EP#28: The Art of the Personal Essay*

The Art of the Personal Essay: An Anthology from the Classical Era to the Present, ed. Phillip Lopate, 1994.

June 2026 — ???

This is the 27th book we’ve tackled for the Essays Project. This is a giant anthology which should keep us going through the summer – and given anticipated travel likely well into next year. While we had considered being more eclectic, and curating batches of essays from various authors, after one trial (Johnson, EP#26) it seemed easier to return to a published anthology which both eases the burden of selection, and guarantees us paper pages upon which to make notes. So here we gol

Introduction

An excellent introduction that takes on the task of trying to distinguish the personal essay from other sorts of essays, and from seemingly similar writing such as memoir and autobiography. Among Lopate’s claims about what distinguishes the personal essay from other forms of essay:

• Sets up a dialog with the reader based on identification, understanding, testiness, and companionship
• Contains self-revelation, personal experiences and tastes, and can affect a confidential manner
• Less formal in that it may have a rambling structure, relaxed diction, freshness of form, and makes no claims to completeness or definitive treatment. Digressions are OK.
• Depends more on style and personality than flawless reasoning
• May be conversational, with throat clearing, or putting objections in the mouth of the reader
• Struggle for honesty; vulnerability; self-revelation; self-doubt and self-questioning; admission of uncertainty, lapses, errors, defects, shortcomings. Interrogation of one’s own ignorance. Amused self-observation.
• The narrator must be reliable
• Contrariness: Stand a platitude on its head. Implicate first oneself, then the reader.
• Unashamed subjectiveness; “skeptical yet gyroscopically poised.”

And this taste for the miniature becomes a strong suit of the form: the ability to turn anything close at hand (Charles Lamb’s ears, Virginia Woolf’s moth, Samuel Johnson’s boarding house) into a grand meditational adventure.

—The Art of the Personal Essay, p xxviii (in Introduction by Phillip Lopate)

Forerunners

Seneca: On Noise; Asthma; Scipio’s Villa; Slaves

As Lopate says in the introduction, one of his goals is to bring in writings that, while not essays by his definition, have some of the central characteristics he sees in the personal essay. Seneca, followed by Plutarch, are the two [western] classical antecedents.

Seneca seems particularly apt in that, unlike most classical authors, his personality comes through: we come to get a sense of the man through his writing about other things. Other essay-like characteristics include a focus on the mundane (how people behave in a bath house), and moving from the particular to the universal (from asthma to death), and a bit of impish humor at the end (where after all this complaining and discussion of the noise, he admits he is about to move elsewhere.

Plutarch: Consolation to His Wife

The Plutarch entry, cast as another predecessor to the essay, seems less apt than Seneca’s work, because it is a letter to his wife rather than writing addressed to a larger audience. As a consequence, the familiarity of his voice, and the emotional quality of his writing (also a consequence of the topic), seem to me to spring from the particular circumstances, rather than the sort of impulses that motivate personal essayists,

… reading break …

These next three pieces are not essays, in my view, but indicate that the impulse that shaped essays arose independently of western thought.

Sei Shonagan: “Hateful Things”

Sei Shonagan is a court lady in 10th Century Japan. She comes across as a snob: opinionated, mannered, petty, spiteful.

This forerunner of the essay is essentially a list of everything she hates, ranging from the minute (a mosquito’s buzz in the bedroom at night) to boorish ill-mannered people. Mildly amusing, and the list tells us a good deal about her and the times and situation in which she lives.

This piece illustrates Lopate’s “unashamed subjectiveness” and “self-revelation,” and the essay’s “taste for the miniature” (e.g. the mosquito’s whine). The list form of this essay also anticipates modern essays that cast themselves as lists (which I don’t care for)

Kenko: Essays in Idleness

Kenko was some kind of court functionary in 13th-14th C Japan, with a reputation as a poet.

The piece is composed of a series of unconnected (as far as I can see) passages about places, scenes, thoughts and so forth. Though as the editor selected the passages to include, perhaps there would be more connection if we could see it all.

It is true it had an informal tone, and treated with every day life. And that it looks closely at small things. And that it, perhaps, in its fragmentary, drifting form illustrates the approach of keeping things open and incomplete.

That said, I did not find this writing very interesting. Lacks the wit, verve, and humor of Shonagan.

Ou-Yang Hsiu: Pleasure Boat Studio

An 11th C Chinese Sung dynasty classical poet ranked as one of the 8 masters of classical Chinese prose. He was a member of the imperial court, and held various offices throughout his life.

He has named his office in the Palace Pleasure Boat Studio, and this piece explains why. He explains that the rooms that make up his office are arranged in a single row, and so the space is long and narrow like a boat. He also notes that after he was exiled he lived on a boat and sailed rivers, and comments that the real purpose of a boat is to deliver people from danger, and not pleasure. But at the same time he notes that some have found pleasure in living on boats, even though he has no time for such diversions. So I suppose his naming his office “Pleasure Boat” is ironic, though perhaps he also likes the connotation of delivering him from danger.

But it doesn’t really make sense to me. Not a vey thrilling piece in my view.

In terms of Lopate’s characteristics of personal essays, this shows contrariness, self-deprecation, and the conversational gesture of speaking to the reader: “Is there anything wrong with that?”

… reading break …

Fountainhead (Montaigne)

Introduction

• Lopate suggests M may have been the greatest essayist who ever lived.
• His family on both sides was wealthy; they were minor land owning nobility
• Notes that he was raised speaking only Latin for the first years of his life, which (not mentioned here) also means he had almost no interaction with his parents or anyone except his tutor.
• M studied law and practiced as a magistrate
• He cast his essays as self-study, a portrait of himself in words.
• His first book, written from 1572-1574, was short and filled with quotations and not especially personal—but it was a success and gave him more confidence.
• M felt there was a basic unity to human experience. He regarded humanity as constantly in flux, and vain, ashamed and contradictory. But he embedded these views in a frame of forgiveness.
• “His own sentences were sinewy, dry, yet succulent: they explode like pomegranate seeds on the tongue.”
• He wrote in the vernacular, not Latin

…the spirit of humanism was in the air, via Erasmus and others, and the classical Greek and Roman authors were being used as a Trojan borse to open the gates to a freer, more speculative and self-analytical mentality (Socrates’ “Know thyself’). Rabelais great, bawdy novel, Gargantua and Pantagruel, likewise gave Montaigne license to write in support of pleasure and an integration of mind and body. Alongside an increase in classical learning and scientific knowledge, new worlds were literally being discovered. Explorers brought back reports of exotic native customs from the Americas and the Pacific, which fueled Montaigne’s relativistic bent.
—ibid., 44

While Montaigne deserves credit for inventing the form, I have to say I don’t care for his writing. He takes paragraphs to say what might be said in a few sentences. And although many seem to think the uncertainty and changeability is a virtue, or at least a characteristic of the new form, I find it a bit irritating. There is something to be said for emphasizing that an important aspect of the personal essay has to do with how the author approaches the topic, but Montaigne not only disclaims expertise, which is fair, but seems to shirk any responsibility for accuracy or accountability.

Having written the above, after reading a few of his essays, I do have to say that I appreciate his tolerant and even compassionate approach.

Of Books, Michel de Montaigne

The first two pages are mostly disclaimer. He portrays himself as unlearned (which does not seem accurate), and uninterested in grappling with difficult books or study—he just wants to enjoy himself.

• “Let attention not be paid to the matter, but to the shape I give it.”
• “I want them to give Plutarch a fillip on my nose and get burned insulting Seneca in me.”

After this he comments on books he likes (and some he does not), beginning with entertaining books, fables, poetry. He also likes Seneca, Plutarch, and Cicero.

Of a Monstrous Child, Michel de Montaigne

M describes a child who is a partial Siamese twin, with a headless body joined to his abdomen. He comments that this might be seen as an omen, but it is better not to: “there is nothing like divining about things past. ‘So that when things happen, by some interpretation they are found to have been prophesied.‘ [Cicero]”

M is compassionate, and argues against revulsion. “We call contrary to nature what happens contrary to custom; nothing is anything but according to nature, whatever it may be. Let this universal and natural reason drive out of us the error and astonishment that novelty brings us.“

… reading break …

On Some Verses of Virgil

This essay exhibits  a candid, cheerful acceptance of the body and its pleasures — especially sexual pleasure — as a defense against the gloom of old age. A minor theme is a defense of writing about oneself without shame or euphemism.

On Aging

Written as M was aging and ailing, he refers to his own bodily decline and refuses a “melancholic and dull tranquillity,” instead cultivating cheerfulness.

Let childhood look ahead, old age backward: was not this the meaning of the double face of Janus? Let the years drag me along if they will, but backward. As long as my eyes can discern that lovely season now expired, I turn them in that direction at intervals. If youth is escaping from my blood and my veins, at least I want not to uproot the picture of it from my memory.

— Michel Montaigne, p 59 [in Lopate]

On Candid Self-disclosure

M defends writing frankly; not surprising since his project is to write about himself, and how he sees things. With regard to sex he notes the hypocrisy that we all have sex yet are ashamed to talk about it because of convention. Complete self-portraiture requires not exempting the body, and indeed he refers to his various ailments and alludes to his own sexual inadequacy.

On Love vs. Marriage

“Love and marriage are two intentions that go by separate and distinct roads. “

Erotic love and marriage run on different principles. Marriage is a rational, social, durable bond; sexual passion is volatile and belongs elsewhere. Passionate love inside marriage is unstable, even dangerous. 

Men and Women

“Women are not wrong at all when they reject the rules of life that have been introduced into the world, inasmuch as it is the men who have made these without them. “

M argues that men and women are not fundamentally different vis a vis sexual appetite. The demands of chastity and constancy are imposed by men and culturally arbitrary; women are judged unfairly. (But there is also misogyny common to those times — women are beguiling, inconstant, vicious — the essay is not proto-feminist, though it does repeatedly undercut male self-flattery.)

I say that males and females are cast in the same mold; except for education and custom, the difference is not great. Plato invites both without discrimination to the fellowship of all studies, exercises, functions, warlike and peaceful occupations, in his commonwealth. And the philosopher Antisthenes eliminated any distinction between their virtue and ours.

Other matters

• Jealousy: Reflections on how sexual and marital customs vary across cultures — reinforcing that our norms are contingent.
• Impotence: his own, and the undesirability of old men in general
• On writing: “Any topic is equally fertile to me. A fly will serve my purpose.” “I owe a complete portrait of myself to the public.”
• On his conduct of affairs: he presents himself as fair to a fault.

… reading break …

The Rise of the English /essay

Abraham Crowley

Of Greatness

“I confess I love littleness in all things. A little convenient estate, a little cheerful house, a little company, and a very little feast…“

The essay argues that greatness is not desirable. It is better to be comfortable than wealthy, because wealth and fame come with inconveniences (servitude, disquiet, danger, guilt), and they also incline one to always want more than one has.

…this whole globe of earth, which we account so immense a body, is but one point or atom in relation to those numberless worlds that are scattered up and down in the infinite space of the sky which we behold.

Abraham Crowley, Of Greatness [ibid., p 121]

Addison and Steele

Nicolini and the Lions, by Joseph Addison,

Nicolini and the Lions, by Joseph Addison, is not an allegory (as I initially wondered), though neither it is a review of the opera.

The piece is more of a parody of political factionalism and rumor mongering of the time, as the references to “the whole session,” the mention of the refined politicians in the audience, and the mention friendship among ostensibly opposed parties (“this is what is practiced every day in Westminster Hall.”)

 It is also self-parody, in that the author’s ‘investigation’ is careless and credulous, though his report is presented as though important and official. Perhaps it is a dif at Italian opera as well: “…our present grievance is not the want of a good taste, but of common sense.”

I did not enjoy this essay. It felt a bit stilted, and, for me, parody does not age well.

An Hour or Two Sacred To Sorrow, Richard Steele

The essay begins by distinguishing two types of people: those who wish everyone to know of doings; and those who wish to be unobserved. A nice distinction, but I cannot relate it to the rest of the essay.

The essay observes that some people like to make a practice of withdrawing temporarily from the world to think about friends who have passed away. And Steele (or at least the narrator) resolves to do this. However, he quickly discovers that though the passings of those he recalls gave him great sorrow when they occurred, with the passage of time his feelings have lessened, and he is able to reflect on his late friends with pleasure.

He begins by remembering the death of his father, when he was five. He did not grasp what happened, really, but experienced it through the grief of his mother. He comments on how impressionable children are, and suggests that this early experience with grief imprinted itself on him and made him unduly prone to commiseration, remorse, and “unmanly gentleness of mind, which has since ensnared me into ten thousand calamities….”

He then speaks more generally, remarking that those who are very old remember the companions of their youth better than recent events, and that untimely tragic deaths are what are most lamented, and most remembered. He speaks of those who died in wars, and how they evoke veneration, but at the same time pity wells up when considering the havoc that war wrecks.

He then mentions a woman he loved — whom he depicts as beautiful, ignorant and careless — who died young. “In the same week, I saw her dressed for a ball, and in a shroud.” More sad events rise up in his mind, but then a servant knocks and delivers a letter and a hamper of wine. He decides to send for his friends, and they stay up til 2 drinking and talking (recollecting?) cheerfully.

Twenty-four Hours in London, Richard Steele

“It is an inexpressible pleasure to know a little of the world, and be of no character or significancy in it.” Thus begins this essay, the narrator taking on the character of a curious flaneur, who decides that he is going to spend a full 24 hours roving around London to see what he may see.

He says: “The hours of the Day and Night are taken up in the Cities of London and Westminster by Peoples as different from each other as those who are Born in different Centuries.” The essay then unfolds as he first takes a boat into the City, starting a 4am, visits the markets, engages in a flirtatious pursuit-by-cab of a coy woman, and has other adventures that include a beggar, traders, and coffee house habituees. I liked the conceit of this essay, although it was difficult to follow the references to 18th C professions, activities, and places.

Claude.ai generated the following outline of his tour, which I have pared down to this:

• a dawn boat-journey downriver to market, with a fleet of gardeners’ boats. Ruddy virgins served as supercargoes, and purveyors sold to the merchants in the market
• a stroll through the gay Convent Garden fruit/vegetable/flower market, and observing “fruit wenches” and chimney sweeps flirting (contrasted with the more sober Stocks Market)
• A mock cab-chase of a coquette; the cabbies exchange hand signals about fares and destinations, and engage in mock jostling in the streets.
• Now the people of fashion come out. At the corner of Warwick Street, street performers sing ballads and the narrator is accosted by a sturdy beggar, but is able to escape when the crowd begins making fun of the beggar
• He moves into the center of the city and comes to The Royal Exchange with merchants and high class shops and prosperous people.
• Then it is on to Robbins (“Robin’s Coffee-house in Exchange Alley, a hub for stock-jobbing and finance), where men “give bills for the value of large estates.”
• And then to Will’s (Will’s Coffee-house in Covent Garden, the famous literary/wits’ haunt), where he hears talk of “cards, dice, love, learning, and politics.”
• The day ends with the bellman calling the hour, and him finding a link-boy to light his way home.

Love-Letters, Richard Steele

A short piece on love letters, which argues that the best way to write a love letter as though you are speaking to the person. With that said, he claims that it is better for the man to cast himself as a pleasant and entertaining fellow, than a forlorn lover whose happiness is fully dependent on her. To wit: “If possible therefore divert your mistress, rather than sigh to her. The pleasant Man she will desire for her own Sake; but the languishing Lover has nothing to hope from her but her Pity.”

Samuel Johnson

The Boarding House

xxx

The Solitude of the Country

An interesting essay where Johnson invoked paens to the benefits of retiring to the country for solitude, and then critiques and undercuts them.

Johnson sorts the admirer’s of solitude into types: the arrogant man; the easily offended fault-finders; the imitators of great men (who retired to solitude); the scholars.

The arrogant man will quickly discover he has lost all his flatterers.

The fault finders will turn their scrutiny upon themselves.

As for the imitators of great men:

But what can retirement confer upon him, who having done nothing can receive no support from his own importance, who having known nothing can find no entertainment in reviewing the past, and who intending nothing can form no hopes from prospects of the future: he can, surely, take no wiser course, than that of losing himself again in the crowd, and filling the vacuities of his mind with the news of the day.

—Samuel Johnson, On the Solitude of the Country (ibid., p 142)

And scholars, while they may find solitude conducive to learning, will suffer from the want of others to critique and provide other viewpoints regarding the objects of study.

In sum, Johnson argues that to praise solitude is to covertly to “depreciate mankind,” to say the good others offer isn’t worth the risk of their malice — and he is against that.

Maria Edgeworth, The Noble Science of Self-Justification

I didn’t care for this essay. It is satirical, and never steps out of that form. On the surface, it depicts women as hypocritical manipulators. It does this cleverly, but I just don’t care for it.

The following is Claude.ai’s response to my comment that I didn’t care for the essay because it positioned women as hypocritical manipulators. I asked Claude.ai to explain some of the virtues of the essay. Its response is quite interesting:

In Letters for Literary Ladies (1795) this is the third piece, following a genuine debate on female education. In that debate Edgeworth’s pro-education speaker says outright that women’s appetite for command need not be attributed to any innate cause, and may be fairly ascribed to their erroneous education, and names as the thing he most dreads his daughter absorbing the Rousseauvian idea that cunning and address are the natural resources of her sex. The Self-Justification essay is the exhibit for that argument — a portrait of precisely the woman the preceding letter says bad education produces. Read alone, it looks like a slur; read third, it’s a demonstration. 

—Claude.ai

This was, of course, not of Claude’s invention. I believe it is drawn from one of the sources it cited, likely this: Susan Egenolf / Women’s Literary Networks and Romanticism, ch. on Letters for Literary Ladies (Liverpool UP), on the essay as ironic commentary on the preceding debate.

There is ambiguity about when this essay was published, and whether it appeared only in the book, or appeared separately earlier. The latter undercuts the argument a bit…

… reading break …

Charles Lamb

New Year’s Eve

Each man has two days of note: his birthday, and New Year’s eve. In both cases, these days can lead to reflection on the passage of time. New Year’s eve is of special note.

Of all sound of all bells (bells, the music nighest bordering upon heaven) —most solemn and touching is the peal which rings out the Old Year. I never hear it without a gathering-up of my mind to a concentration of all the images that have been diffused over the past twelvemonth; all I have done or suffered, performed or neglected-in that regretted time. I begin to know its worth, as when a person dies.

—Charles Lamb, New Year’s Eve

Lamb admits he has no fondness for novelties, and prefers familiarity and retrospection. He turns to morality, and refuses to be resigned to death; he defends clinging to everyday pleasures.

I am in love with this green earth; the face of town and country; the unspeakable rural solitudes, and the sweet security of streets! ould set up my tabernacle here. I am content to stand still at the age which I am arrived…. I do not want to be weaned by age; or drop, like mellow fruit, as they say, into the grave.

—Charles Lamb, New Year’s Eve

He recalls childhood, an old family grievance, a futile courtship of Alice W., , then closes by quoting a cheerful seventeenth-century poem on the New Year as a tonic against his own melancholy.

A Chapter on Ears

The opening devotes to paragraphs to making a pun: he pretends he is talking about ears, but finally admits he means he has no ear for music. He claims to appreciate church bells and psalm singing, but says he has no feeling for other forms of music.

While he professes real feeling for church bells and plain psalm-singing, he does not take pleasure in other forms of music, and mocks those who do: concertgoers who perform rapture they don’t feel; evenings at a musical friend’s house where accomplished company raves over the great composers while he sits uncomprehending—but at least there is beer.

Dream Children: A Reverie

The essay—or I would say story—begins with the narrator in his armchair telling stories about his grandmother’s house to his two children. He describes the house, an uncle of whom he was fond, and various events, including his unsuccessful attempt to court a woman. who has the same name as one of the children. Through the story telling their are occasional references to the listening children—”Here little Alice spread her hands,” … “Here the children fell to crying.” As he is telling about Alice W, whom he tried to court, he sees her looking out of the eyes of child-Alice, and then the children fade an turn into specters: “We are nothing, and less than nothing, and dreams. We are only what might have been…” And here he awakes, “seated in his bachelor chair.”

The Superannuated Man

An essay on retiring. It begins with an account of the drudgery of the narrator’s job, and his growing disaffection with it (after years of number automaticity). He observes that even during the time he had off—Sundays, and a week of vacation—has job loomed large. Sundays, being focused on religion, gave him little respite to recover from his work. And the week of vacation was not long enough to refresh him: “Was it not a series of seven days spent in a restless pursuit of pleasure, and a wearisome anxiety to find out how to make the most of them.”.

Eventually his superiors noticed his growing malaise, and gave him the opportunity to retire with a generous pension. He describes the disbelief of the first few days—”Time stands still to me… I have lost all distinction of season. I do not know the day of the week or the day of the month.”—and then his growing pleasure of being free of work.

I am Retired Leisure. I am to be met with in trim gardens. I am already come to be known by my vacant face and careless gesture, perambulating at no fixe pace, nor with any settled purpose. I walk about; not to and from. They tell me, a certain cum dignitate air, that has been buried so long with my other good parts, has begun to shoot forth in my person. I grow into gentility perceptibly. When I take up a newspaper, it is to read the state of the opera—Opus operatum est. I have done all that I came into this world to do.

—Charles Lamb, The Superannuated Man

… reading break …

William Hazlitt

On Going on a Journey

A pleasant essay about what he gets out of traveling.

The soul of a journey is liberty, perfect liberty, to think, feel, do, just as one pleases. We go a journey chiefly to be free of all impediments and of all inconveniences; to leave ourselves behind, much more to get rid of others.

—William Hazlitt, On Going a Journey

“Give me the clear blue sky over my head, and the green turf beneath my feet, a winding road before me, and a three hours’ march to dinner—and then to thinking!

—William Hazlitt, On Going a Journey

“A stranger takes his hue and character from the time and place….”

—William Hazlitt, On Going a Journey

“the incognito of an inn is one of its striking privileges—’lord of one’s self, uncumber’d with a name.’  […] and become the creature of the moment, clear of all ties—to hold the  only by a dish of sweet-breads, and owe nothing but the score of the evening…

—William Hazlitt, On Going a Journey

The Pleasure of Hating

We read this several years ago. It was nice to re-read it. It still retains a lot of its verve, even though I so not resonate with its dour outlook.

Lines that struck me as memorable before still so strike me:

Seeing all this as I do, and unraveling the various threads of human life into meanness, spite, cowardice, want of feeling, and want of understanding, of indifference towards others, and ignorance of ourselves—seeing custom prevail over all excellence, itself giving way to infamy—mistaken as I have been in my public and private hopes, calculating others from myself, and calculating wrong; always disappointed where placed most reliance; the dupe of friendship, and the fool of love; —have I not reason to hate and to despise myself? Indeed I do; and chiefly for not having hated and despised the world enough.

—William Hazlitt, On Going a Journey

The Fight

I found little to like in this paean to boxing, and the description of the fight and the events leading up to it. Much was obscure, details that no longer are meaningful.

I did ask AI about the context of the essay, and in particular the concept of “The Fancy.” The latter is a reference to boxing as a world where the monied and working classes mix, and where, at least temporarily, they are on equal footing. Hazlitt’s essay seems, in part, to reinforce this conception of “The Fancy” as a special world apart.

Robert Louis Stevenson

The Lantern Bearers

AT first it seems more a story than an essay. It recounts Stevenson’s memories of a game that he and his playmates used to play involving concealing lanterns under their clothes. It has some great passages of writing:

But I recall with a more doubtful sentiment—compounded out of fear and exultation, the coil of equinoctial tempests; trumpeting squalls. scouring flaws of rain; the boats with their reefed lugsails scudding for the harbour mouth, where danger lay, for it was hard to make when the wind had any east in it; the wives clustered with blowing shawls at the pier-head, where (if fate was against them) they might see boat and husband and sons—their whole wealth and their whole family—engulfed under their eyes; and (what I saw but once) a troop of neighbours forcing such an unfortunate homeward, and she squalling and battling in their midst, a figure scarcely human, a tragic Maenad.

—Robert Louis Stevenson, The Lantern Bearers

This becomes motif. Though from the outside the boys’ game appears odd, and involves dreariness and discomfort, it has meaning to them. “To the eye of the observer they are wet and cold and drearily surround ; but ask themselves and they are in the heaven of a recondite pleasure, the ground of which is an ill-smelling lantern. “

The essence of this bliss was to walk by yourself in the black night; the slide shut, the top-coat buttoned; not a ray escaping, whether to conduct your footsteps or to make your glory public; a mere pillar of darkness in the dark; and all the while, deep down in the privacy of your fool’s heart, to know you had a bull’s-eye at your belt, and to exult and sing over the knowledge.

—Robert Louis Stevenson, The Lantern Bearers

Stevenson also evokes a hermit (real? or a literary fiction?) who appears to live a miserable, restricted, put-upon life, but who — had he wished — could live in comfort and luxury. Who knows what he feels — all we know is that he rejected comfort for some inner reason.

Stevenson also connects this to the myth of the monk who went into the forest, became absorbed in the tune of a nightingale, and when he had returned 50 years had passed.

Irrespective of the essay as a whole, he has a line/image I very much like:

“You might explore the tidal rocks … with ever an eye cast backward on the march of the tide and your menaced line of retreat.’

—Robert Louis Stevenson, The Lantern Bearers

A query to AI provides context. Stevenson is quarreling with a French turn towards realism:

• “An observer with a notebook sees only damp boys on a beach. The realist, Stevenson says, gives us mud and old iron, cheap desires and cheap fears, and no news of the nightingale — where the true realism is the poets’: to find where joy resides and give it a voice. This is Stevenson’s running quarrel with French naturalism and its English admirers…”
• “William James built his lecture ‘On a Certain Blindness in Human Beings’ around this essay, especially ‘to miss the joy is to miss all.'”

An Apology for Idlers

This essay had some bits of nice writing in it: “And so he would go his own way, ruffling out his cravat with a crackle of starch, like a turkey when it spread its feathers”

But overall I don’t care for it because it draws a contrast that relies on stereotype that I don’t think are especially apt: the scholar who only reads books and misses the joy of everyday life; and the idler who is ignorant but has learned truly important things while eschewing scholarly pursuits. The scholars I know are generally well-rounded people; and I’d say there is only so much you can learn while recling in the park with a glass of wine at hand, pleasant as that may be.

I like the essay better as it approaches its end, and he notes that much good is done by people who are happy and pleasant:

A happy man or woman is a better thing to find than a five pound note. He or she is a radiating focus of goodwill; and their entrance into a room is as though another candle had been lighted.

—Robert Louis Stevenson, An Apology for Idlers

On Marriage

I’m ambivalent about this essay. It has some very nice writing, as usual, which I’ll call out below. But it also trades in stereotypes (or perhaps it is drawing on what were at the time real social distinctions between men and women which no longer hold, and thus lose their force).

This bit was nice:

We advance in years somewhat in the manner of an invading army in a barren land; the age that we reached, as the phrase goes, we hold with but an outpost, and still keep our communications open with the extreme rear and the beginning of our march. There is our true base; that is not only our beginning but the perennial spring of our faculties; and grandfather William can retire, on occasion, into the green enchanted forest of his boyhood.

—Robert Louis Stevenson, On Marriage

Every sin is our last; every 1st of January a remarkable turning point in our career.

And this, on marriage, still holds nicely:

Times are changed with him who marries; there are no more by-path meadows, where you may innocently linger, but the road lies long and straight and dusty to the grave.  […] A thousand things unpleasing went on in the chiaroscuro of a life that you shrank from too particularly realizing; you did not care, in those days, to make a fetish of your conscience; you would recognize your failures with a nod, and so, good-day. But the time for these reserves is over. You have wilfully introduced a witness into your life, the scene of these defeats, and can no longer close the mind’s eye upon uncomely passages, but must stand up straight and put a name upon your actions. And your witness is not only the judge, but the victim of your sins; not only can she condemn you to the sharpest penalties, but she must herself share feelingly in their endurance.brf

And also:

…but ere you marry, should have learned the mingled lesson of the world: that dolls are stuffed with sawdust, and yet are excellent play things; that hope and love address themselves to a perfection never realized, and yet, firmly held, become the salt and staff of life; that you yourself are compacted of infirmities, perfect, you might say, in imperfection, and yet you have a something in you lovable and worth preserving […] So thinking, you will constantly support your own unworthiness, and easily forgive the failings of your friend. Nay, you will be wisely glad that you retain the sense of blemishes; for the faults of married people continually spur up each of them, hour by hour, to do better and to meet and love upon a higher ground. And ever, between the failures, there will come glimpses of kind virtues to encourage and console.

And also:

It is better to face the fact, and know, that when you have married, you have taken into your life a creature of equal, if of unlike, frailties; whose weak human heart beats no more tunefully than your own.

—Robert Louis Stevenson, On Marriage

These are both excellent, and I think, insightful passages. In retrospect I like this essay, excepting a few portions which time has rendered outmoded.

Max Beerbohm

Going Out for a Walk

A very funny, light essay, against going for walks.

It is a fact that not once in all my life have I gone out for a walk. I have been taken out for walks; but that is another matter. Even while I trotted prattling by my nurse’s side I regretted the good old days when I had, and wasn’t, a perambulator. When I grew up it seemed to mě that the one advantage of living in London was that nobody ever wanted me to come out for a walk. London’s very drawbacks—its endless noise and bustle, its smoky air, the squalor ambushed everywhere in it-assured this one immunity. Whenever I was with friends in the country, I knew that at any moment, unless rain were actually falling, some man might suddenly say “Come out for a walk!” in that sharp imperative tone which he would not dream of using in any other connexion.

—Max Beerbohm, Going out on a Walk

His essay continues with sorts of excuses one might make and how they are likely to fail, that walks do not improve conversation but rather the opposite (he provides funny examples), that the brain does not like walks and refuses to participate, and that this very essay was composed during a walk.

One more passage:

Experience teaches me that whatever a fellow-guest may have of power to instructor to amuse when he is sitting on a chair, or standing on a hearth-rug, quickly leaves him when he takes one out for a walk. The ideas that came so thick and fast to him in any room, where are they now? where that encyclopaedic knowledge which he bore so lightly? where the kindling fancy that played like summer lightning over any topic that was started! 

—Max Beerbohm, Going out for a Walk

He also has some nice turns of phrase, as when a spurned walk-proposer turns and lumbers from the room.

On Laughter

This essay did not thrill me.

I asked Claude.ai for some context and it noted that the essay was a reply to a piece by Bergson (to which the essay refers to at the beginning, and has this to say:

Bergson’s Le Rire treats laughter as social: comedy arises from rigidity interrupting life’s natural flexibility, and laughter serves as a moral corrective, forcing people to recognize their vices and conform to social norms. Beerbohm’s essay is a polite refusal of that whole project. He isn’t interested in laughter as punishment or as a theory of the comic; he’s interested in the helpless, convulsive, often private fit of laughter that no theory explains.
—Claude.ai

So I will revisit the essay, in that light, making note of its points:

It begins with a nod to Bergson’s essays, and then self-deprecating remarks has lack of currency with recent philosophy, and his inability to follow it.

I suffer from a strong suspicion that things in general cannot be accounted for through any formula or set of formulae, and that any one philosophy, hovsoever new, is no better than another. That is in itself a sort of philosophy, and I suspect it accordingly; but it has for me the merit of being the only one I can make head or tail of. 

Moving on to laughter, MB develops a different picture of it:

There is no dignity in laughter, there is much of it in smiles. Laughter is but a joyous surrender, smiles give token of mature criticism   … aeons hence laughter will be obsolete, and smiles universal—every one, always, mildly, slightly, smiling.

Beerbohm’s sketch of laughter calls out various characteristics:

• It is unintentional, it takes one by surprise
• It is catalyzed by a place or situation in which it is inappropriate: “Laughter rejoices in bonds.“
• He highlights the involuntary nature of laughter, and the prospect of it spreading by contagion:
  provides two anecdotes: a description of Lord Byron and his biographer Moore being drawn into convulsions of laughter (which then spread to another), and Boswell’s description of Samuel Johnson being caught up in a fit of laughter (although it did not spread to others.

MB also notes that in myth, history, and drama, no one has ever died of laughter. He thinks this odd, and believes it would have been a great way for Falstaff to pass. He ends by describing a friend, whom he refers to as Comus (the classic spirit of revelry and merrymaking) who is superb at making people laugh, but does not laugh himself. MB very much appreciates ‘Comus,’ but is much happier being the subject of laughter, rather than its creator.

G. K. Chesterton

A Piece of Chalk

I’ve read this essay closely, at three different times. And at each reading I appreciate it more. It entwines light humor, vivid description, self deprecation, and serious reflection in a way that few writers can — it is Chesterton at his best. I think it has become my favorite.

It begins describing how, “on one splendid morning, all blue and silver” GKC decides to go for a walk: he gathers his hat, walking stick, puts six pieces of chalk in his pocket, and goes to the kitchen to borrow some brown butchers paper from his landlady. After a bit of confusion which requires him to explain why he actually wants brown paper…

I then tried to explain the rather delicate logical shade, that I not only liked brown paper, but liked the quality of brownness in paper, just as I liked the quality of brownness in October woods, or in beer, or in the peat-streams of the North. Brown paper represents the primal twilight of the first toil of creation, and with a bright-coloured chalk or two you can pick out points of fire in it, sparks of gold, and blood-red, and sea-green, like the first fierce stars that sprang out of divine darkness.

…he is off, walking over the hills of southern England. He commennnnts on their swelling shapes, and their combination of softness and strength…

I crawled across those colossal contours that express the best quality of England, because they are at the same time soft and strong. The smoothness of them has the same meaning as the smoothness of great cart-horses, or the smoothness of the beech-tree; it declares in the teeth of our timid and cruel theories that the mighty are merciful.

He remarks that he is not going out to draw nature, and that he can’t even draw a cow accurately…

When a cow came slouching by in the field next to me, a mere artist might have drawn it; but I always get wrong in the hind legs of quadrupeds. So I drew the soul of the cow; which I saw there plainly walking before me in the sunlight; and the soul was all purple and silver, and had seven horns and the mystery that belongs to all the beasts.

GKC’s aim is to draw fanciful pictures. He begins, but soon realizes that he has failed to bring a piece of white chalk, which brings his project to a halt. White is essential, as are the qualities it brings to a drawing…

One of the wise and awful truths which this brown-paper art reveals, is that, that white is a colour. It is not a mere absence of colour; it is a shining and affirmative thing, as fierce as red, as definite as black. […] And one of the two or three defiant verities of the best religious morality, of real Christianity for example, is exactly the same thing; the chief assertion of religious morality is that white is a colour. Virtue is not the absence of vices or the avoidance of moral dangers; virtue is a vivid and separate thing, like pain or a particular smell. Mercy does not mean not being cruel or sparing people revenge or punishment; it means a plain and positive thing like the sun, which one has either seen or not seen.

(This transition from the aesthetics of color to the nature of morality is classic GKC.)

…but after a time puzzling, he realizes to his delight that he is sitting upon a large boulder of chalk and that, indeed, all of southern England is a giant piece of chalk.

On Running After One’s Hat

I’ve also read this essay at least three times, and I like it as well, though not as well as ‘Chalk.’ Perhaps it is because ‘Chalk’ has action in it, preparing to go out, discourse with the house keeper, walking through the rolling hills, and, finally, sketching. ‘Hat’ is more abbreviated and abstract, in a sense.

GKC begins by observing that Battersea, which I believe is the area where he lives, is flooded, and that he, being elsewhere, is envious. He imagines, in his minds eye, Battersea as Venice:

The boat that brought the meat from the butcher’s must have shot along those lanes of rippling silver with the strange smoothness of a gondola. The greengrocer who brought cabbages to the corner of the Latchmere Road must have leant upon the oar with the unearthly grace of the gondolier. There is nothing so perfectly poetical as an island; and when a district is flooded it becomes an archipelago.

—G. K. Chesterton, On Running After One’s Hat

From this GKC turns to other things that people commonly consider nuisances or inconveniences: waiting for a train; running after one’s hat; trying to get a bit of cork out of a glass of wine; trying to open a drawer that sticks. Each he raises, and for each he demonstrates, sometimes, perhaps, with tongue in cheek, how viewing it differently can transform it into a contest, or a game of skill, or a hunt.

Now a man could, if he felt rightly in the matter, run after his hat with the manliest ardor and the most sacred joy. He might regard himself as a jolly huntsman pursuing a wild animal, for certainly no animal could be wilder. In fact, I am inclined to believe that hat-hunting on windy days will be the sport of the upper classes in the future.

—G. K. Chesterton, On Running After One’s Hat

He concludes with

An adventure is only an inconvenience rightly considered. An inconvenience is only an adventure wrongly considered.

—G. K. Chesterton, On Running After One’s Hat

I was a bit puzzled by the end where Chesterton refers o a story in which a Priest says “Wine is good with everything except water,” and then, in chiasmus, reverses the saying: water is good with everything but wine.

AI notes the connection with the flooding of Battersea, speculating that water would ruin wine if it got into the cellar, but also suggested a subtler and more polemical interpretation:

Chesterton strongly opposed teetotalism and the temperance movement, which was largely a Nonconformist Protestant cause in England. By attributing the joke to a Catholic priest, he aligns wine-drinking with an old, cheerful, Catholic appreciation of ordinary pleasures. That stance is also the essay’s real subject: the choice between enjoying the world and complaining about it. There may be a further irony here, since a Catholic priest ritually mixes water into the wine at every Mass. The priest’s quip slyly exempts his own altar.

—Claude.ai

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Quotes I Like

Let childhood look ahead, old age backward: was not this the meaning of the double face of Janus? Let the years drag me along if they will, but backward. As long as my eyes can discern that lovely season now expired, I turn them in that direction at intervals. If youth is escaping from my blood and my veins, at least I want not to uproot the picture of it from my memory.

Praise a hunchback for his handsome figure and he is bound to take it as an insult.

“Love and marriage are two intentions that go by separate and distinct roads. “

It is no longer time to kick when we have let ourselves be hobbled.

“Women are not wrong at all when they reject the rules of life that have been introduced into the world, inasmuch as it is the men who have made these without them. “

“Any topic is equally fertile to me. A fly will serve my purpose.”

Everyone shuns to see a man born, everyone runs to see him die.

Things least feared are least guarded against and observed.

Certainly Love’s conduct has much more style when mingled with heedlessness and confusion; mistakes and misadventures give it style and grace. Provided it is sharp and hungry , it matters little whether it is prudent.

xx

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