The English essay is an artform.
The English essay, unlike the French essay, which, in Montaine, begins with philosophical reflections, grows instead out of journalism. Defoe was what he would now be considered a newspaperman to start. He contributed spectacular and suspicious reports from all over about strange things that were happening, made credible in that they were like medieval tales of miracles in that they happened just over the next hill. Then Defoe turning to stories about exotic and far off narratives considered as novels, like “Robinson Crusoe” and “Roxanne”, reworking real material, until he wrote his magnificent “The Journal of the Plague Year”, so well described as if it had been reported rather than built on records, and not considered a novel because it had no dialogue or central figures but only the types of people, like healthy victims closeted in their houses with plague victims and the people who carried dead victims onto carts so that the bodies could be disposed of.
The next stage of the essay was also based in journalism. Addison and Steele wrote for newspapers so as to educate the new middle class reading public about what it was like to be middle class and so shared with the art of the English novel a concern with the conflict of classes, their intermingling, the texture of the times, but without the sense of being fictional, which was to be concerned with stories about families that never arose in history, but rather those stories that were invented for people who would never be recorded in history, and so was unfolded the entire range of family and social life as if it were an archeological excavation into untold secrets that were truer than life rather than the mythology touched ancient stories that are today considered as novels, like “The Golden Ass”, that are not novels at all nut mythological fables even if scholars call them to be novels.
Addison and Steele were also inventing a new form of writing. They were not following the rules of composition that could be recognized as such and applied to poetry. They were writing naturally in the sense of writing that seemed at the time to be the easiest way to construct and feel completed with a piece of work. That included, for example, returning to a point made in the body of work to its final paragraph as a conclusion. Moreover, an essay deliberately meandered from whatever were its opening observations to different or alternative passages until arriving at a final point that the reader might find surprising and pleasing to see how the author through his quickness of mind and free association was able to come to his conclusion. An essay ends with a convention saying it has ended, as when it refers back to its early paragraphs, and so is like the flourishes that end a symphony, and unlike treatises where there is just an end, an absence, as if the writer could just go on and on but stopped at further elaboration. Essays were not treatises which outline an intersecting set of definitions and examples so as to cover a field lor a subfield, as in Hume or Hobbes before that, or the major philosophical treatises in the seventeenth century. An essay was indeed an exploration of a topic that would inform and illuminate by showing the way the author’s mind worked, a Vergil who led, in this case, himself to construct the world he noticed and how he might arrive at his mooring. Essays are by their nature dramatic in that the reader doesn’t know how he will tack during his voyage, sometimes beginning a paragraph with a but or else a specification unexpected to be applied by a generalization, mixing up adage with descriptive passages, keeping the reader interested with the surprises.
Addison and Steele also focussed in its newspapers to a specific grammatical tense. It concerned what had happened recently rather than what was described about in the far past or specu;lations of what might happen in the future or, as in Montaigne, what might hold true at all times except for occasional forays into the foibles of what might occur in the human scene which present stories that are regarded by newspapers as of “human interest” Newspapers had become a genre about what appears to have happened, what was later called the first draft of history, known for being apparently real, political or social, as seen through current observation. It is only very recently that news coverage is so much about speculations of the near future: of trends and what politicians might do the next month rather than reporting what they have done, perhaps because a twenty four hour news cycle makes it difficult to come up with recently just old material.
The form and substance of the journalism of Addison and Steele, which is to make familiar what is occurring in the world of social life and culture as well as politics, which remains a central subject in journalism, is quite familiar three hundred years later in the short essays in “The New Yorker” in both the “Talk of the Town” section and it's back of the book essays, also short and pithy and wide ranging in its concerns, a specific moment and place characterized so as to get at a larger thing. One essay by Addison (“The Spectator”, April 12, 1711) concerns the author’s home to a widowed woman’s library which he examines before meeting her (a New Yorker touch) where he finds this intimate place elegantly designed and filled with fashionable China objects and false wooden books as well as a number of real books, Addison supposing them selected mostly by men, who cover a great variety of serious as well as frivolous works, such as romances, the collection to be anyone admired and so listed by the author. When he greets his host, she tells the author that she has become acquainted with many men only through their books and is commended by the author for her having engaged in learning rather than frivolous pursuits, perhaps because she wants no second husband and has no children. This is admirable though still strange and so reveals that an educated woman is a bit of a sport as well as a species barely recognized as the rest of humankind, however positive the sketch may be. This is the state of affairs as it is just as when every few years there is a bit of a new unravelment of what women now are, recently into sexual microaggressions and now into matters of life and death concerning abortion services/. You have to keep up.
A back of the book essay in “the Spectator”, also by Addison (April 14, 1711), is a discussion about tragedy. Addison sets up an essay similar to what happens in “the New Yorker”, where a critic scans the kind of things going on in art and in books and then moves on to a fresh perspective offered by the work or the critic so as to move onto the next cultural moment. In this case, the essay first brings you up to speed and then discovers what is a fresh perspective. Addison reviews Aristotle on tragedy, emphasizing the good and moral emotions tragedy engenders and criticizes writers who depart from the meter proper for tragedy, whether in Greek or English. Then the essay introduces a fresh thought which brings a new perspective on tragedy itself. The authors remark that playgoers are too taken with the bombast of tragedy, too taken with its eloquence so as to make even an evil action seem attractive when the true purpose of tragedy is its meaning, its lesson, its moral, so as to enlighten the playgoer rather than lead him astray. Better to be an accurate moral rather than an eloquent one and Shakespeare is to be discredited for overdoing his language. Thaty may seem the opposite of what students in my day to learn from literature, which is to go beyond meaning so as to experience the emotions of “Hedda Gabler” or “A Streetcar Named Desire”, meanings an afterthought or just a first impression, but Addison was opening up to a higher level of appreciation by saying that tragic bombast is better replaced, something of a new perspective, whereby tragedy offers wisdom. The critic moves the mind forward.
Samuel Johnson was also a journalist. He supposedly hurried his essays while standing up, the copy boy waiting to get his latest number. He follows Addison and Steele about topicality. He observes and comments on the passing scene so as to make the reader aware of what is going on in public life both as to political and social matters and also to keep up with what is going on in culture, meaning the fine arts and literature. He also adopts the stylistic quirks of the essay in that an essay zig zags from one paragraph to another, denying or qualifying some paragraph before or even entering a new point that is somehow related to what was said earlier. Johnson is distinctive in being so muscular and terse in his reasoning so that readers might be wary of it, but the rigor of his moral framework provides a way to organize the passing scene.
The essence of the essay, the way of its being as an entity, just as a treatise is the repeated invocation of the same basic axioms or premises to any number of applications so that there is confidence that those axioms and premises are available for other related subject matters, as is the case with Euclid’s “Elements” or Kant’s three critiques, is, in the case of essays, the author’s record of the history of the author’s engagement with the essay’s subject. A treatise is by its nature objective, available for any reader and whomever wrote it, standing on its own feet, just nakedly saying truths, whole an essay is always occasioned and particular, the perspective as it unfolds of this time and place and about it as presented by a person with his own experience at the moment and history. Let the reader beware that this modest ambition can become overwhelmingly persuasive because it is engulfed with his prejudices and half truths and suppositions as well as his acquired learning and wisdom. But the essay is a remarkable tool for dealing with matters of which an observer may not be certain by using the writer’s own arsenal of ideas and observations as it finds to make judgments on what may be a new phenomenon of )the passing scene.
A good example of Johnson’s journal entries is “Vanity in a Stage Coach” (The Adventurer no. 84, Aug. 23, 1753). Its apparent subject is what would be called today a human interest story. Johnson observes and reports on a stage coach journey, noteworthy because it is rare enough to be of interest to those who do not frequent it, like a high speed rail line or looking down from the Empire State Building, but frequent enough to be considered part of current life and so to be added to human experience, like a trip to Alaska. This species of encounter is what Simmel would consider an adventure. Two facts about engaging in a stagecoach ride are quickly apparent. There are both men and women bundled up in the confines of a stagecoach and so decorum between the sexes is established through custom rather than the segregation of the sexes, as happened for a while in early twentieth century subway trains where there were women only cars. Western people as far back as the eighteenth century accepted this degree of equality though it is not present today in all Arab countries. Johnson might not have noted this fact as important because it was usual but just part of a description that provides more information than he realizes. Probably appreciated by Johnson was the fact he records that there are inns along the journey where stagecoaches can wait while horses and patrons are refreshed. That implies that the stagecoaches move on scheduled routes so that distances between rests are measured and regular so that inns will get their customers on a regular basis, just as water stops for the railroad were the basis for towns in steam locomotive trains. Stagecoaches were part of commerce.
But Johnson is also moving in a different direction. He reflects on the basic fact of psychological nature that people think they present themselves as anonymous in their presentation while able to observe the people around them and conjecture their characters. At first, the people in the stagecoach are awkward in their apparent disinterest in one another, which is very different, I realize, from “The Canterbury Tales”, where people, also fellow travellers, are loquacious and reveal even more about themselves than the ample amounts they care to convey. When the people in Johnson’s stagecoach do start talking to one another when they share a table at an inn, they make up stories about themselves that are self enhancing even if only to provide an impression to people who will soon to be strangers to themselves soon enough, this stagecoach experiences an unusual arrangement of an isolated group. Later on, Johnson finds that the elevation of status is a fabrication, perhaps testament to everyone's penchant for being self-aggrandizing. Johnson’s final zig zag or his kicker to the essay is that all people, not just those riding in stage coaches, do the same thing. They are self flattering in work and play because so many of the traits and facts are obscure or unknown under one or another set of circumstances. Life is a matter of shading oneself and that is a part of human nature that emerges from looking at a part of the passing scene and so is deeper than a mere human interest story, which aims only at the piquant. It might be noted that Erving Goffman’s twentieth century view is that this universal practice is done so as people can make themselves more adequate or less pathetic while Johnson may have been truer in this matter in that people inflate themselves just because they can and get only marginal rewards rather than they being necessary subterfuges so as to maintain oneself as for being a reputable person. At any rate, Johnson’s observations dig deep beyond the occasion of his topical subject.
Johnson’s English essay, as “Vanity at a Stage Coach”, as a report to a kind of a somewhat strange place where the observer is changed by having gone through the social scenery, is quite short but the form shows up two hundred or so years later in the classic book length essays put in the middle of the book in “The New Yorker”. There is John Hersey’s “Hiroshima” which details the reportage of the first atom bomb used on an enemy target, providing an account of the pain and suffering on a mass scale that took place and the circumstances whereby people avoided the bombing or survived it and the essay does not linger on the question of whether this catastrophe could have been avoided. It just fills one of the two balance scales. Another essay dealing with another catastrophe dealt with in a “New Yorker” essay is James Baldwin’s “The Fire Next Time” wherein racial injustice makes America a strange place where the nation may be perhaps redeemed from its past but then again perhaps not. There is also Hannah Arendt’s essay “Eichmann in Jerusalem”, where the world famous political philosopher journeys as a reporter to Jerusalem to cover the events of the trial and moves herself to the deepest questions concerning whether absolute evil can be banal in its emotions however great its devastation. The essay is a powerful thing but very different from scholarship or history. Johnson, like these three, plumb the soul under the auspices of examining a curiosity.
It might seem that the muscular argumentation about moral or wide ranging themes might disqualify Johnson’s short pieces as essays and instead be categorized as sermons or dissertations or controversies, as in Pascal’s “Provincial Letters”. But Johnson does remain true to the essay form even then. He begins with a perception of the current scene, something topical, then meanders to some abstract analysis, and then applies that back to the immediate occasion at hand so as to illuminate that. Another good example of that is his immediately following essay “The Role of the Scholar” (“The Adventurer”, no. 85, Aug. 28, 1753). He is still preoccupied with how people are open or not to communicate with one another, this time in politics rather than personal relations. He observes that there seem at the moment to be people who are favoring ignorance over learning. He does not say that this may emerge because there are people knowledgeable enough to know that they are regarded as ignorant and so defend themselves by claiming that they can rely on their own reason, their own good sense, rather than the authority of learning, and these perhaps newly bourgeoisie are different from peasants who were ignorant and did not think they could be otherwise and so accepted, as the new class did not, that peasants were intellectually inferior to their betters. It was a new age that Johnson was confronting.
Johnson in his essay mobilizes three principles of Francis Bacon to counter this presumption that scholarship is not necessary to exercise one’s judgment. An adequate scholar has to do three things: read, talk and write. He has to read so as to hear all the arguments and viewpoints; he has to argue with people so as to modify his own thinking; he has to write so as to clarify his thinking. To neglect any of the three makes for a deficient scholar open to gobbledegook. Think how different is Johnson’s view of scholarship as a way to engage with the world than is Max Weber whose celebrated “Science as a Vocation”, written a hundred and fifty years later and descending from the Kantian tradition, this view that scholars are a clerisy to be isolated from the world so as to pursue these arcane interests to which most people will find with indifference. Who cares what other people may think? Scholars, to Weber, have their calling.
After establishing that politicians are likely to retreat into their silos, just as happens to the uneducated and those imperfectly educated, and so belying the idea that it is wonderful to see future backbenchers who come late, these avid factionalists, know when to say “For shame!” by looking at their party comrades, Johnson provides a grand conspectus of where the two political factions stand at that time in British political history. Remember that this is forty years before the division before the left and the right was established in the French Revoltion’s National Assembly. Rather, he separates the contrarians to the establishment. The dissenters longed for the return to the reign of the Stuarts, everything going bad since the Revolution. They distrusted all governments while acknowledging that Queen Anne was not too bad. The main theme of the dissenters is that everywhere there are conspiracies underfoot which will topple England from within. Establishment people, on the other hand, are always excusing what is going on by saying things could be much worse.
I find that Johnson’s portrayal of factional politics seems to me an accurate representation of today’s American politics. The dissenters, who may, at the present moment, be in charge of all the branches of American government, think they have been mistreated by the opposition party and so need to right the wrongs inflicted on them by claims against them and gain a proper respect for what was previous, as to identity politics and law and order, even though they are the ones who tried to accomplish an insurrection but also think that racial equality is a good thing. They are preoccupied with conspiratorial theories, renaming the permanent civil service as the deep state, just as they believed in previous generations that Communists were an internal rather than just an external threat. The establishment party, for its part, thinks all told that the economy is doing rather well and that danger is external, just as Papism is to the supporters of King George, and that the dissenters are the rabble rousers. Johnson did not anticipate the French Revolution but no one had anticipated the rise of Trump whereby the small town and low tax ideas of Republicans was replaced by deep dissenter animosity, and so things stand now as they were in 1753 when Johnson made his observations.
One can say that Dr Johnson develops a method of compiling uncertain matters to a reasonable conclusion. He does so by describing felt experiences as a kind of proof or assertion of the abstractions, however offered, as exciting those felt experiences. This method is common in literary criticism where critics are out to get just right the quality of the experience of a work of art, to nail what a novel is one of the things it is really about, that Conrad is about fear and Austen is about getting along with people, something that is both an exemplification of David Hume and appreciated by all Janeites whether or not they look to the darker sides of Austen’s world. Dr. Johnson is to be set next to systematic philosophy as a reliable way to do things and his essays are superior to Cardinal Newman’s purpose, in his late nineteenth century essays, to rehabilitate religion by merely finding it credible. Johnson is more than credible but short of certain. Perhaps it can be said the best that one can have given how uncertain is the nature of facts, such as assessing the spirit of the moment and the tortuous nature of reasoning whereby you uncover something very different from your postulates when you wend your way through the thicket of supplementary lacunae.
The profound continuity and change in the essay in form and substance took place between the death of Dr. Johnson in 1784 and the first decades of the nineteenth century when Romanticism had come to prevail. Johnson separated his essays from his more formal critical writings, styling the latter as lives of the poets where he mixed biography with criticism. The Romantic essayist, on the other hand, sees himself as writing commentaries on literature and so afterwards the essay is seen as a derivative form rather than a crafted form of art. Being secondary means inferior in creativity, people hanging on to literature so as to admire it rather than being a form of writing on its own that uses literature as a springboard for observations about human nature and human customs, as Montaigne thought when he introduced the French essay, as well as the foibles and structures seen in social life as it is passing by and observed by a critical mind. Hazlitt, the greatest of the Romantic essayists, wrote very vigorous prose to illuminate literature and accomplished a great deal by associating literature with society, as when his “The Spirit of the Age” provides an account of the tensions within English society by placing essays about significant English figures, like Coleridge to Benthem, in juxtaposition to one another. Hazlitt does the same thing when in his set of literary essays concerning “Characteristics of the Comic Poets”, he includes Hogarth, so as to see comedy across differing arts and so does justice to a strain of pictorial art that also existed later in the nineteenth century with Daumier but has become more sober since then, unless you include the German Expressionist exaggeration and satire about the dandies and femme fatales of a newly thriving Germany. Also to be put aside as Hazlitt’s achievement is his reversal or at least the recognition of what was becoming the recognized reevaluation of Shakespeare from Johnson’s view that Shakespeare’s comedies were superior to Shakespeare’s tragedies because the latter were so dark and loathsome to thinking that the excesses of Shakespearean tragedy were the highpoint of world literature because Shakespeare plunged so deeply into the human conscience and its baleful social environment, ev earth man a hero or a villain just as the Romantics thought was the case with elevated figures like Byron’s Manfred. That would seem to give Hazlitt sufficient stature even as only a comment on literature rather than as part of literature.
But it is useful to add that Hazlitt engaged in more purely literary pursuits. His essay “The Fight” is a human interest story that could be placed today in “The New Yorker” as an account of an event placed in its setting so as to illuminate what this particular activity is like and what it conveys and so is a kind of ethnographic sociology already developed in the previous century essayists but without drawing overt conclusions, leaving that to the reader. Hazlitt also writes about the anguish in his own love life using his own self as the evidence for human nature and its extremes, just as novelists can do when they lightly remake their own lives as fictional or, like Capote and Mailer, chronicling the lives of exotic persons. But the derivative status as a commentator rather than as an artist led his lectures on Shakespeare to be thought inferior to the lectures Coleridge was doing agt the same time about Shakespeare because, after all, Coleridge was a great poet and Hazlitt was not.
The essay was the invention only of the last three hundred years. A classicist tells me that the ancient world did not have such a form. Most similar to it are, I am told, Horace’s “Satires”, which are written takes on social life from a critical point of view rather than a history that tries to get things accurately even if the events described are insalubrious. The Victorian essayist for its part is argumentative rather than descriptive and also poses as a commentator on culture in general as its subject matter, as in Matthew Arnold, rather than about the details of a literary work, something adopted by scholarship at the end of the century, precursed by Baudilaire’s essays on art. But that is to go far beyond the heart of the matter.