The Whole Five Feet

Volume 27

English Essays: Sidney to Macaulay

There are many predictable delights to a year of navigating the great landmarks of literary history. But one unexpected pleasure has been the sense that so much of what we consider unprecedented about our own literary culture has actually been seen many times before. This feeling struck me in several different ways while reading this volume of English essays.

The short, personal essay, though it has roots in Seneca and Montaigne, came into its own as a literary form in England in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, as practiced by the writers collected here. The form hits its stride in the early 1700s, in the hands of Joseph Addison and Richard Steele, who wrote gossipy pieces about the London of their day. Addison and Steele collaborated on the Tatler, which Steele founded, and later on the Spectator.  They created a collection of personae, which they called the Spectator Club, and many of their writings are openly fictionalised.  Here's the beginning of Steele's The Vision of Mirza:

When I was at Grand Cairo, I picked up several oriental manuscripts, which I have still by me. Among others I met with one entitled The Visions of Mirza, which I have read over with great pleasure. I intend to give it to the public when I have no other entertainment for them, and shall begin with the first vision, which I have translated word for word.

There follows a three page pastiche of an Arabian night, all of it ostensibly translated from this manuscript. When I read this work -- it's not an essay in the sense that we use the term now, but nor is it a story, exactly -- I thought immediately of a 20th century Orientalist Anglophile, one who specialized in this strange straddling of two forms. Borges' ficciones would not be at all out of place in the Spectator, a fact of which he was no doubt well aware. And yet Borges' odd mingling of fiction and non-fiction, story and essay, narrative and exposition is generally considered a sui generis post-modernist act. In light of these pages, Borges seems rather to be returning the essay to its original form. He's like a real-life version of his greatest creation, Pierre Menard, re-writing hundred-year-old works to which the passage of time has given new meaning.

But there's another way that these essays made me think of more recent writing. Addison and Steele aren't the only writers in this volume who started their own journals. There was Daniel Defoe's Review, Samuel Johnson's Rambler, Sydney Smith's Edinburgh Review (the radical outlet much discussed in Mill's Autobiography), and Leigh Hunt's Examiner. Which is to say that more than a third of the essayists included here published in journals that they had some hand in founding. These journals were often short-lived, and their content was often produced by just one or two contributers. You can probably see where I'm going here. Even names like the Rambler and the Tatler sound like blog names.

There's been a lot of talk recently about the reduction of book coverage in mainstream media. Many wrtiers have rejected out of hand the notion that literary blogs might fill the cultural vacuum that shrinking mainstream media space threatens to create. Blogs make poor substitutes for print reviews, the argument goes, mostly because they aren't edited, and because they lack the rigor and accountability provided by the imprimatur of the professional masthead. At present, this complaint happens to be generally true in practice -- there are a lot of sloppy blogs out there (including this one) and even the very best struggle to balance immediacy with quality control.

 

But there's no reason that any of this must remain true over time. If the decline of the print review sends more literate readers to the blogosphere; if these readers bring with them the expectations inculcated by the best print review sections; if these standards influence which blogs these readers regularly visit and what feedback they provide; if, in short, the stakes are raised within the literary blogosphere, there is no reason to think that some blogs won't respond to this challenge by becoming more professional.

Self-edited doesn't have to mean un-edited, and it certainly doesn't have to mean poorly written. Many of the writers in this volume wrote essays that were unapologetically trifling, written to make a quick buck. But the best of them are still read today. Whoever wishes to attain an English style, Samuel Johnson writes in his Life of Addison (included in this volume), familiar but not coarse, and elegant but not ostentatious, must give his days and nights to the volumes of Addison.  These exemplary works -- like most blogs -- were written, edited and printed by the same hand.

--CRB, August 12, 2007

Volume 28

Essays: English and American

I first read Thoreau's essay Walking, which is included in the Classics' second volume of essays, as a freshman in a course on the American Renaissance. More recently, I've taught the essay several semesters in an undergraduate writing class. In between, I've probably read it close to fifty times. In my writing class, I talk a lot about the way that Thoreau's meandering style matches his subject matter, and more generally about the way that form and content align in a good piece of writing.  But the real reason I teach Walking, and the reason I read it over and over again, is because I love it as much as anything I've ever read.

When my friend Josh got married in his hometown of Concord, Massachusetts last year, I spent the morning before the ceremony at the Sleepy Hollow Cemetery, whose Author's Ridge holds Emerson and Hawthorne and Louisa May Alcott. The first grave I looked for was Thoreau's, and I spent a long time in front of it, thinking mostly about what this essay has meant to me at various times in my life. Even skimming over it now to write this post, I find my heart rate elevating a little. So what did it mean to read these twenty familiar pages as part of 20,000 in the Shelf?

I wish to speak a word for Nature, the essay begins:

for absolute freedom and wildness, as contrasted with a freedom and culture merely civil, --to regard man as an inhabitant, or a part and parcel of Nature, rather than a member of society. I wish to make an extreme statement, if so I may make an emphatic one, for there are enough champions of civilization.

Thoreau emerged from roughly the same New England society that a few generations later produced Charles Eliot. Like Eliot he was Harvard educated. He lived in a world that placed great stock in culture -- and the limits it placed on human behavior -- as opposed to instinct and wildness. Thoreau shared with Emerson the worry that a particular American genius risked being smothered in the cradle by a too-great reverence for European antiquity. In Walking, he links this general philosophical belief with the more immediate conviction that culture teaches men to give over too much of their lives to indoor occupations when they might be out in the natural world. All of which suggests, in part, that Thoreau would think rather little of a young man in the prime of life who chose to spend a year sitting inside reading classic works of literature.

There is an honest answer to this charge, one I've carried with me since February, when I read some of the same points expressed somewhat differently by Emerson. Plainly, we no longer live in an age too much in thrall to the past. Our culture is more than willing to honor instinct and to throw off the limits and demands of cultivation. In particular America is more than willing to celebrate a wild American genius at the expense of European civilization.

All of it true. Thoreau wrote in a different time. But I have come over the years to believe that there's something lasting about this essay, something that speaks to me in a particular way, and so I couldn't simply dismiss it as irrelevant when it seemed to challenge what I was doing with my time. It troubled me as I read Walking for the fifty-first time last week.  Then I came to what has always been my favorite passage in the essay:

We have heard of a Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge. It is said that knowledge is power, and the like. Methinks there is equal need of a Society for the Diffusion of Useful Ignorance, what we will call Beautiful Knowledge, a knowledge useful in a higher sense: for what is most of our boasted so-called knowledge but a conceit that we know something, which robs us of the advantage of our actual ignorance? What we call knowledge is often our positive ignorance; ignorance our negative knowledge. By long years of patient industry and reading of the newspapers--for what are the libraries of science but files of newspapers--a man accumulates a myriad facts, lays them up in his memory, and then when in some spring of his life he saunters abroad into the Great Fields of thought, he, as it were, goes to grass like a horse and leaves all his harness behind in the stable. I would say to the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge, sometimes, --Go to grass. You have eaten hay long enough. The spring has come with its green crop.

Go to grass. I shiver every time I read these words. But this time they especially moved me. I'm more than halfway through the Shelf now, and it feels at times like I've been reading it my whole life. I suspect that some part of me will continue to read it my whole life. But part of me hopes that along with whatever knowledge the Shelf have given me, it is adding to my store of useful ignorance. And when I've finished the green crop will come, and I will be ready to go to grass.

--CRB, August 31, 2007