A Century of English Essays - An Anthology Ranging from Caxton to R. L. Stevenson & the Writers of Our Own Time

Ernest Rhys, Lloyd [Editor] Vaughan

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• Publié par: zoin
• Publié le: 08 décembre 2010
• Nombre de lectures: 21
• Langue: English

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The Project Gutenberg eBook, A Century of
English Essays, by Various, Edited by Ernest Rhys
and Lloyd Vaughan
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Title: A Century of English Essays An Anthology
Ranging from Caxton to R. L. Stevenson & the
Writers of Our Own Time
Author: Various
Editor: Ernest Rhys and Lloyd Vaughan
Release Date: May 5, 2010 [eBook #32267]
Language: English
***START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG
EBOOK A CENTURY OF ENGLISH ESSAYS***
E-text prepared by David Clarke, Chandra Friend,
and the Project Gutenberg Online DistributedProofreading Team (http://www.pgdp.net)
Transcriber's note:
A very small number of printer's errors
have been corrected by reference to other
editions.
Footnotes have been moved from the
bottom of the original page to just below
the referring paragraph, or in a few cases,
to just after the referring sentence.
Author attribution lines have been
regularized so that all appear one line
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See also the detailed transcriber's note at the end
of the work.
Everyman's Library
Edited by Ernest Rhys
ESSAYS
A Century of English Essays Chosen by Ernest
Rhys and Lloyd Vaughan* * * * *
This is No. 653 of Everyman's Library. The
publishers will be pleased to send freely to all
applicants a list of the published and projected
volumes arranged under the following sections:
TRAVEL * SCIENCE * FICTION
THEOLOGY & PHILOSOPHY
HISTORY * CLASSICAL
FOR YOUNG PEOPLE
ESSAYS * ORATORY
POETRY & DRAMA
BIOGRAPHY
REFERENCE
ROMANCE
In four styles of binding: cloth, flat back, coloured
top; leather, round corners, gilt top; library binding
in cloth, & quarter pigskin.
LONDON: J. M. DENT & SONS, Ltd. NEW YORK: E. P. DUTTON & CO.
* * * * *
[Illustration: Most current … For that they come
home to men's business & bosoms.—Lord Bacon]
[Illustration: A CENTURY of ENGLISH ESSAYS: an
ANTHOLOGY RANGING FROM
CAXTON TO R. L. STEVENSON & THE WRITERS
OF OUR OWN TIME.
LONDON TORONTO & PARIS: J.M. DENT &
SONS LTD. NEW YORK E.P. DUTTON AND
CO.]
First Issue of this Edition 1913
Reprinted 1915, 1916INTRODUCTION
This is a book of short essays which have been
chosen with the full liberty the form allows, but with
the special idea of illustrating life, manners and
customs, and at intervals filling in the English
country background. The longer essays, especially
those devoted to criticism and to literature, are put
aside for another volume, as their different mode
seems to require. But the development of the art in
all its congenial variety has been kept in mind from
the beginning; and any page in which the egoist
has revealed a mood, or the gossip struck on a
vein of real experience, or the wise vagabond
sketched a bit of road or countryside, has been
thought good enough, so long as it helped to
complete the round. And any writer has been
admitted who could add some more vivid touch or
idiom to that personal half meditative, half
colloquial style which gives this kind of writing its
charm.
We have generally been content to date the
beginning of the Essay in English from Florio's
translation of Montaigne. That work appeared
towards the end of Queen Elizabeth's time, in
1603, and no doubt it had the effect of setting up
the form as a recognized genre in prose. But as we
go back behind Florio and Montaigne, and behind
Francis Bacon who has been called our "first
essayist," we come upon various experiments aswe might call them—essays towards the essay,
attempts to work that vein, discursively pertinent
and richly reminiscent, out of which the essay was
developed. Accordingly for a beginning the line has
been carried back to the earliest point where any
English prose occurs that is marked with the
gossip's seal. A leaf or two of Chaucer's prose, a
garrulous piece of the craftsman's delight in his
work from Caxton, and one or two other
detachable fragments of the same kind, may help
us to realize that there was a predisposition to the
essay, long before there was any conscious and
repeated use of the form itself. By continuing the
record in this way we have the advantage of being
able to watch its relation to the whole growth in the
freer art of English prose. That is a connection
indeed in which all of us are interested, because
however little we write, whether for our friends
only, or for the newspapers, we have to attempt
sooner or later something which is virtually an
essay in everyday English. There is no form of
writing in which the fluid idiom of the language can
be seen to better effect in its changes and in its
movement. There is none in which the play of
individuality, and the personal way of looking at
things, and the grace and whimsicality of man or
woman, can be so well fitted with an agreeable and
responsive instrument. When Sir Thomas Elyot in
his "Castle of Health" deprecates "cruel and
yrous[1] schoolmasters by whom the wits of
children be dulled," and when Caxton tells us "that
age creepeth on me daily and feebleth all the
body," and that is why he has hastened to ordain in
print the Recule of the Historeys of Troyes, andwhen Roger Ascham describes the blowing of the
wind and how it took the loose snow with it and
made it so slide upon the hard and crusted snow in
the field that he could see the whole nature of the
wind in that act, we are gradually made aware of a
particular fashion, a talking mode (shall we say?) of
writing, as natural, almost as easy as speech itself;
one that was bound to settle itself at length, and
take on a propitious fashion of its own.
[Footnote 1: Irascible.]
But when we try to decide where it is exactly that
the bounds of the essay are to be drawn, we have
to admit that so long as it obeys the law of being
explicit, casually illuminative of its theme, and
germane to the intellectual mood of its writer, then
it may follow pretty much its own devices. It may
be brief as Lord Verulam sometimes made it, a
mere page or two; it may be long as Carlyle's
stupendous essay on the Niebelungenlied, which is
almost a book in itself. It may be grave and urbane
in Sir William Temple's courtly style; it may be Elian
as Elia, or ripe and suave like the "Spectator" and
the "Tatler." The one clause that it cannot afford to
neglect is that it be entertaining, easy to read,
pleasant to remember. It may preach, but it must
never be a sermon; it may moralize, but it must
never be too forbidding; it may be witty, high-
spirited, effervescent as you like, but it must never
be flippant or betray a mean spirit or a too
conscious clever pen.
Montaigne, speaking through the mouth of Florio,touched upon a nice point in the economy of the
essay when he said that "what a man directly
knoweth, that will he dispose of without turning still
to his book or looking to his pattern. A mere
bookish sufficiency is unpleasant." The essayist, in
fact, must not be over literary, and yet, if he have
the habit, like Montaigne or Charles Lamb, of
delighting in old authors and in their favourite
expressions and great phrases, so that that habit
has become part of his life, then his essays will
gain in richness by an inspired pedantry. Indeed
the essay as it has gone on has not lost by being a
little self-conscious of its function and its right to
insist on a fine prose usage and a choice economy
of word and phrase.
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." Goldsmith'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 advantage of
both recognizing the faculty in others and using it
themselves, like Charles Lamb; and if we were to
take the lyrical temperament, as Ferdinand
Brunetière did in accounting for certain French
writers, and relate it to some personal asseveration
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
"Tatler&quo