Great Essays of All Nations/Introduction

“It is myself I pourtray,” said Montaigne, and it is, indeed, as an apt and untrammelled expression of personality that the essay has its primary interest. This it shares with the lyric, but whereas one has limits that are clearly defined and a plan that is more or less rigid, the other is free and fragmentary, conditioned only by the necessity that the author shall set down his thoughts after a fashion not merely intelligible, but also memorable and expressive. It is the difference between the white-hot emotion which impelled Shelley to write “Lines to an Indian Air” and the easy familiarity with which Charles Lamb set down on paper those quips and whimsical turns which he was wont to stutter forth at the fireside.

But there is no greater mistake than to suppose, as so many do, that the essay originated on a certain day in the month of March, 1591, when Montaigne withdrew to his lonely castle tower and began to jot down the notes that developed into his famous Essais. It is not belittling the significance of Montaigne’s achievement to deny that he invented the essay form, or that it ever originated in an hour which can be marked on the calendar. Just as it used to be held that the essay sprang ready made from the brain of Montaigne, so it was thought that Greek Literature began with the epic, elaborated and polished by Homer’s magic. Fuller knowledge has bereft us of many of these picturesque anniversaries, and the record of human achievement has in consequence lost something of its definiteness. We find that while a cataclysm or a revolution may destroy in a given moment the results of the painful labour of centuries, creation, whether in large or in little, is the outcome of slow and persistent effort carried on through relatively long periods. We know now that the literary forms, like all other manifestations of life, have been evolved gradually and almost imperceptibly, so that it is impossible to assign their origin to any fixed date. The most that we can do is to observe appearances, and even so, we shall find that the beginnings are invariably obscure, making it necessary for us to beware of dogmatism.

It is, then, at a very early stage in world-literature that we find the essay emerging. Bacon, with his usual penetration, recognized this. In the dedication to the 1612 edition of his Essays he wrote: “The word essay is late, but the thing is ancient. For Seneca’s Epistles to Lucilius, if one mark them well, are but essays, that is, dispersed meditations.” We can see clear signs of this emergence of the essay in the Wisdom literature of the Hebrews, particularly in the books of Ecclesiasticus and Ecclesiastes. Here we may note how the essay develops from ​the rudimentary proverb or maxim—the pithy saying in which one more expert than his fellows would sum up a common experience. Let us take an example. Even when society was much less complex than it is now men had noticed that the very necessary operation of bartering was not unattended by abuses. It remained, however, for one who was gifted with a picturesque and pointed turn of speech to crystallize the common feeling in the words which are preserved for us in Ecclesiasticus: “A nail will stick fast between the joinings of stones; and sin will thrust itself in between buying and selling.”

Sayings of this kind expressed so aptly what everybody felt that they passed quickly from one person to another, becoming part of the general stock-in-trade of speech. And from these early literary efforts it was but a short stage to the collection and classification of such proverbs as were already current. Those dealing with particular topics, such as “Friendship” or “Honesty,” were grouped, or else they were ranged under the name of some popular leader or hero. Probably the latter custom arose from a feeling akin to that which leads a comparatively obscure writer to seek a foreword from the pen of one who has achieved fame, thus hoping to add lustre and interest to his title-page.

Here, at any rate, is the germ of the essay as we understand it, and it is represented in all the world-literatures—in the gnomic wisdom of the Hebrew Scriptures, as we have seen; in the maxims of Confucius or of Lao Tzu in Chinese literature; as well as in the proverbs which Cervantes has enshrined in Don Quixote. At a much later date we may observe a precisely similar process at work in America in the proverbs which Benjamin Franklin collected and published in Poor Richard’s Almanac.

The transition from these maxims to the essay in its most primitive form was natural and easy. A sage would take one or another of them as a text and set down his musings upon it more or less systematically, or he would use one of them as a point of departure and from it moralize at large as the whim of the moment dictated. In the early literatures both maxims and rudimentary essays were embedded in bigger collections which were a hotch-potch of prose and verse; of maxims and disquisitions; of tales, dramas, and chronicles. In the introduction to the literature of Ancient India which Dr. E. J. Thomas contributes to this volume he shows that the Mahābhārata, the Purāṇas, and the Vedānta-sūtras are each a conglomeration of forms not yet fully differentiated, and that each of these contains discourses which in a later age and under different conditions would have been published separately as essays. The Wisdom books of the Old Testament, as we have seen, exemplify the same idea. Authorship in those days was a composite affair. Nothing was individual.

In some countries that condition persisted late: in others the various forms, one after another, became more clearly defined until they werev ​able to stand by themselves. The heroic narrative became the epic. The lowlier tale developed into the ballad or the prose-narrative. Out of the maxim evolved the essay, and in that way originated an essential feature which the essay, no matter how it may vary, has never lost. Just as the maxim embodies a lesson gathered from past experience to provide a norm for future conduct, so the primary function of the essay is criticism. It may be outspoken and elaborated or implicit and desultory, but it is always there. In some cases the writer takes himself and his mission very seriously: in others he is content to play a jester’s part, hiding his truth under a cloak of badinage. If you grasp his intention, good. If not, and you are satisfied merely to amuse yourself with his banter and superficial word-play, the loss is yours. One writer delivers impassioned harangues as from a platform, emphasizing each point with a blow of his clenched fist upon the desk before him. Another draws you to the fireside and chats intimately to you as to a bosom friend, conveying a subtle suggestion of the truth rather than a dogmatic assertion of it. Some essayists are logical, building up their argument in a faultless sequence and leading to an inevitable conclusion. Others are discursive, wandering wherever the whim of the moment may dictate. With these you can never be sure where you will end, or whether, indeed, there will be any conclusion at all.

Now a few catholic spirits can appreciate both methods, but the majority of readers find themselves inevitably inclining to one or the other. Those who like to know definitely what a man is driving at will tolerate with some difficulty the manner of the man who flutters from one idea to another with gay inconsequence and a total contempt for all the rules. On the other hand, those who distrust logic and feel in their bones the limitations of reason will hardly escape impatience as they see a skilful dialectician with sure hands erecting the house of cards which another will as surely demolish. The result is that of these two directions which the essay has taken, those who follow the one are perpetually excommunicated by those who favour the other. The lovers of Lamb aver that Macaulay was no essayist, while the champions of Macaulay declare that Lamb was a mere trifler. And although we have borrowed the word “essay” from the French, one cannot disguise the fact that to-day a Frenchman’s interpretation of the word is not quite ours. A frank recognition of differences would seem to be the best approach to a true understanding of the situation. It is possible for branches apparently very dissimilar to come from a common stock. To concentrate upon superficial differences is easy but not very helpful. To get at the essential oneness beneath these differences is a much more profitable undertaking, and to attempt this is what the reader is invited to do in the present collection. He will keep his predilections, but he is asked to remember that personality expresses itself in many ways. “When I make choice of a subject ​that has not been treated on by others,” says Addison, “I throw together my reflections on it without any order or method.” It is possible to make that a tenet to which all essayists must subscribe, just as Boileau attempted to lay down for all time the rules that should govern French verse. The better way, surely, is to emulate Bacon’s wise comprehensiveness, and to refuse to be enslaved by mere labels. It is strange that critics who will admit, freely, the widest differences of manner in the short story and will cheerfully agree that both the objective and the subjective methods are open to the novelist are prone to insist on a rigid uniformity in the essayist. If he is not like Addison, for example, then he is nothing. It would be wiser to acknowledge that Addison’s way was admirable, but also that there are tidy souls to whom this “throwing together . . . without order or method” is utterly repugnant. On this account alone to refuse them the name of essayists is to exalt manner at the expense of substance and tantamount to saying that a pear-tree is not a pear-tree because it is an espalier.

Environment and training have indeed played no small part in modifying and shaping the form which the essay has taken at various times and in various places. It has taken more kindly to some soils than to others. Certain conditions have favoured it, while others have hampered and distorted its growth. In lands where the prevailing mood vacillates between grim earnestness and uproarious merriment the essay has lost the note of light and easy whimsicality as far as it has persisted at all. In times, too, when life and goods have been insecure or when every nerve has been braced to repel an invader there has been little inclination for the gentle dalliance of the essay. But no form has been better suited to the Anglo-Saxon temperament, and the genial urbanity with which Addison sought to mitigate the bitterness of party strife in England was so effective that it found frequent imitators elsewhere. One of the most interesting features of eighteenth-century literature is the number of instances in which Addison’s experiment was copied in other countries. Gaspar Gozzi in Italy, Holberg in Denmark, Dalin in Sweden, Van Effen in Holland, Novikov in Russia, and Benjamin Franklin in America all followed the lead which had been given with such conspicuous success. From its earliest days the tradition of the essay has been in favour of common sense and sweet reasonableness. The wisdom of Ecclesiastes, the sage counsel of Confucius, and the urbanity of Addison have all tended in the same direction. Ripe thought and a wide experience have shown the futility of extreme counsels and the virtue of the golden mean. It would not be too much to say that the essay has been one of the most potent influences in humanizing relationships and in promoting healthy social intercourse.