Expository Writing

by Mervin James Curl

This mood of human interest is illustrated, of course, by other writers than the informal essayists. The historian Parkman filled his volumes with the intimate details of personal experience that keep them warm and forever alive. As distinct from the dry-as-dust chroniclers, who eschew all of the throbbing incidents of life, he was eager to include whenever inclusion would help the reader's true imagination, such details as that, back in colonial times, the thunderous praying of a member of the General Court of Massachusetts, who had retired to his room for Heavenly counsel, revealed the secret of the proposed attack upon the fortress of Louisbourg to a landlady—and hence to all the world. Nor does he fail to mention that when the Grand Battery at Louisbourg was captured, William Tufts, of Medford, a lad of eighteen, climbed the flagstaff with his red coat in his teeth and made it fast to the pole for a flag. As we read Parkman's words, we can feel his heart glow with the joy of the climbing lad, we know that in the historian there was beating the throb of human love such as would have made him an admirable essayist had he turned his hand to the form.

If, then, you feel like confidential writing, what may your subjects be? Essayists have written about three main classes of subjects: first always, people, their glory, their pathos, their sadness, and their whims; second, nature as it appeals to the writers in a personal way, reflecting their joys and sorrows, or contributing to their sense of pleasure, beauty, and companionship in the world; and third, matters of science, industry, art, literature, as the essayists think these affect the emotions of humanity. If you are in wonderment and desire to speak of the bravery of men fighting the battle of life, you may write with Stevenson the somber but inspiring "Pulvis et Umbra." If you are tempted to smile at the tendency of people to announce beliefs militantly, you may write with Mr. Crothers "On Being a Doctrinaire." If man's ceaseless quest of the perfect appeals, you may write with Mr. Sharp "The Dustless Duster." The interesting old custom of having an awesome "spare chamber," the hurly-burly and humor of moving, the fascinating process of shaving that Grandfather performs on Sunday, the ways in which some people make themselves lovable, others hateful, others pitiful, and still others ridiculous—these are your rightful field if you but care to use them. The informal essayist loves humanity not blindly but wisely. "There is something about a boy that I like," Charles Dudley Warner wrote, and thereby proved himself worthy to write such essays. Lamb, thinking of chimney-sweeps, cries out, "I have a kindly yearning toward these dim specks—poor blots—innocent blacknesses." Nor is the essayist restricted to the lives of others; the true informal essayist never forgets his own boyhood. The swimming and fishing larks, the tramp for the early chestnuts, the machines that you built at ten years, the tricks you played on friends and enemies, human and four-footed—these await your essay. Especially your grown-up self offers a fertile meadowland of essays. What are your hobbies—and have you any follies? If you can but poke fun at yourself, we will listen. Finally, if you have an interesting acquaintance, a rosy corner grocer, or a maiden aunt of the old school, or a benignant grandfather, or a quaint laundress, or "hired man," or anybody who is worth the words—and who is not?—and who really interests you, you may make a character sketch. Thus Stevenson in "A Scotch Gardener," Leigh Hunt in "The Old Lady," "The Old Gentleman," "The Maidservant," and John Brown in "Jeems the Doorkeeper." Remember only one thing—you must, for some reason, see attractiveness in the character, even the paradoxical attractiveness of repulsion. Remember that Hazlitt wrote an essay on "The Pleasures of Hating."

When people do not offer subjects, turn to nature, as Mr. Burroughs and Mr. Sharp and John Muir have turned in our day, and as others have turned at times ever since there was an essay. Do you admire the cool deep woods, the songs of the thrushes, the clouds that roll into queer shapes, the endlessly talking brooks, the bugs that strive and fight and achieve, the queer hunted live things that you see everywhere? There is your essay. Mr. Warner wrote a delightful series about gardening in which he makes fun—partly of himself, partly of nature. Richard Jefferies found a subject in "July Grass." Mr. Belloc gives the spirit of the primeval currents of air that bore the ships of our forefathers in his essay, "On a Great Wind." California sequoias, red-eyed vireos, the pig in his pen, the silly hens in their yard, friendly dogs, a group of willows, a view from a mountain-top, trees that rush past as you skim the road in your car, there's hardly a phase of nature that does not offer an essay, have you but the eyes to see and the heart to warm. One caution must be given. This kind of essay will try to lure you into words that seem poetic but really lie; beware that you tell the truth, for a sunset, glorious though it is, is still a sunset. For the higher imaginative flights we reserve our verse. On the other hand, scientific analysis is not for the essay; it is too impersonal. Nature, as seen in the informal essay, is the nature of emotion that keeps its balance through humor and sanity. Do not, then, write an essay about nature unless you are sure of your balance, unless you are sure that you can tell the truth.

But the essayist does not stop with the creations in nature; he goes on to the works of man. He sees the exquisite beauty of a deftly guided mathematical problem, the answer marshaled to its post in order, he feels the exultation of a majestic pumping station, he knows the wonder of the inspiration of artists. As you pass the steel skeleton of the skyscraper, or see the liner gliding up the harbor, or thrill to the locomotive that paws off across the miles, or stand in awe and watch the uncanny linotype machine at its weird mysteries, you may find your subject all ready for the expression. Mr. Joseph Husband finds the romance of these.[84] Books, too, chats with your favorite authors, trips through art galleries, listening to concerts, finding the wonders of the surgeon,—all these, as they appeal to you, as you react to them, as they disclose a meaning, are fit subjects for your essay. Thus Mr. Crothers writes in "The Hundred Worst Books."

Men, nature, things, all are at your beck if you but keenly feel their appeal, if you have an honest thought about them. As you treat them do not hesitate to use the word "I"; in the essay we expect the word, we look for it, we miss it when it eludes us, for the great charm of the informal essay is its personal note, its revelation of the heart of the writer.

Since the essay is urbanely personal, it does not take itself too seriously. Our definition declared that the essayist will not try to force his views upon his reader nor hold them too feverishly himself. If you are militant about a subject, you should write, not an informal essay, but a treatise or an argument in which full play will be given to your cudgels. If you violently believe in woman-suffrage—as you well may—so that you can be only dead-serious about it, do not write an informal essay. For the essay aims at the spirit as well as the intellect, hopes to create a glow in the reader as well as to convince him of a truth. You should write an informal essay when you are in the mood of Sir Roger de Coverley as he remarked, "There is much to be said on both sides." This does not mean that you should write spinelessly—not in the least; it means only that you should be an artist rather than a blind reformer. Sometimes the mind wishes to go upon excursion, to give play to the "wanton heed and giddy cunning" that are in the heart. The essay, says Richard Middleton, "should have the apparent aimlessness of life, and, like life, its secret purpose." It may be mere "exuberant capering round a discovered truth," to borrow Mr. Chesterton's phrase. Again, it may feel the length of the shadows, the cold breath of the mists of the still, unpierced places. The essay does not deny the shadows; it rather believes in riding up to the guns with a smile and the gesture of courtesy. It sees the truth always, but it also prefers not to be a pest in declaring the truth disagreeably. "Therefore we choose to dally with visions." Many an informal essay has been written on "Death," but not in the mood of the theologian. The essay has about it the exquisite flavor of personality such as we find in the cavalier lads who rode to feasting or to death with equal grace and charm. The real essay ought not to leave its reader uncomfortable; it leaves to the militant writers to work such mischief.

Do not, therefore, ever allow your essay to become a sermon, for to the sermon there is only one side. And do not try to wrench a moral from everything. If you do, the moral will be anæmic and thin. Do not, after watching brooks, be seized with a desire to have your reader "content as they are." Nor, after the locomotive has melted into the distance shall you buttonhole your reader and bid him, like the engine, be up and doing! Better is it to play pranks with respectability and logic. Stevenson's ability to write charming essays came partly from the fact that, as Barrie has said of him, "He was the spirit of boyhood tugging at the skirts of this old world of ours and compelling it to come back and play." Mr. Chesterton often inspires us to do some really new thinking by his ridiculous contentions. Where but in the essay could a man uphold the belief that Faith is Nonsense and perhaps Nonsense is Faith?

In fact, humor is always present in the informal essay. It may be grave or even sad, it is never really boisterous, it is best subtle and quiet, but of whatever kind it should be present. Meredith said "humor is the ability to detect ridicule of those we love without loving them the less." Note, in the light of these words, John Brown's description of his friend Jeems: "Jeems's face was so extensive, and met you so formidably and at once, that it mainly composed his whole; and such a face! Sydney Smith used to say of a certain quarrelsome man, 'His very face is a breach of the peace.' Had he seen our friend's he would have said that he was the imperative mood on two (very small) legs, out on business in a blue greatcoat." Lamb had the gentle humor in exquisite degree, kindly and shrewd. When the little chimney-sweep laughed at him for falling in the street Lamb thought, "there he stood ... with such a maximum of glee and minimum of mischief, in his mirth—for the grin of a genuine sweep hath absolutely no malice in it—that I could have been content, if the honor of a gentleman might endure it, to have remained his butt and mockery till midnight." The humor is often ironic, frequently dry and lurking, but kindly still, for the essayist loves his fellow man.

Since the essay is not super-serious, it need not be too conscientiously thorough and exhaustive. It must, to be sure, have some point, some core of thought, must meditate, but it need not reach a final conclusion. It often believes, with Stevenson, that "to travel hopefully is better than to arrive," and it spends its time on the pleasant way. It takes conclusions about as seriously as we take them when we sit with pipe and slippers by the fireside and chat. Its view of the subject is limited also. It is not a piece of research, it need not cover the whole ground with all the minutiæ. The essayist, first of all, will admit that he does not say all that might be said. Very likely he will declare that he is merely making suggestions rather than giving a treatment. Think how endless a real treatise on old china would be, and then how brief and sketchy Lamb's essay is. The beauty of writing an informal essay is that you can stop when you please, you do not feel the dread command of the subject.

Just as the conclusion may be dodged, so the strict laws of rhetoric may be winked at. De Quincey remarks, "Here I pause for a moment to exhort the reader ... etc.," and for a whole page talks about a different subject! But we do not mind, for, as has been said of him—and the remark is equally true of many essayists—he is like a good sheep dog, he makes many detours, may even disappear behind a knoll, but finally he will come eagerly and bravely back with his flock and guide the sheep home. Digressions are allowable, so long as safe return is made. The formlessness of the essay is to be held by an invisible web that is none the less binding, like the bonds of the Fenris wolf. We may go round the subject or stand off and gaze at it, may introduce anecdotes, bits of conversation, illustrations of various sorts, may even cast the essay largely in narrative form, so long as at the heart of it there is our idea. "You may tack and drift, only so you tack and drift round the buoy." Hazlitt, in "On Persons One Would Wish to Have Seen," uses much conversation. Thackeray, in "Tunbridge Toys," clings to the narrative medium.