Publisher's Synopsis
Excerpt from A Century of English Essays: An Anthology Ranging From Caxton to R. L, Stevenson,& the Writers of Our Own Time
The most perfect balance of the art on its familiar side as here represented, and after my Lord Verulam, is to be found, I suppose, in the creation of Sir Roger de Coverley.' Gold smith's 'man in Black' runs him very close in that saunterer's gallery, and Elia's people are more real to us than our own acquaintances in flesh and blood. It is worth note, perhaps, how often the essayists had either been among poets like Hazlitt, or written poetry like Goldsmith, or had the advan tage of both recognizing the faculty in others and using it themselves, like Charles Lamb; and if were to take the lyrical temperament, as Ferdinand Brunetiere did in accounting for certain French writers, and relate it to some personal assevera tion of the emotion of life, we might end by claiming the essayists as dilute lyrists, engaged in pursuing a rhythm too subtle for verse and lifelike as common-room gossip.
And just as we may say there is a lyric tongue, which the true poets of that kind have contributed to form, so there is an essayist's style or way with words - something between talking and writing. You realize it when you hear Dame Prudence, who is the mother of the English essay, discourse on riches; Hamlet, a born essayist, speak on acting; T. T., a forgotten essayist of 1614, with an equal turn for homily, write on 'painting the Face or the Tat/er make good English out of the first thing that comes to hand. It is partly a question of art, partly of temperament; and indeed para phrasing Steele we may say that the success of an essay depends upon the make of the body and the formation of the mind, of him who writes it. It needs a certain way of turning the pen, and a certain intellectual gesture, which cannot be acquired, and cannot really be imitated.
It remains to acknowledge the contributions of con temporary essayists. Without these later pages, the book would be like the hat of Tom Lizard's ceremonious old gentleman, whose story, he said, would not have been worth a farthing if the brim had been any narrower. As to the actual omissions, they are due either to the limits of the volume, or to the need of keeping the compass in regard to both the subjects and the writers chosen. American essayists are left for another day; as are those English writers, like Sir William Temple and Bolingbroke, Macaulay and Matthew Arnold, who have given us the essay in literary full dress.
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