The Good of Them.
It is our misfortune that of good essayists there should be but few. Men
there have been who have done the essayist's part so well as to have
earned an immortality in the doing; but we have had not many of them, and
they make but a poor figure on our shelves. It is a pity that things
should be thus with us, for a good essayist is the pleasantest companion
imaginable. There are folk in plenty who have never read Montaigne at
all; but there are few indeed who have read but a page of him, and that
page but once. And the same may be said of Addison and Fielding, of Lamb
and Hazlitt, of Sterne and Bacon and Ben Jonson, and all the members of
their goodly fellowship. To sit down with any one of them is to sit down
in the company of one of the 'mighty wits, our elders and our betters,'
who have done much to make literature a good thing, having written books
that are eternally readable. If of all them that have tried to write
essays and succeeded after a fashion a twentieth part so much could be
said the world would have a conversational literature of inexhaustible
interest. But indeed there is nothing of the sort. Beside the 'rare and
radiant' masters of the art there are the apprentices, and these are many
and dull.
Generalities.
Essayists, like poets, are born and not made, and for one worth
remembering the world is confronted with a hundred not worth reading.
Your true essayist is in a literary sense the friend of everybody. As
one of the brotherhood has phrased it, it is his function 'to speak with
ease and opportunity to all men.' He must be personal, or his hearers
can feel no manner of interest in him. He must be candid and sincere, or
his readers presently see through him. He must have learned to think for
himself and to consider his surroundings with an eye that is both kindly
and observant, or they straightway find his company unprofitable. He
should have fancy, or his starveling propositions will perish for lack of
metaphor and the tropes and figures needed to vitalise a truism. He does
well to have humour, for humour makes men brothers, and is perhaps more
influential in an essay than in most places else. He will find a little
wit both serviceable to himself and comfortable to his readers. For
wisdom, it is not absolutely necessary that he have it, but in its way it
is as good a property as any: used with judgment, indeed, it does more to
keep an essay sweet and fresh than almost any other quality. And in
default of wisdom--which, to be sure, it is not given to every man, much
less to every essayist, to entertain--he need have no scruples about
using whatever common sense is his; for common sense is a highly
respectable commodity, and never fails of a wide and eager circle of
buyers. A knowledge of men and of books is also to be desired; for it is
a writer's best reason of being, and without it he does well to hold his
tongue. Blessed with these attributes he is an essayist to some purpose.
Give him leisure and occasion, and his discourse may well become as
popular as Montaigne's own.
In Particular.
For the British essayists, they are more talked about than known. It is
to be suspected that from the first their reputation has greatly exceeded
their popularity; and of late years, in spite of the declamation of
Macaulay and the very literary enthusiasm of the artist of _Esmond_ and
_The Virginians_, they have fallen further into the background, and are
less than ever studied with regard. In theory the age of Anne is still
the Augustan age to us; but in theory only, and only to a certain extent.
What attracts us is its outside. We are in love with its houses and its
china and its costumes. We are not enamoured of it as it was but as it
seems to Mr. Caldecott and Mr. Dobson and Miss Kate Greenaway. We care
little for its comedy and nothing at all for its tragedy. Its verse is
all that our own is not, and the same may be said of its prose and
ours--of the prose of Mr. Swinburne and Mr. George Meredith and the prose
of Addison and Swift. Mr. Gladstone is not a bit like Bolingbroke, and
between _The Times_ and _The Tatler_, between _The Spectator_ (Mr.
Addison's), and _The Fortnightly Review_, there is a difference of close
upon two centuries and of a dozen revolutions--political, social,
scientific, and aesthetic. We may babble as we please about the
'sweetness' of Steele and the 'humour' of Sir Roger de Coverley, but in
our hearts we care for them a great deal less than we ought, and in fact
Mr. Mudie's subscribers do not hesitate to prefer the 'sweetness' of Mr.
Black and the 'humour' of Mr. James Payn. Our love is not for the
essentials of the time but only its accidents and oddities; and we
express it in pictures and poems and fantasies in architecture, and the
canonisation (in figures) of Chippendale and Sheraton. But it is
questionable if we might not with advantage increase our interest, and
carry imitation a little deeper. The Essayists, for instance, are often
dull, but they write like scholars and gentlemen. They refrain from
personalities; they let scandal alone, nor ever condescend to
eavesdropping; they never go out of their way in search of affectation or
prurience or melancholy, but are content to be merely wise and cheerful
and humane. Above all, they do their work as well as they can. They
seem to write not for bread nor for a place in society but for the
pleasure of writing, and of writing well. In these hysterical times life
is so full, so much is asked and so much has to be given, that tranquil
writing and careful workmanship are impossible. A certain poet has
bewailed the change in a charming rondeau:--
'More swiftly now the hours take flight!
What's read at morn is dead at night;
Scant space have we for art's delays,
Whose breathless thought so briefly stays,
We may not work--ah! would we might,
With slower pen!'
It must be owned that his melancholy is anything but groundless. The
trick of amenity and good breeding is lost; the graces of an excellence
that is unobtrusive are graces no more. We write as men paint for the
exhibitions: with the consciousness that we must pass without notice if
we do not exceed in colour and subject and tone. The need exists, and
the world bows to it. Mr. Austin Dobson's little sheaf of _Eighteenth
Century Essays_ might be regarded as a protest against the necessity and
the submission. It proves that 'tis possible to be eloquent without
adjectives and elegant without affectation; that to be brilliant you need
not necessarily be extravagant and conceited; that without being maudlin
and sentimental it is not beyond mortal capacity to be pathetic; and that
once upon a time a writer could prove himself a humourist without feeling
it incumbent upon him to be also a jack-pudding.