Owing to the general laxity with which men and women use the language they inherit, in the course of years words are apt to be broadened and coarsened in their meaning. Striving against this tendency, every scrupulous writer is in danger of robbing words of a part of their birthright: through fear of letting them mean too much he makes them mean too little. Ultimately, of course, the popular meaning prevails, and we suck our fountain-pens in vain who seek to preserve a kind of verbal aristocracy; but it is a pleasant game while it lasts, and it does no one any harm.

For instance, there is this word "essay." It is used to-day loosely to mean almost any kind of prose article, especially when such articles are rescued from periodical literature and reprinted in book form. Mr. Chesterton's twisted allegories are essays, and so are Mr. Lucas's pleasant pilferings from queer books, and Mr. Shaw's dramatic criticisms. So, too, for that matter, are Earle's characters, and the Roger de Coverley papers, and Swinburne's laudations of the Elizabethan dramatists. Confronted with this embarrassing promiscuity, the critic who really wishes the word "essay" to mean something is forced to give it a purely arbitrary meaning, and this I have ventured to do in choosing a title for my lament. To say that the art of writing little articles for the newspapers and republishing them in modest volumes is decaying would be absurd; but to say that at the present time very few people are trying to write like Charles Lamb is patently true. To me, essays are such leisurely expressions of a humane and agreeable personality as we find in the works of Elia. They may criticize and rhapsodize and narrate, but the reader is always conscious of the individuality that controls the pen. A fit medium of expression for tranquil minds, they reveal with a careless generosity the mind, emotions and placid processes of thought that give them birth. The delicately-flattered reader feels that the essayist is guarding no Bluebeard's chamber of the mind. As far as the hospitable writer has himself explored it, so far are its dim corridors open to his inquiring eyes.

For of all forms of artistic expression, this is the most personal and self-revealing. It might be described as the art of expression in dressing-gown and carpet-slippers. A bad man, if there be any bad men, might endeavour to express a moment of his criminal life in a sonnet or a short story or a romance; but he would, I hope, think too highly of humanity in general to seek to reflect it in his own lost person. Yet this is the work of the essayist. "These I fear," he says with spirit, "are my meannesses, my weaknesses, my vices; but, on the other hand, I have, I think, these trivial virtues. Perhaps there are other men like me!" No bad man could write like that; he would rather believe himself unique in his villainy.

And this brings me to the quality that leads men to write essays. Being men of leisurely mind, it might naturally be presumed that they would be satisfied with dreaming, and that they would leave the drudgery of writing to men of action. But it is apparent to me that the true essayist is a man troubled with a great loneliness. He finds, doubtless, being a generous lover of his fellows, a number of acquaintances who share and even surpass his own special virtues; but he cannot discover in his personal environment those rarer beings who should also disclose his own delicate vices; and these are the men above all others with whom he wishes to come in contact. So he takes pen and paper, and, setting down his faults and his merits with a high fairness, stretches, as it were, a pair of appealing hands to his comrades in the world. This habit of analysing his own weakness gives him an introspective turn of mind. He is always lying in wait to catch himself tripping; but he would not have you ignore the other side of his character; he wishes to be fair to himself and honourable to you. He prepares a kind of balance-sheet for Judgment Day, and he is above all things anxious that it should be correct. His heart, to use a worthily hackneyed phrase, is in his work, and he appoints humanity his auditor.

Essays are written by leisurely men for leisurely readers. You cannot read Lamb as you read a romance—passionately—tearing the pages. The words flow smoothly across the printed pages, and you drift comfortably with the current, pausing here and there, as doubtless Lamb paused in the writing, to dream in some twilit backwater of thought. The nominal purpose of the voyage may be trifling; but its true purpose is as splendid as all high human endeavour. We do not really dare the great adventure in order to see Charles Lamb dreaming over the crackling of roast pork, or Mr. Max Beerbohm in rapt contemplation of his hat-box. Our autumn has its pork, and we, too, have our hat-boxes. We set out, like all great explorers, in search of ourselves, and our common sense tells us that we are most likely to get authentic news of our destination from the intellectual honesty of the essayists. Theirs is the seasoned wisdom and ripe authority of old travellers, and we realize in reading their log-books that our road does not differ greatly from theirs. Perhaps at the end of the journey we shall know that all roads are one.

I suppose that, using the word "essay" in the restricted sense I have suggested, the great essayists might easily be numbered on a baby's toes, and, as one of them still flourishes, the decay that has overtaken this form of expression may not be immediately obvious. But in the past there has always been a host of minor essayists, writers who might not achieve a great partnership between their hearts and their pens, but who did agreeable work nevertheless, and it is the absence of these minor writers of essays from the number of our modern authors that alarms me. It is true that we have our Charles Lamb, but I look in vain for our Leigh Hunt. Nor can we let ourselves be put off with some of the very able work that appears in periodicals, and has the shape and length and general outward appearance of real essays. Journalism is growing more impersonal, though by no means less egoistic, and you may search the writings even of our individual journalists, such as Mr. Chesterton and Mr. Lucas, Mr. Benson and Mr. Belloc, in vain for a decent confession of personal weaknesses. It is true they set down their petty private vices—no one who even pretends to write essays can help doing that—but they make them appear either humorously criminal, or like so many virtues in disguise, and we have seen that your true essayist is neither a sinner nor a saint, but just a common man like his readers. So while we who are ashamed of the skeletons in our waistcoat-pockets may read the writings of these gentlemen for their wit and cleverness, we will continue to turn to Lamb and Montaigne for sympathy and advice. They will bring us to the place where dreams blend with realities, and action puts on the gentle gown of thought.

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 jourmalism 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 exactly a lifetime to write and exactly a lifetime to comprehend; but, in their essence, essays—I cling to my restricted sense of the word—ignore time and even 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.

It may be said confidently that few persons write like this to-day; it may even be objected by sticklers for accuracy in titles that few persons have ever written like this, and I am willing to agree. But the essayist whom I have described is the perfect type—that ideal which less gifted men can only pursue to the brink of their graves; and while in some measure this was always the ideal of periodical writers in the past, it certainly is in no wise the ideal of the journalists of to-day. They do not wish to write sympathetically of themselves; they cannot linger with leisurely trains of thought. Breathless assurance, dogmatic knowledge, and a profusion of capital "we"s help them to sing their realization of the glories of to-day, their passionate belief in the future, their indifferent contempt for the past. These are, they tell us, days of action, and dreamers can have but short shrift in a common-sense world. Probably this is true, but I notice that the literature of action does not make its readers very comfortable. Men and women are growing weary-eyed these days, and their feet stumble like those of tired runners. Their voices are growing hoarse from shouting energetic prophecies into the deaf ears of the future, and their hands are sore from their unending task of holding the round earth in its place. They cannot dream because they will not allow themselves to sleep.

It may be morbid, but I sometimes think that I can detect a note of wistfulness in the eyes of my neighbours in life, when they let them stray from their newspapers to rest for a moment on the leaves of my book. Once I discovered a tear on the cheek of a clerk in the city, and I taxed him with this mark of treachery to the life of action; but he assured me that his sorrow was due to the low price of Consols. It may have been; I do not know. But one of these days our journalists will have to stop to take breath, and in the universal holiday perhaps some of their readers will have time to write essays.