass directions, he is never in any haste to get there. The essay suggests; but if you don't quite see the point it does not make much difference, and if you disagree there are no bones broken. After all, "What know I?" said the Frenchman who first essayed the essay. So, in true essay fashion, we come back right to where we started from, after a pleasant little promenade. The essay, as we think of it without attempting to define it, is the sort of thing Addison and Elia were so good at turning out.

What this popular impression does is to beg the question—which, in the true essay spirit, we are of course at liberty to do. But if you say only Addison and Lamb, you will have to dismiss perhaps the greater part of your modern essays and a very important number of the Pioneers and the Founding Fathers of the essay. What is the first example of the essay with which the high-school student is confronted? If the fashions in secondary school English have not greatly changed since the war it would still be the Essay on Milton. Perhaps the student has had a touch of Elia; but he has met him as an isolated tidbit in the Dissertation on Roast-Pig, as a reading "selection," and not as an example of the essay. Perhaps the student has met Addison, but by way of the Roger de Coverley Papers; and unless secondary-school psychology has changed greatly, a paper is not often identified as an essay. The boy and the girl are first directly aware that they are traveling in essay land when they meet Mr. Macaulay on Milton.

Take, then, Thomas Babington Macaulay and test him by the popular specifications laid down previously, specifications drawn from our vague but clinging belief of what an essay should be. It will emerge that Macaulay, one of our super-essayists, is pretty nearly everything that an essayist should not be. He is not exactly urbane. He is not—to put it mildly—tolerant. He has no "mood," unless by mood you mean iron convictions. And on the formal side Macaulay of the swelling organ tones and of the magnificently wrought sequences is not what you would call the ambling wayfarer or the felt-slippered dreamer in the easy chair. Macaulay knows where he is going before he starts out, and he knows every minute of the day that he is on the right road. If Montaigne was an essayist, then Macaulay ought not to be one; yet, unfortunately for our peace of mind at the present moment, he is. That is why we cannot say that something is an essay because it is written by an essayist. Macaulay was not an essayist. Emerson is reputed to have written essays; but how many of us think of Emerson as an essayist?

But if a definition, or a stab at a definition, is unavoidable, then one might reverse Christopher Morley, and say, certainly on the basis of the modern essay and with fair reason on the basis of the entire history of the essay, that the essay is a form rather than a mood. The essay is a short piece of expository prose, and that is as far as we can go. Mood is often present, though, far less frequently in the modern essay than in the earlier record. But mood is not an essential part, if definition is suited to data instead of data to definition. And even if you insist on mood you cannot insist on the mood of Addison, of Elia, of Max Beerbohm, or Hilaire Belloc in his gentler phases, of the late Samuel McChord Crothers—in whom we have just lost the Addison of our own day—of Mr. Morley himself when he is alone at home in Paumanok with old Thomas Burton. You must allow for, and give entry to, other moods: to Chesterton when he is writing about capitalists and vegetarians; to Belloc when he is writing about modernists; and to H. L. Mencken. Why is not the editor of the American Mercury represented in the anthologies? Because he calls his essays Prejudices ? Allowing for historical changes in vocabulary and reticence, Mr. Mencken is not much more prejudiced against Methodists than Macaulay was against Tories, than Ruskin was against the industrial system, or than Chesterton is against this same system. Mr. Mencken, I cannot help feeling, is the victim of established notions among the anthologists. His urbanity, tolerance, quietism, lack of self-confidence, and gift for understatement do not exactly leap to the eye. But by the definition of the essay as a short prose piece he belongs. He has written some very noticeable short pieces. And incidentally, there is a prudential reason. If you refuse Mr. Mencken admission to the anthologies for the use of high-school and college youth, he will bust right in, despite the Polizei, and carry your student youth off with him.

It is, then, with the contemporary essay as it has been with the essay at all times, only much more so. The essay can be, and is, anything and everything. You cannot define the essayist as someone who doesn't know too much about anything but is willing to try. In that case you would have to deport W. C. Brownell, who can be easily convicted of knowing a great deal about literature, and Frenchmen, and the American scene in general. You would have to deport William Beebe because he knows altogether too much about the jungle and the sea and the people who go down to both. You would have to deport Santayana. From nearly every collection of American essays you would have to exclude the late Stuart P. Sherman, because in respect to American literature and American tradition Stuart Sherman knew. And on the other hand you would have to expel an entire host of younger and very young writers whom as a matter of fact you often include in your anthologies. As against Brownell, Beebe, Sherman, who would be disfranchised from the essay on the ground of knowing too much, some of the young men might well qualify. But the difficulty is that although they sometimes do not know very much, and are thus entitled to write essays, they are not willing to wait and try. Because of their irritating refusal to say "What know I?" or "Perhaps," or "Does it not then seem?"—because of their insistence that they do know and are going to tell you whether you like it or not—they would, by the mood and meditation test, be excluded. And yet there they are. They have written fine short pieces and must be reckoned with.

The essay, then, as we find it today in America—which includes, of course, the British Isles and the Dominions—is in theme and spirit everything. If Mr. Shepard had looked hard enough for the year 1925 he would have found a few essays in the Montaigne-Addison-Lamb tradition to make a juster balance against the articles on government regulation and Ku Klux, without excluding the latter. Other editors have been more successful. Mr. Morley, of course, was never in such danger. Starting out with a strong emotion for Addison and Lamb, his problem was the opposite one: to give adequate recognition to the younger writers of essays who will not be put off with urbanity or abstract speculation or a timid questioning of life. They want to speak about the visible, social, political, financial, sexual world about them. Mr. Morley went some distance in admitting a piece on Mussolini in his second series of Modern Essays, published after three years. By 1924 the world had made such progress away from the inner life to the hard external facts that even the essay had to take note and come out now and then from the ivory tower.

In going part of the way to meet the modern world the essay of Addison and Lamb has not made a surrender of itself. It has only consented to take up residence by the side of the essay which is not Addison or Lamb, but a speech by President Coolidge, a study of the international temper by Alfred E. Zimmern, a study of the frontier influence in American life by Professor Turner. These three articles I find in McCullough and Burgum's excellent collection, A Book of Modern Essays, by the side of such "truer" essays as Stuart P. Sherman's "What Is a Puritan?" and the "ideal" essay: Galsworthy on "Castles in Spain," Kenneth Grahame on "Day-dreams," A. Clutton-Brock on "Friendship," and Meredith Nicholson on "The Cheerful Breakfast Table." So in the University of Michigan's compilation, Adventures in Essay Reading, you will find among the modern representatives Le Baron Briggs, President Meiklejohn and Wu Ting Fang busying themselves with concrete problems in the company of Samuel McChord Crothers and Agnes Repplier and G. K. Chesterton embodying the more traditional type.

The perfect state would be, of course, where the traditional type of essay did more than live in neighborhood with the modern, concrete, militant article or chapter; where the old urbanity and reverie borrowed something of the new iron and "punch," and lent something of its own easy grace to the two-fisted newcomers. And that frequently happens. There is charm as well as edge in Charles Merz's study of our new filling-station civilization in his piece on "The Once Open Road" in the McCullough and Burgum collection. There is charm as well as bite in Robert Littell's "Let There Be Ivy" and "Pigskin Preferred" in Warner Taylor's Essays of the Past and Present. On the other side of the line, Samuel McChord Crothers has shown that a training in the earlier spirit of the essay does not immunize one against the gift for satire. His last essay on "The Literary Slums," in the Atlantic Monthly, will testify to his ability to rub in the salt where it will do most good. Agnes Repplier knows how to bring the older method to the exploitation of modern instances.

And thus you will find the modern essay, in the sense of time, representative of the history of the essay of all time, either in a blend of qualities or in the pure example. We have young essayists, in this country and England, who can write essays of first-class criticism and write other essays of pure whimsy. I have in mind in this country the aforesaid Robert Littell, and on the other side of the ocean, J. B. Priestley, in the latter of whom there is obviously an exceptional talent at play. John Burroughs and William Beebe are in the tradition of Walden. On his own level I find Walter Pritchard Eaton's nature essay maintaining the amateur tradition in which the English-speaking world has been so rich. In the essays of the late Frank Moore Colby, the spirit of Montaigne has come to life again, though expressing itself at times in the staccato of modern times. For a striking combination of the old humane background with the modern energy and vocabulary, for a combination of urbanity and acid, it will more than repay the student to consult the essays of Elmer Davis. For the essay of pure whimsy reinforced by extraordinary observation and colored with tenderness there are the several volumes of Robert Cortes Holliday, in whom, at every reading, I catch the ring of genius; he certainly has earned his place in the entourage of Charles Lamb. The essay, which very soon after its beginning grew to be anything and everything, from sermon to dream, from epigram to pamphlet, has its examples among our writers today, in the pure type of every genre, and in almost every blend.

And as all the forms of the essay have survived, there has survived also—and to my mind that is of far greater importance—the spirit of the essay, asserting itself in every form though in varying degree, and with but few exceptions. To say that there is a single thing which may be called the spirit of the essay would seem at first to contradict the thesis I have been stressing, namely, that the essay may be anything and everything; may be Montaigne or Macaulay. What I mean is that, taking this literature of short or comparatively short prose, we do find that for the corpus as a whole there is a single spiritual trait; and that trait is moderation, restraint, the sense of proportion. Montaigne's skepticism has been a little more than enough to outweigh Macaulay's dogmatism. The amateur talents of a Lamb mix with the wisdom of an Emerson or the specialized knowledge of a Brownell to make the essay, in the total, more or less incurably and beautifully amateur, tentative, wandering, wondering. Almost it seems inevitable that when a man sits down to write an essay he finds it impossible always to say "I know it all." The hereditary virtue of "What know I?" persists; the sense of modesty; the sense of proportion.

Now a sense of proportion is something to be thankful for today. Mr. Shepard has grasped this outstanding virtue of the essay when he remarks of the pieces in his collection that, hard-hitting though most of them are, they cannot be said to belong to "the Literature of Despair." You will find plenty of despair lying around today in the novels and in the biographies and the Outlines. But in the contemporary essay you will find the corrective and sometimes the antidote to that despair. Take as an example Aldous Huxley. In his novels life is disillusion and disenchantment. In his essays life manages to keep a good many of its old truths and its old values. To put it quite roughly, Aldous Huxley in his essays is much more sane, much more faithful to the truth of things, much more guarded in his affirmations and denials, than the people in his novels are. Is it the spirit of Montaigne looking over his shoulder and whispering, "What, after all, know you?" Is it the spirit of Addison politely suggesting that this is a world full of many kinds of people and a life full of all sorts of values, and one should not be too rough? Is it the spirit of Lamb lisping, "Well, now, really?" This much is certain: that in an age of disenchantment and revolt and "debunkage" it is in the essays that you must chiefly look for the sense of humor and the sense of proportion. Always excepting Mr. Mencken, a modern essay setting forth the full thesis expounded by Sinclair Lewis in Elmer Gantry is inconceivable. The ancestral spirits of the essay simply will not allow it. When you sit down to the composition of an essay, of a most modern, contemporaneous essay, something within you urges you to stop and look and listen—and think twice.

Virginia Woolf

SOURCE: "The Modern Essay," in Collected Essays, Vol. U, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1925, pp. 41-50.

[One of the most prominent figures in twentieth-century literature, Woolf rebelled as a novelist against traditional narrative techniques, developing a highly individualized style that employed the stream-of-consciousness mode. She was also esteemed for her critical essays, which cover a broad range of topics and contain some of her finest prose. In the following review of the five-volume collection Modern English Essays, edited by Ernest Rhys, Woolf considers the essential qualities of the modern essay.]

As Mr. Rhys truly says, it is unnecessary to go profoundly into the history and origin of the essay—whether it derives from Socrates or Siranney the Persian—since, like all living things, its present is more important than its past. Moreover, the family is widely spread; and while some of its representatives have risen in the world and wear their coronets with the best, others pick up a precarious living in the gutter near Fleet Street. The form, too, admits variety. The essay can be short or long, serious or trifling, about God and Spinoza, or about turtles and Cheapside. But as we turn over the pages of [Modern English Essays,] containing essays written between 1870 and 1920, certain principles appear to control the chaos, and we detect in the short period under review something like the progress of history.

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

So great a feat is seldom accomplished, though the fault may well be as much on the reader's side as on the writer's. Habit and lethargy have dulled his palate. A novel has a story, a poem rhyme; but what art can the essayist use in these short lengths of prose to sting us wide awake and fix us in a trance which is not sleep but rather an intensification of life—a basking, with every faculty alert, in the sun of pleasure? He must know—that is the first essential—how to write. His learning may be as profound as Mark Pattison's, but in an essay it must be so fused by the magic of writing that not a fact juts out, not a dogma tears the surface of the texture. Macaulay in one way, Froude in another, did this superbly over and over again. They have blown more knowledge into us in the course of one essay than the innumerable chapters of a hundred text-books. But when Mark Pattison has to tell us, in the space of thirty-five little pages, about Montaigne, we feel that he had not previously assimilated M. Grun. M. Grin was a gentleman who once wrote a bad book. M. Grun and his book should have been embalmed for our perpetual delight in amber. But the process is fatiguing; it requires more time and perhaps more temper than Pattison had at his command. He served M. Grun up raw, and he remains a crude berry among the cooked meats, upon which our teeth must grate for ever. Something of the sort applies to Matthew Arnold and a certain translator of Spinoza. Literal truth-telling and finding fault with a culprit for his good are out of place in an essay, where everything should be for our good and rather for eternity than for the March number of the Fortnightly Review. But if the voice of the scold should never be heard in this narrow plot, there is another voice which is as a plague of locusts—the voice of a man stumbling drowsily among loose words, clutching aimlessly at vague ideas, the voice, for example, of Mr. Hutton in the following passage:

Add to this that his married life was very brief, only seven years and a half, being unexpectedly cut short, and that his passionate reverence for his wife's memory and genius—in his own words, 'a religion'—was one which, as he must have been perfectly sensible, he could not make to appear otherwise than extravagant, not to say an hallucination, in the eyes of the rest of mankind, and yet that he was possessed by an irresistible yearning to attempt to embody it in all the tender and enthusiastic hyperbole of which it is so pathetic to find a man who gained his fame by his 'dry-light' a master, and it is impossible not to feel that the human incidents in Mr. Mill's career are very sad.

A book could take that blow, but it sinks an essay. A biography in two volumes is indeed the proper depository; for there, where the license is so much wider, and hints and glimpses of outside things make part of the feast (we refer to the old type of Victorian volume), these yawns and stretches hardly matter, and have indeed some positive value of their own. But that value, which is contributed by the reader, perhaps illicitly, in his desire to get as much into the book from all possible sources as he can, must be ruled out here.

There is no room for the impurities of literature in an essay. Somehow or other, by dint of labour or bounty of nature, or both combined, the essay must be pure—pure like water or pure like wine, but pure from dullness, deadness, and deposits of extraneous matter. Of all writers in the first volume, Walter Pater best achieves this arduous task, because before setting out to write his essay ('Notes on Leonardo da Vinci') he has somehow contrived to get his material fused. He is a learned man, but it is not knowledge of Leonardo that remains with us, but a vision, such as we get in a good novel where everything contributes to bring the writer's conception as a whole before us. Only here, in the essay, where the bounds are so strict and facts have to be used in their nakedness, the true writer like Walter Pater makes these limitations yield their own quality. Truth will give it authority; from its narrow limits he will get shape and intensity; and then there is no more fitting place for some of those ornaments which the old writers loved and we, by calling them ornaments, presumably despise. Nowadays nobody would have the courage to embark on the once-famous description of Leonardo's lady who has

learned the secrets of the grave; and has been a diver in deep seas and keeps their fallen day about her; and trafficked for strange webs with Eastern merchants; and, as Leda, was the mother of Helen of Troy, and, as Saint Anne, the mother of Mary …

The passage is too thumb-marked to slip naturally into the context. But when we come unexpectedly upon 'the smiling of women and the motion of great waters', or upon 'full of the refinement of the dead, in sad, earth-coloured raiment, set with pale stones', we suddenly remember that we have ears and we have eyes, and that the English language fills a long array of stout volumes with innumerable words, many of which are of more than one syllable. The only living Englishman who ever looks into these volumes is, of course, a gentleman of Polish extraction. But doubtless our abstention saves us much gush, much rhetoric, much high-stepping and cloud-prancing, and for the sake of the prevailing sobriety and hard-headedness we should be willing to barter the splendour of Sir Thomas Browne and the vigour of Swift.

Yet, if the essay admits more properly than biography or fiction of sudden boldness and metaphor, and can be polished till every atom of its surface shines, there are dangers in that too. We are soon in sight of ornament. Soon the current, which is the life-blood of literature, runs slow; and instead of sparkling and flashing or moving with a quieter impulse which has a deeper excitement, words coagulate together in frozen sprays which, like the grapes on a Christmas tree, glitter for a single night, but are dusty and garish the day after. The temptation to decorate is great where the theme may be of the slightest. What is there to interest another in the fact that one has enjoyed a walking tour, or has amused oneself by rambling down Cheapside and looking at the turtles in Mr. Sweeting's shop window? Stevenson and Samuel Butler chose very different methods of exciting our interest in these domestic themes. Stevenson, of course, trimmed and polished and set out his matter in a traditional eighteenth-century form. It is admirably done, but we cannot help feeling anxious, as the essay proceeds, lest the material may give out under the craftsman's fingers. The ingot is so small, the manipulation so incessant. And perhaps that is why the peroration—

To sit still and contemplate—to remember the faces of women without desire, to be pleased by the great deeds of men without envy, to be everything and everywhere in sympathy and yet content to remain where and what you are—

has the sort of insubstantiality which suggests that by the time he got to the end he had left himself nothing solid to work with. Butler adopted the very opposite method. Think your own thoughts, he seems to say, and speak them as plainly as you can. These turtles in the shop window which appear to leak out of their shells through heads and feet suggest a fatal faithfulness to a fixed idea. And so, striding unconcernedly from one idea to the next, we traverse a large stretch of ground; observe that a wound in the solicitor is a very serious thing; that Mary Queen of Scots wears surgical boots and is subject to fits near the Horse Shoe in Tottenham Court Road; take it for granted that no one really cares about Æschylus; and so, with many amusing anecdotes and some profound reflections, reach the peroration, which is that, as he had been told not to see more in Cheapside than he could get into twelve pages of the Universal Review, he had better stop. And yet obviously Butler is at least as careful of our pleasure as Stevenson; and to write like oneself and call it not writing is a much harder exercise in style than to write like Addison and call it writing well.

But, however much they differ individually, the Victorian essayists yet had something in common. They wrote at greater length than is now usual, and they wrote for a public which had not only time to sit down to its magazine seriously, but a high, if peculiarly Victorian, standard of culture by which to judge it. It was worth while to speak out upon serious matters in an essay; and there was nothing absurd in writing as well as one possibly could when, in a month or two, the same public which had welcomed the essay in a magazine would carefully read it once more in a book. But a change came from a small audience of cultivated people to a larger audience of people who were not quite so cultivated. The change was not altogether for the worse. In volume iii. we find Mr. Birrell and Mr. Beerbohm. It might even be said that there was a reversion to the classic type, and that the essay by losing its size and something of its sonority was approaching more nearly the essay of Addison and Lamb. At any rate, there is a great gulf between Mr. Birrell on Carlyle and the essay which one may suppose that Carlyle would have written upon Mr. Birrell. There is little similarity between A Cloud of Pinafores, by Max Beerbohm, and A Cynic's Apology, by Leslie Stephen. But the essay is alive; there is no reason to despair. As the conditions change so the essayist, most sensitive of all plants to public opinion, adapts himself, and if he is good makes the best of the change, and if he is bad the worst. Mr. Birrell is certainly good; and so we find that, though he has dropped a considerable amount of weight, his attack is much more direct and his movement more supple. But what did Mr. Beerbohm give to the essay and what did he take from it? That is a much more complicated question, for here we have an essayist who has concentrated on the work and is without doubt the prince of his profession.

What Mr. Beerbohm gave was, of course, himself. This presence, which has haunted the essay fitfully from the time of Montaigne, had been in exile since the death of Charles Lamb. Matthew Arnold was never to his readers Matt, nor Walter Pater affectionately abbreviated in a thousand homes to Wat. They gave us much, but that they did not give. Thus, some time in the nineties, it must have surprised readers accustomed to exhortation, information, and denunciation to find themselves familiarly addressed by a voice which seemed to belong to a man no larger than themselves. He was affected by private joys and sorrows, and had no gospel to preach and no learning to impart. He was himself, simply and directly, and himself he has remained. Once again we have an essayist capable of using the essayist's most proper but most dangerous and delicate tool. 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. We only know that the spirit of personality permeates every word that he writes. The triumph is the triumph of style. For it is only by knowing how to write that you can make use in literature of your self; that self which, while it is essential to literature, is also its most dangerous antagonist. Never to be yourself and yet always—that is the problem. Some of the essayists in Mr. Rhys' collection, to be frank, have not altogether succeeded in solving it. We are nauseated by the sight of trivial personalities decomposing in the eternity of print. As talk, no doubt, it was charming, and certainly the writer is a good fellow to meet over a bottle of beer. But literature is stern; it is no use being charming, virtuous, or even learned and brilliant into the bargain, unless, she seems to reiterate, you fulfil her first condition—to know how to write.

This art is possessed to perfection by Mr. Beerbohm. But he has not searched the dictionary for polysyllables. He has not moulded firm periods or seduced our ears with intricate cadences and strange melodies. Some of his companions—Henley and Stevenson, for example—are momentarily more impressive. But A Cloud of Pinafores has in it that indescribable inequality, stir, and final expressiveness which belong to life and to life alone. You have not finished with it because you have read it, any more than friendship is ended because it is time to part. Life wells up and alters and adds. Even things in a bookcase change if they are alive; we find ourselves wanting to meet them again; we find them altered. So we look back upon essay after essay by Mr. Beerbohm, knowing that, come September or May, we shall sit down with them and talk. Yet it is true that the essayist is the most sensitive of all writers to public opinion. The drawing-room is the place where a great deal of reading is done nowadays, and the essays of Mr. Beerbohm lie, with an exquisite appreciation of all that the position exacts, upon the drawing-room table. There is no gin about; no strong tobacco; no puns, drunkenness, or insanity. Ladies and gentlemen talk together, and some things, of course, are not said.

But if it would be foolish to attempt to confine Mr. Beerbohm to one room, it would be still more foolish, unhappily, to make him, the artist, the man who gives us only his best, the representative of our age. There are no essays by Mr. Beerbohm in the fourth or fifth volumes of the present collection. His age seems already a little distant, and the drawing-room table, as it recedes, begins to look rather like an altar where, once upon a time, people deposited offerings—fruit from their own orchards, gifts carved with their own hands. Now once more the conditions have changed. The public needs essays as much as ever, and perhaps even more. The demand for the light middle not exceeding fifteen hundred words, or in special cases seventeen hundred and fifty, much exceeds the supply. Where Lamb wrote one essay and Max perhaps writes two, Mr. Belloc at a rough computation produces three hundred and sixty-five. They are very short, it is true. Yet with what dexterity the practised essayist will utilize his space—beginning as close to the top of the sheet as possible, judging precisely how far to go, when to turn, and how, without sacrificing a hair's-breadth of paper, to wheel about and alight accurately upon the last word his editor allows! As a feat of skill it is well worth watching. But the personality upon which Mr. Belloc, like Mr. Beerbohm, depends suffers in the process. It comes to us not with the natural richness of the speaking voice, but strained and thin and full of mannerisms and affectations, like the voice of a man shouting through a megaphone to a crowd on a windy day. 'Little friends, my readers', he says in the essay called 'An Unknown Country', and he goes on to tell us how—

There was a shepherd the other day at Findon Fair who had come from the east by Lewes with sheep, and who had in his eyes that reminiscence of horizons which makes the eyes of shepherds and of mountaineers different from the eyes of other men.… I went with him to hear what he had to say, for shepherds talk quite differently from other men.

Happily this shepherd had little to say, even under the stimulus of the inevitable mug of beer, about the Unknown Country, for the only remark that he did make proves him either a minor poet, unfit for the care of sheep, or Mr. Belloc himself masquerading with a fountain-pen. That is the penalty which the habitual essayist must now be prepared to face. He must masquerade. He cannot afford the time either to be himself or to be other people. He must skim the surface of thought and dilute the strength of personality. He must give us a worn weekly halfpenny instead of a solid sovereign once a year.

But it is not Mr. Belloc only who has suffered from the prevailing conditions. The essays which bring the collection to the year 1920 may not be the best of their authors' work, but, if we except writers like Mr. Conrad and Mr. Hudson, who have strayed into essay writing accidentally, and concentrate upon those who write essays habitually, we shall find them a good deal affected by the change in their circumstances. To write weekly, to write daily, to write shortly, to write for busy people catching trains in the morning or for tired people coming home in the evening, is a heart-breaking task for men who know good writing from bad. They do it, but instinctively draw out of harm's way anything precious that might be damaged by contact with the public, or anything sharp that might irritate its skin. And so, if one reads Mr. Lucas, Mr. Lynd, or Mr. Squire in the bulk, one feels that a common greyness silvers everything. They are as far removed from the extravagant beauty of Walter Pater as they are from the intemperate candour of Leslie Stephen. Beauty and courage are dangerous spirits to bottle in a column and a half; and thought, like a brown-paper parcel in a waistcoat pocket, has a way of spoiling the symmetry of an article. It is a kind, tired, apathetic world for which they write, and the marvel is that they never cease to attempt, at least, to write well.

But there is no need to pity Mr. Clutton Brock for this change in the essayist's conditions. He has clearly made the best of his circumstances and not the worst. One hesitates even to say that he has had to make any conscious effort in the matter, so naturally has he effected the transition from the private essayist to the public, from the drawing-room to the Albert Hall. Paradoxically enough, the shrinkage in size has brought about a corresponding expansion of individuality. We have no longer the 'I' of Max and of Lamb, but the 'we' of public bodies and other sublime personages. It is 'we' who go to hear the Magic Flute; 'we' who ought to profit by it; 'we', in some mysterious way, who, in our corporate capacity, once upon a time actually wrote it. For music and literature and art must submit to the same generalization or they will not carry to the farthest recesses of the Albert Hall. That the voice of Mr. Clutton Brock, so sincere and so disinterested, carries such a distance and reaches so many without pandering to the weakness of the mass or its passions must be a matter of legitimate satisfaction to us all. But while 'we' are gratified, 'I', that unruly partner in the human fellowship, is reduced to despair. 'I' must always think things for himself, and feel things for himself. To share them in a diluted form with the majority of well-educated and well-intentioned men and women is for him sheer agony; and while the rest of us listen intently and profit profoundly, 'I' slips off to the woods and the fields and rejoices in a single blade of grass or a solitary potato.

In the fifth volume of modern essays, it seems, we have got some way from pleasure and the art of writing. But injustice to the essayists of 1920 we must be sure that we are not praising the famous because they have been praised already and the dead because we shall never meet them wearing spats in Piccadilly. We must know what we mean when we say that they can write and give us pleasure. We must compare them; we must bring out the quality. We must point to this and say it is good because it is exact, truthful, and imaginative:

Nay, retire men cannot when they would; neither will they, when it were Reason; but are impatient of Privateness, even in age and sickness, which require the shadow: like old Townsmen: that will still be sitting at their street door, though thereby they offer Age to Scorn ‧

and to this, and say it is bad because it is loose, plausible, and commonplace:

With courteous and precise cynicism on his lips, he thought of quiet virginal chambers, of waters singing under the moon, of terraces where taintless music sobbed into the open night, of pure maternal mistresses with protecting arms and vigilant eyes, of fields slumbering in the sunlight, of leagues of ocean heaving under warm tremulous heavens, of hot ports, gorgeous and perfumed.‧

It goes on, but already we are bemused with sound and neither feel nor hear. The comparison makes us suspect that the art of writing has for backbone some fierce attachment to an idea. It is on the back of an idea, something believed in with conviction or seen with precision and thus compelling words to its shape, that the diverse company which includes Lamb and Bacon, and Mr. Beerbohm and Hudson, and Vernon Lee and Mr. Conrad, and Leslie Stephen and Butler and Walter Pater reaches the farther shore. Very various talents have helped or hindered the passage of the idea into words. Some scrape through painfully; others fly with every wind favouring. But Mr. Belloc and Mr. Lucas and Mr. Squire are not fiercely attached to anything in itself. They share the contemporary dilemma—the lack of an obstinate conviction which lifts ephemeral sounds through the misty sphere of anybody's language to the land where there is a perpetual marriage, a perpetual union. Vague as all definitions are, a good essay must have this permanent quality about it; it must draw its curtain round us, but it must be a curtain that shuts us in, not out.