`It Should Give Pleasure'

In November 1922, the year of Ulysses and The Waste Land, Virginia Woolf published in the Times Literary Supplement a review of Modern English Essays 1870 to 1920, a five-volume collection edited by Ernest Rhys. I suspect many of the writers anthologized by Rhys would remain ciphers to most contemporary readers, myself included, but his collection possessed the unexpected virtue of rousing Woolf to write this paragraph

“Of all forms of literature…the essay is the one which least calls for the use of long words. The principle which controls it is simply that it should give pleasure; the desire which impels us when we take it from the shelf is simply to receive pleasure. Everything in an essay must be subdued to that end. It should lay us under a spell with it first word, and we should only wake, refreshed, with its last. In the interval we may pass through the most various experiences of amusement, surprise, interest, indignation; we may soar to the heights of fantasy with Lamb or plunge to the depths of wisdom with Bacon, but we must never be roused. The essay must lap us about and draw its curtain across the world.”

I am newly impressed with Woolf’s common sense and spirit of fun – not qualities I formerly associated with her. “Pleasure,” for the common reader, is always the premiere virtue in essays or any other writing. In another essay (“Illness – An Unexploited Mine,” 1926) she wins my heart by enthusiastically quoting Charles Lamb:

“We dip in Lamb’s Letters (some prose writers are to be read as poets) and find, `I am a sanguinary murderer of time, and would kill him inch-meal just now. But the snake is vital.’”

In the course of knocking Samuel Johnson’s reputation down a few pegs [in “Saint Samuel of Fleet Street,” 1925], she gives Lamb’s a boost:

“[Johnson] was pompous and sententious and Latin. It took all Lamb’s genius to liberate English prose from the thrall.”

One gauge of an essayist’s worth: We “receive pleasure,” as Woolf says above, even when she’s wrong. One the three qualities she assigns to Johnson, only “Latin” is accurate with any regularity. But Lamb, and his friend William Hazlitt, liberated English prose, and the English essay, in ways that remain unappreciated. No essayist, for my money gives more pure pleasure than Lamb, and I say that while loving Johnson.

Let’s agree that pleasure comes in many forms, even in the seemingly unified sensibility of one reader. Today, I may wish only to read an essay by Edward Abbey. Nothing else will do. Tomorrow, something within may summon William H. Gass, John Muir, Seneca or Max Beerbohm. All give me pleasure – of various intensities, appealing to various capacities. Only the common reader, autonomous and free, can render a verdict of pleasure or its absence. In Woolf I detect for the first time, with all allowances for the difference in gender, the verdict she passed on Samuel Johnson:

“…the coarse, moody, rough-tempered man, who possesses, by virtue perhaps of his coarseness and his moodiness, the peculiar sympathy, the majestic tolerance, the broad humour, which, when he has been in his grave a century and a half, still makes the cabmen think of him on a wet night in the Strand.”