Excerpt
It is not a little unfortunate that no one can attempt the essay form nowadays, more especially that type of essay which is personal, reminiscent, “an open letter to whom it may concern,” without being accused of trying to write like Charles Lamb. Of course, if we were ever accused of succeeding, that would be another story! There is, to be sure, no doubt that the gentle Elia impressed his form and method on all English writers who followed him, and still reaches out across a century to threaten with his high standards those who still venture into this pleasant and now so neglected field. Such are the rigors of triumphant gentleness. Still—and he would have been the first to recognize the fact—it is rather unfair to demand of every essayist the revelation of a personality like Lamb's. Fundamentally, all literature, even naturalistic drama, is the revelation of a personality, a point of view. But it is the peculiar flavor of the essay that it reveals an author through his chat about himself, his friends, his memories and fancies, in something of the direct manner of a conversation or a letter; and he himself feels, in writing, a delightful sense of intimacy with his future readers. That Lamb was a master of this art like no other, without a visible or probable rival, hardly constitutes a reason for denying to less delightful men and gifted artists the right also to practice it, to put themselves and their intimate little affairs and idiosyncrasies into direct and personal touch with such few readers as they may find. For the readers of his essays are the author's friends in a sense that the readers of his novels or dissertations, or the witnesses of his plays, can never be. There will be no story to hold them, no fictional, independent characters, no ideas nor arguments on high questions of policy. There will be only a joint interest in the minutiæ of life. If I like cats and snowstorms, and you like cats and snowstorms, we are likely to come together on that mutual ground, and clasp shadow hands across the page. But if you do not like cats and snowstorms, why then you will not like me, and we needn't bore each other, need we?
The little papers in this volume, issued from the peaceful town of Sewanee atop the Cumberland plateau, between Thumping Dick Hollow and Little Fiery Gizzard Creek, have been written at various times and places in the past fifteen years, many of them while I still dwelt in New York, and babbled o' green fields, many before, and some few after, the outbreak of the Great War. That War, you will perhaps discover, finds in them no reflection. It has been consciously excluded, for though the world can never be the same world again, as we are in no danger of forgetting, there are some things which even war and revolution cannot change, such as the memories of our childhood, the joy of violets in the Spring, the delight in melody, the humor of small dogs, the coo of babies. I have fancied we are sometimes by way of forgetting that. At any rate, of such matters, in hours when he has no thought but to please himself, the essayist chats, and shall chat in the happy years that are to come again, or all our bloodshed has been in vain. If, at the same time, he chances to please an editor also, and then to make a few friends who like what he likes, smiles sympathetically at what makes him smile, why, that is clear again!
This author has been fortunate enough to please several editors in the past, and to all of them, who have given him permission to reprint such papers in this volume as have appeared in their periodicals, he extends his gratitude. They are specifically, the editors of The Atlantic Monthly, Scribner's, House and Garden, The Dial, Ainslee's, The Scrap Book, The Boston Transcript and The New York Tribune.
W. P. E.
Twin Fires,Sheffield,Mass.
Penguin PersonsAfter all, one knows so little about a man from his printed works! They are the gleanings of his thoughts and investigations, the pick of his mind and heart; and they are at best but an impersonal and partial record of the writer. Even autobiography has something unsatisfactory about it; one feels the narrator is on guard always, as it were, and, aware of an audience cold and of strangers, keeps this back and trims up that to make himself more what he should be (or, in some perverse cases, what he should not be). But probably no man who is worthy of attention sits down to write a letter to a good friend with one eye on posterity and the public. In his intimate correspondence he is off guard. Hence, some day, when he has died, the world comes to know him by fleeting glimpses as he was,—which is almost as near, is it not, as we ever get to knowing one another?—knows him under his little private moods, in the spell of his personal joys and sorrows, sees his flashes of unexpected humor,—even, it may be, his unexpected pettinesses Thus dangerous and thus delightful is it to publish a great man's letters.
Such letters were Ruskin's to Charles Eliot Norton, which Professor Norton has given to the world. No one can fail from those letters to get a more intimate picture of the author of Modern Painters than could ever be imagined out of that work itself, and out of the rest of his works besides, not excepting the wonderful Fors Clavigera; and not only a more intimate, but a different picture, touched with greater whimsicality, and with infinite sadness, too....