A child's guide to reading

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

After Thoreau Mr. Burroughs is the most distinguished of modern writers on nature and out-of-door life.

“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.

In English, in Everyman’s Library.

The most charming and humorously wise of living American essayists.

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.

In the Golden Treasury Series.

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.

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.”

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.

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.

There are several handy editions, notably the pocket edition, published by Dent, of this famous translation whereby Montaigne became an English classic.

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.

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).

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.

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.

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.

See pages 183-6 of this Guide.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

In the English translation of Thomas M’Crie.

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.

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.

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.

Steele is usually found with Addison in selections from the Spectator.

The best thoughts of this romancer and some of the best of his writing are in his essays.

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.

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.

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.

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.

In one volume, published by Little, Brown & Co. The literary quality of Webster’s orations entitles them to a place among American essays.