THE FAMILIAR ESSAY

BY PERCY VAN DYKE SHELLY

Assistant Professor of English

In one of his more intimate essays, one that is somewhat exceptionally full of details as to his personal habits and tastes, Montaigne informs us that sometimes he prefers claret wine to white wine, and sometimes white wine to claret. The younger Scaliger, with this passage in mind, asks, with some heat, "What the deuce does it matter to us which he prefers?"

Scaliger was a learned man-the most learned man of Europe in his day. Than "learning," Montaigne valued few things less; he expressed a vigorous contempt of pedantry and wrote ingeniously of the advantages of ignorance. To the erudite Scaliger the confidences of the garrulous Seigneur de Montaigne seemed, no doubt, but so many impertinences, or evidence of a monstrous egotism. Possibly the great man's question was prompted by a touch of spleen; it may have been a pedant's fling at one who had denounced pedantry. But it seems more probable that the irritability arose from an offended taste, from a gentleman's sense of the indecorum of a man's talking about himself and assuming that all the world will be delighted to listen. That the world generally is delighted to listen-at least when the talk of self is neither boastful nor snobbish— Scaliger seems not to have observed. Nor is this to be wondered at. Those forms of prose literature in which the interest centers about the study of personality, either subjective or objective, and concern themselves largely with the intimate affairs of life-the biography, autobiography, essay, novel, etc. -were just coming, or had not yet come, into existence. Montaigne himself had only just discovered, for himself and the modern world, the literary value of the ego. In his "Essays" he was giving the public a first taste of the delights of the literature in which an interesting personality portrays

itself. By writing of himself, Montaigne had created a new thing-the essay; and Scaliger seems not to have been superior to the majority of critics in being unable to perceive the merits of a new literary mode.

Scaliger is dead. Montaigne still lives, and has been a force in literature from his day to this. Moreover, the influence he has exerted and the vitality of his works have in no small measure been due to that very habit of mind which led to his confiding to the reader his preference in the matter of wines. His being so entirely human and altogether frank explains at once his creation of the literature of gossip and his enduring popularity. He discovered that what interested him as a man, however trifling, would in all probability interest others; and he was the first to use this discovery consistently in the choice and treatment of subjects for literary purposes. He tells us that he crossed himself when he yawned. "Scratching," he writes, "is one of Nature's sweetest gratifications. . . I use it most in my ears, which are apt to itch." The insignificant things, which after all make up the greater part of life-these, along with many higher matters, Montaigne had the humanity and courage to write about.

In her "Diary and Letters," Madam d'Arblay gives an account of a meeting with Boswell in Windsor at the time his "Life of Dr. Johnson" was going through the press. The great biographer, his pockets full of proof-sheets, was hot on the scent of additional material to illustrate his great subject. He appealed to Madam d'Arblay, declaring that he needed her help. "Yes, madam," said he, "you must give me some of your choice little notes of the doctor's; we have seen him long enough upon stilts; I want to show him in a new light. Grave Sam, and great Sam, and solemn Sam, and learned Sam-all these he has appeared over and over. Now I want to entwine a wreath of the graces across his brow; I want to show him as gay Sam, agreeable Sam, pleasant Sam; so you must help me with some of his beautiful billets to yourself." The anecdote illustrates, as few things could, the deliberateness with which Boswell sought to paint Johnson the man rather than Johnson

the "Great Cham of Literature" or the "Great Moralist" or the "Great Lexicographer." Boswell's "Life of Dr. Johnson" is a book that we call priceless, unique in our literature and in the literature of all time-a thing so good that we cannot imagine its ever losing its interest. The reason is that in it a memorable and unique personality is portrayed to the life, as he lived. We see Johnson among his friends, we hear him talk, know how he dressed, ate, drank. Here, we say, is an authentic bit of the past made real; a personality ever interesting, rescued out of the jaws of time; the man himself, reported in his essential character. Now, Montaigne too was a unique and memorable personality, and it is his chief distinction that he had the courage to be his own Boswell.

There are but few of the forms of literature in which the author appears in undress. If not sock or buskin, he wears a poet's mantle, or dons gown and spectacles, or frock coat and top hat. Usually his relation to the reader is a formal one. In a manner he speaks ex cathedra, he feels the restraint of his subject, has an eye to the effect his utterances may have upon the public. He communicates his thought, his feelings, and emotions; but impersonally, or remotely. He is, in a sense, on public view, and not altogether himself. He establishes no intimate relations with the reader. Even the lyric poet, while writing of his inmost passions, is a poet

"-hidden

In the light of thought—"

But there are other kinds of literature in which, as Hazlitt puts it, "the reader is admitted behind the curtain, and sits down with the writer in his gown and slippers;" types in which the author puts us upon the footing of fellowship, admits us to the circle of his acquaintances and friends, and does not so much write as talk. Of these kinds, the chief are the autobiography, the familiar letter, and the familiar essay; and the last is that in which the writer is perhaps most at his ease, most truly himself, and closest to the reader.

The term "essay" has come to be applied to many kinds of

composition. We have Locke's "Essay on the Human Understanding," Pope's "Essay on Man" and "Essay on Criticism," Macaulay's biographical, historical, and critical essays, Huxley's scientific essays, Mill's economic essays, Symonds' "Essays Speculative and Suggestive." There are the aphoristic essays of Bacon and the periodical essays of Steele and Addison. But all of these represent an extension in the use of the term and are writings of a different stamp from the original essay, which was essentially familiar. The essay of the type originated by Montaigne we are now obliged to distinguish from all other kinds of essays by some such epithet as "familiar" or "personal." This, in its essence, is a short prose composition in which the author, writing of himself or of something that is near to his heart, discloses his personality to the reader in an intimate and familiar way.

Alexander Smith, one of the less known and most excellent of familiar essayists of the mid-nineteenth century, and the author of "Dreamthorp," is of opinion that "Of human notabilities, men of letters are the most interesting." If such is the case, we see at once one of the secrets of Montaigne's success and of the success of the other familiar writers. They are the men of letters who, in their works, give us most of themselves. Your true essayist talks much of himself. In him that part of man which loves to gossip is not undeveloped. He talks of his hobbies, his friends, his family, the books he reads, the plays he sees, the places he visits, what he likes to eat and drink. He dwells on his loves and hatreds, his aversions and prejudices. And usually in the most engaging way.

Yet there is much more in all this than mere gossip. If your man of letters is the most interesting of human notabilities, it is probably not so much because he is more articulate or outspoken than others, as because more than others he is interested in that which concerns the human mind and heart. The essayist, even in his most gossipy moods, touches some of the most profound things of life, and it is the frequent suggestion of the sublime and the universal that makes true literature of what at first appears to be but idle gossip. "I had one