The Smart Student's Guide to Really Hard Classic Essays

The Smart Student's Guide to Really Hard Classic Essays

Martin Asiner

Published by Martin Asiner at Smashwords

Copyright 2012 Martin Asiner

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Table of Contents

TheClassicEnglishEssay

AddisonandSteele

MatthewArnold

SirFrancisBacon

ThomasCarlyle

GKChesterton

JeanDeCrevecoeur

DanielDeFoe

JohnDonne

JohnDryden

JonathanEdwards

RalphWaldoEmerson

HenryFielding

OliverGoldsmith

WilliamHazlitt

THHuxley

SamuelJohnson

CharlesLamb

ThomasBabingtonMacaulay

JohnStuartMill

JohnMilton

WilliamMorris

JohnHenryNewman

WalterPater

EdgarAllanPoe

ThomasDeQuincey

JohnRuskin

PercyByssheShelley

SirPhilipSidney

PhilipDormerStanhope

JonathanSwift

HenryDavidThoreau

MaryWollstonecraft

WilliamWordsworth

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The Classic English Essay: A General Introduction

The Beginnings of the Essay:

The modern essay as the term now is generally understood had its beginnings oddly enough in the spoken word. The content of sparkling conversations was lost until someone had the means and the desire to transcribe them into written form. But these early transcriptions were hit and miss affairs that were totally dependent on the whims of the occasional writer. Professional essayists or writers of any other genre could not exist unless civilization had advanced enough to produce a society that was literate enough to encourage both writer and reader to pay attention to the development of the printed word. Further, there had to be reasonably long intervals of peace that made it physically safe enough for potential writers to think of their craft rather than how to avoid the depredations of barbarian hordes.

What we today think of an essay is the type that is most often written and read for audiences that have been accustomed to accept as the norm—the personal essay. Essays, however, are as varied as any other literary genre. There are numerous others: the character essay that defines specific personality types; the descriptive essay that takes the reader from his known and comfortable world to the exoticism of what lies beyond the horizon; the critical essay that allows the writer to judge the worth of a man, a painting, a text, or anything else for that matter according to the standards that he devises and expects the rest of the world to follow; the scientific essay that probes the interaction between an observer and the actual realm of nature to uncover hitherto unknown relationships that explain why things are the way they are; and the reflective essay that allows the writer to do for the hazy truths of life, religion, and philosophy what the scientific essayist does for demonstrable nature.

The various essay types did not all appear magically at one time in their present forms. Some, like the character essays of Theophrastus, developed early. Others, like the reflective essays of Plutarch, appeared later. And still others, like the personal essays of the Romantic and Victorian eras, were written in a style and format in use today. Pre-dating these essay types were writings of Biblical times that can more correctly be called pithy attempts at moralizing, such as those found in The Book of Proverbs and Ecclesiastes. The languages of these early attempts at essay writing were in languages other than English, which is hardly surprising since English did not develop into a language resembling our own until a century after Chaucer. Greek philosophers like Socrates and Plato inscribed on paper essays that more nearly resembled transcriptions of extended dialogues between themselves and their verbal participants. Plato’s ability to write in a smoothly flowing manner would centuries later influence the essays of Montaigne, the man who is generally accorded the status as the Father of the Modern Essay. Similarly, Aristotle’s logic and precision influenced the prose style of yet another classic essayist, Francis Bacon. After the decline of the Greeks, the Romans took their place as rulers of the western world in all arenas including that of literature. The list of Roman writers who authored essays of varying types is imposingly long: Julius Caesar, who wrote of his battles with the Gauls in Caesar’s Conquests; Horace, who wrote of the rhetorical development of writing in Ars Poetica; Marcus Aurelius, who explored man’s philosophical quest for meaning in his Meditations, and Cicero, who often wrote lengthy reflective essays.

With the fall of the Roman Empire, civilization, technology, and literacy went into a long and slow decline that lasted for nearly a thousand years. However, despite a general paucity of learned individuals, there were some who kept the light of learning alive. These individuals were mostly affiliated with the Catholic Church. It was they who laboriously copied and recopied countless texts over the centuries. When they were not otherwise involved in mere transcription, a precious few began to recreate a long lost art—that of the reflective essay. Since the life of the essayist was largely confined to the cloistered environment of the church walls, the choice of topic was similarly limited to religious themes. The Confessions of St. Augustine and the Consolations of Philosophy of Boethius are typical.

Eventually civilization, technology, and literacy recovered sufficiently—albeit haltingly—to permit once again the conditions needed to encourage writers to practice their craft. These writers tended to look to the past glories of Greece and Rome as inspiration for their respective efforts. Hence, the works of Plato, Aristotle, Socrates, Plutarch, and Seneca were read, not just for their themes but also for their styles. However, the writers of the Renaissance were more willing than their literary forebears to experiment with a variety of style. By the sixteenth century, Machiavelli’s The Prince and Castiglione’s The Book of the Courtier had set a new standard for the essay, one that combined a criticism of society with the unmistakable stamp of the writer’s personality. In England, Chaucer wrote essays on a variety of topics in a version of English that served as a linguistic bridge between the Anglo-Saxon hodge-podge of the post William the Conqueror variety and the English of the Elizabethans. Following Chaucer were other writers of the essay: Mandeville’s Travels; Caxton, Sidney’s A Defense of Poetry; and Moore’s Utopia.

Though the genre of essay writing was reasonably entrenched in literature, no one had yet come along to give it the name of essay nor to combine the previously existing essay formats into the one that moderns could point to and say that this was the first essay. This man was Michel Montaigne, who decided in 1571 to leave the hustle and bustle of courtly life and focus on a more relaxed lifestyle of quiet reading and thoughtful writing. In 1580, he published what he called Essais, which translates in English from the French as attempts. Montaigne wrote most often in the personal vein, and his prose style was quickly adopted by English writers who saw the advantages of allowing them to personify themselves in a way that would ensure literary immortality. Before Montaigne, essay writing was unworthy of a formal name and existed only as loosely organized data bits, topics, and styles. After Montaigne, essay writing had a name, had a definite structural unity, and most important, had a definite future.

The 17th Century English Essay:

With the beginning of the 17th century England was ready for a significant increase in both the type and topic of essay written. London, as always, set the tenor and tone of what passed for cutting edge literary achievement. The Renaissance led to far more than just a rebirth in nearly every endeavor of human advancement; it produced a new type of Londoner, one who was better educated, more affluent, and more receptive to new modes of communication. Those who could read wished there was more to read; thus, writers and publishers were only too eager to supply them with news of the world external to London. Such writers knew that the traditional genres of writing that had satisfied the Elizabethans would no longer suffice for this new generation of consumers who wanted an increasingly varied style of writing leavened with a wit that became associated with the early part of that century.

The prose style of most of the 17th century followed the accepted trio of what was held to be the orthodox principles of writing: to include an overwhelmingly full style of expression that required the author not to stop writing until he had covered every possible permutation of idea, theme, tone, and detail; to cite as often and as thoroughly as possible all the sources of one’s prose; and to honor the wisdom of the Great Writers of Antiquity by imitating their style as the sole worthy models of literary excellence.

The types of essay that readers came to demand increased dramatically within just a few decades. Following the lead blazed by Montaigne, Francis Bacon wrote essays that his readers came to recognize as ones that carried the unmistakable stamp of the author’s intent. Bacon published several versions of his Essays on Religious Meditations. His first edition of 1597 contained less than a dozen essays, mostly on topics as suggested by the title. Fifteen years later, he issued a second edition of nearly forty essays that contained the essays that are heavily anthologized today. In 1625, he followed with a third edition that ensured his fame as one who could write in a pithy style of precisely phrased epigrams. To the previous generation who had become accustomed to the rambling prose of Montaigne, Bacon’s essays seemed a welcome breath of fresh literary air. Where Montaigne would casually place himself at the center of his essays, Bacon chose to come across as more calculating and less idealistic. The result was that Bacon emerged as the originator of the formal reflective essay. In his essays such as Of Truth, Of Death, and Of Parents and Children, Bacon made it clear that his focus was on man and his behavior. Bacon was not a writer known for warmth and empathy. He was not concerned with what man could be but with how man truly was. As a consequence, he distrusted the Aristotelian method of deductive reasoning that relied heavily on the syllogism. Human beings were too complex to be reduced to a philosophical equal sign. He preferred the inductive or scientific study of cause and effect, a method which permitted him to gather evidence, all of which was to be used empirically. Bacon did not fit easily into the niche of the trio of orthodox principles. Although he attacked the Great Writers of Antiquity, he maintained the traditional custom of citing sources for a veneer of justified authority. Bacon further diverged from the trio by his refusal to pontificate endlessly in the full style of expression that his contemporaries so valued. Bacon preferred to get to the point in a manner that moderns call the terse mode of the epigram.

Those who followed Bacon each advanced the formation of and the widespread acceptance of the essay in ways that often diverged and overlapped at the same time. In Timber: Or Discoveries Made Upon Men and Matter, Ben Jonson used his vast erudition to express sentiments that while not new nevertheless aroused strong acceptance of an updated classicism that was more rules-bound than the prose of an earlier generation. In The Anatomy of Melancholy, Robert Burton perfectly exemplifies the trio of accepted principles of writing. Burton was typical of many of his contemporaries in that he tried to master the sum total of all knowledge in one book. Though the purpose of this book was purportedly on melancholy, he attempted to cover every topic under the sun. As a consequence, its organization is complex and nearly incoherent. His book can more accurately be described as a collection of informal essays on man’s position in the universe. Every page is larded with classical allusions, obscure references, and Latinate expressions. Though strictly speaking not a collection of essays, The Anatomy of Melancholy, when infrequently read today, can be dissected into suitably small chunks of essay-like structures. John Donne in Devotions upon Emergent Occasions used the essay as a forum to dramatize his religious beliefs. These devotions elevated the religious essay to a medium that was characterized by stark immediacy and arresting figurative language.

By the mid 17th century, the confrontations between the Cavaliers and the Roundheads caused a short-lived halt to the proliferation of essay types. Because these confrontations tended to revolve around the bitter disputes of which political party would dominate and which religion would similarly emerge as an ecclesiastical power, essayists had to choose sides to survive. Under the aegis of religion or politics, essayists often wrote of matters of philosophical import. Sir Thomas Browne in his Religio Medici was atypical of the reflective writer in that he dared to argue for religious freedom, a deed that earned him the immediate enmity of the Catholic Church, which retaliated by calling him an atheist.

During the Restoration (1660—1700), the political, social, religious, and scientific culture of England underwent a rapid metamorphosis, one that was mirrored in the variety of prose literature written. The intellectual and ruling classes had begun to accept a scientific, rationalistic, materialistic world view. England had learned through bitter experience to avoid religious-based internecine warfare. The following were out: witch trials, astrology, and alchemy. What was in was a rational quest for order that appealed to refined gentlemen who liked to discuss matters of commonsense, gentility, and a scientific rationale that they felt sure was the new underpinning of society. Writing, however, still remained the province of the rich and leisurely aristocrat. Those who wished to write but were lacking funds had to find a patron to pay the bills. The prose style of the Restoration took its cue from the overarching sense of clarity and correctness of expression that suffused the upper class. The diary of Samuel Pepys is the record of one who wished to tell his life’s story in a readable manner that even today has its adherents. Essayists of this period were not limited by prevailing socio-economic conditions as were their immediate forebears. Writers like John Dryden (critical essay), Izaak Walton (descriptive essay), and Abraham Cowley (personal essay) typify those writers who were able to expand enormously the range, theme, and style of the essay. By the time the Augustan Age began in 1700, the essay—as practiced in England—had traveled far from the first halting steps of its practitioners of the previous century to take on recognizable shape.

The 18th Century English Essay:

The Augustan Age, also known as the Enlightenment, covers the first half of the 18th century and the term connotes a rationalistic and scientific approach to the religious, social, and economic issues of the time. Further, its adherents held to a reliance on reason and empiricism rather than on authority and sanctified dogma. In England the leading figures of the Enlightenment were Locke and Hume; in France were Montesquieu, Voltaire, Rousseau, and Diderot; in Germany were Kant and Herder; and in America were Franklin and Paine. The growing emphasis on logic and reason quickly filtered down to essayists who prided themselves on keeping their fingers on the changing literary pulses of a population that was no longer solely the province of white-gloved aristocrats. Though the commoners received scant attention from Parliament, a rising level of literacy influenced them to widen their scopes of reading. The development of the essay continued to evolve in a manner that reflected a steady change in society at all levels.

During the Augustan Age, the essay was dominated by a select few: Addison, Steele, Defoe, Pope, and Stanhope. The periodical essay matured quickly due to the widespread growth of newspapers and readers who were hungry for news of all types. Joseph Addison and Richard Steele combined to produce a thrice weekly journal called the Tatler, which debuted in 1709. Steele did most of the writing as he wrote on a myriad of topics, most of which pointed out the foibles of humanity. Steele had the novel idea of disguising his morality tales as the exploits of real life persons. His readers grew to adore these fictional protagonists. After the Tatler folded two years later, Steele began a new venture with Addison to do most of the writing. This periodical was the Spectator, and during its two year run, it proved to be immensely popular. Addison wrote of a new host of fictional heroes, all of whom seemed perfectly real to his readers.

Despite the fame that Daniel Defoe has for his much-beloved novels, he was also a competent essayist who rubbed his contemporaries the wrong way since his choice of topics was often in opposition to theirs. Defoe preferred to write critical essays, most of which targeted what he saw as inequities in British society. He saw the English language as needing the same linguistic purifying that the Academy of Paris had provided for French grammar. In An Essay on Projects: Of Academics, he favors the establishment of a school that would oversee the future proper growth of the English Language. Defoe was also a life long supporter of women’s rights and in An Essay on Projects: An Academy for Women, he insists that women be given the same educational opportunities as men.

Alexander Pope, like Defoe, was another writer more famed for his non-essay writings but he was a steady contributor to a periodical called the Guardian. He wrote a preface to his translation of the Iliad, in which he compares the merits of Homer and Virgil. Pope’s prose is at his best in his preface to an edition to the plays of Shakespeare. Here he both praises and faults Shakespeare in ways that reveal that even in his negative criticisms of Shakespeare, Pope states that his praises far outnumber his carpings since the blame often placed on Shakespeare is really the fault of sloppy editors who miscopied many lines.

One genre of essay that reached its peak at this time was the epistolary essay—the letter. Philip Dormer Stanhope, the Earl of Chesterfield, has been dubbed the very essence of suave wit and urbanity based on a series of letters written to a clumsy and cloddish son over a period of three decades. Readers sometimes give credit to Stanhope as one who personifies what it means to be a gentleman, but a thorough reading of all of them shows him to be a man who confuses what he would like society to be with what it truly is. To Stanhope, 18th century society was a minefield of potential faux pas, simply waiting to blow to smithereens those dolts—like his son—who inadvertently used the wrong fork at the dinner table. Generations of readers have never reached consensus whether Stanhope’s excessive cynicism has rendered his torrent of advice to be merely endured like Polonius’ windbag comments from Hamlet.

The latter half of the 18th century was dominated by a man for whom the entire century was named—Samuel Johnson. Moderns tend to know of him due to the massive biography written by James Boswell. From this account, we learn the details of a man who was supremely proficient in all matters literary. Boswell notes that Johnson was the conversational leader in innumerable coffee houses where the elite were invited to join in. In 1750, Johnson founded a periodical not unlike that of Addison’s the Spectator. He called this twice weekly periodical the Rambler. During its two year run, he wrote hundreds of essays that consisted of literary criticism, fables, and allegories. In 1758, he began a new effort called the Idler, which was considerably less formal and more chatty. Both periodicals, however, delighted their readers with essays that had something for everyone. From Johnson, his readers learned that essays could be didactic as with the Rambler or entertaining as with the Idler. Johnson was not bashful about taking cheap shots at those who incurred his ire. In his Lives of the Poets, he could hardly contain his disgust with the Metaphysical poets like Cowley and Donne. His diatribes against them have gained enduring fame with one oft quoted venting of spleen: Of Wit the most heterogeneous ideas yoked by violence together. Johnson expressed a similar loathing with Milton: "Paradise Lost is one of the books which the reader admires and lays down and forgets to take it up again. None ever wished it longer than it is. Its perusal is a duty rather than a pleasure. When Johnson wrote of Shakespeare, the Bard had not been dead long enough for his readers to assume that he had passed the test of time for greatness. In his Preface to Shakespeare," Johnson takes an objective appraisal of Shakespeare’s vices and virtues, both of which he finds in about equal abundance.

Under Oliver Goldsmith, the letter essay made a strong return with his The Citizen of the World. Goldsmith wrote a series of letters purportedly written by a Chinese visitor to England who commented on the vast spectrum that was English society. Since this visitor had no preconceived notions, his comments were assumed to be bias free. Goldsmith, of course, was this Chinese visitor and he took full advantage to point out those areas of English society that he felt were in need of correction. His audience delighted in his witty barbs that deflated many a sacred cow. Goldsmith’s best known essay is his criticism of the English theater, An Enquiry on the Theater; or a Comparison between Laughing and Sentimental Comedy. Here he inveighs against what he sees as the barbarization of the theater in the form of sentimental comedy.

Throughout the 18th century, literature was changing because those who were reading it were themselves changing. The literacy of the general population was increasing primarily due to a vast increase in both the quantity and quality of reading material. Periodicals, newspapers, and magazines were branching out in two directions—those that were general purpose reading sources and those that targeted a specific segment of the reading population. Addison and Steele had whetted the appetite of readers for witty and informative essays and Johnson later further fed their ever increasing desire to read. In the ubiquitous coffee houses scattered throughout England, a rising middle class had a place to meet and to discuss the strange and wonderful concepts that emerged from a multitude of reading materials.

The 19th Century English Essay:

By the beginning of the 19th century, the essay had advanced in style, content, and format from its predecessors of the past era. The rise of the review and the magazine made it possible for writers to increase vastly the scope of their efforts. Essayists were no longer bound to the few pages that typified an effort by Addison or Steele. The added length also added to the complexity of the subject matter. Now writers found that they could branch off into areas that had been off limits to their forebears. Nearly every type of essay flourished after 1800 in England, but it was in the personal essay that writers found their literary niche.

Before 1802, periodicals most often had to rely on the output of underpaid hacks whose venal editors told them which political spin was required to please one government party or the other. Three conservative editors decided to alter the entire literary landscape of the periodical by founding the Edinburgh Review. Francis Jeffrey, Henry Brougham, and Sydney Smith were determined to deflect the encroaching power of the Tories by publishing a periodical dedicated to Whig ideals. These editors not only paid top wages to attract the best writers they also allowed them to submit their essays anonymously. As a result, no arm twisting was needed to approximate the desired spin. When readers saw that this new periodical published essays only of high merit they rushed to buy copies. As a review based periodical, the Edinburgh Review published essays that contemplated the merits of literature, politics, science and just about any other field of human endeavor. Its purpose was to criticize the fruits of man’s intellectual labor. The success of this periodical inevitably led to the founding of a competitor, the Quarterly Review in 1809. This latter review was launched since the Tories desired a counterpoint to what they deemed the monstrous heresies of the Whigs. These two did so well that William Blackwood was encouraged to launch yet a third periodical, called unsurprisingly, Blackwood’s. Blackwood’s periodical was a magazine rather than a review in that it included original compositions of poetry, fiction, and drama. If the purpose of a review-based periodical like the Edinburgh Review was political advocacy, then the purpose of a magazine like Blackwood’s was artistic entertainment. Though a Review would rarely if ever print anything of an original composition like poetry or fiction, a Magazine, though primarily a forum for original compositions, would regularly include reviews.

The impact of the Reviews and Magazines on 19th century England cannot be understated. This impact had both a positive and negative result. On the positive side, they encouraged the free exchange of ideas that is necessary for any nation that dares to call itself free or progressive. On the downside, each all too often engaged in verbal assassination of those who disagreed with that periodical’s editorial bent. The influence of the Reviews and Magazines continued unabated until the rise of and widespread acceptance of newspapers gave the reading public access to views that were timelier as founts of public opinion.

The Age of Romanticism in England began with the publication of William Wordsworth’s Lyrical Ballads in 1798. Essayists of this period tended to dramatize individualism and to show solidarity for the downtrodden who sought political, economic, and religious freedom. For Wordsworth, this reaching out for individualism took the form of rebalancing the poet’s ability to express himself in images that were not weighed down with the stifling conventionality of 18th century literary rules that dictated a strict adherence to poetic tropes. In "Preface to Lyrical Ballads, Wordsworth wrote of the necessity of writing verse that captured the real language of men," one that was unadorned with a focus on the rich and powerful. Instead, he sought to place the poor, the weak, and the commoner at the center of his moral universe. Wordsworth’s close friend Samuel Coleridge wrote in Biographia Literaria of his need to provide the world—at mind numbing length—a pulpit for his literary criticism with comments on specific works. Much of this work is a spirited counterattack on those who saw in him and Wordsworth as no more than poetic debasers. Coleridge does not make it easy for moderns to catch his drift since he assumed that his readers had an in depth knowledge of the popular authors of psychology and philosophy of his day, including, among others, Hobbes, Aristotle, Descartes, and Kant. A third well-known essayist of the era was Charles Lamb, whose essays of light whimsy and fancy hid a life full of personal trauma and demons. In his essays published under the pseudonym Elias, Lamb writes of the beauty of a desired past viewed through the prism of a fractured present. Lamb’s essays were uniformly of the personal variety. He never allowed his personal miseries—which included the murder of his father by his sister and his own forced stay in a lunatic asylum—to penetrate the light and airy world of his imagination. It is this return to a poetic never-never land that is the hallmark of his essays. A fourth significant essayist is William Hazlitt, a close friend of Lamb, but never were two writers more unlike. Where Lamb was allusive and genial, Hazlitt was vigorously confrontational and quite willing to expose every last one of his personal demons. In his familiar essay, On the Pleasure of Hating, Hazlitt actually declares that hating is therapeutic in nature. In Liber Amoris, Hazlitt unveils to the public all the sordid details of a love affair gone awry between himself at the age of forty-one and a flirty female of nineteen. Reading Hazlitt, his many admirers have declared, is rather like walking through effluvium, refusing to wipe off the soles of one’s shoes, and then suggesting that it was all an exhilarating experience. Thomas De Quincey shared with Hazlitt the unfortunate trait of allowing personal crises to control his life. In De Quincey’s case, this crisis was the self-inflicted wound of opium addiction. In highly personal essays like The English Mail Coach and On the Knocking of the Gate in Macbeth, De Quincey’s style is fragmentary, paradoxical, and tantalizingly allusive, exactly what one might expect in a drug-induced euphoria. De Quincey’s lifetime literary output is impressive mostly in quantity. Except for the two mentioned essays and his successful and controversial Confession of an English Opium Eater, there is some justification to the claim that Thomas De Quincey does not belong in the Literary Hall of Fame. The final significant essayist of the Romantic Age was Percy Bysshe Shelley, who was better known as a poet, but in his critical essay A Defense of Poetry, Shelley defends the very genre of poetry against what he considered the scurrilous charges of irrelevance by his close friend Thomas Love Peacock. Peacock was typical of the Utilitarian creed that all of man’s creations, whether artistic or not, had to have a measurable payoff. To Shelley, this was a monstrous canard and he responded by noting the importance of the poet-prophet in society.

The Victorian Age began in 1837 with the coronation of Victoria as Queen of England and continued until her death in 1901. The Romantic quest for individualism and unrestrained support and sympathy for the commoners seeking freedom on a myriad of levels had begun to morph into a mindset not unlike that of the Augustan Age in which the individual was expected to find his rightful place in the Universal Scheme of Things. This rightful place was thought of as a mass huddling where the focus was on developing the public’s moral and social character, and literature was the primary means by which this was to be done. The inculcation of moral values was the hallmark of the last half of the century. Underlying this thrust of didacticism were the twin foundations of Liberalism and Utilitarianism. To a Victorian, Liberalism had none of the modern day cachet of a nanny state doling out entitlements to an underclass that has grown to accept them as a matter of right. Rather, to such a Victorian, Liberalism was much closer to what conservatism means today, a rejection of big government and a restriction of the functions of government to the smooth running of the state such that minimal interference was needed. The second foundation was Utilitarianism as defined by Jeremy Bentham, who decreed that since humanity was motivated chiefly by self-interest, it was incumbent on society to quantify the extant to which this motivation was possible. Any institution that was held to be measurably useful was worthwhile. Any institution that was found to be lacking this utility must be discarded. This interaction among moral inculcation, Liberalism, and Utilitarianism was the background against which writers deduced that their efforts must be directed toward reforming society’s understanding of what constitutes the optimum level of education, government, and philosophy.

Thomas Carlyle was the first great prose writer of the Victorian Age. He was not known as an essayist; indeed, he wrote numerous books outlining his Great Man theory which suggests that English society is afflicted with various evils like creeping capitalism, onrushing liberalism, and enervating nihilism. Few today read his books in their entireties; instead snippets of his books are anthologized as essays which then find their way into college anthologies. Carlyle in his thundering prose style comes across as no less than a biblical prophet hectoring the reader as to what is wrong with society so as to induce that reader to accept what is right about Carlyle’s solution, one in which all members of a debilitated society are required not only to accept a Great Man as an iron-fisted leader but also to revere him. His chapter/essay The Hero as Divinity from On Heroes, Hero-Worship and the Heroic in History well illustrates his insistence that the Divine Hero has been chosen by God to lead and who are we to dispute what is so blindingly obvious? The second notable prose writer of the era was Thomas Babington Macaulay. As with Carlyle, Macaulay was primarily a writer of book length histories, nearly all of which were replete with moral certainty as to who was good and who was not. In essays like London Streets and London Coffeehouses, Macaulay writes using the social critical mode. He recreates the physical atmosphere of the setting by appealing to the reader’s five senses. Reading an essay by Macaulay requires one to smell and hear the dissonance and effluvia that so often characterized a London street. John Henry Newman was another Victorian prose writer whose fame lay in books, but as with Carlyle and Macaulay, many of Newman’s chapters have been anthologized as spiritual essays. Newman had been a cleric of the Anglican Church who gained the enmity of many of his peers when he converted to the Roman Catholic faith. He spent many years enduring the painful barbs of those who saw him as nothing less than an apostate. In Apologia Pro Vita Sua, Newman traces the slow and incremental process that ultimately led to his abandoning one faith for another. John Stuart Mill is also frequently anthologized as an essayist though these essays are printed as chapters of books. In On Liberty, Mill has written a book of five chapters with each celebrating the right of the eccentric to differ from his contemporaries. For Mill, liberty consists of the right to be free to do as he pleases. This approval of liberty seems so natural and his logic flows so smoothly that the reader is inclined to subliminally take for granted Mill’s tacit assumptions and definitions. For better or worse, generations of readers have hailed Mill as the very essence of liberal freedom. Continuing the trend of full length book authors whose discrete chapters are often anthologized as essays is John Ruskin. Ruskin’s passion was to link the tangled relationship between art and the political ramifications of that art. In books such as the Stones of Venice, Unto This Last, and Modern Painters, Ruskin depicts a world that is afflicted with the same evils of brute capitalism that bedeviled Carlyle and Macaulay.

When it comes to essay writing, Matthew Arnold stands as the premier critic of the nineteenth century. Originally famed for his verse, Arnold achieved even greater renown for the breadth and acuteness of his prose. In The Function of Criticism at the Present Time, he defends the right of criticism to be judged at least as highly as the creative function. For Arnold, to create a work of literature and to criticize that same work requires comparable skills. Further, he insists that the Utilitarian credo of finding a practical use for all things cannot apply to criticism. Though an author may write or critique a work with great passion, that passion comes primarily from the author’s inner core of feeling but unless that author infuses his work with the critical faculty, then the result will be tenuous and ephemeral at best. In Culture and Anarchy, Arnold applies social criticism to counter a spurious claim that culture itself has only limited value. Following Arnold and Newman as the most learned and respected of Victorian writers is Thomas Henry Huxley. Huxley spent nearly half a century promoting the value of science for the betterment of humanity with the same doggedness that Arnold showed for literary and social criticism. Huxley was an indefatigable lecturer on science, with many of these lectures later printed as scientific essays of criticism. Early in his career, he published extensively essays related to the hard sciences as typified by On the Physical Basis of Life. Later he altered focus to include the need for education in science as in A Liberal Education.

William Morris, as did John Ruskin, saw art as an immortal extension of the human soul. However, unlike Ruskin, who tended to view art in terms of how it impacted on politics, Morris saw art as a worthwhile end unto itself. In his seminal essay, The Beauty of Life, Morris writes that art had to overcome the debilitating effects of crass commercialization. He held that all art had to be both useful and beautiful to be considered as art. William Morris closes out the century of prose writers who took the essay as handed to them by an earlier generation of Romantics and redirected focus to include an expanding body of beliefs and technology that was simply unavailable just a few decades earlier. The essay had very nearly grown into the finished product of the modern era.

The 20th Century English Essay:

The English essay of the 20th century continued the trend of a general expansion of all types of the essay. Some types, however, expanded more than others, some less. The critical essay of the sort found on the editorial page of major newspapers increased not only in number but also in its ability to sway the reading public. The opinions of the editors of The New York Times, for example, are read throughout the English-speaking world and these opinions often find their way into other media such as television which then broadcasts them as straight news. Syndicated columnists now have a forum which reaches to the tens of millions. In the 19th century, the English essay was generally limited to the United Kingdom and the United States. Now such essays are regularly written and read wherever English is the norm. Thus, the readership pool has blossomed exponentially. General purpose news magazines publish essays with just as wide a range as was done a century earlier. Political bias in many of these magazines is also just as commonplace as in the Victorian Age. Readers, therefore, have the same onerous task as their forebears to distinguish between spin and impartiality.

The personal essay has had the most enduring impact on the modern reader since it more than any other essay type has found its way into the public consciousness. From the personal essayists’ earliest practitioners, their current counterparts have well learned the value of a medium that speaks intimately into the ears of the discerning reader who feels that he alone is the recipient, one who may not always be sure whether and to what extent the author is carrying on a dialogue with that reader or is eavesdropping as with a monologue.

Max Beerbohm was a master of the character essay, one that he used most often as a barb to nettle his target. Beerbohm never was mean-spirited, but his essays carried the unmistakable cachet of one who knew the difference between the club of crass invective and the sting of witty satire. He also wrote essays criticizing society at large as in Hosts and Guests, wherein he attends a party and extrapolates from those present that the world is much like a party with all present as either guest or host. Each guest is a country and Beerbohm is free to gently poke away at that guest/country, revealing the foibles of both. Bertrand Russell spent more than a half century writing books on philosophy, history, and mathematics in which he urged his readers to be skeptical of all that floated on the surface of an argument. To him, the world was full of lies, distortions, and half-truths. In his essay on social criticism, The Harm that Good Men Do, he uses harm as an ironic counterpoint to suggest that those who point fingers of blame at good men for doing good deeds are likely to do so out of mean self-interest. G. K. Chesterton was one of the most prolific of writers in several genres. In his longer works, he seeks to act confrontationally, challenging the reader with outrageous comments. But in his essays, he is much more subdued and gentle. He saw the social and political climate of pre-World War I England as being stifled by the heavy hand of gloom and doom and in his essays he sought to displace that gloom with light-hearted frivolousness. His choice of title, as in The Advantages of Having One Leg or On Running after One’s Hat well indicates that the moroseness of daily life can be leavened with attention paid to the minutia of life.

No one was safe from the vituperative pen of H. L. Mencken, the self-appointed dean of the attackers of parochialism, provincialism, patriotism, Puritanism, philistinism, and prohibition. In between, he took numerous cheap shots at college professors and women’s liberation. He even coined a new word, Booboisie, which to him signified those whom he deemed to be intellectualism’s weakest link. He was an elitist who had no love for democracy, the common man, or anyone else who disagreed with his exalted opinions. He wrote numerous essays bemoaning what he saw as the need for a cultured minority to rule America. In American Culture, he urges Americans to found a landed aristocracy to rule rather than to remain content with what he felt was mob rule. His essays are similarly politically incorrect. The art of the character essay might have died out were it not for Lytton Strachey. Very nearly single-handedly, he revived the popularity of the biographical essay. He wrote full length biographies of Queen Victoria and Queen Elizabeth that are considered definitive. His essays caught the spirit of the subject in a very few pages as witnessed in his essay, James Boswell, which portrays a man who falls to wrack and ruin on the very eve of his most astonishing success, his Life of Dr. Johnson. Strachey did not spare his readers from peeking at the slimy underside of his subjects.

Virginia Woolf made her reputation as a novelist and essayist, both of which revolved around feminist themes. In The Mark on the Wall, Woolf uses a stream of consciousness mode that she would put to good use in her novels Mrs. Dalloway and To the Lighthouse. She begins with a mark on a wall and from there free associates from one tendril of thought to another. In Modern Fiction, Woolf uses the critical essay mode to consider the leading fiction writers of the time. Her most anthologized essay is A Room of One’s Own, in which she creates a hybrid essay of character and criticism to hypothesize the imaginary sister of William Shakespeare who never achieved fame as a writer only because she was a woman. T. S. Eliot was known primarily as a poet of the first rank but he wrote a number of literary critical essays, one of which was Tradition and the Individual Talent. Eliot countered the prevailing notion that tradition was somehow a negative as far as evaluating the worth of an author or his work; his response was that a critic must know the historical and social context of that work to judge it fairly. In The Metaphysical Poets, Eliot reviewed the current status of 17th century English poets. In this essay, he used a phrase—dissociation of sensibility—that has since become a critical commonplace. And in another literary critical essay, Hamlet, Eliot coined yet another phrase that has since gone on to literary immortality—the objective correlative. Robert Benchley was a skilled humorist who, like Chesterton, found much in the trivia of life with which he could poke gentle fun. In My Face, Benchley notes how his face seems to change in shape from day to day, with one day looking like Wimpy from the Popeye cartoons and on other days like actor Wallace Beery. Aldous Huxley, like Virginia Woolf, made his mark mostly as a very successful novelist, but when he chose to write essays, they varied from one form to another. In Wordsworth in the Tropics, Huxley uses an imaginative variant of straight literary criticism to critique several of Wordsworth’s poems. In Selected Snobberies, he writes scathing social criticism of those snobs who pretend to be sick merely because that disease is currently fashionable. Edmund Wilson was a critic in the mold of T. S. Eliot, one who could write on a multitude of genres, most of which were literary criticism. His essays tended to focus on history and politics, and in his essay, "The Pre-Presidential T. R." these disciplines overlap. For those who rate the talent of modern essayists, the name of E. B. White usually emerges in the top two or three. White, as an editorial essayist for The New Yorker, regaled readers with pieces that brimmed with wit, style, and gentle humor. He could write literary criticism as he did on Thoreau in A Slight Sound at Evening or social satire in Getting Ready for a Cow. Then there is George Orwell, who earned eternal fame for 1984, but also managed to write well-received essays such as his days as a Burmese policeman in Shooting an Elephant. In Such, Such Were the Joys, Orwell dares to trudge up some very unpleasant memories of his days as a youthful student at a school that might have been modeled after the brute house of sadism from Dickens’ Nicholas Nickleby. What novelists like Orwell and Huxley prove is the same as what other writers in diverse genres show when all concerned decide to write essays: the essay at the end of the twentieth century is in no danger of petering out so long as there is a constant influx of talent of those who want to whisper in our ear even as we wonder just what it is that we are hearing.

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Joseph Addison and Richard Steele

(1672—1719) (1672—1729)

Context:

By the time that Joseph Addison and Richard Steele combined their literary talents to found the Tatler in 1709, the periodical essay had been in existence since Montaigne published the first personal reflections on the human condition in his Essais. However, the art of essay writing had failed to catch readers’ interest until Addison and Steele proved to them that the emotional equanimity that marked the age might be successfully balanced by a candid appeal to morality and sentiment. The Restoration was a time in which an increasingly vocal middle class sought an outlook that reflected their desire for a return of a public morality and common sense that Addison and Steele provided first in the Tatler then later in the Spectator.

Richard Steele and Joseph Addison have been joined at the literary hip for their collaboration in their reinventing of the personal essay. Yet, despite their considerable individual talents, they were far more different than alike in every manner imaginable. Steele was an odd mixture of the impulsiveness of the Restoration rake with the stern restraint of Pope’s best verse. Addison avoided this mixture as he was invariably cautious, predictable, and dependable. Steele was bursting with the initial enthusiasm of literary novelty while Addison could assess this novelty and redirect it in a manner that would prove attractive to their reading public. It was to their credit that they could objectively discern what the one lacked the other could provide.

Steele was an Irishman, born in the same year as Addison. His earliest writings resonated with his life long obsession to act as a moral compass for his peers. In his The Christian Hero (1701), his goal was indicated by its sub-title: An Argument proving that no Principles but those of Religion are sufficient to make a great man. He followed this with a series of plays that pandered to the jaded tastes of the time. For him, virtue and vice were locked in a philosophical bear hug in which the former might occasionally fail but the latter never permanently succeed. These early dramatic efforts had only middling success. The Funeral (1701), The Lying Lover (1703), and The Tender Husband (1705) did little more than allow him to gain entrance to where the real power players were on the London literary scene. Unknown to him, this scene was the innocuous London coffee-house where the next generation of movers and shakers were even then groping toward a new medium. They did not then know it, but as Steele sat in their midst, he could sense that they were quite bored with the current literary scene. These coffee drinkers were the nascent middle class whose collective psyches and energies were geared toward finding a new moral equilibrium that they felt sure was lacking but could not articulate its substance. As Steele listened to their daily comments and complaints, he was struck with an epiphany. What his coffee drinking comrades needed was a journal that would specifically address their needs. This journal was the Tatler.

Steele faced considerable difficulties in getting out the first issue. Financing, of course, is always a factor in any new enterprise. Steele had to borrow heavily. Complicating things was a lack of a widespread forum by which Steele could present his brainchild. Those writers who had similar ideas had to wait until they could find a newspaper willing to publish them, or failing that, could print them as a broadside, which could be sold pamphlet-like. There simply was no pre-existing medium for Steele until April 12, 1709 with the debut issue of the Tatler. He was the primary writer, editor, and typesetter. He printed three issues per week. These early issues contained a variety of essays, all of which dealt with, in one way or other, the role of morality in contemporary London. But Steele knew that he could not merely unleash upon his readers a screed damning vice and trumpeting virtue. He truly wished to do precisely that but he knew that he needed the proper medium. He borrowed liberally from Swift the fictional character of Isaac Bickerstaff, to whom Steele gave credit for the opening issue. He borrowed from dozens of other writers the practice of filling his pages with various captivating and interacting characters in a manner that we might today see more than a passing resemblance to a soap opera. Finally, Steele chose to present his creation as a sort of morphed newspaper with publishing dates, pagination, headers, and printing front and back. It was impossible, of course, for Steele to carry on this one man show for very long. He needed help with the writing and creative end of bringing out a three times weekly paper. And for that help, he turned to Joseph Addison.

Addison had first met Steele at the Charterhouse School when both were boys. Their relationship remained relatively constant for several years when as often happens their paths diverged. Addison became quite skilled in Latin so much so that he won a scholarship to Magdalene College. For the next decade, Addison allied himself as a neophyte politician in the Whig camp. When the Whigs were in power, Addison prospered. In other times, as with the reign of Queen Anne, they were out of power, and his star was in decline. However, with the victory by the Duke of Marlborough over the French in 1704, Addison was prompted to produce The Campaign, which oddly enough, was hailed by both parties. Addison was rewarded with a sinecure, but essentially, he was no more than one of many hangers on with little promise for the future. It was during this period of stasis in his life that he got the call for help from Richard Steele.

Addison had come upon, quite by accident, one of the first issues of the Tatler, and immediately contacted Steele to congratulate him. After they had renewed their acquaintance, Steele asked Addison if he could contribute a few pieces for publication. It did not take long for Addison to dash off three essays (18, 20, 24). Despite Addison’s contributions, Steele found that he still had to carry on single-handedly until Addison could write and edit on a regular basis. By the time the Tatler folded in January of 1711, both writers had collaborated on 271 essays, the result of which was to change the social and literary fabric of England in a way that was apparent even as each issue hit the stands.

For nearly two years, Addison and Steele regaled England with calls to reform morality in ways that actually increased the likelihood that their readers would do exactly that. The Tatler inveighed against the evils of dueling, the pangs of a jilted lover, the ubiquitousness of pedantry in dramatic criticism, and even unwelcome competition from a rival publication. These early essays were noteworthy in that Addison and Steele convincingly endowed the fictional protagonists with fully fleshed characteristics that made them seem as if they were indeed real people. Their readers further enjoyed the frequent deflating of the egos and smarmy priggishness of those whose moral centers were far removed from their own. The decision to conclude the run of the Tatler was primarily because Addison and Steele had unwisely chosen to encroach upon the sordid world of grubby politics. Rather than attempt to patch up the problems of the Tatler, they decided to unleash a new journal, which they called the Spectator.

Both writers knew that they could not sell their newest offering as merely an updated version of the old. Unlike the Tatler, which often featured assorted articles, the Spectator limited itself to one theme at a time. From the former’s three times per week appearance, the latter was offered as a daily. Addison and Steele well knew that a continuous cast of characters formed an indispensable element to success. There was Captain Sentry, Will Honeycomb, Sir Roger de Coverly, Sir Andrew Freeport, and an anonymous Templar. These five permitted the reading audience to revel in the new heroes of the age. Gone were the moneyed and high born denizens of the Jacobean dramas. In were the rising middle class who pulled themselves up by their bootstraps to strut their new found status. The Spectator had a run of 555 issues before closing in January of 1713.

Summary: (From the Tatler #167 Betterton’s Funeral):

Thomas Betterton was the leading Shakespearean actor of the day. In this essay, Steele discusses Betterton’s death and by extension what he deems the moribund state of the theater. As Steele walks to the funeral, he pauses to consider the impact that Betterton’s death has had on his contemporaries. He believes that the qualities that made Betterton a great actor were the same as those that made him a great man. He favorably compares Betterton to the classic Roman actor Roscius, who was so well known in his day that his contemporaries sought to simulate the virtue that he showed upon the stage. Steele muses that out of all the varieties of human social interaction the most potent in creating virtue belongs to the theater. Youth, he concludes, cannot learn virtue from lecture. Rather, they learn it best only when they see it on the stage and then attempt to simulate it. He then compares contemporary tragedy to opera. When an audience sees an acted tragedy, they can easily assimilate the virtue of the actors. However, he is less sanguine about the prospects of opera to do the same. No actor of antiquity, not even Roscius, was a better actor than Betterton. Thus, no one else could better inculcate moral virtue more readily than Betterton. He mentions one role that stands out in his memory. As Othello, Betterton gave a bravura performance of one who unwisely mixed innocence with betrayal. So stirring was Betterton as the Moor that no one in the audience could possibly imagine Shakespeare’s text as one line longer or shorter than it was. He concludes his essay by noting the gulf between Betterton as a pantheon of the theater and any other actor who lacks Betterton’s histrionic talents. This last thought brings to Steele’s mind Macbeth’s soliloquy: Tomorrow, tomorrow, and tomorrow, in which he notes that Betterton, like a walking shadow, walks briefly on the stage of life before vacating it entirely.

Analysis:

In nearly all of the essays in the Tatler, Richard Steele sought to inculcate a sense of decorum and morality that he felt was lacking at all levels of society. The death of the actor Thomas Betterton gave him an early opportunity to address what he saw as a dearth of virtue in the younger generation. Steele did not go into any detail about what he meant by this lack but he apparently meant a general decline of virtue that if left unchecked might threaten to topple the bedrock of Christian morality that he saw as a fast disappearing fount of goodness.

Steele’s tone is one of a curious detachment. Betterton comes across as a symbol of lost virtue, much as Roscius must have seemed to his fellow Romans. Of all the emotions that Steele might have evinced, passion was not one of them. Instead, Steele is content to wax philosophic about what is great and noble in human nature. This cool appraisal of what he saw as a potential moral cataclysm fits in nicely with his overall approach typical of Augustan focus on decorum and sense. In the opening paragraph, Steele lists the various traits that he sees Betterton as inherently symbolizing: Voice, stature, motion and other gifts must be very bountifully bestowed by nature. He laments that the current crop of post-Betterton actors (and by extension the impressionable youth of the day) were woefully deficient in all the above to the extant that labor and industry will but push the unhappy endeavorer, in that way, the further off his wishes.

From Roscius’ era to Betterton’s, Steele suggests that virtue must be seen to be assimilated. A didactic lesson on Aristotelian precepts simply will not do. It is only through enacted virtue on the stage that will allow a free-born people to appreciate and retain a system of morality that had endured a successful run of two thousand years from the most ancient of the classicists right up to Steele’s present era.

Modern readers of Steele might wonder at his unquestioned acceptance that staged virtue must lead to permanently internalized virtue. His apotheosis of Betterton’s interpretation of Othello might indeed have seemed to Steele as having value over and above the world of entertainment, but his concluding quote from Macbeth that Betterton struts and frets his hour upon the stage, / and then is heard no more may have less relevance for later generations of theater goers.

Summary: (From the Spectator # 251 The Cries of London):

The essay begins with the voice of Joseph Addison, who notes that the daily clangor of London has a varying effect on its residents. Addison mentions two of his fictional members of the Spectator Club, both of whom appear in many other essays. The first is Sir Roger de Coverly, who emerges in many of these essays, as the Spectator’s most prominent spokesperson. Sir Roger is a respected country squire whose opinion on any matter is beyond reproach. Here he complains of the Cries that he cannot get them out of his head, or go to sleep for them. The second is Will Honeycomb, the local town gallant and fop, who has a rather contrary belief. He calls them ramage de la ville (chirping of the town), preferring them to the sounds of larks and nightingales, with all the music of the fields and woods. Addison prefers not to offer his own opinion, instead choosing to quote a letter from Ralph Crochet, without saying anything further of it. Ralph Crochet introduces himself in a letter to Addison as "a man of all business, and would willingly turn my head to anything for an honest