CHAPTER XVII. DEPARTMENTS OF EXPRESSION ESSAY. To write just treatises requireth time in the writer, and leisure in the reader, which is the cause which hath made me choose to write certain brief notes, set down rather significantly than curiously, which I have called essays.— LORD BACON. The essay writer is the lay preacher upon that vague mass of doctrine which we dignify by the name of knowledge of life or of human nature.--CORNHILL MAGAZINE. IT The T is the province of some to spread out a subject in all its breadth and variety; of others, to touch upon many subjects, but to exhaust none. These gleaners in the field of thought have swelled the volume of our literature with a class of productions known as essays. term literally signifies an attempt, a trial, or endeavor. It was in this sense that Locke modestly styled his great work an Essay on the Human Understanding.' Before him, Bacon had dedicated to the elder brother of Charles I a collection of short formal pieces on life and manners, which he chose to call Essays. Compact and pithy, inexhaustible in aliment, and rich in imagery, they remain the originals and still the models of the severer and statelier essay writing. These, of all my works,' he said, 'have been most current, for that, as it seems, they come home to men's businesse and bosomes.' Fifty years later, Cowley further recommended this kind of composition by his agreeable speculations in moral and social science. Temple and Shaftesbury are principally known by this species of effort. Then came the celebrated essayists, Steele, Addison, Johnson, Goldsmith, and others. The manner in which these essays were given to the world, on separate sheets-Tatler, Spectator, Rambler, and similar papers at intervals of five days, distinguished them from everything of the kind that had preceded, and was a great cause of their almost incredible popularity. They were peculiar, too, in the circumstance of being suggested by the vices and fashionable follies of the day. The end was moral health; and thus sermons, veiled in pleasantry, light, graceful, and fastidious, were preached on every conceivable text, from the brevity of life to the extravagance of female toilets. To them, especially to Addison, must be referred the introduction of a polite taste for letters. Their success induced a crowd of followers, whose influence, in the aggregate, did much to reduce our language to grammatical correctness and rhetorical force. Under the auspices of a confederacy of men of wit and learning in the early part of the present century, essay writing assumed a new phase. We allude to the foundation of the Reviews and Magazines,―Edinburgh, London Quarterly, North American, Blackwood's, Westminster, all of which became the exemplars of numerous similar publications. The primary object of most was to furnish thorough criticisms of books and careful papers on the current topics of politics and reform. As their scope enlarged, contributions were received on any subject to which the writer had devoted special attention. Their limits and popular purpose required that the articles should be condensed and spirited. Hence a peculiar style-brief, pithy, trenchant, often eloquent, but always positive. The master spirits were Jeffrey, Sidney Smith, Lamb, Hazlitt, De Quincey, and Macaulay. Meanwhile Irving's Sketch Book appeared, forming in America an epoch in this kind of literature; of the same generic character as Addison's essays, but with important specific peculiarities. The former have a direct moral purpose; the latter seek only to delight, and are founded on sentiment. With one or another modification, the chief of which are editorials, criticisms, reviews, and dissertations, the essay has latterly absorbed an enormous amount of the productive energy of mind on both sides of the Atlantic. Indeed, the number of essayists is almost identical with the number of writers. A few, like Emerson and Whipple, have limited their writings, to essays; the most are also, like Arnold, Froude, Stedman, and Lowell, historians, biographers, poets, and so forth. Usually they are (at least for the time) contributors to the periodical press, who naturally seek to rescue their work from that forgetfulness which inevitably overwhelms such a form of publication. Generally speaking, then, the essay should have one capital idea, one prominent fact or thought to state, error to controvert, or end to accomplish. Its style may vary from the simple and colloquial to the most condensed and profound, admitting wit, humor, ornament, and illustration, to give point, interest, and lucidity. In its literary-critical function, let us add, the essay should display cultivated taste, full knowledge, sympathy, candor, freedom from prepossessions, readiness to recognize merit, absence of any personal motive whatever. That love for vivacity which aspires to an entertaining article, and begets in the victim a rankling sense of insult, a friend will find it hard to defend. The first purpose of criticism is by no means to amuse or entertain, but to teach and discipline. It should be stimulating and corrective; with the public, insisting on correctness of opinion; with the author, on correctness of sense and expression, by the impartial application of those tests which have been generalized from the practice of the masters of literature; endeavoring to see things as they really are, and so exposing pretence and incompetence only to discover and foster excellence; adducing reasons for admiration, justifying censure by argument and example. The critic's duty lies between indiscriminate praise and indiscriminate blame. To go to either extreme is probably to decide against the voice of the public. Works puffed into undeserved notoriety have sunk to oblivion, while others strongly condemned, doomed, it may be, to a season of neglect, have achieved lasting popularity. It was the lashing, hasty, capricious, self-revealing character of much criticism that led Mr. Lewes to write, 'The good effected by criticism is small, the evil incalculable'; and Dr. Holland: 'There has not lived a great British author within the last century whose works have not been subjected to the most scorching criticisms and the most slashing and sweeping condemnations. Yet those criticisms and condemnations have passed for nothing. The criticisms, often profoundly ingenious, and full of learning and power, die, and the books live. They are often exceedingly creditable productions—so creditable, indeed, that they form the basis of great personal reputations — but they accomplish absolutely nothing except the revelation of the men who produce them.' Worthy exemplifications of the higher, wider, more earnest criticism may be found in Vaughan's Hours with the Mystics, Shairp's Aspects of Poetry, Arnold's Essays in Criticism, Froude's Short Studies on Great Subjects, and Stedman's Victorian Poets; but English literature, it would seem, has yet to be enriched with a true and sufficient realization of Pope's ideal critic: But where's the man who counsel can bestow, Still pleased to teach, and yet not proud to know? Not dully prepossessed, nor blindly right; Though learn'd, well-bred; and, though well-bred, sincere; Who to a friend his faults can freely show; |