_WHAT CONSTITUTES A GOOD ESSAY?_
Prose has a bad name. We think of it and speak of it as including
everything in language that is _not_ poetry. In former times art
in literature meant poetry,--or, at a stretch, it included in addition
only oratory.
The beginning of art in the use of _unmeasured_ language (if we
may use that term to designate language that does not have the metrical
form) was undoubtedly oratory,--the impassioned appeal of a speaker to
his fellow men. The language was rhythmical, but not measured, that
is, not susceptible of division into lines, corresponding to bars of
music; and the element of beauty was distinctly subordinate to the
elements of nobility and truth. In modern times poetry has come to be
more and more the mere aggregation of images of beauty, without much
reference to the intellectual, and still less to the ethical; and prose
has been the recognized medium for the intellectual and the moral.
Of course, modern times have not given us any oratory superior to
that of Demosthenes and Cicero; nor any plain statement of historical
fact superior to that of Herodotus, Thucydides, or Tacitus. But art
in conversational prose, reduced to writing and made literature,
may fairly be said to date from the essayists of Queen Anne’s
time--Addison, Swift, Goldsmith, and their fellows; and it was brought
to perfection by Lamb, De Quincey, Macaulay, Thackeray, Irving, and
others of their day.
In most of this prose we find a new element--humour. The original,
characteristic, typical essay is whimsical, sympathetic, kindly,
amusing, suggestive, and close to reality. The impassioned appeal of
oratory has been adapted to the requirements of reading prose by such
writers as De Quincey and Macaulay; but the humorous essay has been by
far the more popular.
And what is humour? It would be hard to say that it is either beauty,
nobility, or truth. The fact is poetry, with its lofty atmosphere,
rarefied, artificial, and emotional, is in danger of becoming morbid,
unhealthy, and impractical. Humour is the sanitary sea salt that
purifies and saves. No one with a sense of humour can get very far
away from elemental and obvious facts. Humour is the corrective,
the freshener, the health-giver. Its danger is the trivial, the
commonplace, and the inconsequent.
The primary object of prose is to represent the truth, but in so far
as prose is true literature, it must make its appeal to the emotions.
The humorous essay must make us feel healthier and more sprightly,
the impassioned oratorical picture must fire us with desires and
inspire us with courage of a practical and specific kind. Mere
logical demonstration, or argumentative appeal, are not in themselves
literature because their appeal is not emotional, and so not a part
of the vibrating electric fluid of humanity; and beauty plays the
subordinate part of furnishing suggestive and illustrative images for
the illumination of what is called “the style.”
Gradually prose has absorbed all the powers and useful qualities of
poetry not inconsistent with its practical and unartificial character.
So the characteristics of a good prose style are in many respects not
unlike the characteristics of a good poetic style.
First, good prose should be rhythmical and musical, though never
measured. As prose is never to be sung, the artificial characteristics
of music should never be present in any degree; but as poetry in its
more highly developed forms has lost its qualities of simple melody
and attained characteristics of a more beautiful harmony, so prose,
starting with mere absence of roughness and harshness of sound,
gradually has attained to something very near akin to the musical
harmony of the more refined poetry. Almost the only difference lies
in the presence or absence of measure; but this forms a clear dividing
line between poetry (reaching down from above) and prose (rising up
from below).
Second, the more suggestive prose is, the better it is. It is true
that images should not be used merely for their own sake, as they may
be in poetry; but their possibilities in the way of illustration and
illumination is infinite, and it is this office that they perform in
the highest forms of poetry. To paraphrase Browning, it enables the
genius to express “thoughts hardly to be packed into a narrow” word.
And so that whole side of life that cannot possibly be expressed in
the definite formulæ of science finds its body and incarnation in
literature.
Third, good prose will never be very far from easily perceived facts
and realities of life. The saving salt of humour will prevent wandering
very far; and this same humour will make reading easier, and will
induce that relaxation of labour-strained faculties which alone permits
the exercise and enjoyment of our higher powers. We shall never get
into heaven if we are forever working, and humour causes us to cease
work and lie free and open for the inspiration from above.
It would be hard to find either nobility, truth, or beauty as
distinguishing characteristics in the following letter of Charles
Lamb’s; but it is certain that it is admirable prose. If it does not
give us that which we seek, it most certainly puts us into the mood in
which we are most likely to find it in other and loftier writers:
“March 9, 1822.
“Dear Coleridge--It gives me great satisfaction to hear that the pig
turned out so well: they are interesting creatures at a certain age.
What a pity that such buds should blow out into the maturity of rank
bacon! You had all some of the crackling and brain sauce. Did you
remember to rub it with butter, and gently dredge it a little, just
before the crisis? Did the eyes come away kindly, with no Œdipean
avulsion? Was the crackling the colour of ripe pomegranate? Had you no
complement of boiled neck of mutton before it, to blunt the edge of
delicate desire. Did you flesh maiden teeth in it?
“Not that I sent the pig, or can form the remotest guess what part Owen
could play in the business. I never knew him give anything away in his
life. He would not begin with strangers. I suspect the pig after all
was meant for me; but at the unlucky juncture of time being absent,
the present somehow went round to Highgate. To confess an honest
truth, a pig is one of those things I could never think of sending
away. Teal, widgeons, snipes, barn-door fowls, ducks, geese--your tame
villatic things--Welsh mutton, collars of brawn, sturgeon, fresh or
pickled; your potted char, Swiss cheeses, French pies, early grapes,
muscadines, I impart as freely unto my friends as to myself. They are
but self-extended; but pardon me if I stop somewhere. Where the fine
feeling of benevolence giveth a higher smack than the sensual rarity,
there my friends (or any good man) may command me; but pigs are pigs,
and I myself therein am nearest to myself. Nay, I should think it an
affront, an undervaluing done to Nature who bestowed such a boon upon
me, if in a churlish mood I parted with the precious gift. One of the
bitterest pangs of remorse I ever felt was when a child--when my kind
old aunt had strained her pocket-strings to bestow a sixpenny whole
plum-cake upon me. In my way home through the Borough I met a venerable
old man, not a mendicant, but thereabouts; a look-beggar, not a verbal
petitionist; and in the coxcombry of taught charity, I gave away the
cake to him. I walked on a little in all the pride of an Evangelical
peacock, when of a sudden my old aunt’s kindness crossed me; the sum it
was to her; the pleasure that she had a right to expect that I--not the
old impostor--should take in eating her cake--the ingratitude by which,
under the colour of a Christian virtue, I had frustrated her cherished
purpose. I sobbed, wept, and took it to heart so grievously, that I
think I never suffered the like; and I was right. It was a piece of
unfeeling hypocrisy, and it proved a lesson to me ever after. The cake
has long been masticated, consigned to the dunghill with the ashes of
that unseasonable pauper.
“But when Providence, who is better to us all than our aunts, gives me
a pig, remembering my temptation and my fall, I shall endeavour to act
towards it more in the spirit of the donor’s purpose.
“Yours (short of pig) to command in everything,
C. L.”
When we have finished reading this, we wonder if we have not mistaken
our standards of life; if the senses are not as truly divine as our
dreams, and certainly far more within the reach of our realization.
We think, we feel happy, we are certainly no worse. Whatever strange
thing this humour may have done to us, we are more truly _men_ for
having experienced it.
And it is this that prose can do that poetry, even of the best, can
never accomplish.