Creative Nonfiction

Introductions and Texts

Table of Contents

▪️Creative Nonfiction: An Overview

Letters
▪️On Noise, by Seneca.

Consolation
▪️Consolation to His Wife, by Plutarch.

Book Review
▪️Of Books, by Michel de Montaigne.

Memoirs
▪️An Hour or Two Sacred to Sorrow, by Richard Steele

Meditation
▪️The Solitude of the Country, by Samuel Johnson

Analytic Meditation
▪️On the Pleasure of Hating, by William Hazlitt

Prose poem or Reverie

▪️Dream Children: A Reverie, by Charles Lamb.

Humor
▪️On Running After One's Hat, by G. K. Chesterton

Travelogue
▪️Street Walking by Virginia Woolf.

Creative Nonfiction: An Overview

The Creative Nonfiction (CNF) genre can be rather elusive. It is focused on story, meaning it has a narrative
plot with an inciting moment, rising action, climax and denouement, just like fiction. However, nonfiction only
works if the story is based in truth, an accurate retelling of the author’s life experiences. The pieces can vary
greatly in length, just as fiction can; anything from a book-length autobiography to a 500-word food blog post
can fall within the genre.

Additionally, the genre borrows some aspects, in terms of voice, from poetry; poets generally look for truth
and write about the realities they see. While there are many exceptions to this, such as the persona poem, the
nonfiction genre depends on the writer’s ability to render their voice in a realistic fashion, just as poetry so
often does. Writer Richard Terrill, in comparing the two forms, writes that the voice in creative nonfiction aims
“to engage the empathy” of the reader; that, much like a poet, the writer uses “personal candor” to draw the
reader in.

Creative Nonfiction encompasses many different forms of prose. As an emerging form, CNF is closely
entwined with fiction. Many fiction writers make the cross-over to nonfiction occasionally, if only to write
essays on the craft of fiction. This can be done fairly easily, since the ability to write good prose—beautiful
description, realistic characters, musical sentences—is required in both genres.

The first key element of nonfiction—perhaps the most crucial thing— is that the genre relies on the author’s
ability to retell events that actually happened. The talented CNF writer will certainly use imagination and craft
to relay what has happened and tell a story, but the story must be true. You may have heard the idiom that
“truth is stranger than fiction;” this is an essential part of the genre. Events—coincidences, love stories, stories
of loss—that may be expected or feel clichéd in fiction can be respected when they occur in real life.

A writer of Creative Nonfiction is always on the lookout for material that can yield an essay; the world at-large
is their subject matter. Additionally, because Creative Nonfiction is focused on reality, it relies on research to
render events as accurately as possible. While it’s certainly true that fiction writers also research their subjects
(especially in the case of historical fiction), CNF writers must be scrupulous in their attention to detail. Their
work is somewhat akin to that of a journalist, and in fact, some journalism can fall under the umbrella of CNF
as well. Writer Christopher Cokinos claims, “done correctly, lived well, delivered elegantly, such research
uncovers not only facts of the world, but reveals and shapes the world of the writer” (93). In addition to
traditional research methods, such as interviewing subjects or conducting database searches, he relays Kate
Bernheimer’s claim that “A lifetime of reading is research:” any lived experience, even one that is read, can
become material for the writer.

The other key element, the thing present in all successful nonfiction, is reflection. A person could have lived
the most interesting life and had experiences completely unique to them, but without context—without
reflection on how this life of experiences affected the writer—the reader is left with the feeling that the writer
hasn’t learned anything, that the writer hasn’t grown. We need to see how the writer has grown because a large
part of nonfiction’s appeal is the lessons it offers us, the models for ways of living: that the writer can survive a
difficult or strange experience and learn from it.

SENECA

Seneca the Younger (c. A.D. 3-65) was born in Cordoba, Spain, about the same time as Christ; his father,
Seneca the Elder, was an accomplished rhetorician (‫ری‬GG‫ )تقری‬and writer. Seneca went to Rome to study
philosophy and rhetoric (‫ )تقریریت‬and became a renowned orator and writer himself. He also took up the
philosophy of Stoicism (‫ فلسفی تعلیم جو بحرانی صورتوں میں صبر کی اہمیت پر زور دیتی ہے۔‬:‫)استوائیت‬, which counseled
that perfection and contentment could be reached through reason, simple living, indifference to pain and death,
and social equality. To the Stoics, a wise man was one who played the cards that were dealt to him,
uncomplainingly and with dignity, whether a slave or a king. Exiled by the emperor Claudius, who was said to
fear the philosopher's growing popularity, Seneca was recalled eight years later in triumph to become the
young Nero's tutor. His influence over Nero was, at least initially, salutary (‫ ;)فائدہ مند‬for a while, the emperor's
tutor and the military leader Burrus ruled Rome together harmoniously behind the scenes. But eventually
Nero's cruel propensities (‫ )رجحانات‬revealed themselves: he killed his mother, his brother, and, after Seneca was
again sent into exile, his tutor; that is, he demanded that Seneca kill himself, and the old man obliged. The
nobility with which Seneca took his life was much admired, and was considered an apt demonstration of his
philosophy, suicide being a Stoic virtue. However, he was often criticized for the disparity between his Stoic
beliefs and his practices in other respects: he amassed enormous wealth, curried favor, and even whined (‫شکوہ‬
‫ )کرنا‬at misfortune-he acted, in short, like a human being instead of a paragon (‫ نمونہ‬/‫ )مثالی‬of virtue.

Seneca was a prolific author of tragedies (which strongly influenced Elizabethan drama), dialogues, and
orations, but his reputation as the founder of the essay rests on his letters, which both Montaigne and Bacon
cited as their inspiration and which remain his most attractive and accessible work. Essays in disguise, these
"moral letters, " written during Seneca's last exile, were probably intended from the start for the public rather
than for their ostensible (‫ )ظاہری‬recipient, a civil servant named Lucilius. Each has a homiletic (‫مباحثہ یا تعلیمی‬
‫)مذہبی بیانات سے متعلق‬, ethical, Stoic message to convey. In them, a portrait of Seneca also emerges: asthmatic,
aging, wry (‫)تلخی سے بھرپور‬, alternately crabby (‫ )بدمزاج‬and serene (‫)پرسکون‬, critical of hypocrisy and luxury,
observant of 4 manners and mores (we learn much from him about Roman daily life), argumentative, worldly.

In his style Seneca stressed brevity and clarity. Reacting in part against Cicero's "grand style, " a beautiful but
wordy, florid (flowery) oratory that rounded out sentences on the basis of sound, Seneca developed a more
clipped, epigrammatic (concise) manner known as the humble or familiar style, which used common language
and relied more heavily on metaphor, antithesis, and wit. Since writing in Seneca's time was often read aloud
and drew applause at "points'' -witty turns of phrase-it tended to devolve (‫ )آگے بڑھانا‬into aphoristic series. The
results can be both dazzling (‫ )دلکش‬and fatiguing. Macauley once complained that Seneca's "works are made
up of mottoes (‫ولے‬G‫ مق‬/‫اوتیں‬G‫)کہ‬. There is hardly a sentence which might not be quoted, · but to read him
straightforwardly is like dining on nothing but anchovy sauce (famous Italian sauce. Anchovy is a dry fish)."
The paradox of Seneca's style is that it is at once simpler, more plain spoken than Cicero's and more baroque (
‫)عجیب و غریب‬, contorted (‫ )ٹیڑھا‬under brevity's lash. A virtue of his jerky, abrupt manner is that it gives the
impression of a mind in action-thought, counterthought, without any smoothing over the bumps. Its importance
to us here is that it affected the development of the essay during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, when
classicism had returned and the reigning academic model was the euphonious (famous) Cicero. The anti-
Ciceronian’s, such as Bacon, Montaigne, and Lipsius, led a rebellion, taking Seneca as their model, and out of
it came modern prose: quick, pungent, ironic, self-questioning, reflective of mental process. It all goes back to
Seneca.

On Noise

I cannot for the life of me see that quiet is as necessary to a person who has shut himself away to do some
studying as it is usually thought to be. Here am I with a babel (‫ )بولی‬of noise going on all about me (‫میرے ارد‬
‫)گرد ہنگامہ مچا ہوا ہے‬. I have lodgings right over a public bathhouse. Now imagine to yourself every kind of
sound that can make one weary of one’s years. When the strenuous (‫ )مشقت سے بھرپور‬types are doing their
exercises, swinging weight-laden hands about, I hear the grunting as they toil away—or go through the
motions of toiling away—at them, and the hissings and strident (‫ )تیز آواز‬gasps every time they expel their pent-
up breath. When my attention turns to a less active fellow who is contenting himself with an ordinary
inexpensive massage, I hear the smack of a hand pummeling (‫ ہاتھوں سے دبانا‬/‫ )مار پڑنا‬his shoulders, the sound
varying according as it comes down flat or cupped. But if on top of this some ball player comes along and
starts shouting out the score, that’s the end! Then add someone starting up a brawl, and someone else caught
thieving, and the man who likes the sound of his voice in the bath, and the people who leap into the pool with a
tremendous splash. Apart from those whose voices are, if nothing else, natural, think of the hair remover,
continually giving vent to this shrill and penetrating cry in order to advertise his presence, never silent unless it
be while he is plucking someone’s armpits and making the client yell for him! Then think of the various cries
of the man selling drinks, and the one selling sausages and the other selling parties, and all the ones hawking
for the catering shops, each publicizing his wares with a distinctive cry of his own.

“You must be made of iron,” you may say, “or else hard of hearing if your mind is unaffected by all this babel
of discordant noises around you, when continual ‘good morning’ greetings were enough to finish off the Stoic
Chrysippus!” But I swear I no more notice all this roar of noise than I do the sound of waves or falling water—
even if I am here told the story of a people on the Nile who moved their capital solely because they could not
stand the thundering of a cataract! Voices, I think, are more inclined to distract one than general noise; noise
merely fills one’s ears, battering away at them while voices actually catch one’s attention. Among the things
which create a racket all around me without distracting me at all I include the carriages hurrying by in the
street, the carpenter who works in the same block, a man in the neighborhood who saws, and this fellow tuning
horns and flutes and the Trickling Fountain and emitting blasts instead of music. I still find an intermittent
noise more irritating than a continuous one. But by now I have so steeled myself against all these things that I
can even put up with a coxswain’s (‫ )کشتی بان‬strident tones as he gives his oarsmen (‫ )چپو‬the rhythm. For I force
my mind to become self-absorbed and not let outside things distract it. There can be absolute bedlam (‫)ہنگامہ‬
without so long as there is no commotion (‫ )ہنگامہ‬within, so long as fear and desire are not at loggerheads (
‫)تکرار‬, so long as meanness and extravagance are not at odds and harassing each other. For what is the good of
having silence throughout the neighborhood if one’s emotions are in turmoil?
The peaceful stillness of the night had lulled
The world to rest.
This is incorrect. There is no such thing as “peaceful stillness” except where reason has lulled it to rest. Night
does not remove our worries; it brings them to the surface. All it gives us is a change of anxieties. For even
when people are asleep, they have dreams as troubled as their days. The only true serenity is the one which
represents the free development of a sound mind. Look at the man whose quest for sleep demands absolute
quiet from his spacious house. To prevent any sound disturbing his ears every one of his host of slaves
preserves total silence and those who come anywhere near him walk tip-toe. Naturally enough he tosses from
side to side, trying to snatch some fitful sleep in between the spells of fretting, and complains of having heard
sounds when he never heard them at all. And what do you suppose is the reason? His mind is in a ferment. It is
this which needs to be set at peace. Here is the mutiny that needs to be suppressed. The fact that the body is
lying down is no reason for supposing that the mind is at peace. Rest is sometimes far from restful. Hence our
need to be stimulated into general activity and kept occupied and busy with pursuits of the right nature
whenever we are victims of the sort of idleness that wearies of itself. When great military commanders notice
indiscipline among their men, they suppress it by giving them some work to do, mounting expeditions to keep
them actively employed. People who are really busy never have enough time to become skittish. And there is
nothing so certain as the fact that the harmful consequences of inactivity are dissipated by activity.
We commonly give the impression that the reasons for our having gone into political retirement are our disgust
with public life and our dissatisfaction with some uncongenial and unrewarding post. Yet every now and then
ambition rears its head again in the retreat into which we were really driven by our apprehensions and our
waning interest; for our ambition did not cease because it had been rooted out, but merely because it had tired
—or become piqued, perhaps, at its lack of success. I would say the same about extravagant living, which
appears on occasion to have left one and then, when one has declared for the simple life, places temptation in
the way. In the middle of one’s program of frugality it sets out after pleasures which one had discarded but not
condemned, its pursuit of them indeed being all the more ardent the less one is aware of it. For when they are
in the open vices invariably take a more moderate form; diseases too are on the way towards being cured when
once they have broken out, instead of being latent, and made their presence felt. So, it is with the love of
money, the love of power and the other maladies that affect the minds of men—you may be sure that it is when
they abate and give every appearance of being cured that they are at their most dangerous. We give the
impression of being in retirement and are nothing of the kind. For it we are genuine in this, if we have sounded
the retreat and really turned away from the surface show, then, as I was saying a little while ago, nothing will
distract us. Men and birds together in full chorus will never break into our thinking when that thinking is good
and has at last come to be of a sure and steady character.

The temperament that starts at the sound of a voice or chance noises general is an unstable one and one that has
yet to attain inward detachment. It has an element of uneasiness in it, and an element of the rooted fear that
makes a man a prey to anxiety, as in the description given by our Virgil:

And I, who formerly would never flinch

At flying spears or serried ranks of Greeks,
Am now alarmed by every breeze and roused
By every sound to nervousness, in fear
For this companion and this load alike.
The earlier character here is the wise man, who knows no fear at the hurtling of missiles, or the clash of
weapons against weapons in the close-packed ranks, or the thunderous noise of a city in destruction. The other,
later one has everything to learn; fearing for his belongings he pales at every noise; a single cry, whatever it is,
prostrates him, being immediately taken for the yelling of the enemy; the slightest movement frightens him out
of his life; his baggage makes him a coward. Pick out any one of your “successful” men, with all they trail or
carry about with them, and you will have a picture of the man “in fear of this companion and this load.” You
may be sure, then, that you are at last “lulled to rest” when noise never reaches you and when voices never
shake you out of yourself, whether they be menacing or inviting or just a meaningless hubbub of empty sound
all round you.

“This is all very well,” you may say, “but isn’t it sometimes a lot simpler just to keep you away from the din?”
I concede that, and in fact it is the reason why I shall shortly be moving elsewhere. What I wanted was to give
myself a test and some practice. Why should I need to suffer the torture any longer than I want to when
Ulysses found so easy a remedy for his companions even against the Sirens?

PLUTARCH

Plutarch (A.D. 46? -c. 120) was born in Boeotia (‫)بی اوشیا‬, not far from Delphi; studied at Athens, became a
valued diplomat (like Montaigne), and at the height of his worldly success retired to his native town to become
a priest of the temple of Delphi and teach philosophy to the young. He is best known as the first great
biographer: his Parallel Lives paired biographies of noble Greeks and Romans, such as Alexander the Great
and Julius Caesar. But it is his numerous Moralia essays (moral essays) and dialogues on ethical, literary, and
historical subjects, that influenced the development of the personal essay. As the classicist and translator Moses
Hadas has noted, "Almost alone in the canon of Greek writers whom Europe has accepted, Plutarch can be
called charming, and his charm, combined with his broad and direct knowledge, makes him the most effective
intermediary between the Graeco-Roman world and our own. Unlike the austere (simple) classics, again,
Plutarch is a personal writer, and in the course of his copious (abundant) works he tells us of his family and
friends and reveals his tastes and interests so fully that we know him more intimately than we do any other
Greek writer. " Plutarch put great stock in family ties and friendship and, atypically (unusually) for his age,
saw marriage as the closest of human bonds. "There is an unexampled reverence for womanhood, " wrote
Hadas, "a touching tenderness for little children, a deep sympathy for animal creation, and, so far as such a
thing was possible for an aristocratic Platonist, a respect for all the disinherited of the earth. It is his
humanitarianism, in large part, which made Plutarch so appealing to Montaigne and Shakespeare."

The essay below, "Consolation (‫لی‬G‫ )تس‬to His Wife, " displays all of Plutarch 's Consolation to His Wife
sympathetic tendencies. The consolation was a well-established literary genre in antiquity (Seneca 'wrote
several), but Plutarch's is often considered the most attractive example of the form, because of its genuineness
of feeling and touching directness.

Consolation to His Wife

My DEAR WIFE: The messenger you sent with tidings of the death of our little daughter apparently missed
me on his road to Athens, and consequently I learned about the child only when I arrived in Tanagra. I suppose
that the funeral has already taken place. I could wish that the arrangements were such as to cause you the
minimum of pain, both for the present and the future. If you have omitted any ceremony which you think
might lighten your grief because you wished to await my approval, do carry it out. But excesses and
superstitions should be avoided; I know it is not in your character to indulge in them. Above all, my dear wife,
help us both preserve our customary composure in this affliction. I am of course very sensible of it and feel its
force; but if I find your grief exceeds due measure, I shall be more greatly distressed than by the misfortune
itself. Neither am I "fashioned of oak or stone," as is well known to you, who have shared with me in the
nurture of our several children, all of whom we have ourselves brought up at home.

After the birth of our four sons, you yearned for a daughter, and I seized the opportunity of giving her your
dear name: I know that she was precious to you. Peculiar poignancy (strange sadness) attaches to tenderness
for children when their presence is altogether welcome and completely untainted (pure) by ill will and
reproach (censure). The child herself possessed a marvelous cheeriness of temper and gentleness, and her
responsiveness to love and eagerness to please evoked not only pleasure but an appreciation of human
goodness. She would invite her nurse to offer her breast not only to other infants but even to furnishings and
toys in which she took delight. It was as if, out of humane sensibilities, she invited them to her own table, to
share in the good things she had; what was most delightful to her she wished all who pleased her to enjoy.

I cannot see, my dear wife, why these and similar qualities which delighted us when she was alive should now
distress and confound us when we bring them to mind. Rather do I fear lest we lose those memories along with
our grief, like that Clymene who said, "I hate that well-turned cornel bow; away with all exercises!" She
avoided and shuddered at every re minder of her son. In general, nature avoids everything that causes distress.
But in the case of our child, in the degree that she proved to us a thing most lovable to fondle and look at and
hear, so the memory of her must abide with us and become part of us, and it will bring us a greater quantity
and variety of joy than of sorrow. Surely some portion of the discourses I have uttered to others should prove
helpful to ourselves in time of need; we must not then sink into lethargy nor conjure (raise/ invoke) up the
sorrows which are the price of those numerous delights.

I was told by those who were present and found your conduct remarkable that you did not put on mourning nor
induce any uncomeliness or unseemliness in yourself or in your servants, that there was no preparation for
extravagant solemnities (somberness) at the grave, but that everything was done decently and quietly with only
the family in attendance. For my part I was not surprised, for you would never prink (over-dress) for the
theater or processions, but even for pleasurable outings thought that extravagance was useless and maintained
your sensible moderation even among people who looked askance (doubtfully) at it. It is not only in bacchic
(Bacchus was roman god of wine, agriculture and fertility, associated with celebrations and enjoyment of life)
celebrations that a virtuous woman must remain uncorrupted, but in sorrow too she must remember that excess
is to be avoided and that transports of emotion require to be controlled; it is not her love, as the many think,
that she must fight against, but the incontinence (lack of self-control) of her soul. Upon love we bestow sorrow
and respect and an abiding memory of the departed; but the insatiable yearning (‫ )شدید خواہش‬for lamentation
which leads to wailing and beating of the breast is no less shameful than unbridled voluptuousness (sexually
attractive)-though men find it venial (forgivable), for it is a bitter smart rather than an agreeable sensation
which is associated with the impropriety (rude/ indecency). What could be more illogical than to check excess
of laughter and gaiety and then give free flow to rivers of tears and lamentations which stream from the same
source? Or, as some husbands do, to quarrel with their wives over the use of perfumery and purple and then
suffer them to shear their hair in mourning, to dye their garments black, to sit in unnatural attitudes and recline
in uncomfortable positions? Or, what is hardest of all, to oppose their wives and prevent them if they chastise
their servants or maids immoderately or unfairly, and then to overlook it when they chastise themselves
unfeelingly and cruelly in trying circumstances which call for gentleness and kindliness?

But between us, my dear wife, there was never any occasion for such differences, nor, I think, will there ever
be. The simplicity of your grooming and the frugality of your diet has evoked the astonishment of all the
philosophers who have ever visited or associated with us. Nor is there any of our townsmen who has not
remarked upon your admirable simplicity at festivals and sacrifices and theatrical performances. Upon a
similar occasion in the past, you demonstrated your singular steadfastness when you lost the eldest of your
children; and it was the same when charming Charon left us. I remember that friends were escorting me on my
way from the seashore when the news of my son's death was brought, and they together with others
accompanied me to the house. When they observed perfect orderliness and quiet in the house they thought, as
they afterwards confided in others, that nothing amiss had happened and that it was an empty rumor that
reached me. So discreetly had you arranged your house hold at a juncture which offered an occasion for great
disorder. And yet you yourself suckled that son, and underwent surgery when your breast suffered a contusion.
That is the conduct of a noble woman and a loving mother.

Endeavor often to transpose yourself in imagination to the period when our child was not yet born, and yet we
had no cause to reproach fortune; and then consider that our present state is a continuation of that former
period, for our condition is now as it was then. If we look upon our situation in the past as freer of reproach
than our present state, we shall seem to be resentful that our child was ever born. The two years of her life that
intervened must by no means be effaced from our memory but rather reckoned as a pleasure, for they afforded
us delight and happiness. We must never consider a small good as a large evil, nor be ungrateful for what
fortune has given us because it has not filled the measure as full as we expected. Always respectful to the
divine and a cheerful and un complaining attitude towards fortune produces fruit that is good and sweet. In
case of misfortune there is no surer means of either quenching grief entirely or diminishing its size and
intensity by an admixture of opposite emotions than by calling to mind good things in the past and trans posing
and reshaping our reflections upon life from the gloomy and troubled to the bright and shining. Perfumes not
only delight our sense of smell but are an antidote to bad odors. Similarly, recollection of good things in the
midst of evil functions as a necessary remedy for such as not avoiding the memory of past blessings and not
always and everywhere upbraid fortune. It makes us ill, inculpating our own lives, to find fault with a single
blot, as in a book, when all the rest is clean and unstained.

….. If you pity the babe because she departed this life unmarried and childless, again you have the consolation
of knowing that you yourself enjoyed a full share of such experiences. It is not fair to set a high value upon
these matters for those who lack them and a low for those who have them. She has arrived where there is no
distress; there is then no need for us to be distressed. Why should we be afflicted with grief on her account
when she herself can experience no grief? -Translated by Moses Hada

MICHEL de MONTAIGNE

Michel Eyquem de Montaigne (1533-1592) may well have been the greatest essayist who ever lived. His
father's family, the Eyquems, had amassed their wealth as merchants and risen to minor landowning nobility;
they built a chateau in the town of Montaigne, in the Perigord region, and Montaigne considered himself as
much a son of Gascony (a town in Southwestern Kingdom of France) as of France.

What Montaigne tells us about himself is peculiarly (unusually), charmingly specific and daily: he is on the
short side, has a loud, abrasive (harsh/rough) voice, suffers from painful kidney stones, scratches his ears a lot
(the insides itch), loves sauces, is not sure radishes (‫ )مولیاں‬agree with him, does his best thinking on horseback,
prefers glass to metal cups, moves his bowels regularly in the morning, and so on. It is as if the self were a new
continent, and Montaigne its first explorer.

Of course, he had a little help: the spirit of humanism was in the air, via Erasmus and others, and the classical
Greek and Roman authors were being used as a Trojan horse to open the gates to a freer, more speculative (
‫ )تفصیلی طور پر سوچنے واال‬and self-analytical (‫ )خود تجزیاتی‬mentality (Socrates' "Know thyself'). Rabelais' (:‫رابیلے‬
16 ‫فرانسیسی لکھاری اور فلسفی‬th c.) great, bawdy (‫ غیر اخالقی‬،‫ )فحش‬novel, Gargantua and Pantagruel, likewise gave
Montaigne license to write in support of pleasure and an integration (‫ )مالپ‬of mind and body. Alongside an
increase in classical learning and scientific knowledge, new worlds were literally being discovered. Explorers
brought back reports of exotic (‫ )اجنبی‬native (‫ )دیسی‬customs from the Americas and the Pacific, which fueled
Montaigne's relativistic (‫ )عالقیت‬bent. Skeptical (‫ شک سے متعلق‬/‫)تشکیک‬, undogmatic (‫بری‬G‫)غیر ج‬, and curious
about difference (see "Of a Monstrous Child"), Montaigne was further persuaded of the need for tolerance by
the civil war between Catholics and Protestants in his own backyard.
He chose to write not in Latin, the learned language of the time, but in conversational, vernacular (‫)عام زبان‬
French; and he minimized his singular career (a valued diplomat used by kings, and twice mayor of Bordeaux
(bordo: city of France famous for red wine)), opting instead for a tone of ironic self-deprecation (‫)خود تنقیدی‬.
This grew partly out of his view of the human condition.

Montaigne regarded humanity as constantly in flux (fluctuation), vain (‫ مغرور‬/‫)خود پرست‬, ashamed of itself, and
contradictory. Rather than condemning people, however, he recommended a generous self-forgiveness. He
preferred not to aim so high (there is little of the mystical, transcendent, or tragic in this author) but to steer a
middle course. His thought evolved from an early expression of Stoicism (including the concern about dying
well) to skepticism and eventually a brand of epicureanism (giving counsel on the art of living well)
(epicureanism: mental pleasure was regarded more highly than physical—freedom from anxiety and mental
pain especially arising from needless fear of death and of gods).

One of the most radical of Montaigne's practices was to follow his thoughts no matter where they led him. The
result conveyed the spontaneity of mental discovery, on the one hand, and a heedless lack of structure, on the
other. In "Of Books" and elsewhere, he made a case for the common reader, the non-scholar, who will simply
say what he or she thinks about a book. His literary preferences were for Senecan conclusions rather than
windy lead-ups, for language that is to the point, not bothering with elegance but "rough and contemptuous."
His own sentences were sinewy, dry, yet succulent; they explode like pomegranate seeds on the tongue.
Appending afterthoughts to his old essays in succeeding editions, Montaigne let digressions swell and
complicate, even undercut, his earlier idea. Since there is little that is orderly and.so much that is rewarding
along the way, the best way to approach Montaigne is to surrender to his approach and saturate yourself in his
mind. He is one writer who becomes much easier to read, the more you read him.

Of Books

I have no doubt that I often happen to speak of the things that are better treated by the masters of the craft, and
more truthfully. This is purely the essay of my natural faculties, and not at all of the acquired ones; and
whoever shall catch me in ignorance will do nothing against me, for I should hardly be answerable for my
ideas to others, I who am not answerable for them to myself, or satisfied with them. Whoever is in search of
knowledge, let him fish for it where it dwells; there is nothing I profess less. These are my fancies, by which I
try to give knowledge not of things, but of myself. The things will perhaps be known to me someday, or have
been once, according as fortune may have brought me to the places where they were made clear. But I no
longer remember them. And if I am a man of some reading, I am a man of no retentiveness. Thus, I guarantee
no certainty, unless it be to make known to what point, at this moment, extends the knowledge that I have of
myself. Let attention be paid not to the matter, but to the shape I give it.

Let people see in what I borrow whether I have known how to choose what would enhance my theme. For I
make others say what I cannot say so well, now through the weakness of my language, now through the
weakness of my understanding. I do not count my borrowings, I weigh them. And if I had wanted to have them
valued by their number, I should have loaded myself with twice as many. They are all, or very nearly all, from
such famous and ancient names that they seem to identify themselves enough without me. In the reasonings
and inventions that I transplant into my soil and confound with my own, I have sometimes deliberately not
indicated the author, in order to hold in check the temerity of those hasty condemnations that are tossed at all
sorts of writings, notably recent writings of men still living, and in the vulgar tongue, which invites everyone
to talk about them and seems to convict the conception and design of being likewise vulgar. I want them to
give Plutarch a fillip on my nose and get burned insulting Seneca in me. I have to hide my weakness under
these great authorities. I will love anyone that can unplume me, I mean by clearness of judgment and by the
sole distinction of the force and beauty of the remarks. For I who, for lack of memory, fall short at every turn
in picking them out by knowledge of their origin, can very well realize, by measuring my capacity, that my soil
is not at all capable of producing. Have no doubt that I Often happen to speak of things that are certain too rich
flowers that I find sown there, and that all the fruits of my own growing could not match them.

For this I am obliged to be responsible: if I get myself tangled up, if there is vanity and faultiness in my
reasoning that I do not perceive or that I am not capable of perceiving when pointed out to me. For faults often
escape our eyes; but infirmity of judgment consists in not being able to perceive them when another reveals
them to us. Knowledge and truth can lodge in us without judgment, and judgment also without them; indeed
the recognition of ignorance is one of the fairest and surest testimonies of judgment that I find.

I have no other marshal but fortune to arrange my bits. As my fancies present themselves, I pile them up; now
they come pressing in a crowd, now dragging single file. I want people to see my natural and ordinary pace,
however off the track it is. I let myself go as I am. Besides, these are not matters of which we are forbidden to
be ignorant and to speak casually and at random. I should certainly like to have a more perfect knowledge of
things, but I do not want to buy it as dear as it costs. My intention is to pass pleasantly, and not laboriously,
what life I have left. There is nothing for which I want to rack my brain, not even knowledge, however great its
value.

I seek in books only to give myself pleasure by honest amusement; or if I study, I seek only the learning that
treats of the knowledge of myself and instructs me in how to die well and live well: This is the goal toward
which my sweating horse should strain. -PROPERTIUS If I encounter difficulties in reading, I do not gnaw my
nails over them; I leave them there, after making one or two attacks on them. If I planted myself in 'them, I
would lose both myself and time; for I have an impulsive mind. What I do not see at the first attack, I see less
by persisting. I do nothing without gaiety; continuation and too strong contention dazes, de presses, and
wearies my judgment. My sight becomes confused and dispersed. I have to withdraw it and apply it again by
starting, just as in order to judge the luster of a scarlet fabric, they tell us to pass our eyes over it several times,
catching it in various quickly renewed and repeated glimpses.

If this book wearies me, I take up another; and I apply myself to it only at the moments when the boredom of
doing nothing begins to grip me. I do not take much to modern books, because the ancient ones seem to me
fuller and stronger; nor to those in Greek, because my judgment cannot do its work with a childish and
apprentice understanding. Among the books that are simply entertaining, I find, of the modems, the Decameron
of Boccaccio, Rabelais, and The Kisses of Johannes Secundus, if they may be placed under this heading, worth
reading for amusement. As for the Amadises and writings of that sort, they did not have the authority to detain
even my childhood. I will also say this, whether boldly or rashly, that this heavy old soul of mine no longer lets
itself be tickled, not merely by Ariosto, but even by the good Ovid: his facility and inventions, which once
enchanted me, hardly entertain me at all now.

I speak my mind freely on all things, even on those which perhaps exceed my capacity and which I by no
means hold to be within my jurisdiction. And so, the opinion I give of them is to declare the measure of my
sight, not the measure of things. When I feel a distaste for Plato's Axiochus as a work without power
considering such an author, my judgment does not trust itself: it is not so stupid as to oppose itself to the
authority of so many other famous ancient judgments, which it considers its tutors and masters, and with which
it is rather content to err. It blames and condemns itself either for stopping at the outer bark, not being able to
penetrate to the heart, or for looking at the thing by some false light. It is content with simply securing itself
from confusion and disorder; as 13 for its weakness, it readily recognizes and admits it. It thinks it gives a
correct interpretation to the appearances that its conception presents to it; but these are weak and imperfect.

Most of Aesop's Fables have many meanings and interpretations. Those who take them allegorically choose
some aspect that squares with the fable, but for the most part this is only the first and superficial aspect; there
are others more living, more essential and internal, to which they have not known how to penetrate; this is how
I read them……
ADDISON & STEELE

In the annals (records) of essay writing, Addison and Steele seem joined at the hip (inseparable). Though they
had separate careers and temperaments-Joseph Addison (1672-1719) was successful Whig (a british party:
supporter of American war of independence) politician who rose to the post of secretary of state; Richard
Steele (1672-1729) lived a more helter-skelter (confusion), bohemian (socially unconventional person
especially one who is involved in arts) life as a journalist and playwright. It is their successful collaboration,
writing and publishing two periodicals (magazines) printed on news sheets, The Tatler and The Spectator, that
fuses them in our minds.

The eighteenth century witnessed a phenomenal flourishing of periodicals, providing work for talented writers
as well as hacks. Steele started The Tatler, which appeared three times a week, offering witty (humorous)
essays, criticism, gossipy items; and news bits, and Addison, his friend from Oxford days, joined soon after.
Though written in an amusing, breezy style, the essays often put forward a moral point, or they offered lessons
in manners to a middle-class readership aspiring to imitate the aristocracy. Their energy often came from the
topical: fashions or the talk of the town. Addison 's "Nicolini and the Lions'' typifies (symbolizes/ exemplifies)
the duo's fascination with theater and public spectacle. Steele's "Twenty-four Hours in London'' is an early
instance of a writer's transforming random street activity into literature (Lamb's essay on beggars, Gogol's
"Nevsky Prospect," Virginia Woolf's "Street Haunting," and Walter Benjamin's urban pieces are later
examples). Addison and Steele also shared the period's fascination with character types, and often disguised
their authorship behind humorous false personae (fake identity to conceal real motif) and made-up
correspondents (journalists) (see "Love-Letters' '). The men's club in The Spectator is composed of characters
that would influence Dickens and other nineteenth-century novelists. Both The Tatler and The Spectator were
so popular that they were printed in full editions for centuries. Addison 's smooth prose style, particularly, was
held up /or emulation (mimicry/ imitation/ rivalry). Samuel Johnson wrote, "His prose is the model of the
middle style.... Whoever wishes to attain an English style, familiar but not coarse, and elegant but not
ostentatious (braggy/ showy), must give his days and nights to the volumes of Addison. " Today's readers may
resist Addison's mellifluous (smooth/ fluent) polish, preferring Steele's edgier (tenser/ touchier/ interesting),
more spontaneous and intimate tone. Both were familiar essayists more often than personal ones; "In an age
when emotional modesty was part of good manners, the essayists were embarrassed to speak in their own
persons,” notes Robert Allen. Of the two, Steele seemed more inclined to bare his soul (see "An Hour or Two
Sacred to Sorrow '').

An Hour or Two Sacred to Sorrow

There are those among mankind who can enjoy no relish of their being, except the world is made acquainted
with all that relates to them, and think everything lost that passes unobserved; but others find a solid delight in
stealing by the crowd, and modeling their life after such a manner, as is as much above the approbation as the
practice of the vulgar. Life being too short to give instances great enough of true friendship or goodwill, some
sages have thought it pious to preserve a certain reverence for the names of their deceased friends; and have
withdrawn themselves from the rest of the world at certain seasons, to commemorate in their own thoughts
such of their acquaintance who have gone before them out of this life. And indeed, when we are advanced in
years, there is not a more pleasing entertainment, than to recollect in a gloomy moment the many we have
parted with, that have been dear and agreeable to us, and to cast a melancholy thought or two after those, with
whom, perhaps, we have indulged ourselves in whole nights of mirth and jollity. With such inclinations in my
heart I went to my closet yesterday in the evening, and resolved to be sorrowful; upon which occasion I could
not but look with disdain upon myself, that though all the reasons which I had to lament the loss of many of
my friends are now as forcible as at the moment of their departure, yet did not my heart swell with the same
sorrow which I felt at the time; but I could, without tears, reflect upon many pleasing adventures I have had
with some, who have long been blended with common earth. Though it is by the benefit of nature, that length
of time thus blots out the violence of afflictions; yet, with tempers too much given to pleasure, it is almost
necessary to revive the old places of grief in our memory; and ponder step by step on past life, to lead the mind
into that sobriety of thought which poises the heart, and makes it beat with due time, without being quickened
with desire, or retarded with despair, from its proper and equal motion. When we wind up a clock that is out of
order, to make it go well for the future, we do not immediately set the hand to the present instant, but we make
it strike the round of all its hours, before it can recover the regularity of its time. Such, thought I, shall be my
method this evening; and since it is that day of the year which I dedicate to the memory of such in another life
as I much delighted in when living, an hour or two shall be sacred to sorrow and their memory, while I run
over all the melancholy circumstances of this kind which have occurred to me in my whole life.

The first sense of sorrow I ever knew was upon the death of my father, at which time I was not quite five years
of age; but was rather amazed at what all the house meant, than possessed with a real understanding why
nobody was willing to play with me. I remember I went into the room where his body lay, and my mother sat
weeping alone by it. I had my battledore in my hand, and fell a-beating the coffin, and calling Papa; for, I know
not how, I had some slight idea that he was locked up there. My mother caught me in her arms, and,
transported beyond all patience of the silent grief she was before in, she almost smothered me in her embraces;
and told me in a flood of tears, Papa could not hear me, and would play with me no more, for they were going
to put him under ground, whence he could never come to us again. She was a very beautiful woman, of a noble
spirit, and there was a dignity in her grief amidst all the wildness of her transport, which, methought, struck me
with an instinct of sorrow, that, before I was sensible of what it was to grieve, seized my very soul, and has
made pity the weakness of my heart ever since. The mind in infancy is, methinks, like the body in embryo; and
receives impressions so forcible, that they are as hard to be removed by reason, as any mark with which a child
is born is to be taken away by any future application. Hence it is, that good nature in me is no merit; but having
been so frequently overwhelmed with her tears before I knew the cause of any affliction, or could draw
defenses from my own judgment, I imbibed commiseration, remorse, and an unmanly gentleness of mind,
which has since ensnared me into ten thousand calamities; and from whence I can reap no advantage, except it
be, that, in such a humor as I am now in, I can the better indulge myself in the softnesses of humanity, and
enjoy that sweet anxiety which arises from the memory of past afflictions.

We, that are very old, are better able to remember things which befell us in our distant youth, than the passages
of later days. For this reason, it is, that the companions of my strong and vigorous years present themselves
more immediately to me in this office of sorrow. Untimely and unhappy deaths are what we are most apt to
lament; so little are we able to make it indifferent when a thing happens, though we know it must happen.
Thus, we groan under life, and bewail those who are relieved from it. Every object that returns to our
imagination raises different passions, according to the circumstance of their departure. Who can have lived in
an army, and in a serious hour reflect upon the many gay and agreeable men that might long have flourished in
the arts of peace, and not join with the imprecations of the fatherless and widows on the tyrant to whose
ambition they fell sacrifices? But gallant men, who are cut off by the sword, move rather our veneration than
our pity; and we gather relief enough from their own contempt of death, to make that no evil, which was
approached with so much cheerfulness, and attended with so much honor. But when we turn our thoughts from
the great parts of life on such occasions, and instead of lamenting those who stood ready to give death to those
from whom they had the fortune to receive it; I say, when we let our thoughts wander from such noble objects,
and consider the havoc which is made among the tender and the innocent, pity enters with an unmixed
softness, and possesses all our souls at once.

Here (were there words to express such sentiments with proper tenderness) I should record the beauty,
innocence, and untimely death, of the first object my eyes ever beheld with love. The beauteous virgin! how
ignorantly did she charm, how carelessly excel! Oh death! thou hast right to the bold, to the ambitious, to the
high, and to the haughty; but why this cruelty to the humble, to the meek, to the undiscerning, to the
thoughtless? Nor age, nor business, nor distress, can erase the dear image from my imagination. In the same
week I saw her dressed for a ball, and in a shroud. How ill did the habit of death become the pretty trifler! I
still behold the smiling earth - A large train of disasters were coming on to my memory, when my servant
knocked at my closet-door, and interrupted me with a letter, attended with a hamper of wine, of the same sort
with that which is to be put to sale on Thursday next, at Garraway's coffee house. Upon the receipt of it, I sent
for three of my friends. We are so intimate, that we can be company in whatever state of mind we meet, and
can entertain each other without expecting always to rejoice. The wine we found to be generous and warming,
but with such a heat as moved us rather to be cheerful than frolicsome. It revived the spirits, without firing the
blood. We commended it until two of the clock this morning; and having to-day met a little before dinner, we
found, that though we drank two bottles a man, we had much more reason to recollect than forget what had
passed the night before.

-Richard Steele

SAMUEL JOHNSON

Samuel Johnson (1709-1784), or Dr. Johnson, as he is commonly known, is one of the heroes of Western
intellectual life. Overcoming poverty, illness, and a strikingly unprepossessing (plain/unattractive) appearance,
he became the leading light of English literature's Augustan Age. Boswell's classic biography captures the
conversational wit and lovable eccentricities (oddness) of Johnson. A well-rounded man of letters, he excelled
at poetry, biography (the magnificent Lives of the Poets), drama, fiction (Ressalas), literary criticism (Prefaces
to Shakespeare), lexicography (compiling the first full English dictionary), and, last but not least, essays.

An admirer of Addison and Steele, Johnson started several of his own periodical essay series: The Rambler,
The Adventurer, and The Idler. With his penchant (liking) for moral seriousness, aphorism (saying), and
judgmental gravity, he tended to slow down the more journalistically streamlined, vigorous prose of Addison
and Steele. Lady Mary Wortley Montagu said, amusingly if unfairly, that Johnson followed The Spectator
"with the same pace a pack horse would do a hunter, " and Hazlitt critiqued the oratorical, ploddingly
(diligently) rounded evenness of his sentences. The fact is that Johnson had more on, and in, his mind than
most writers, so only a philosophical, ruminative (thoughtful) style would do for him. Most critics have viewed
Dr. Johnson as a moral essayist rather than a personal essayist. Still, we see him cutting a personal figure in the
essay about his landlady's boarding house, and his psychologically astute (smart) pieces on the fragility of
friendship and procrastination (delay) seem too keenly observed not to have been drawn from his own
experience. Johnson displays a modern sense of realism; he refuses to sugar-coat things (see his skepticism
about the joys of "The Solitude of the Country"). The dark side of Johnson's philosophy is said to have come
from a dread (fear) of the "vacuity (emptiness) of life. " In The Rambler", he analyzes most human activity as a
kind of running away from the horrified awareness of inner vacuum, a need to fill the vacancies of attention,
and lessen the tediousness (boredom) of time" with novelty and diversion. Whether one agrees or not, it is hard
to dispute the deep thoughtfulness of Johnson's prose.

The Solitude of the Country

There has always prevailed among that part of mankind that addicted their minds to speculation, a propensity
to talk much of the delights of retirement; and some of the most pleasing compositions produced in every age,
contain descriptions of the peace and happiness of a country life.

I know not whether those who thus ambitiously repeat the praises of solitude, have always considered, how
much they depreciate mankind by declaring, that whatever is excellent or desirable is to be obtained by
departing from them; that the assistance 17 which we may derive from one another, is not equivalent to the
evils which we have to fear; that the kindness of a few is overbalanced by the malice of many; and that the
protection of society is too dearly purchased, by encountering its dangers and enduring its oppressions.

These specious representations of solitary happiness, however opprobrious to human nature, have so far spread
their influence over the world, that almost every man delights his imagination with the hopes of obtaining
some time an opportunity of retreat. Many indeed, who enjoy retreat only in imagination, content themselves
with believing that another year will transport them to rural tranquility, and die while they talk of doing what if
they had lived longer they would never have done. But many likewise there are, either of greater resolution or
more credulity, who in earnest try the state which they have been taught to think thus secure from cares and
dangers; and retire to privacy, either that they may improve their happiness, increase their knowledge, or exalt
their virtue. The greater part of the admirers of solitude, as of all other classes of mankind, have no higher or
remoter view, than the present gratification of their passions. Of these some, haughty and impetuous, fly from
society only because they cannot bear to repay to others the regard which themselves exact, and think no state
of life eligible, but that which places them out of the reach of censure or control, and affords them
opportunities of living in a perpetual compliance with their own inclinations, without the necessity of
regulating their actions by any other man's convenience or opinion. There are others of minds more delicate
and tender, easily offended by every deviation from rectitude, soon disgusted by ignorance or impertinence,
and always expecting from the conversation of mankind, more elegance, purity and truth than the mingled
mass of life will easily afford. Such men are in haste to retire from grossness, falsehood and brutality; and hope
to find in private habitations at least a negative felicity, and exemption from the shocks and perturbations with
which public scenes are continually distressing them.

To neither of these votaries will solitude afford that content, which she has been taught so lavishly to promise.
The man of arrogance will quickly discover, that by escaping from his opponents he has lost his flatterers, that
greatness is nothing where it is not seen, and power nothing where it cannot be felt: and he, whose faculties are
employed in too close an observation of failings and defects, will find his condition very little mended by
transferring his attention from others to himself; he will probably soon come back in quest of new objects, and
be glad to keep his covetousness employed on any character rather than his own.

Others are seduced into solitude merely by the authority of great names, and expect to find those charms in
tranquility which have allured states men and conquerors to the shades: these likewise are apt to wonder at
their disappointment, from want of considering, that those whom they aspire to imitate carried with them to
their country seats minds full fraught with subjects of reflection, the consciousness of great merit, the memory
of illustrious actions, the knowledge of important events, and the seeds of mighty designs to be ripened by
future meditation. Solitude was to such men a release from fatigue, and an opportunity of usefulness. But what
can retirement confer upon him, who having done nothing can receive no support from his own importance,
who having known nothing can find no entertainment in reviewing the past, and who intending nothing can
form no hopes from prospects of the future: he can, surely, take no wiser course, than that of losing himself
again in the crowd, and filling the vacuities of his mind with the news of the day. Others consider solitude as
the parent of philosophy, and retire in expectation of greater intimacies with science, as Numa repaired to the
groves when he conferred with Egeria. These men have not always had reason to repent. Some studies require
a continued prosecution of the same train of thought, such as is too often interrupted by the petty avocations of
common life: sometimes, likewise, it is necessary, that a multiplicity of objects be at once present to the mind;
and everything, therefore, must be kept at a distance, which may perplex the memory, or dissipate the
attention. But though learning may be conferred by solitude, its application must be attained by general
converse. He has learned to no purpose, that is not able to teach; and he will always teach unsuccessfully, who
cannot recommend his sentiments by his diction or address.

Even the acquisition of knowledge is often much facilitated by the ad vantages of society: he that never
compares his notions with those of others, readily acquiesces in his first thoughts, and very seldom discovers
the objections which may be raised against his opinions; he, therefore, often thinks himself in possession of
truth, when he is only fondling an error long since exploded. He that has neither companions nor rivals in his
studies, will always applaud his own progress, and think highly of his performances, because he knows not that
others have equaled or excelled him. And I am afraid it may be added, that the student who withdraws himself
from the world, will soon feel that ardor extinguished which praise or emulation had enkindled, and take the
advantage of secrecy to sleep rather than to labor.

There remains yet another set of recluses, whose intention entitles them to higher respect, and whose motives
deserve a more serious consideration. These retire from the world, not merely to bask in ease or gratify
curiosity, but that being disengaged from common cares, they may employ more time in the duties of religion,
that they may regulate their actions with stricter vigilance, and purify their thoughts by more frequent
meditation.

To men thus elevated above the mists of mortality, I am far from presuming myself qualified to give directions.
On him that appears "to pass through things temporary," with no other care than "not to lose finally the things
eternal," I look with such veneration as inclines me to approve his conduct in the whole, without a minute
examination of its parts; yet I could never forbear to wish, that while vice is everyday multiplying
seducements, and stalking forth with more hardened effrontery, virtue, would not withdraw the influence of her
presence, or forbear to assert her natural dignity by open and undaunted perseverance in the right. Piety
practiced in solitude, like the flower that blooms in the desert, may give its fragrance to the winds of heaven,
and delight those unbodied spirits that survey the works of God and the actions of men; but it bestows no
assistance upon earthly beings, and however free from taints of impurity, yet wants the sacred splendor of
beneficence.

Our Maker, who, though he gave us such varieties of temper and such difference of powers yet designed us all
for happiness, undoubtedly intended that we should obtain that happiness by different means. Some are unable
to resist the temptations of importunity, or the impetuosity of their own passions incited by the force of present
temptations: of these it is undoubtedly the duty, to fly from enemies which they cannot conquer, and to
cultivate, in the calm of solitude, that virtue which is too tender to endure the tempests of public life. But there
are others, whose passions grow more strong and irregular in privacy; and who cannot maintain an uniform
tenor of virtue, but by exposing their manners to the public eye, and assisting the admonitions of conscience
with the fear of infamy: for such it is dangerous to exclude all witnesses of their conduct, till they have formed
strong habits of virtue, and weakened their passions by frequent victories. But there is a higher order of men so
inspirited with ardor, and so fortified with resolution, that the world passes before them without influence or
regard: this ought to consider themselves as appointed the guardians of mankind; they are placed in an evil
world, to exhibit public examples of good life; and may be said, when they withdraw to solitude, to desert the
station which Providence assigned them…… (Extract).

WILLIAM HAZLITT

William Hazlitt (1778-1830) was the son of a Unitarian minister who bounced from parish to parish (even
settling for a while in America after the Revolution) because of his radical, deist views. Hazlitt inherited from
his father a freethinker's love of liberty and republicanism. Studying metaphysics to become a philosopher, he
fell in love with painting (a passion he never lost), but found his draftsmanship insufficient and switched to
writing. His decision to write was also inspired by meeting, at nineteen, Coleridge and Wordsworth. He was
instantly won over to their new style of Romantic poetry; later he became disenchanted with both men and
drew devastating portraits of them in his memoir "My First Acquaintance with Poets. " This sharp swing
between enthusiasm and disappointment became a pattern with Hazlitt. Still, he always remained loyal to the
sympathies and ideals of his youth. What he could never forgive others, such as Wordsworth, was their
abandonment of progressive politics as they got older, for more conservative positions. Hazlitt remained a
young man in the ardor of his likes and dislikes.

Needing money, he turned to journalism, and the combination of his wide interests (drama, politics, paintings,
manners, psychology) and his ability to bring any subject alive with his strong, even violent, opinions attracted
an audience. His career was launched by a controversial attack of Malthus' essay on population, and he never
shrank thereafter from making an enemy in print. "Hazlitt," declared Keats, an admirer, ". . . is your only good
damner, and if ever I am damn 'd-damn me if I shouldn’t like him to damn me. " He was the first to recognize
that "I am not in the ordinary sense of the term a good-natured man, " and his analysis "On the Pleasure of
Hating" remains a classic of spleen. But he was equally good at conveying his enjoyments of say, boxing, in
"The Fight," or walking, in "On Going a Journey. " Above all else, he valued what he called "gusto"-energy of
will, red-bloodedness-and he strove successfully, to bring that quality to his writing.

Hazlitt is now regarded as part of the history of Romanticism--one might say he was the essayistic arm of the
Romantics-and he stressed the importance of feeling in art and life. His own feelings seemed never entirely in
control: he quarreled with nearly all his friends and was reckless and frustrated in matters of love. He married
twice, both times unhappily; and at the age of forty-three, the same year his successful essay collection, Table
Talk, appeared, he fell in love, unrequitedly and scandalously, with a pretty barmaid. His obsessional account
of that disastrous infatuation, Liber Amoris, remains a fascinating piece of confessional literature. (Decades
later, Robert Louis Stevenson, who had planned to write Hazlitt's biography, withdrew from the project in
dismay when he discovered it.) Hazlitt's political infatuation with his idol, Napoleon, was equally misguided:
he devoted years to composing a favorable three-volume history of an emperor who had been the enemy of the
British, and the book, instead of bringing him the fortune he expected, bankrupted the publishing company.
Hazlitt, who had already written a premature "Farewell to Essay-Writing, " was forced to return to the form
that had elicited his best results.

That Hazlitt was an astute student of the essay may be witnessed in his still fresh analyses of Montaigne,
Addison and Steele, Dr. Johnson, his friend Lamb, and Washington Irving. His own efforts brought a new
intimacy to the personal essay, establishing as never before a conversational rapport, a dialogue with the
reader. He championed vernacular language, a varied syntax, and streamlined, modern sentences. His
arguments and themes were powerfully focused, displaying a philosophically trained mind. Above all, his
prose is pulsing, energetic, alive. Hazlitt's very irritableness, which goaded him on like sand in an oyster, led in
the end to beautifully formed pearls.

On the Pleasure of Hating

THERE's a spider crawling along the matted floor of the room where I sit (not the one which has been so well
allegorized in the admirable Lines to a Spider, but another of the same edifying breed); he runs with heedless,
hurried haste, he hobbles awkwardly towards me, he stops-he sees the giant shadow before him, and, at a loss
whether to retreat or proceed, meditates his huge foe-but as I do not start up and seize upon the straggling
caitiff, as he would upon a hapless fly within his toils, he takes heart, and ventures on with mingled cunning,
impudence, and fear. As he passes me, I lift up the matting to assist his escape, am glad to get rid of the
unwelcome intruder, and shudder at the recollection after he is gone. A child, a woman, a clown, or a moralist a
century ago, would have crushed the little reptile to death-my philosophy has got beyond that-I bear the
creature no ill-will, but still I hate the very sight of it. The spirit of malevolence survives the practical exertion
of it. We learn to curb our will and keep our overt actions within the bounds of humanity, long before we can
subdue our sentiments and imaginations to the same mild tone. We give up the external demonstration, the
brute violence, but cannot part with the essence or principle of hostility. We do not tread upon the poor little
animal in question (that seems barbarous and pitiful!) but we regard it with a sort of mystic horror and
superstitious loathing. It will ask another hundred years of fine writing and hard thinking to cure us of the
prejudice, and make us feel towards this ill-omened tribe with something of "the milk of human kindness,"
instead of their own shyness and venom.

Nature seems (the more we look into it) made up of antipathies: without something to hate, we should lose the
very spring of thought and action. Life would turn to a stagnant pool, were it not ruffled by the jarring
interests, the unruly passions, of men. The white streak in our own fortunes is brightened (or just rendered
visible) by making all around it as dark as possible; so, the rainbow paints its form upon the cloud. Is it pride?
Is it envy? Is it the force of contrast? Is it weakness or malice? But so it is, that there is a secret affinity [with],
a hankering after, evil in the human mind, and that it takes a perverse, but a fortunate delight in mischief, since
it is a never-failing source of satisfaction. Pure good soon grows insipid, wants variety and spirit. Pain is a
bittersweet, which never surfeits. Love turns, with a little indulgence, to indifference or disgust: hatred alone is
immortal. Do we not see this principle at work everywhere?

Animals torment and worry one another without mercy: children kill flies for sport: everyone reads the
accidents and offenses in a newspaper as the cream of the jest: a whole town runs to be present at a fire, and
the spectator by 1).0 means exults to see it extinguished. It is better to have it so, but it diminishes the interest;
and our feelings take part with our passions rather than with our understandings. Men assemble in crowds, with
eager enthusiasm, to witness a tragedy: but if there were an execution going forward in the next street, as Mr.
Burke observes, the theatre would be left empty. A strange cur in a village, an idiot, a crazy woman, are set
upon and baited by the whole community. Public nuisances are in the nature of public benefits.

How long did the Pope, the Bourbons, and the Inquisition keep the people of England in breath, and supply
them with nicknames to vent their spleen upon! Had they done us any harm of late? No: but we have always a
quantity of superfluous bile upon the stomach, and we wanted an object to let it out upon. How loth were we to
give up our pious belief in ghosts and witches, because we liked to persecute the one, and frighten ourselves to
death with the other!

It is not the quality so much as the quantity of excitement that we are anxious about: we cannot bear a state of
indifference and ennui: the mind seems to abhor a vacuum as much as ever nature was supposed to do. Even
when the spirit of the age (that is, the progress. of intellectual refinement, warring with our natural infirmities)
no longer allows us to carry our vindictive and headstrong humors into effect, we try to revive them in
description, and keep up the old bugbears, the phantoms of our terror and our hate, in imagination. We burn
Guy Fawx in effigy, and the hooting and buffeting and maltreating that poor tattered figure of rags and straw
makes a festival in every village in England once a year. Protestants and Papists do not now burn one another
at the stake: but we subscribe to new editions of Fox's Book of Martyrs; and the secret of the success of the
Scotch Novels is much the same-they carry us back to the feuds, the heart-burnings, the havoc, the dismay, the
wrongs, and the revenge of a barbarous age and people-to the 22 rooted prejudices and deadly animosities of
sects and parties in politics and religion, and of contending chiefs and clans in war and intrigue. We feel the
full force of the spirit of hatred with all of them in turn.

As we read, we throw aside the trammels of civilization, the flimsy veil of humanity. "Off, you! endings!" The
wild beast resumes its sway within us, we feel like hunting-animals, and as the hound starts in his sleep and
rushes on the chase in fancy, the heart rouses itself in its native lair, and utters a wild cry of joy, at being
restored once more to freedom and lawless, unrestrained impulses. Everyone has his full swing, or goes to the
Devil his own way.

…. Old friendships are like meat served up repeatedly, cold, comfortless, and distasteful. The stomach turns
against them. Either constant intercourse and familiarity breed weariness and contempt; or, if we meet again
after an interval of absence, we appear no longer the same. One is too wise, another too foolish, for us; and we
wonder if we did not find this out before. We are disconcerted and kept in a state of continual alarm by the wit
of one, or tired to death of the dullness of another. The good things of the first (besides leaving stings behind
them) by repetition grow stale, and lose their startling effect; and the insipidity of the last becomes intolerable.

The most amusing or instructive companion is at best like a favorite volume, that we wish after a time to lay
upon the shelf; but as our friends are not willing to be laid there, this produces a misunderstanding and ill-
blood between us. Or if the zeal and integrity of friendship is not abated, [n]or its career interrupted by any
obstacle arising out of its own nature, we look out for other subjects of complaint and sources of
dissatisfaction. We begin to criticize each other's dress, looks, and general character. "Such a one is a pleasant
fellow, but it is a pity he sits so late!" Another fails to keep his appointments, and that is a sore that never heals.
We get acquainted with some fashionable young men or with a mistress, and wish to introduce our friend; but
he is awkward and a sloven, the interview does not answer, and this throws cold water on our intercourse. Or
he makes himself obnoxious to opinion; and we shrink from our own convictions on the subject as an excuse
for not defending him. All or any of these causes mount up in time to a ground of coolness or irritation; and at
last, they break out into open violence as the only amends we can make ourselves for suppressing them so
long, or the readiest means of banishing recollections of former kindness so little compatible with our present
feelings. We may try to tamper with the wounds or patch up the carcase of departed friendship; but the one will
hardly bear the handling, and the other is not worth the trouble of embalming! The only way to be reconciled
to old friends is to part with them for good: at a distance we may chance to be thrown back (in a waking
dream) upon old times and old feelings: or at any rate we should not think of renewing our intimacy, till we
have fairly spit our spite, or said, thought, and felt all the ill we can of each other. Or if we can pick a quarrel
with someone else, and make him the scape-goat, this is an excellent contrivance to heal a broken bone.

I think I must be friends with Lamb again, since he has written that magnanimous Letter to Southey, and told
him a piece of his mind! I don't know what it is that attaches me to so much, except that he and I, whenever we
meet, sit in judgment on another set of old friends, and "carve them as a dish fit for the Gods." There was
L[eigh] [Hunt], John Scott, Mrs. [Montagu], whose dark raven locks make a picturesque background to our
discourse, who is grown fat, and is, they say, married, Rickman]; these had all separated long ago, and their
foibles are the common link that holds us together. We do not affect to condole or whine over their follies; we
enjoy, we laugh at them, till we are ready to burst our sides, "sans intermission, for hours by the dial." We
serve up a course of anecdotes, traits, master strokes of character, and cut and hack at them till we are weary.
Perhaps some of them are even with us. For my own part, as I once said, I like a friend the better for having
faults that one can talk about. "Then," said Mrs. [Montagu], "you will never cease to be a philanthropist!"
Those in question were some of the choice-spirits of the age, not "fellows of no mark or likelihood"; and we so
far did them justice: but it is well they did not hear what we sometimes said of them. I care little what anyone
says of me, particularly behind my back, and in the way of critical and analytical discussion: it is looks of
dislike and scorn that I answer with the worst venom of my pen. The expression of the face wounds me more
than the expressions of the tongue. If I have in one instance mistaken this expression, or resorted to this
remedy where I ought not, I am sorry for it. But the face was too fine over which it was mantled, and I am too
old to have misunderstood it! . . . I sometimes go up to -'s; and as often as I do, resolve never to go again. I do
not find the old homely welcome. The ghost of friendship meets me at the door, and sits with me all dinner-
time. They have got a set of fine notions and new acquaintance. Allusions to past occurrences are thought
trivial, nor is it always safe to touch upon more general subjects. M. does not begin as he formerly did every
five minutes, "Fawcett used to say,'' &c. That topic is something worn. The girls are grown up, and have a
thousand accomplishments. I perceive there is jealousy on both sides. They think I give myself airs, and I
fancy the same of them. Every time I am asked, "If I do not think Mr. Washington Irving a very fine writer?" I
shall not go again till I receive an invitation for Christmas Day in company with Mr. Liston.

The only intimacy I never found to flinch or fade was a purely intellectual one. There was none of the cant of
candor in it, none of the whine of mawkish sensibility. Our mutual acquaintances were considered merely as
subjects of conversation and knowledge, not at all of affection. We regarded them no more in our experiments
than "mice in an air-pump:" or like malefactors, they were regularly cut down and given over to the dissecting-
knife. We spared neither friend nor foe. We sacrificed human infirmities at the shrine of truth. The skeletons of
character might be seen, after the juice was extracted, dangling in the air like flies in cobwebs: or they were
kept for future inspection in some refined acid. The demonstration was as beautiful as it was new. There is no
surfeiting on gall: nothing keeps so well as a decoction of spleen. We grow tired of everything but turning
others into ridicule, and congratulating ourselves on their defects.

CHARLES LAMB

Charles Lamb (1775-1 834), one of the great masters of the English essay, was born in a quiet, cloistered
section of buildings in London called the Temple. His father was a servant and barrister's clerk who had seven
children. Three survived: Charles, the youngest, his brother John, and his sister Mary, who helped raise him.
Lamb went to Christ's Hospital school on a scholarship (and befriended the future poet Samuel Coleridge
there), but because of family poverty he was forced to quit school and go to work at fourteen as a clerk at the
South Sea House. A few years later he switched to the East India House, where he clerked for the rest of his
life, until retired on a pension. At age twenty, Lamb witnessed a horrific family tragedy: Mary, temporarily
insane, stabbed their mother to death and wounded their father. Lamb, who seized the knife out of his beloved
sister's hand, soon afterward cracked under the strain and had a mental breakdown himself. Mary was spared
prison by the courts and remanded to the custody of her younger brother, who took care of her (as she did him)
for the rest of their lives. Periodically she would suffer relapses; a friend reports how he "met the brother and
sister on one such occasion, walking hand in hand across the fields to the old asylum, both bathed in tears. "
Lamb remained a bachelor; his one professed love was for a blonde with blue eyes, Ann Simmons (renamed
Alice W--n in the essays), who married someone else.

Lamb had a great zest for theatre and wrote impressive drama criticism (Specimens of English Dramatic Poets)
and, with Mary, the children's classic Tales from Shakespeare. His own attempts at playwriting failed; with
typical self-mockery, he joined the crowd who hooted derisively at the premiere of his lame farce, Mr. H-
(about a gentleman trying to conceal that he had more success moonlighting as a journalist, supplying jokes
and squibs for the newspapers. In 1820, at age forty-five, he began writing the pieces that eventually became
Essays of Elia for London Magazine (which also published Hazlitt, Keats, and DeQuincy). He took the name
Elia from an Italian fellow clerk at South Sea House. The lightly fictionalized persona is essentially Lamb, but
with playful alterations (Mary becomes "Cousin Bridget") and intentional confusions (brother John, in the
wrenching conclusion to "Dream Children, " is styled both "John L. " and "James Elia, " as if the author could
not make up his mind whether to disguise or name the loss). Just as the device of a fictional persona allowed
Lamb the necessary distance to shape his autobiographical material so the artful arrangement of Essays of Elia
and its sequel More Essays of Elia, ensured that they were not just collections but books. They can be read
almost like a novel, with an irresistible, idiosyncratic, quixotic character at its center. Lamb was an astute
psychologist, fascinated like Montaigne with the exasperating contradictions of character. Many of his essays
are either portraits of eccentrics or wry explorations of his own ambivalences. Elia is both an individual and a
type, a forerunner of those passively resistant nineteenth-century office workers who turn up in Gogol's "The
Overcoat, " Dostoevsky's "The Double, " and Hawthorne's "The Custom House.

"Obstinately enthralled with the past, Lamb fashioned his style on English Renaissance prose writers such as
Sir Thomas Browne, Robert Burton, and Sir William Temple, who were considered quaint even in his day. He
loved archaic, mildewed vocabulary, which he used with solemn mockery-as he did puns, exaggerated
metaphors, buffoonish catalogs-for comic effect. He was also a master of ironic shading, and could move from
outrageous silliness to sincerity and pathos in a single sentence. Praised, somewhat stereotypically, for
"sweetness of heart, delicacy of feeling, and indefinable charm of style, " this gentle Lamb was not without
claws: he had a perverse streak that could cuff the reader and rupture affability. His experiences with tragedy
and death, though he rarely wrote of them specifically, may account for the melancholy cast underneath the
Cheshire Cat smile.

In company, Lamb's gifts for conversation and friendship were much prized. He even managed to remain
friends with the irascible William Hazlitt and to provide a stable home for the younger man to visit. "The great
difference, " noted Ronald Blythe, "between Lamb and Hazlitt was that the former seemed to have received the
gift of perpetual early middle age and the latter, with his moodiness, his hero worship, his passionate love and
his general recklessness, appeared to have been cursed with everlasting youth. '' Together, they brought the
English personal essay to its highest peak.

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 traditional 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 scene-so 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 Field 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 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 someone 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 26 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 dancer-here 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 eye-brows and tried to look courageous.

Then I told how good she was to all her grand-children, having us to the great-house in the holydays, where I
in particular used to spend many hours by myself, in gazing upon the old busts of the Twelve Caesars, 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 out-some times
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 dace 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 frisking,-I had more pleasure in these busy-idle
diversions than in all the sweet flavors of peaches, nectarines, oranges, and such like common baits of children.
Here John slily 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-grand mother Field loved all her grand-
children, yet in an especial manner she might be said to love their uncle, John L- , 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 uneasy
without him, as he their poor uncle must have been when the doctor took off his limb.

Here the children fell crying, and asked if their little mourning which they had on was not for uncle John, and
they looked up, and prayed to me not to go on about their uncle, but to tell them some stories about their pretty
dead mother. Then I told how for seven long years, in hope sometimes, sometimes in despair, yet persisting
ever, I courted the fair Alice W--n; and, as much as children could understand, I explained to them what
coyness, and difficulty, and denial meant in maidens-when suddenly, turning to Alice, the soul of the first Alice
looked out at her eyes with such a reality of re-presentment, that I became in doubt which of them stood there
before me, or whose that bright hair was; and while I stood gazing, both the children gradually grew fainter to
my view, receding, and still receding till nothing at last but two mournful features were seen in the uttermost
distance, which, without speech, strangely impressed upon me the effects of speech; "We are not of Alice, nor
of thee, nor are we children at all. The children of Alice call Bartrum father. We are nothing; less than nothing,
and dreams. We are only what might have been, and must wait upon the tedious shores of Lethe millions of
ages before we have existence, and a name"-and immediately awaking, I found myself quietly seated in my
bachelor armchair, where I had fallen asleep, with the faithful Bridget unchanged by my side-but John L. (or
James Elia) was gone forever.

*Blakesware, in Hertfordshire, is where Lamb's grandmother, Mary Field, was housekeeper. G. K.

CHESTERTON G. K.

Chesterton (1874-1936) was one of the most popular and prolific British authors of his time. A man of
enormous energy, industry, and communicative good spirits, he wrote some ninety books, including celebrated
essay collections such as All Things Considered, Tremendous Trifles, Come to Think of It, and The Uses of
Diversity. Chesterton had an essentially religious perspective, even before he converted formally to Roman
Catholicism in 1922. His Father Brown mystery novels, as well as his books Heretics and Orthodoxy, took the
attitude that there is nothing stuffy about being religious, that it is indeed the highest kind of sanity. He had a
mental pull toward paradox, the mystery of medieval Christianity, and the romance of church ritual. His
whimsical imagination seemed able to imbue even the gritty realities of the modern world with a magical and
romantic aura, as is demonstrated in the two essays that follow. This fantasy element helps explain why
Borges, for instance, was a great fan of Chesterton's work. Another reason was Chesterton's sparkling,
conversational, punning style. He can be a forceful arguer, with his cheerfully coercive, "favorite uncle"
manner, but even when-or especially when -he tries to make us swallow something that seems wrong-headed
or propagandistic, we will go along for the fun of the ride.

On Running After One's Hat

I feel an almost savage envy at hearing that London has been flooded in my absence, while I am in the mere
country. My own Battersea has been, I understand, particularly favored as a meeting of the waters. Battersea
was already, as I need hardly say, the most beautiful of human localities. Now that it has the additional
splendor of great sheets of water, there must be something quite incomparable in the landscape (or waterscape)
of my romantic town. Battersea must be a vision of Venice. The boat that brought the meat from the butcher's
must have shot along those lanes of rippling silver with the strange smoothness of a gondola. The greengrocer
who brought cabbages to the corner of the Latchmere Road must have leant upon the oar with the unearthly
grace of the gondolier. There is nothing so perfectly poetical as an island; and when a district is flooded it
becomes an archipelago.

Some consider such romantic views of flood or fire slightly lacking in reality. But really this romantic view of
such inconveniences is quite as practical as the other. The true optimist who sees in such things an opportunity
for enjoyment is quite as logical and much more sensible than the ordinary "indignant Ratepayer" who sees in
them an opportunity for grumbling. Real pain, as in the case of being burnt at Smithfield or having a toothache,
is a positive thing; it can be supported, but scarcely enjoyed. But, after all, our toothaches are the exception,
and as for being burnt at Smithfield, it only happens to us at the very longest intervals. And most of the
inconveniences that make men swear or women cry are really sentimental or imaginative inconveniences-
things altogether of the mind. For instance, we often hear grown-up people complaining of having to hang
about a railway station and wait for a train. Did you ever hear a small boy complain of having to hang about a
railway station and wait for a train? No; for him to be inside a railway station is to be inside a cavern of
wonder. I feel an almost savage envy on hearing that London has been a wonder and a palace of poetical
pleasures. Because to him the red light and the green light and the signal are like a new sun and new moon.
Because to him when the wooden arm of the signal falls down suddenly, it is as if a great king had thrown
down his staff as a signal and started a shrieking tournament of trains. I myself am of little boys' habit in this
matter. They also serve who only stand and wait for the two-fifteen. Their meditations may be full of rich and
fruitful things. Many of the most purple hours of my life have been passed at Clapham Junction, which is now,
I suppose, under water. I have been in many moods so fixed and mystical that the water might well have come
up to my waist before I noticed it particularly. But, in the case of all such annoyances, as I have said,
everything depends upon the emotional point of view. You can safely apply the test to almost every one of the
things that are currently talked of as the typical nuisances of daily life.

For instance, there is a current impression that it is unpleasant to have to run after one's hat. Why should it be
unpleasant to the well-ordered and pious mind? Not merely because it is running, and running exhausts one.
The same people run much faster in games and sports. The same people run much more eagerly after an
uninteresting little leather ball than they will after a nice silk hat. There is an idea that it is humiliating to run
after one's hat, and when people say it is humiliating, they mean that it is comic. It certainly is comic; but man
is a very comic creature, and most of the things he does are comic-eating, for instance. And the most comic
things of all are exactly the things that are most worth doing-such as making love. A man running after a hat is
not half so ridiculous as a man running after a wife.

Now a man could, if he felt rightly in the matter, run after his hat with the manliest ardor and the most sacred
joy. He might regard himself as a jolly huntsman pursuing a wild animal, for certainly no animal could be
wilder. In fact, I am inclined to believe that hat-hunting on windy days will be the sport of the upper classes in
the future. There will be a meet of ladies and gentlemen on some high ground on a gusty morning. They will
be told that the professional attendants have started a hat in such-and such a thicket, or whatever be the
technical term. Notice that this employment will in the fullest degree combine sport with humanitarianism. The
hunters would feel that they were not inflicting pain. Nay, they would feel that they were inflicting pleasure,
rich, almost riotous pleasure, upon the people who were looking on. When last I saw an old gentleman running
after his hat in Hyde Park, I told him that a heart so benevolent as his ought to be filled with peace and thanks
at the thought of how much unaffected pleasure his every gesture and bodily attitude were at that moment
giving to the crowd.

The same principle can be applied to every other typical domestic worry. A gentleman trying to get a fly out of
the milk or a piece of cork out of his glass of wine often imagines himself to be irritated. Let him think for a
moment of the patience of angels sitting by dark pools, and let his soul be immediately irradiated with
gratification and repose. Again, I have known some people of very modern views driven by their distress to the
use of theological terms to which they attached no doctrinal significance, merely because a drawer was
jammed tight and they could not pull it out. A friend of mine was particularly afflicted in this way. Every day
his drawer was jammed, and every day in consequence it was something else that rhymes to it. But I pointed
out to him that this sense of wrong was really subjective and relative; it rested entirely upon the assumption
that the drawer could, should, and would come out easily. "But if," I said, "you picture to yourself that you are
pulling against some powerful and oppressive enemy, the struggle will become merely exciting and not
exasperating. Imagine that you are roping up a fellow creature out of an Al pine crevasse. Imagine even that
you are a boy again and engaged in a tug of-war between French and English." Shortly after saying this, I left
him; but I have no doubt at all that my words bore the best possible fruit. I have no doubt that 30 every day of
his life he hangs on to the handle of that drawer with a flushed face and eyes bright with battle, uttering
encouraging shouts to himself, and seeming to hear all round him that roar of an applauding ring.

So, I do not think it is altogether fanciful or incredible to suppose that even the floods in London may be
accepted and enjoyed poetically. Nothing beyond inconvenience seems really to have been caused by them;
and inconvenience, as I have said, in only one aspect, and that is the most unimaginative and accidental aspect
of a really romantic situation. An adventure is only an inconvenience rightly considered. An inconvenience is
only an adventure wrongly considered. The water that girdled the houses and shops of London must, if
anything, have only increased their previous witchery and wonder. For as the Roman Catholic priest in the
story said: "Wine is good with everything except water," and on a similar principle, water is good with
everything except wine.

VIRGINIA WOOLF

Virginia Woolf (1882-1941) was one of the pioneers of modern fiction. She grew up in an intellectual climate,
as the daughter of Leslie Stephen, a well-known man of letters, and was educated at home. Her mother died
when Virginia was still a child-the first of many family deaths that would contribute to her lifelong
melancholia and bouts of mental illness. She married another writer, Leonard Woolf, and they set up the
Hogarth Press, which published new writing. They also drew around themselves a glittering company of
London artists, writers, and intellectuals known as the Bloomsbury group, among them Lytton Strachey, E. M.
Forster, John Maynard Keynes, Vita Sackville-West, Roger Fry, and Clive Bell.

Woolf, inspired by Dostoevsky and convinced that the realist novel dwelled too much on surface detail and did
not capture the "myriad impressions" to which the mind was exposed, developed her own stream-of
consciousness technique in novels such as To the Lighthouse, Mrs. Dalloway, and The Waves, which plumbed
the shifting consciousness and inner states of her characters. At the same time she was a prolific, important
essayist, writing hundreds of book reviews and literary essays, the best of which were collected in her
Common Reader. In her literary criticism, Woolf worked out the theories and preferences that she employed in
her fiction. She was also attracted to the mental freedom of the essay in and of itself, and wrote sympathetic
appreciations of Montaigne, Hazlitt, and Addison.

Some of Woolf's most remarkable essay work was contained in book length, extended meditations: A Room of
One's Own (an essential text for the women's movement), Three Guineas, and the achingly lovely, personal
unfinished memoir "A Sketch of the Past, " in Moments of Being. She also wrote a number of superb shorter
personal essays, such as the "Street Haunting" and "The Death of the Moth. " Both show her characteristic
movement toward reverie as well as her penchant for shifting angles of vision. "Street Haunting," with its
mobile, rhapsodic eye, exemplifies Woolf's technique of darting, quicksilver leaps into different characters'
consciousness.

A writer fascinated with the boundary between life and death, whose aim was to capture "a very vivid idea" of
any subject, Virginia Woolf chose to drown herself rather than go on being incapacitated by severe depression.

Street Haunting

No one perhaps has ever felt passionately towards a lead pencil. But there are circumstances in which it can
become supremely desirable to possess one; moments when we are set upon having an object, an excuse for
walking half across London between tea and dinner. As the foxhunter hunts in order to preserve the breed of
foxes, and the golfer plays in order that open spaces may be preserved from the builders, so when the desire
comes upon us to go street rambling a pencil does for a pretext, and getting up we say: "Really I must buy a
pencil," as if under cover of this excuse we could indulge safely in the greatest pleasure of town life in winter-
rambling the streets of London.

The hour should be the evening and the season winter, for in winter the champagne brightness of the air and
the sociability of the streets are grateful. We are not then taunted as in the summer by the longing for shade and
solitude and sweet airs from the hayfields. The evening hour, too, gives us the irresponsibility which darkness
and lamplight bestow. We are no longer quite ourselves. As we step out of the house on a fine evening between
four and six, we shed t}: i.e., self our friends know us by and become part of that vast republican army of
anonymous trampers, whose society is so agreeable after the solitude of one's own room. For there we sit
surrounded by objects which perpetually express the oddity of our own temperaments and enforce the
memories of our own experience. That bowl on the mantelpiece, for instance, was bought at Mantua on a
windy day.

We were leaving the shop when the sinister old woman plucked at our skirts and said she would find herself
starving one of these days, but, "Take it!" she cried, and thrust the blue and white China bowl into our hands as
if she never wanted to be reminded of her quixotic generosity. So, guiltily, but suspecting nevertheless how
badly we had been fleeced, we carried it back to the little hotel where, in the middle of the night, the innkeeper
quarreled so violently with his wife that we all leant out into the courtyard to look, and saw the vines laced
about among the pillars and the stars white in the sky. The moment was stabilized, stamped like a coin
indelibly among a million that slipped by imperceptibly. There, too, was the melancholy Englishman, who rose
among the coffee cups and the little iron tables and revealed the secrets of his soul-as travelers do. All this
Italy, the windy morning, the vines laced about the pillars, the Englishman and the secrets of his soul-rise up in
a cloud from the China bowl on the mantelpiece. And there, as our eyes fall to the floor, is that brown stain on
the carpet. Mr. Lloyd George made that. "The man's a devil!" said Mr. Cummings, putting the kettle down with
which he was about to fill the teapot so that it burnt a brown ring on the carpet.

But when the door shuts on us, all that vanishes. The shell-like covering which our souls have excreted to
house themselves, to make for themselves a shape distinct from others, is broken, and there is left of all these
wrinkles and roughness’s a central oyster of perceptiveness, an enormous eye. How beautiful a street is in
winter! It is at once revealed and obscure. Here vaguely one can trace symmetrical straight avenues of doors
and windows; here under the lamps are floating islands of pale light through which pass quickly bright men
and women, who, for all their poverty and shabbiness, wear a certain look of unreality, an air of triumph, as if
they had given life the slip, so that life, deceived of her prey, blunders on without them. But, after all, we are
only gliding smoothly on the sur face. The eye is not a miner, not a diver, not a seeker after buried treasure. It
floats us smoothly down a stream; resting, pausing, the brain sleeps perhaps as it looks.
How beautiful a London Street is then, with its islands of light, and its long groves of darkness, and on one
side of it perhaps some tree-sprinkled, grass-grown space where night is folding herself to sleep naturally and,
as one passes the iron railing, one hears those little cracklings and stirrings of leaf and twig which seem to
suppose the silence of fields all round them, an owl hooting, and far away the rattle of a train in the valley. But
this is London, we are reminded; high among the bare trees are hung oblong frames of reddish yellow light-
windows; there are points of brilliance burning steadily like low stars-lamps; this empty ground, which holds
the country in it and its peace, is only a London square, set about by offices and houses where at this hour
fierce lights burn over maps, over documents, over desks where clerks sit turning with wetted forefinger the
files of endless correspondences; or more suffusedly the firelight wavers and the lamplight falls upon the
privacy of some drawing-room, its easy chairs, its papers, its China, its inlaid table, and the figure of a woman,
accurately measuring out the precise number of spoons of tea which She looks at the door as if she heard a ring
downstairs and somebody asking, is she in?

But here we must stop peremptorily. We are in danger of digging deeper than the eye approves; we are
impeding our passage down the smooth stream by catching at some branch or root. At any moment, the
sleeping army may stir itself and wake in us a thousand violins and trumpets in response; the army of human
beings may rouse itself and assert all its oddities and sufferings and sordidities. Let us dally a little longer, be
content still with surfaces only-the glossy brilliance of the motor omnibuses; the carnal splendor of the
butchers' shops with their yellow flanks and purple steaks; the blue and red bunches of flowers burning so
bravely through the plate glass of the florists' windows.

For the eye has this strange property: it rests only on beauty; like a butterfly it seeks color and basks in
warmth. On a winter's night like this, when nature has been at pains to polish and preen herself, it brings back
the prettiest trophies, breaks off little lumps of emerald and coral as if the whole earth were made of precious
stone. The thing it cannot do (one is speaking of the average unprofessional eye) is to compose these trophies
in such a way as to bring out the more obscure angles and relationships. Hence after a prolonged diet of this
simple, sugary fare, of beauty pure and uncomposed, we become conscious of satiety. We halt at the door of
the boot shop and make some little excuse, which has nothing to do with the real reason, for folding up the
bright paraphernalia of the streets and withdrawing to some duskier chamber of the being where we may ask,
as we raise our left foot obediently upon the stand: "What, then, is it like to be a dwarf?"

She came in escorted by two women who, being of normal size, looked like benevolent giants beside her.
Smiling at the shop girls, they seemed to be disclaiming any lot in her deformity and assuring her of their
protection. She wore the peevish yet apologetic expression usual on the faces of the deformed. She needed
their kindness, yet she resented it. But when the shop girl had been summoned and the giantesses, smiling
indulgently, had asked for shoes for "this lady" and the girl had pushed the little stand in front of her, the dwarf
stuck her foot out with an impetuosity which seemed to claim all our· attention. Look at that! Look at that! she
seemed to demand of us all, as she thrust her foot out, for behold it was the shapely, perfectly proportioned foot
of a well-grown woman. It was arched; it was aristocratic. Her whole manner changed as she looked at it
resting on the stand. She looked soothed and satisfied. Her manner became full of self-confidence. She sent for
shoe after shoe; she tried on pair after pair. She got up and pirouetted before a glass which reflected the foot
only in yellow shoes, in fawn shoes, in shoes of lizard skin. She raised her little skirts and displayed her little
legs. She was thinking that, after all, feet are the most important part of the whole person; women, she said to
herself, have been loved for their feet alone. Seeing nothing but her feet, she imagined perhaps that the rest of
her body was of a piece with those beautiful feet. She was shabbily dressed, but she was ready to lavish any
money upon her shoes. And as this was the only occasion upon which she was not afraid of being looked at but
positively craved attention, she was ready to use any device to prolong the choosing and fitting. Look at my
feet, she seemed to be saying, as she took a step this way and then a step that way. The shop girl good-
humoredly must have said something flattering, for suddenly her face lit up in ecstasy. But, after all, the
giantesses, benevolent though they were, had their own affairs to see to; she must make up her mind; she must
decide which to choose. At length, the pair was chosen and, as she walked out between her guardians, with the
parcel swinging from her finger, the ecstasy faded, knowledge returned, the old peevishness, the old apology
came back, and by the time she had reached the street again she had become a dwarf only.

But she had changed the mood; she had called into being an atmosphere which, as we followed her out into the
street, seemed actually to create the humped, the twisted, the deformed. Two bearded men, brothers,
apparently, stone-blind, supporting themselves by resting a hand on the head of a small boy between them,
marched down the street. On they came with the unyielding yet tremulous tread of the blind, which seems to
lend to their approach something of the terror and inevitability of the fate that has overtaken them. As they
passed, holding straight on, the little convoy seemed to cleave asunder the passers-by with the momentum of
its silence, its directness, its disaster. Indeed, the dwarf had started a hob bling grotesque dance to which
everybody in the street now conformed: the stout lady tightly swathed in shiny sealskin; the feeble-minded boy
sucking the silver knob of his stick; the old man squatted on a doorstep as if, suddenly overcome by the
absurdity of the human spectacle, he had sat down to look at it-all joined in the hobble and tap of the dwarf's
dance. In what crevices and crannies, one might ask, did they lodge, this maimed company of the halt and the
blind? Here, perhaps, in the top rooms of these narrow old houses between Holborn and Soho, where people
have such queer names, and pursue so many curious trades, are gold beaters, accordion pleaters, cover buttons,
or support life, with even great fantasticality, upon a traffic in cups without saucers, China umbrella handles,
and highly-coloured pictures of martyred saints. There they lodge, and it seems as if the lady in the sealskin
jacket must find life tolerable, passing the time of day with the accordion pleater, or the man who covers
buttons; life which is so fantastic cannot be altogether tragic. They do not grudge us, we are musing, our
prosperity; when, suddenly, turning the comer, we come upon a bearded Jew, wild, hunger-bitten, glaring out
of his misery; or pass the humped body of an old woman flung abandoned on the step of a public building with
a cloak over her like the hasty covering thrown over a dead horse or donkey. At such sights the nerves of the
spine seem to stand erect; a sudden flare is brandished in our eyes; a question is asked which is never
answered. Often enough these derelicts choose to lie not a stone's throw from theatres, within hearing of barrel
organs, almost, as night draws on, within touch of the sequined cloaks and bright legs of diners and dancers.
They lie close to those shop windows where commerce offers to a world of old women laid on door steps, of
blind men, of hobbling dwarfs, sofas which are supported by the gilt necks of proud swans; tables inlaid with
baskets of many coloured fruits; sideboards paved with green marble the better to support the weight of boars'
heads; and carpets so softened with age that their carnations have almost vanished in a pale green sea.

Passing, glimpsing, everything seems accidentally but miraculously sprinkled with beauty, as if the tide of
trade which deposits its burden so punctually and prosaically upon the shores of Oxford Street had this night
cast up nothing but treasure. With no thought of buying, the eye is supportive and generous; it creates; it
adorns; it enhances. Standing out in the street, one may build up all the chambers of an imaginary house and
furnish them at one's will with a sofa, table, carpet. That rug will do for the hall. That alabaster bowl shall
stand on a carved table in the window. Our merrymaking shall be reflected in that thick round mirror. But,
having built and furnished the house, one is happily under no obligation to pos sess it; one can dismantle it in
the twinkling of an eye, and build and furnish another house with other chairs and other glasses. Or let us
indulge ourselves at the antique jewelers, among the trays of rings and the hanging necklaces. Let us choose
those pearls, for example, and then imagine how, if we put them on, life would be changed. It becomes
instantly between two and three in the morning; the lamps are burning very white in the deserted streets of
Mayfair. Only motor-cars are abroad at this hour, and one has a sense of emptiness, of airiness, of secluded
gaiety. Wearing pearls, wearing silk, one steps out onto a balcony which overlooks the gardens of sleeping
Mayfair. There are a few lights in the bed rooms of great peers returned from Court, of silk-stockinged
footmen, of dowagers who have pressed the hands of statesmen. A cat creeps along the garden wall. Love-
making is going on sibilantly, seductively in the darker places of the room behind thick green curtains.
Strolling sedately as if he were promenading a terrace beneath which the shires and counties of England lie
sun-bathed, the aged Prime Minister recounts to Lady So-and So with the curls and the emeralds the true
history of some great crisis in the affairs of the land. We seem to be riding on the top of the highest mast of the
tallest ship; and yet at the same time we know that nothing of this sort matters; love is not proved thus, nor
great achievements completed thus; so that we sport with the moment and preen our feathers in it lightly, as we
stand on the balcony watching the moonlit cat creep along Princess Mary's garden wall.

But what could be more absurd? It is, in fact, on the stroke of six; it is a winter's evening; we are walking to the
Strand to buy a pencil. How, then, are we also on a balcony, wearing pearls in June? What could be more
absurd? Yet it is nature's folly, not ours. When she set about her chief masterpiece, the making of man, she
should have thought of one thing only. Instead, turning her head, looking over her shoulder, into each one of us
she let creep instincts and desires which are utterly at variance with his main being, so that we are streaked,
variegated, all of a mixture; the colors have run. Is the true self this which stands on the pavement in January,
or that which bends over the balcony in June? Am I here, or am I there? Or is the true self neither this nor that,
neither here nor there, but something so varied and wandering that it is only when we give the rein to its
wishes and let it take its way unimpeded that we are indeed ourselves? Circumstances compel unity; for
convenience' sake a man must be a whole. The good citizen when he opens his door in the evening must be
banker, golfer, husband, father; not a nomad wandering the desert, a mystic staring at the sky, a debauchee in
the slums of San Francisco, a soldier heading a revolution, a pariah howling with skepticism and solitude.
When he opens his door, he must run his fingers through his hair and put his umbrella in the stand like the rest.