THE READING OF ESSAYS
All literature consists of the written opinions and ideas, the
knowledge and experience, of individuals; it is a chorus of human
voices. Often the individuality of the creative artist is lost in the
magnitude of the work. It is present, necessarily, in every line, but
in the highest forms of literature, epic and dramatic poetry, the
personal lineaments are dissolved. Shakespeare, sincerest of poets, did
not in his dramas reveal his heart or directly utter a single belief
that we can feel sure was the private conviction of the author, and
the attempts to associate lines from Shakespeare with the personal
experiences of the actor of Stratford are invariably grotesque. Homer,
who, according to Mr. Kipling, “smote his bloomin’ lyre” and “winked
back” at us, was no such living man; it is likely that even if there
was a Homer, a poet who made the nucleus of “Iliad,” many hands during
several centuries produced the Greek epics, “The Iliad” and “The
Odyssey,” as we have them. Although Dante writes in the first person,
his adventures in worlds beyond the earth are those of a disembodied
spirit, a universal soul seeing visions in regions where he must put
off something of his personality before he can enter. In the places
where his prejudices and local enmities creep into his immense epic
of the heavens, his work is least poetic; it is precipitated from the
ideal to a kind of ghostly guide book, and the voices of the angels and
the winds of the under world for the moment become still.
The novelist at his best disappears from his work. There is no greater
shock than when at the end of “The Newcomes,” Thackeray abruptly
wrenches us from the deathbed of Colonel Newcome and says that he, W.
M. Thackeray, has just written a story and that it is now fading away
into Fableland. A device of printing would save us from the shock;
the epilogue ought to begin on a new page, and a large “Finis” should
follow Colonel Newcome’s death. The person who makes a work of art has
the privilege of talking about himself in a preface; after that he must
stand back and let the stage fill with characters.
Even in great art, however, we do feel the presence of a man and we are
willing to let him step in front of his stage sometimes and talk in his
own person. The best English novelists, Fielding, Thackeray, George
Eliot, Meredith, are essayists for pages at a time, and most of us do
not resent their intrusion. We like writers who use the capital I.
So we take peculiar delight in that kind of literature which is
avowedly a talk, a monologue in which an author discourses, not through
poetic forms, or through fiction in which other characters are the
speakers, but directly to us as in a private letter or a spoken
lecture. This kind of discourse is called an essay. The man who talks
may pretend to be something that he is not, and the essayist is often a
writer of fiction portraying only one character. Such was Lamb when he
pretended to be Elia; such was Swift in many of his pamphlets; such was
the “_Spectator_,” a multiple personality whose wig Addison and Steele
and their friends could put on at will.
Whether it is a real or a fictitious person who addresses us through
the essay, the form of the essay is the same, a direct communication
from a “me” to a “you.”
The essay may have for its subject anything under the sun. It may be
a short biography with critical comment, as in Macaulay’s essays on
Addison, on Chatham, on Clive, and Carlyle’s essays on Burns and Scott.
Other essays by Macaulay and Carlyle are on a framework of historical
narrative. Oliver Wendell Holmes invented an essay form all his own in
“The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table,” in which the opinions of the
autocrat are linked together by a pleasant boarding-house romance. And
he achieved an unusual triumph when he continued the form in other
books, “The Poet at the Breakfast Table” and “The Professor at the
Breakfast Table,” and did not suffer the disaster that usually befalls
a writer’s effort to repeat a success.
Most of the written philosophy of the modern world is in the form of
essays. In Emerson we have philosophy in short eloquent discourses,
many of them like sermons. Political arguments and orations, if they
have literary quality, like those of Burke and Webster, properly come
under the head of essay. And almost all of the important body of
literature called criticism is in essay form.
To say that every kind of writing seems to be essay which is not
something else is, like some other Hibernian statements, a short way of
expressing the truth. To be an artistic essay, to be really worthy the
name, a composition must have in it a living personality. Personality
is the soul of the essay. We do not admit under the term, essay, broad
as it is, the discourse which has only utility to recommend it. An
article on “How Our Presidents are Elected” may be instructive, it may
be more necessary to the education of the young citizen than Leigh
Hunt’s chat about stage-coaches. But Hunt’s chat is an essay: the other
is not. A present-day indication of the difference between the essay
and the unliterary form of exposition is the habit of our magazines of
classifying all prose pieces that tell us “how” and “what” as “special
articles,” whereas “essays”--the editors do not print essays if they
can help it! If a modern writer has an idea that would make an essay
he is tempted to disguise it under some more acceptable shape. But the
editors would retort--and with justice--that they would gladly print
essays if they could get good ones.
There is something frank and immediate in the appeal of an essay;
the writer of it must be able to talk continuously well; he has
no surprises of plot to fall back on to wake the interest of an
inattentive auditor; he stands before us on a bare platform with no
stage lights or scenery to help him. When he succeeds, his reward is
a kind of personal victory, he finds not only readers but friends.
This is especially true of those essayists who discourse of “things
in general,” the true essayists, Charles Lamb, William Hazlitt, Leigh
Hunt, Montaigne, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Robert Louis Stevenson, Oliver
Goldsmith. The true essayist, like the Walrus in “Alice in Wonderland,”
advises us that the time has come
To talk of many things:
Of shoes--and ships--and sealing wax--
Of cabbages--and kings--
And why the sea is burning hot--
And whether pigs have wings.
And he proceeds, subject to no obligation in the world except the great
obligation never to be dull. The obligation upon the essayist not to
be dull imposes a peculiar obligation upon the reader that he shall be
keen-witted. A stupid person may be stirred to attention by a novel or
a play, but no stupid person can enjoy an essay. Indeed a taste for
essays is a pretty sure sign of a reader who appreciates the literary
spirit in itself.
Just as the essay form is a kind of test of appreciation, so certain
writers are touchstones by which the taste of the reader may be judged.
One such touchstone is Charles Lamb, the prince of English essayists.
Whoever likes Lamb with unfeigned enthusiasm has passed the frontier
of reading and is at home in the universe of books. The reader who
hopes to care for the best in Lamb will not do well, I think, to begin
with the most familiar of his essays “A Dissertation on Roast Pig”;
certainly he will not stop with that, for it has not Elia’s finest
smile nor even his jolliest fooling. And of course it has not his
wisdom and pathos. The young reader can in an hour read a half dozen of
Lamb’s essays, “Old China,” “The Superannuated Man,” “Dream Children,”
“Imperfect Sympathies,” “The Sanity of True Genius” and “A Chapter
on Ears,” and get a taste of his sweet variety. Lamb is one of the
easiest of writers to read entire. His attempts at fiction and even his
verse may be disregarded. The true Lamb, the Lamb of the essays and
the letters, which are as good as essays, can be contained in a couple
of volumes of moderate size. The essays of Elia are printed in many
cheap editions; I have seen a book seller’s counter stacked high with
copies at twenty-five cents. As late as 1864, the editor of the first
complete edition of Lamb thought that the public at large knew him but
little, though his fame and popularity had increased since his death. I
believe that since 1864 his popularity has increased still more--those
twenty-five cent editions seem to show that in his own phrase, he has
become “endenizened” in the heart of the English-speaking nations.
Perhaps the beginner will be a little perplexed at first by the
obscurity of Lamb’s allusions to literature, for though he says that
he could “read almost anything,” he has a special liking for the
quaint, and half the books that he mentions will be unfamiliar to the
modern reader. But any book that pleased him will be worth looking at,
and there is so much of common humanity in him that one can pass over
his obscure references and still understand and enjoy him. So that if I
recommend as the best possible short guide to literature his “Detached
Thoughts on Books and Reading,” I do not forget that the beginner will
not recognize all the book titles and authors that Lamb touches with
affectionate familiarity. Yet the thoughts are clear enough and have
more of the true spirit of reading packed into them than is to be found
in many a thick volume of literary criticism. The essays that touch the
heart of the simplest reader, such as “Dream Children,” may be read
first, and they will lead to the literary essays, which are the best of
all criticisms in the English language. Knowledge of Lamb is knowledge
of literature. He opens the way not only to the choicest old books, but
to the finest of his contemporaries. No man knew better than he the
value of those friends of his whom we have set high in literature; he
measured their altitude while they were swinging into place among the
poetic stars.
As the chief master of literary ceremonies of his time, Lamb will be
found at his best not only in his essays but in his letters. His essays
have the informality of letters, and his letters have much of the
choiceness of phrase, the original turn of thought that distinguish
his essays. In his friendly letters you can meet almost everybody worth
knowing in that great period of English literature. Lamb is among the
fine few whose correspondence is a work of literary art.
The literature of private letters stands somewhere between essays
and biography and partakes of the interest of both. The good letter
writer is as rare in printed books as in the mail bags that are now
hurrying over the world; and the delight of reading good printed
letters by a distinguished man is somewhat like the delight of reading
a well-written letter from a friend. To be sure, a book of letters is
not a masterwork of art, but it often brings pleasure when the reader
is not just in mood for the artistic masterpiece, for the great poem or
novel. I can recommend for a place in a library even of very limited
dimensions such a collection of letters as Mr. E. V. Lucas’s “The
Gentlest Art,” or Scoones’s “English Letters.”
It is said that the modern modes of communication, the telegraph, the
telephone, the unpardonable post card, have caused or accompanied a
decline in the art of letter writing. But the mail of the day has not
yet been sorted; there may be great letter writers even now sending to
their friends epistles that we shall some day wish to read in print.
It hardly seems as if the world could be growing so unfriendly that it
will let polite correspondence go the way of some other old-fashioned
graces. Certainly the young man and the young woman can do nothing
better for the pleasure of friends and family, and nothing better for
their own self-cultivation, than to develop the habit of careful and
courteous letter writing. Better than most school courses in literature
and composition would be the daily practice of writing to some brother,
sister or friend. One of the most remarkable young writers of the
present day owes much of her purity of style, much of her education, to
the practice of writing--no, of _rewriting_ letters to her many friends.
Our friendly letters need not be stiff compositions written with the
nose to the paper and the tongue squeezed painfully between the lips.
But they should be written with care. A rewritten letter need not be an
artificial thing. Why should we not take pains in phrasing a message to
a friend? Neither sincerity nor “naturalness” enjoins us to send off
the first blotted drafts of our communications, any more than freedom
and “naturalness” oblige us to go out in public hastily dressed. Candor
and spontaneity do not suffer from a care for our phrases and some
thought in grooming our style.
If the courtly letter and the well-bred essay are not the
characteristic literary form of our generation, we have some writers of
satire and of literary and political opinions who deserve to be ranked
among the essayists. Mr. F. P. Dunne would have been a pamphleteer in
Swift’s time, a writer of the chatty essay in the days of Lamb and
Hunt. Since he was born to bless our time, he finds a wider audience
by putting his wit and wisdom, his Celtic blend of irony and humanity,
into the mouth of “Mr. Dooley.” Another essayist of great power,
though he is probably not called an “essayist” in the encyclopedias,
is Mark Twain. He promises us an interminable Autobiography, some
parts of which have been published. It is to be different from all
other autobiographies, for the principle of its construction is that
it is to have no order; he will talk about anything that happens to
interest him, talk about it until he is tired of it and then talk about
something else. This unprincipled willfulness of order and subject
is the essayist’s special privilege. No man since Elia has succeeded
better than Mark Twain in keeping up the interest of discursive
monologue about things in general. Our public does not yet know how
great a writer is this master of the American joke, and there are
critics who will cry out that the mention of Mark Twain and Charles
Lamb in the same breath is a violation of good sense. Yet Charles
Lamb’s “Autobiography” is, except in its brevity, as like to the
fragments of Mark Twain as the work of two men can be.
“Below the middle stature,” says Elia of himself, “cast of face
slightly Jewish, with no Judaic tinge in his complexional religion;
stammers abominably, and is therefore more apt to discharge his
occasional conversation in a quaint aphorism, or a poor quibble, than
in set and edifying speeches; has consequently been libeled as a person
always aiming at wit; which, as he told a dull fellow that charged
him with it, is at least as good as aiming at dullness. A small eater,
but not drinker; confesses a partiality for the production of the
juniper berry; was a fierce smoker of tobacco, but may be resembled to
a volcano burnt out, emitting only now and then an occasional puff....
He died ----, 18--, much lamented.” The footnote to the last sentence
reads: “To anybody.--Please to fill up these blanks.” That is about as
near to Mark Twain’s manner of fooling as anything in literature. All
the genial essayists are given to jest and quibble and folly. And when
you come upon a writer whose fantastic whimsies and nonsensical abandon
are charming, be sure to turn the page, for you will invariably find
wisdom and pathos and greatness of heart.
In one class of essay Mark Twain is past master, the essay of travel.
In “A Tramp Abroad” and “Following the Equator,” not to speak of that
satire on foolish American tourists, “Innocents Abroad,” we have not
only some of the best of Mark Twain’s writing, but examples of a kind
of essay in which very few authors have succeeded. The traveler who
can see things with his own eye and make the reader see them, with a
tramp’s independence of what guide books, geographies, and histories
say, is the rarest of companions. A good essay in travel looks easy
when it is done, but is very seldom met with because the independent
eye is so seldom placed in a human head. Moreover, until recent times
of cheap transit, most men of letters have been obliged to stay at
home and make literature of domestic materials or what the great world
sent them in books. Though literature of travel is very old, going back
to the time when the first educated man visited a neighboring tribe
and lived to return home and tell the tale, yet the personal essay of
travel is, in its abundance, the product of the nineteenth century,
when authors ceased to be poor and could circumnavigate the globe.
The English historian, Kinglake, is remembered not for his “Crimean
War” but for his “Eothen,” published in 1844. It was so strange and
fresh a book of travel that several London publishers rejected it. An
account of a journey in the East that omitted information about many
great landmarks of Palestine and had not a word of statistics--how
could a publisher recommend it to the British people? One secret of the
book is that Kinglake, having tried to write his travels in various
forms and having failed, hit on the plan of addressing his account to a
friend, and the feeling of freedom which this gave him prevented him,
he says, “from robing my thoughts in the grave and decorous style which
I should have maintained if I had professed to lecture to the public.
Whilst I feigned to myself that you, and only you, were listening,
I could not by any possibility speak very solemnly. Heaven forbid
that I should talk to my genial friend as though he were a great and
enlightened Community, or any other respectable Aggregate.” Thus it
came about that Kinglake, aiming at one friend, reached the community,
the “Aggregate,” and found in it a host of friends.
In the same year that saw the publication of “Eothen,” Thackeray began
his “Journey from Cornhill to Cairo,” another book of travel that
stands like a green tree in a world of guide posts. Among American
writers, besides Mark Twain, who have made delightful books of their
journeys abroad, are Aldrich, Howells, and Charles Dudley Warner.
These touring essayists are usually more interested in living people
than in monuments of the dead; and they take more pleasure in their
own opinions and experiences than in encyclopedic facts. They are good
traveling companions because they are stored with wisdom and sympathy
before they set sail, and in the presence of strange sights and scenes
they give play to their fancy. So they are akin not so much to the
professional traveler, the geographer and student of social conditions,
as to the essayist who is good company at home.
That is what the essayist must be, above all other writers--unfailing
good company. He may be philosopher, historian, or critic, but if he
is to be numbered among the choice company of essayists, his pages
must be lighted by the glow of friendliness, enlivened by the voice
of comradeship. Sometimes this friendliness takes terribly unfriendly
forms, as in the stinging irony of Swift or the hot thunder and
lightning of Carlyle; these preachers seem not to love their audience,
but at heart they have sympathy even for us whom they browbeat, and it
is not we, but the heavy thoughts with which their souls are burdened,
that have banished the smile from their faces.
LIST OF ESSAYS
_Supplementary to Chapter VIII_
JOSEPH ADDISON (1672-1719). _Selections from the Spectator._
Edited by Thomas Arnold in the _Clarendon Press Series_. There are many
school editions of the De Coverley papers. A sense of unity rather
than of excellence has singled out the De Coverley papers for school
reading and has made them, consequently, the best known of Addison’s
(and Steele’s) work. But only about a third of the De Coverley papers
are among the fifty best essays from the _Spectator_. Owing to the
weight of eighteenth-century tradition, under which criticism is still
laboring, Addison’s reputation is greater among professional writers
about literature than many modern readers, coming with fresh mind to
the _Spectator_, can quite sincerely feel is justified. Only the mature
reader who has some historical understanding of Addison’s time can
appreciate his cool wit and somewhat pallid humor, and feel how nearly
perfect is the adaptation of his style to his purpose and his limited
thoughts.
MATTHEW ARNOLD (1822-88). _Essays in Criticism._ _Culture and Anarchy._
Arnold’s essays on books and writers are among the very best, for he
combines deep knowledge of literature with the charm of the true
essayist. His essays on “Culture,” like many of the literary sermons
of Carlyle and Ruskin, propound with great earnestness what every
well-bred person takes more or less for granted. But one reason we
take the need of culture for granted, one reason that such sermons are
becoming obsolete, is because Carlyle and Ruskin and Arnold made their
ideas, through their writings and the hosts of writers they influenced,
part of the common current thought of our time.
FRANCIS BACON (1561-1626). _Essays._ _Wisdom of the Ancients._ _The
Advancement of Learning._
There are many inexpensive editions of the “Essays,” and good texts of
Bacon’s other work in English prose have been prepared for students.
Owing to their brevity the “Essays” are the best known of Bacon’s prose
work. But compared with the longer works of Bacon, they are scarcely
more than _tours de force_, experiments in epigrammatic condensation.
Not the young reader, but the mature reader who would know the
Elizabethan age, its noblest thinker and the most eloquent prose
contemporary with the King James Bible, will wish to read Bacon’s life
and works in Spedding’s edition.
THOMAS BROWNE (1605-82). _Religio Medici._ _Urn Burial._ _Enquiries
into Vulgar Errors._
The three or four small books of this very great essayist are to be
found in a volume of the _Golden Treasury Series_, and also in the
fine little Dent edition.
EDMUND BURKE (1729-97). _Speech on American Taxation._ _Speech on
Conciliation with America._ _Letter to the Sheriffs of Bristol._
A good edition of Burke’s principal speeches is that edited by F. G.
Selby and published by Macmillan. The prescriptions of the schools
have made the “Speech on Conciliation” familiar as a difficult thing
to analyze rather than as a magnificent essay (for essay it is, though
delivered as a speech). Burke’s other philosophic and political essays
are among the great prose of his century and should be sought both by
the student of history and by the reader of literature.
JOHN BURROUGHS. _Birds and Poets._ _Locusts and Wild Honey._
_Wake-Robin._
After Thoreau Mr. Burroughs is the most distinguished of modern writers
on nature and out-of-door life.
THOMAS CARLYLE (1795-1881). _Sartor Resartus._ _Heroes and
Hero-Worship._ _Past and Present._ _Critical and Miscellaneous Essays._
“Heroes and Hero-Worship” is, for the beginner, the best, because the
clearest, of Carlyle’s work. Carlyle’s opinions become of less and
less consequence as time passes, and he remains great by virtue of the
superbly eloquent passages in which the poet overcomes the preacher. He
is an illustrious example of the fact that nothing passes so rapidly
as the beliefs of a day which a preacher hurls at the world about
him--and at posterity,--and also of the fact that eloquence and beauty
survive the original burning question which gave them life and which
later generations are interested in only from a biographic and historic
point of view. The essay carries in it the journalistic bacteria that
make for its speedy dissolution, but the poetic thought, whatever the
occasion of its utterance, outlives circumstance and changes of ideas
and taste.
CICERO. _Letters and Orations._
In English, in _Everyman’s Library_.
SAMUEL MCCHORD CROTHERS. _The Gentle Reader._
The most charming and humorously wise of living American essayists.
SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE (1772-1834). _Biographia Literaria._ _Lectures
on Shakespeare._
Both in _Bohn’s Library_ and in _Everyman’s Library_. Coleridge’s
detached opinions on books are golden fragments of criticism. His
“Lectures on Shakespeare” are, for a reader with imagination, the most
inspiring notes on Shakespeare that we have, though the many and patent
inaccuracies make his comments distasteful to modern scholars, who
prefer to commit their own inaccuracies.
WILLIAM COWPER (1731-1800). _Letters._
In the _Golden Treasury Series_.
DANIEL DEFOE (1661-1731). _Essay on Projects._ _The Shortest Way with
the Dissenters._
Defoe was a journalist and pamphleteer who lacked the charm of the true
essayist, but whose prose in essay form is worth reading for its vigor
and variety of idea.
THOMAS DE QUINCEY (1785-1859). _Selections._
In one volume, published by Houghton, Mifflin & Co. “The Confessions
of an English Opium-Eater” is in _Everyman’s Library_, and also the
“Reminiscences of the Lake Poets.” De Quincey’s beautiful poetic prose
is unlike anything before or since. The “Opium-Eater” belongs perhaps
under “Biography,” but may stand here. Its somewhat sensational subject
has secured for it, fortunately, a wide reading and so kept De Quincey
from passing into the shadowy company of distinguished writers known
only to the few. His essays fill many volumes. Those in the inexpensive
volume in the _Camelot Series_, published by Walter Scott, include some
of the best and should be read, perhaps, before the “Opium-Eater.”
JOHN DRYDEN (1631-1700).
There are collections of Dryden’s prose, but the best way to become
acquainted with “the father of modern English prose” is to run through
his complete works and read the remarkable prefaces to his plays and
poems. In them English criticism, for all the merit of some essays
earlier in the seventeenth century, really begins.
[Illustration: EMERSON]
FINLEY PETER DUNNE. _Mr. Dooley in Peace and War._ _Mr. Dooley in the
Hearts of His Countrymen._ _Mr. Dooley’s Philosophy._
RALPH WALDO EMERSON (1803-82). _Essays._ _Representative Men._ _The
Conduct of Life._ _Society and Solitude._
Emerson’s essays, including “The American Scholar” (which is as fresh
and pertinent to our time as if written yesterday), have been printed
in inexpensive editions by Houghton, Mifflin & Co. The volumes named
above should be owned in American households. More than Carlyle or
Ruskin or any other of the preaching essayists of the nineteenth
century, Emerson emerges as the prophetic, visionary spirit who seized
and phrased the best moral and spiritual ideas that his time had to
offer to future times.
JOHN FLORIO (1550-1625). _Translation of Montaigne’s Essays._
There are several handy editions, notably the pocket edition, published
by Dent, of this famous translation whereby Montaigne became an English
classic.
OLIVER GOLDSMITH (1728-74). _The Citizen of the World._
Among the lighter satirical essays of the eighteenth century “The
Citizen of the World” is second only to the _Spectator_, if not equal
to it.
WILLIAM HAZLITT (1778-1830). _Essays._
A good selection appears in the _Camelot Series_. “Though we are mighty
fine fellows nowadays,” says Stevenson, “we cannot write like Hazlitt.”
(See Hazlitt’s “English Comic Writers” and “Lectures on the English
Poets” for his studies of Shakespeare).
LAFCADIO HEARN. _Glimpses of Unfamiliar Japan._ _Kokoro: Hints and
Echoes of Japanese Inner Life._
OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES (1809-94). _Autocrat of the Breakfast Table._
_Professor at the Breakfast Table._ _Poet at the Breakfast Table._
In _Everyman’s Library_ and in inexpensive editions, published by
Houghton, Mifflin & Co. A wise, witty, beautifully lucid mind. Holmes
snatched philosophy from the library and brought it to the breakfast
table so that the poorest boarder goes to his day’s work from the
company of an immortal who has met him halfway and talked to him
without condescension.
JAMES HENRY LEIGH HUNT (1784-1859). _Essays._
One volume of selections in the _Camelot Series_. Also in two volumes
with his poems in the _Temple Classics_ (Dent & Co.). Young readers who
will look at Hunt’s essay “On Getting Up on Cold Mornings” will not
need to be urged further into his delightful society.
RICHARD JEFFERIES (1848-87). _An English Village._ _Field and
Hedgerow._ _The Open Air._ _The Story of My Heart._
SAMUEL JOHNSON (1709-84). _Lives of the Poets._
Students of literature will wish to read one or two of Johnson’s
criticisms. He was a much greater man than writer, better as a talker
and letter writer than as an essayist. A good selection from the “Lives
of the Poets” is edited by Matthew Arnold.
CHARLES LAMB (1775-1834). _Essays of Elia._
See pages 183-6 of this Guide.
ABRAHAM LINCOLN (1809-65). _Letters and Speeches._
To be found in the complete works, edited by Nicolay and Hay, and in
several small volumes of selections; the volume in _Everyman’s Library_
has an introduction by James Bryce.
JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL (1819-91). _Among My Books._ _My Study Windows._
_Democracy and Other Addresses._ _Political Essays._ _Letters._
The foremost American critic. Interest in the bookish and literary side
of Lowell should not lead us to overlook his ringing political essays,
notably that on Lincoln, written during the war and remarkable as
having phrased at the moment the judgment of the next generation.
THOMAS BABINGTON MACAULAY (1800-59). _Essays._
There are many editions of the more familiar essays of Macaulay,
especially those that have formed a part of school and college reading
courses. The essay on Milton, unfortunately prescribed in college
preparatory work, is one of the poorest. Those on Clive and Hastings,
also often prescribed, are among the best. It is the prevailing fashion
to underrate Macaulay as a critic, as it was perhaps in his lifetime
the fashion to overrate him. He is lastingly powerful and invigorating,
a great essayist, if only because he knows so well what he wishes to
say and knows precisely how to say it. He is not subtle, not poetic,
but his clear large intellect is still a bright light through the
many-hued mists of Victorian criticism.
JOHN MILTON (1608-74). _Areopagitica, etc._
Milton’s prose is difficult to read and only a little of it is worth
reading except by the student of Milton and the student of history.
The noblest passages of Milton’s prose have been collected in a single
volume, edited by Ernest Myers, and published by Kegan Paul, Trench &
Co.
JOHN MUIR. _The Mountains of California._ _Our National Parks._
JOHN HENRY NEWMAN (1801-90). _Idea of a University._ _Apologia pro
Vita Sua._
An admirable volume of selections, edited by Lewis E. Gates, is
published by Henry Holt & Co. Newman’s “Apologia” belongs properly in
our list of Biography, but it is really an essay in defense of certain
of his ideas. Owing to the fact that Newman’s work is largely religious
controversy and discourse directed to practical rather than artistic
ends, his literary power and the beauty of his prose have not won him
so many readers as he deserves.
BLAISE PASCAL (1623-62). _Provincial Letters._
In the English translation of Thomas M’Crie.
WALTER HORATIO PATER (1839-94). _The Renaissance._ _Appreciations._
The finest English critic of his generation. Contrary to a current
impression that Pater is for the “ultra-literary,” most of his work is
clear and simple; the essays on Wordsworth and Coleridge are the best
to which a reader of those poets can turn.
JOHN RUSKIN (1819-1900). _Sesame and Lilies._ _Crown of Wild Olive._
_Queen of the Air._ _Frondes Agrestes._
There are fourteen volumes of Ruskin in _Everyman’s Library_. “Sesame
and Lilies” and “Frondes Agrestes” (selected passages from “Modern
Painters”) have been often reprinted. The best of Ruskin’s prose is
very beautiful, the worst is tediously prolix. He regretted that his
eloquence took attention from his subject matter, but like Carlyle,
he lives by his eloquence and poetry rather than by his opinions and
teachings.
SYDNEY SMITH (1771-1845). _The Peter Plymley Letters._ _Essays._
In one volume, published by Ward, Lock & Co. After Swift, perhaps the
wittiest English essayist who used his keen weapons in the interests of
justice.
RICHARD STEELE (1671-1729). _Essays_ from the _Tatler_ and the
_Spectator_.
Steele is usually found with Addison in selections from the _Spectator_.
ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON (1849-94). _Familiar Studies of Men and Books._
_Memories and Portraits._ _An Inland Voyage._ _Travels with a Donkey._
The best thoughts of this romancer and some of the best of his writing
are in his essays.
JONATHAN SWIFT (1667-1745). _Selected Prose._
Selections from his prose writings are to be found in a volume of the
_Camelot Series_ and also in a small volume published by D. Appleton &
Co. Not until the reader is familiar with “Gulliver’s Travels” and has
some understanding of Swift’s life and the historical background of
his work, can he feel the genius of the satirical essays and political
lampoons. Swift is often repellent to those who only half understand
him, but he grows in power and dignity to those who appreciate his
underlying righteousness.
WILLIAM MAKEPEACE THACKERAY (1811-63). _Book of Snobs._ _Roundabout
Papers._ _From Cornhill to Cairo._ _English Humorists._
Thackeray is an essayist by temperament and shows it in his novels.
His satirical and literary essays may be reserved until after one has
read his novels, but they will not be overlooked by anyone who likes
Thackeray or who likes good essays.
HENRY DAVID THOREAU (1817-62). _A Week on the Concord and Merrimac
Rivers._ _Walden._ _Excursions._ _The Maine Woods._ _Cape Cod._
_Spring._ _Summer._ _Winter._ _Autumn._
Thoreau’s work is one long autobiographical journal ranging from brief
diary notes on nature to full rounded essays. A prose poet of nature,
and second to Emerson only as a philosophic essayist on nature and
society. His greatness becomes more and more evident in an age when
“nature writers” are popular.
IZAAK WALTON (1593-1683). _The Complete Angler._ In _Everyman’s
Library_.
CHARLES DUDLEY WARNER (1829-1900). _In the Wilderness._ _As We Go._
_Backlog Studies._ _In the Levant._
A charming essayist, a humorous lover of books and nature. His
reputation has waned somewhat during the past twenty years, but
Americans cannot afford to lose sight of him.
DANIEL WEBSTER (1782-1852). _Speeches and Orations._
In one volume, published by Little, Brown & Co. The literary quality of
Webster’s orations entitles them to a place among American essays.