CHAPTER VII

THE INFORMAL ESSAY

It is a fine thing to be serious, to draw one's self up to a formal task of explaining a machine or analyzing an idea or criticizing a novel; and it is just as fine, and often more pleasurable, to banish the grim seriousness of business and take on pliancy, smile at Life-even though there be tears

· and chuckle at Care. Life is more than mere toil; there are the days of high feast and carnival, the days of excursion, and then the calm quiet days of peaceful meditation, sometimes even the days of gray sadness shot through with the crimson thread of sacrifice and sorrow. Often in the least noisy days we see most clearly, with most balance, and with the keenest humor, the finest courage. Like an athlete who cannot be forever in the life of stern rigor but must stray at times into the ways of the drawing-room and the library, so we at times take our ways into the realm of whim and sparkle and laughter, of brooding contemplation, of warm peace of soul. "I want a little breathing-space to muse on indifferent matters," says Hazlitt, and, "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!" In such moods we look for a good friend to talk with, and when the friend is not at hand

why, we may write informal essays to make record of ur thoughts and feelings. For the Informal Essay is the transcript of a personal reaction to some phase or fact of life, personal because the author does not regard life with the cold eye of the scientific thinker, and because he does not, on the other hand, insist, as does the reformer, that others than himself accept the views he sets forth. He will

not force his belief upon others, will not even hold it too feverishly himself, but, if we cannot accept, will even smile urbanely though he may think we are quite wrongand bow, and go his own way.

The greatest charm of the informal essay is its personal nature. There is little, if indeed anything, personal about the analysis of problems or situations, slight revelation of the author in a treatise on dietetics or party politics or bridge building. This kind of writing is essentially the writing of our business. "But what need of ceremony among friends?" Lamb asks, and hits the heart of the informal essay. We are with friends, and with them, if the mood is on us, we chat about the delights of munching apples on snappy October mornings, or the humor of the scramble for public office, or the romance of spanning a stream in the hills, or, at times, the mysteries of life and death. And then the chat is thoroughly personal, we feel no grim duty, but only the quiet pleasure of uttering whatever we may think or feel, about things in which we find our personal interests aroused. It is as the counterpart in literature of such talk in living that the informal essay reveals the personal note, is really the lyric of prose. For the informal essay does not affirm, "This must be done!" or, "I will defend this with my life!" or, "This is undeniable truth!" Rather it says, "This is how I feel about things to-day," and if the essayist be aware that he has not always felt thus, that he may even feel differently again, he is unabashed. He will make you his confidant, will tell you what he thinks and how he feels, will banish the cold front of business, and will not be secretive and niggardly of himself, but only duly reticent.

As soon as we turn to informal essays we find this personal note. Here is Cowley's essay "Of Myself," frankly telling of his life. Our eye falls upon Hazlitt's words, "I never was in a better place or humor than I am at present for writing on this subject. I have a partridge getting ready for my sup

per, my fire is blazing on the hearth, the air is mild for the season of the year, I have had but a slight fit of indigestion to-day (the only thing that makes me abhor myself), I have three hours good before me, and therefore I will attempt it." Such intimacy, such personal contact is to be found only in the informal essay. Only in a form of writing that we frankly acknowledge as familiar would Samuel Johnson write "The Scholar's Complaint of His Own Bashfulness." And once in the writing, the author cannot keep himself out. Steele, not Addison, wrote the words, "He is said to be the first that made Love by squeezing the Hand" - honest, jovial, garrulous Dick Steele, thinking, perhaps, of his "Darling Prue."

If, then, you have some random ideas that interest you, if the memory of your kite-flying days comes strong upon you, or of your early ambitions to be a sailor or a prima donna, if you can see the humor of rushing for trains or eluding taxes, or reciting without study, if you feel keenly the joy of climbing mountains, or canoeing, or gardening, or fussing with engines, or making things with hammer and nails or flour and sugar, if you see the beauty in powerful machinery or in the deep woods and streams and flowers, or the patient heroism-modest heroism of the men in "Information" booths at railway stations, if you find pathos in the world, or humor, or any personal significance, and are able to understand without being oppressed with seriousness or poignant reality, even of humor, if you remember or see or feel such things, and wish to talk quite openly about them as they appeal to you, write an informal essay.

Now you can write a personal essay that will be enjoyable only if your personality is attractive. And you cannot draw a reader to you unless you have a keen reaction to the facts of life. Writing informal essays is impossible for the man whose life is neutral, who goes unseeing, unhearing through the world; it is most natural to the man who touches life at

many points and touches with pleasure. Those magic initials, R. L. S., which the world, especially the young world, loves, mean to us a personality that reveled in playing with lead soldiers, in hacking a way through the tropical forests of Samoa, in pursuing streams to their sources, in cleaning "crystal," in talking with all living men, in reading all living books, in whiling the hours with his flageolet. "I have," says Lamb, "an almost feminine partiality for old china." We think, perhaps, of Bacon as a cold austere figure, until we know him, but is he cold when, writing of wild thyme and water mints he says, "Therefore you are to set whole alleys of them, to have the pleasure when you walk or tread" of sniffing their sweet fragrance? And is a man uninterested who writes, "I grant there is one subject on which it is pleasant to talk on a journey; and that is what one shall have for supper when we get to our inn at night"? When we consider the loves of that bright flower of English young manhood, Rupert Brooke, we can the more keenly feel the loss that the essay, as well as poetry, had in his untimely death.

These have I loved:

White plates and cups, clean-gleaming,

Ringed with blue lines; and feathery, faëry dust;
Wet roofs, beneath the lamplight; the strong crust
Of friendly bread; and many-tasting food;
Rainbows; and the blue bitter smoke of wood;

And radiant raindrops couching in cool flowers;

And flowers themselves, that sway through sunny hours,
Dreaming of moths that drink them under the moon;
Then, the cool kindliness of sheets, that soon
Smooth away trouble; and the rough male kiss
Of blankets; grainy wood; live hair that is
Shining and free; blue-massing clouds; the keen
Unpassioned beauty of a great machine;
The benison of hot water; furs to touch;
The good smell of old clothes; and other such

The comfortable smell of friendly fingers,

Hair's fragrance, and the musty reek that lingers
About dead leaves and last year's ferns. . . .

Dear names,

And thousand other throng to me! Royal flames;
Sweet water's dimpling laugh from tap or spring;
Holes in the ground; and voices that do sing;
Voices in laughter, too; and body's pain,

Soon turned to peace; and the deep-panting train;
Firm sands; the little dulling edge of foam
That browns and dwindles as the wave goes home;
And washen stones, gay for an hour; the cold
Graveness of iron; moist black earthen mould;
Sleep; and high places; footprints in the dew;
And oaks; and brown horse-chestnuts, glossy-new;
And new-peeled sticks; and shining pools on grass;—
All these have been my loves.1

Lamb's young Bo-bo was in the right of it, the right frame of mind, when he cried, "O, father, the pig, the pig, do come and taste how nice the burnt pig eats!" The true writer of informal essays can see that Card Catalogues are humorous, that The Feel of Leather Covered Books is sufficiently interesting to deserve treatment, that Shaving, and Going to Bed Last, and Wondering if the Other Man Knows More, and Manners, and Politeness, and The Effect of Office-holding upon Personality, and Intellectual Deviltry, and The Humility of Sinners, and The Arrogance of Saints, and The Joys of Calling Names, and City Chimney-pots, and The "Woman's Page," and Keeping Up, and The Pleasures of Having a Besetting Sin, and The Absurdities of Education, and When Shakespeare Nods, and thousands of other subjects are all waiting to have their essays. Can there be any possible interest in a carpet layer? Mr. Dallas Lore Sharp, as we have seen,2 finds it quite wonderful. Is he not to be

1 Rupert Brooke: Collected Poems. By courtesy of the publishers, John Lane Company * See Chapter v.