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XXVI.—The Field of the Essay

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 December 2020

Charles E. Whitmore
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Extract

Of all the literary terms in common use, the word “essay” has perhaps the widest field and the most indeterminate content. Since the form to which it applies has taken on a fresh character in the hands of almost all its chief exponents, it has become in practice the designation for any piece of prose of moderate length, and has consequently embraced a bewilderingly various subject-matter. Moreover, the essayists themselves are by no means all of a piece. Bacon and Lamb, for instance, have little in common; and the type of ‘essayist’ represented by Macaulay and Carlyle has little in common with either. As a result of this wide extension, studies of the essay either include so much as to be very indefinite, or else are based on partial views, the upshot, in either case, becoming sufficiently vague. At the same time, the word “essay” goes on being used, and collections, of curiously assorted content, go on being made; and it therefore seems worth while to pass in review the different types represented in actual practice, in order to see just how much continuity is discernible among them.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 36 , Issue 4 , December 1921 , pp. 551 - 564
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1921

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References

1 So, particularly, Professor Hugh Walker's The English Essay (London, 1915), which, in spite of some attempt at exclusion, ends by including a little of almost everything. But I have yet to find a study which practices a vigorous delimitation.

2 Which, as Professor Northup well says, “was to be literally an attempt, a trial (Latin exagium, ‘a weighing, balance‘), an estimate of pros and cons, a debate which should determine the practical worth of motives and qualities and characters” (Riverside edition, p. xxiii).

3 Charles Lamb, Greatest of the Essayists, in these Publications, xxxii, p. 552.

4 The relation of the “character” to the essay, though undeniable, is elusive and in need of watching. The 17th century type, whether a vehicle for satire and stylistic cleverness as in Overbury, or for sounder and more sympathetic observation as in Earle, was an unstable form, which, so far as it remained a living force in literature, tended to make its subject more individual and more plausibly human, even where the generic label was retained. This development, beginning with Steele and Addison, is carried still further in Lamb's descriptions of the South Sea House clerks and the old benchers of the Temple, with an emphasis on picturesque and individual traits which reaches a climax in such pieces as Stevenson's English Admirals or Portraits by Räeburn. The result is a steady transition from the purely analytic or satiric mood to sheer delight in the quaintness of individual human beings, a change which we can also trace in the 19th century novel. That it has influenced both style and point of view in the essay proper is clear; but equally so is the fact that all such “characters” are only assimilated to the true essay, not examples of it; their proper place is under the head of descriptions-of persons, with or without the addition of an analytic element.

5 Il Quattrocento (Milan, 1900), p. 84.

6 Alberti calls his treatise on painting a commentary, probably with a view to modesty, for it is sizable and systematic.

7 See, among others, the letter on brawn (Everyman ed., I, p. 232; that on the roast pig (ib., II, p. 15); and that on life at Enfield (ib., II, p. 256).

8 Such titles as The Tatler, The Spectator, The Rambler, The Citizen of the World, are of obvious reference here.

9 “The volume was, indeed, a kind of treatise to be:—a hard, systematic, well-concatenated train of thought, still implicated in the circumstances of a journal.”—Pater, Sebastian van Storck.

10 Cf. Dixon Scott's remark on Henry James' Passionate Pilgrim: “The action of the tale—its love affair and phantom—is scarcely more than a piece of delicate clockwork to keep his impressions softly circling” (Men of Letters, p. 83).

11 For a capital account of the general background of ideas in England from which the Baconian essay emerges, see J. Zeitlin, Commonplaces in Elizabethan, Life and Letters, in Journ. of Eng. and Germ. Phil. XIX (1920), pp. 47-65. The traits which he there points out can be traced well back into the Renaissance.

12 Mr. Bradford, as is well known, does not wholly like portrait, for which he would substitute psychograph. The latter, however, beside being ugly, seems not readily intelligible, and is hardly likely to make its way into accepted use.

13 English Essays (Macmillan, 1917), p. ix.

14 “The Essays want no Preface: they are all Preface: A Preface is nothing but a talk with the reader; and they do nothing else.”— Letter of Lamb to his publishers (Everyman ed., II, p. 33).

15 A Century of Essays (Everyman's Library), p. viii.

16 Ibid., p. ix.