That’s what
I look for in an essayist. Call it learning tempered by experience, realism
tempted by but never succumbing to lazy cynicism. No whining or proselytizing.
Just a mature understanding of self and others, filtered through a sensibility
that likes a good joke. The models are obvious: Montaigne, Johnson, Lamb, all
of whom are cited by Leslie Stephen (1832-1904) in “The Essayists.” It was published
in The Cornhill Magazine in 1881 and
collected in Men, Books, and Mountains
(ed. S.O.A. Ullmann, Hogarth Press, 1956). Stephen is most concerned with the
English essayists, beginning with Bacon, but here he is on the French:
“A Frenchman
can always season his wisdom with epigram, and coins his reflections into the
form of detached pensées. But our
language or our intellect is too blunt for such jewellery [sic] in words. We cannot match Pascal, or Rochefoucauld, or
Vauvenargues, or Chamfort. Our modes of expression are lumbering, and seem to
have been developed rather in the pulpit than in the rapid interchange of
animated conversations.”
Stephen has
qualified appreciation for Lamb and Hazlitt. The former is “inimitably graceful”
but “always on the verge of affectation”; the latter, “a man of marked
idiosyncrasy” who possesses “a certain acidity; a rather petulant putting
forwards of little crotchets or personal dislikes.” These characterizations are
accurate, but Lamb and Hazlitt in tandem are a self-correcting pair. Each
moderates the weaknesses of the other.
Today, the
essay is enervated, rarely well written and too often poisoned with politics. In
short, boring. Yes, we have Joseph Epstein, Cynthia Ozick and Arthur Krystal,
but we have lost Chesterton, Mencken, Liebling, Rebecca West and Hubert Butler.
Stephen seemed to foresee this: “Essay-writing, thus understood, is as much one
of the lost arts as good letter-writing or good talk. We are too distracted,
too hurried.” The essay is the liveliest and most elastic of literary forms,
and deserves to be reanimated.
1 comment:
You've put your finger on something -- that the essay today often seems enervated and burdened with politics. The boredom-"politics" connection may turn out to be one of the defining characteristics of the present. Much of the "passion" in writing and activism is, I suspect, put on, assumed -- or at least it comes from a very thin surface of attention and intellectual activity. People seem to be bored, and if they're not killing themselves (a popular activity), they may be keeping themselves going by reading and writing "politics." They engage in virtue-signaling, and maybe get responses from some readers that help them to feel that someone knows they are still alive.
But of course real politics is largely concerned with taking the time to work through the differences between people and groups who are willing to get along and settle for less than they'd like. When a member of Congress calls the president a motherfucker, for example, that hardly deserves to be called "politics." It is more like playground misbehavior. She had no serious desire to do the -hard- thing and actually do politics, that is, work with another elected official with whom she disagreed.
The universities are to blame for a lot of this, I believe -- speaking as someone who retired from the English faculty of a state university last year. How good it is to be away from the foolishness...
Dale Nelson
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