The essay, as a literary type, is written comment upon any subject, highly informal in nature, extremely personal in character, and brief in expression. It is also usually marked by a notable beauty of style.
III
TYPES OF THE ESSAY
Just as there are many kinds of houses and many kinds of boats so there are many kinds of essays. Some essays tend to emphasize the giving of information, lean very strongly toward formality, and place comparatively little weight on personality,—and yet even such essays, as compared with other and more serious writings, are discursive and personal. They are like some people who seem to favor extreme formality without ever quite attaining it.
Other essays are critical. They point out the good and the bad, and they set forward ideals that should be reached. The criticism they give is not measured and accurate like the criticism a cabinet-maker might make concerning the construction of a desk. It is more or less personal and haphazard like the remarks of one who knows what he likes and what he does not like but who does not wish to bother himself by going into minute details.
Many essays tell stories, but never for the sake of the stories alone. They use the stories as frameworks on which to hang thought, or as illustrations to emphasize thought. The essays hold beyond and above everything the personality of the one who writes.
Almost all essays are in some sense biographical, but they reveal stories of lives, instead of telling the stories in organized form. The little of biography that essays tell is just enough to permit the writers to recall the memories of childhood, and the varied affections and interests of life. For real biography one must go elsewhere than to essays.
Some essays lift one into a fine and close communion with their writers, and give intimate companionship with a human soul. They are the best of all essays. Such essays are always extremely familiar, and deeply personal, like the essays of Michel de Montaigne and Charles Lamb. About such essays is an aroma, a fascination, a delight, that makes them a joy forever. As one reads such essays he feels that he is walking and talking with the writers, and that he hears them express noble and uplifting thoughts.
The terse style of Francis Bacon; the magical phrases of Sir Thomas Browne; the well-rounded sentences of Joseph Addison, Sir Richard Steele and Oliver Goldsmith; the poetic prose of Thomas de Quincey; the charm of the pages of Charles Lamb and Robert Louis Stevenson,—all this is in no sense accidental. The intimate revelation of self, such as is always made by the best essayists, creates the most pleasing style. Genuine self-expression, whether it be the fervor of an impassioned orator, the ardor of a lyric poet, or the meditative mood of the essayist, always tends to embody itself in an appropriate style. For that reason much of the best prose of the language is to be found in the works of the great essayists.
Some writers, like Thomas de Quincey, have so felt the significance of beauty of style, and have so appreciated its relationship to the revelation of mood and personality, that they seem, in some cases, to have written for style alone. Their essays are unsurpassed tissues of prose and poetry.