THE FAMILIAR ESSAY THE familiar essay, like the lyric poem and the familiar letter, is personal and subjective. Its primary object is not, as in other types of essay, to furnish information, to criticise, or to teach; it is intended to entertain while giving the writer's personal view of his subject and of any aspects of life that the subject may suggest to him. There is always something of the freedom and informality of conversation, and our interest depends not a little upon whether or not we are attracted to the man who is disclosed to us through his writings. The essay may be serious, pathetic, satirical, witty, or playfully humorous in tone, but to succeed as literature it must. be stimulating as well as entertaining and must be distinctive in style. This type of essay was popular during the early nineteenth century, when, in prose as well as in verse, men were writing freely of the things that were closest to their hearts, and revealed themselves as they wrote. Next in significance to the lyrical poetry of the period come the essays of an illustrious group of writers: Lamb, Hazlitt, De Quincey and Leigh Hunt. Thackeray and Stevenson were among those who carried on the familiar essay during the latter part of the century. Charles Lamb or "Elia" wrote to gain relief from the tedium of clerical work. He met with courage and self-sacrifice circumstances that would have weighed down many a man, and he had a capacity for enjoying to the full the simpler pleasures that were within his reach. His wide sympathies and charming personality, as well as his appreciation of the noble and beautiful in life have made him one of the best loved of English authors. William Hazlitt spent much of his life in lecturing and writing for periodicals. His critical work shows him to have been a man of strong convictions and prejudices, and in his essays, as Coleridge remarked, "He says things of his own in a way of his own." Leigh Hunt, journalist, wrote interestingly, although his essays do not reveal the depth of thought or feeling of his greater contemporaries. William Makepeace Thackeray, best known as a novelist, was always essentially an essayist or commentator on life, a shrewd, often satirical observer, and yet a tender-hearted and great-souled man. Robert Louis Stevenson, poet, romancer, and essayist, reveals himself as a genial soul with a wilful perversity that makes his observations on life individual and interesting, in spite of a style that at times seems too self-conscious. CHARLES LAMB (1775-1834) DREAM-CHILDREN: A REVERIE Children love to listen to stories about their elders, when they were children; to stretch their imagination to the conception of a traditionary great-uncle or grandame, whom they never saw. It was in this spirit that my little ones crept about me the other evening to hear about their great-grandmother Field, who lived in a great house in Norfolk (a hundred times bigger than that in which they and papa lived) which had been the sceneso at least it was generally believed in that part of the country-of the tragic incidents which they had lately become familiar with from the ballad of the Children in the Wood. Certain it is that the whole story of the children and their cruel uncle was to be seen fairly carved out in wood upon the chimney-piece of the great hall, the whole story down to the Robin Redbreasts, till a foolish rich person pulled it down to set up a marble one of modern invention in its stead, with no story upon it. Here Alice put out one of her dear mother's looks, too tender to be called upbraiding. Then I went on to say, how religious and how good their great-grandmother Field1 was, how beloved and respected by everybody, though she was not indeed the mistress of this great house, but had only the charge of it (and yet in some respects she might be said to be the mistress of it too) committed to her by the owner, who preferred. living in a newer and more fashionable mansion which he had purchased somewhere in the adjoining county; but still she lived in it in a manner as if it had been her own, and kept up the dignity of the great house in a sort while she lived, which afterwards came to decay, and was Lamb's grandmother, Mary Field, housekeeper for a family in Hertfordshire. nearly pulled down, and all its old ornaments stripped and carried away to the owner's other house, where they were set up, and looked as awkward as if some one were to carry away the old tombs they had seen lately at the Abbey, and stick them up in Lady C.'s tawdry gilt drawing-room. Here John smiled, as much as to say, "that would be foolish indeed." And then I told how, when she came to die, her funeral was attended by a concourse of all the poor, and some of the gentry too, of the neighborhood for many miles round, to show their respect for her memory, because she had been such a good and religious woman; so good indeed that she knew all the Psaltery by heart-ay, and a great part of the Testament besides. Here little Alice spread her hands. Then I told what a tall, upright, graceful person their great-grandmother Field once was, and how in her youth she was esteemed the best dancerhere Alice's little right foot played an involuntary movement, till, upon my looking grave, it desisted-the best dancer, I was saying, in the county, till a cruel disease, called a cancer, came, and bowed her down with pain; but it could never bend her good spirits, or make them stoop, but they were still upright, because she was so good and religious. Then I told how she was used to sleep by herself in a lone chamber of the great lone house; and how she believed that an apparition of two infants was to be seen at midnight gliding up and down the great staircase near where she slept, but she said "those innocents would do her no harm"; and how frightened I used to be, though in those days I had my maid to sleep with me, because I was never half so good or religious as she and yet I never saw the infants. Here John expanded all his eyebrows and tried to look courageous. Then I told how good she was to all her grandchildren, having us to the great house in the holidays, where I in particular used to spend many hours by myself, in gazing upon the old busts of the Twelve Cæsars, that had been Emperors of Rome, till the old marble heads would seem to live again, or I to be turned into marble with them; how I never could be tired with roaming about that huge mansion, with its vast empty rooms, with their worn-out hangings, fluttering tapestry, and carved oaken panels, with the gilding almost rubbed outsometimes in the spacious old-fashioned gardens, which I had almost to myself, unless when now and then a solitary gardening man would cross me and how the nectarines and peaches hung upon the walls, without my ever offering to pluck them, because they were forbidden fruit, unless now and then,-and because I had more pleasure in strolling about among the old melancholy-looking yew trees, or the firs, and picking up the red berries, and the fir-apples, which were good for nothing but to look at―or in lying about upon the fresh grass with all the fine garden smells around me--or basking in the orangery, till I could almost fancy myself ripening too along with the oranges and the limes in that grateful warmth or in watching the dance that darted to and fro in the fish-pond, at the bottom of the garden, with here and there a great sulky pike hanging midway down. the water in silent state, as if it mocked at their impertinent friskings, I had more pleasure in these busy-idle diversions than in all the sweet flavors of peaches, nectarines, oranges, and suchlike common baits of children. Here John slyly deposited back upon the plate a bunch of grapes, which, not unobserved by Alice, he had meditated dividing with her, and both seemed willing to relinquish them for the present as irrelevant. Then, in somewhat a more heightened tone, I told how, though their great-grandmother Field loved all her grandchildren, yet in an especial manner she might be said to love their uncle, John L,1 because he was so handsome and spirited a youth, and a king to the rest of us; and, instead of moping about in solitary corners, like some of us, he would mount the most mettlesome horse he could get, when but an imp no bigger than themselves, and make it carry him half over the county in a morning, and join the hunters when there were any out-and yet he loved the old great house and gardens too, but had too much spirit to be always pent up within their boundaries-and how their uncle grew up to man's estate as brave as he was handsome, to the admiration of everybody, but of their great-grandmother Field most especially; and how he used to carry me upon his back when I was a lame-footed boy-for he was a good bit older than me-many a mile when I could not walk for pain;-and how in after life he became lame-footed too, and I did not always (I fear) make allowances enough for him when he was impatient and in pain, nor remember sufficiently how considerate he had been to me when I was lame-footed; and how when he died, though he had not been dead an hour, it seemed as if he had died a great while ago, such a distance there is betwixt life and death; and how I bore his death as I thought pretty well at first, but afterwards it haunted and haunted me; and though I did not cry or take it to heart as some do, and as I think he would have done if I had died, yet I missed him all day long, and knew not till then how much I had loved him. I missed his kindness, and I missed his crossness, and wished him to be alive again, to be quarreling with him (for we quarreled sometimes), rather than not have him again, and was as uneasy without him, as he, their poor uncle, must have 1 The essayist's brother, John Lamb. |