Grün was a gentleman who once wrote a bad book. But when Mark Pattison has to tell us, in the space of thirty-five little pages, about Montaigne, we feel that he had not previously assimilated M. They have blown more knowledge into us in the course of one essay than the innumerable chapters of a hundred text-books. Macaulay in one way, Froude in another, did this superbly over and over again. His learning may be as profound as Mark Pattison's, but in an essay it must be so fused by the magic of writing that not a fact juts out, not a dogma tears the surface of the texture. A novel has a story, a poem rhyme but what art can the essayist use in these short lengths of prose to sting us wide awake and fix us in a trance which is not sleep but rather an intensification of life-a basking, with every faculty alert, in the sun of pleasure? He must know-that is the first essential-how to write. Habit and lethargy have dulled his palate. So great a feat is seldom accomplished, though the fault may well be as much on the reader's side as on the writer's. The essay must lap us about and draw its curtain across the world. In the interval we may pass through the most various experiences of amusement, surprise, interest, indignation we may soar to the heights of fantasy with Lamb or plunge to the depths of wisdom with Bacon, but we must never be roused. It should lay us under a spell with its first word, and we should only wake, refreshed, with its last.
Everything in an essay must be subdued to that end. The principle which controls it is simply that it should give pleasure the desire which impels us when we take it from the shelf is simply to receive pleasure. Of all forms of literature, however, the essay is the one which least calls for the use of long words.
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