This is a book of short essays which have been chosen with the full
liberty the form allows, but with the special idea of illustrating
life, manners and customs, and at intervals filling in the English
country background. The longer essays, especially those devoted to
criticism and to literature, are put aside for another volume, as
their different mode seems to require. But the development of the art
in all its congenial variety has been kept in mind from the beginning;
and any page in which the egoist has revealed a mood, or the gossip
struck on a vein of real experience, or the wise vagabond sketched a
bit of road or countryside, has been thought good enough, so long as
it helped to complete the round. And any writer has been admitted who
could add some more vivid touch or idiom to that personal half
meditative, half colloquial style which gives this kind of writing its
charm.
We have generally been content to date the beginning of the Essay in
English from Florio's translation of Montaigne. That work appeared
towards the end of Queen Elizabeth's time, in 1603, and no doubt it
had the effect of setting up the form as a recognized _genre_ in
prose. But as we go back behind Florio and Montaigne, and behind
Francis Bacon who has been called our "first essayist," we come upon
various experiments as we might call them--essays towards the essay,
attempts to work that vein, discursively pertinent and richly
reminiscent, out of which the essay was developed. Accordingly for a
beginning the line has been carried back to the earliest point where
any English prose occurs that is marked with the gossip's seal. A leaf
or two of Chaucer's prose, a garrulous piece of the craftsman's
delight in his work from Caxton, and one or two other detachable
fragments of the same kind, may help us to realize that there was a
predisposition to the essay, long before there was any conscious and
repeated use of the form itself. By continuing the record in this way
we have the advantage of being able to watch its relation to the whole
growth in the freer art of English prose. That is a connection indeed
in which all of us are interested, because however little we write,
whether for our friends only, or for the newspapers, we have to
attempt sooner or later something which is virtually an essay in
everyday English. There is no form of writing in which the fluid idiom
of the language can be seen to better effect in its changes and in its
movement. There is none in which the play of individuality, and the
personal way of looking at things, and the grace and whimsicality of
man or woman, can be so well fitted with an agreeable and responsive
instrument. When Sir Thomas Elyot in his "Castle of Health" deprecates
"cruel and yrous[1] schoolmasters by whom the wits of children be
dulled," and when Caxton tells us "that age creepeth on me daily and
feebleth all the body," and that is why he has hastened to ordain in
print the Recule of the Historeys of Troyes, and when Roger Ascham
describes the blowing of the wind and how it took the loose snow with
it and made it so slide upon the hard and crusted snow in the field
that he could see the whole nature of the wind in that act, we are
gradually made aware of a particular fashion, a talking mode (shall we
say?) of writing, as natural, almost as easy as speech itself; one
that was bound to settle itself at length, and take on a propitious
fashion of its own.
[Footnote 1: Irascible.]
But when we try to decide where it is exactly that the bounds of the
essay are to be drawn, we have to admit that so long as it obeys the
law of being explicit, casually illuminative of its theme, and germane
to the intellectual mood of its writer, then it may follow pretty much
its own devices. It may be brief as Lord Verulam sometimes made it, a
mere page or two; it may be long as Carlyle's stupendous essay on the
Niebelungenlied, which is almost a book in itself. It may be grave and
urbane in Sir William Temple's courtly style; it may be Elian as Elia,
or ripe and suave like the "Spectator" and the "Tatler." The one
clause that it cannot afford to neglect is that it be entertaining,
easy to read, pleasant to remember. It may preach, but it must never
be a sermon; it may moralize, but it must never be too forbidding; it
may be witty, high-spirited, effervescent as you like, but it must
never be flippant or betray a mean spirit or a too conscious clever
pen.
Montaigne, speaking through the mouth of Florio, touched upon a nice
point in the economy of the essay when he said that "what a man
directly knoweth, that will he dispose of without turning still to his
book or looking to his pattern. A mere bookish sufficiency is
unpleasant." The essayist, in fact, must not be over literary, and
yet, if he have the habit, like Montaigne or Charles Lamb, of
delighting in old authors and in their favourite expressions and great
phrases, so that that habit has become part of his life, then his
essays will gain in richness by an inspired pedantry. Indeed the essay
as it has gone on has not lost by being a little self-conscious of its
function and its right to insist on a fine prose usage and a choice
economy of word and phrase.
The most perfect balance of the art on its familiar side as here
represented, and after my Lord Verulam, is to be found, I suppose, in
the creation of "Sir Roger de Coverley." Goldsmith's "Man in Black"
runs him very close in that saunterer's gallery, and Elia's people are
more real to us than our own acquaintances in flesh and blood. It is
worth note, perhaps, how often the essayists had either been among
poets like Hazlitt, or written poetry like Goldsmith, or had the
advantage of both recognizing the faculty in others and using it
themselves, like Charles Lamb; and if we were to take the lyrical
temperament, as Ferdinand Brunetiere did in accounting for certain
French writers, and relate it to some personal asseveration of the
emotion of life, we might end by claiming the essayists as dilute
lyrists, engaged in pursuing a rhythm too subtle for verse and
lifelike as common-room gossip.
And just as we may say there is a lyric tongue, which the true poets
of that kind have contributed to form, so there is an essayist's style
or way with words--something between talking and writing. You realize
it when you hear Dame Prudence, who is the Mother of the English
essay, discourse on Riches; Hamlet, a born essayist, speak on acting;
T.T., a forgotten essayist of 1614, with an equal turn for homily,
write on "Painting the Face"; or the "Tatler" make good English out of
the first thing that comes to hand. It is partly a question of art,
partly of temperament; and indeed paraphrasing Steele we may say that
the success of an essay depends upon the make of the body and the
formation of the mind, of him who writes it. It needs a certain way of
turning the pen, and a certain intellectual gesture, which cannot be
acquired, and cannot really be imitated.
It remains to acknowledge the friendly aid of those living essayists
who are still maintaining the standards and have contributed to the
book. This contemporary roll includes the Right Hon. Augustine
Birrell, Mr. Hilaire Belloc, Mr. G.K. Chesterton, Mr. Austin Dobson,
Mr. Edmund Gosse, Mr. E.V. Lucas, Mrs. Meynell, Mr. Edward Thomas and
Mr. W.B. Yeats. In addition a formal acknowledgment is due to Messrs.
Chatto and Windus for leave to include an essay by Robert Louis
Stevenson; to Messrs. Longmans and Co. for an essay of Richard
Jefferies; and Messrs. Methuen and Co. for two by Mr. Lucas, and one
by Mr. Belloc. Mr. A.H. Bullen has very kindly given his free consent
in the case of "The Last of the Gleemen,"--a boon to be grateful for.
Without these later pages, the book would be like the hat of Tom
Lizard's ceremonious old gentleman, whose story, he said, would not
have been worth a farthing if the brim had been any narrower. As to
the actual omissions, they are due either to the limits of the volume,
or to the need of keeping the compass in regard to both the subjects
and the writers chosen. American essayists are left for another day;
as are those English writers, like Sir William Temple and Bolingbroke,
Macaulay and Matthew Arnold, who have given us the essay in literary
full dress.