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Modern Essays and Stories

9781465665614
213 pages
Library of Alexandria
Overview
The essay, then, instead of being a formal composition, is characterized by a lack of formality. It is a species of very friendly and familiar writing. Like good conversation, it turns in any direction, and drops now and then into interesting anecdotes or pleasant descriptions, but never makes any attempt to go to the heart of a subject. However serious an essay may be it never becomes extremely formal or all-inclusive. A chapter in a textbook includes all that the subject demands and all that the scope of treatment permits. It presents well-organized information in clear, logical form. It aims definitely to explain or to instruct. It may reveal nothing whatever concerning its writer. An essay, on the other hand, includes only those parts of the subject that interest the writer; it avoids logical form, and is just as chatty, wandering, anecdotal and aimless as is familiar talk. It focuses attention, not on subject-matter but on the personality of the writer. The essay does not reveal a subject: it reveals personal interests in a subject. It touches instead of analyzing. It comments instead of classifying. Truth may sparkle in an essay as gold sparkles in the sand of an Alaskan river, but the presentation of the truth in a scientific sense is no more the purpose of the essay than is the presentation of the gold the purpose of the river. In the eighteenth century, essayists like Joseph Addison, Richard Steele, Oliver Goldsmith and Samuel Johnson, commented freely upon eighteenth century manners and customs, but they made no attempt to present a careful survey of the subject. Every writer wrote of what happened to interest him. To-day it is possible to draw from the great body of eighteenth century essays material for an almost complete survey of manners and customs in that period—but that result is only an accident. The writers did not intend it. The essayist is not concerned with giving accurate and logically-arranged information. He thinks only of telling how his subject appeals to him, of telling whether or not he likes it, and why. The more personally he writes, the better we like his work. In his revelation of himself we find a sort of revelation of ourselves as well,—and we like his work in proportion to that revelation. Naturally, a good essay is short; for self-revelation is given in flashes, as it were,—in sparkles of thought that gleam only for a moment. Many so-called essays of great length are either only partly essays, or else are made up of a number of essays put together. Stevenson's An Inland Voyage is partly a straightforward story of a canoe trip, and partly a series of essays on subjects suggested by the trip. It is possible to draw from a self-revealing book of considerable length a great number of essays on a wide variety of subjects. The essays gleam in the pages of ordinary material as diamonds gleam in their settings of gold. The essay, as a literary type, is written comment upon any subject, highly informal in nature, extremely personal in character, and brief in expression. It is also usually marked by a notable beauty of style.