Page:Points of View (1924).pdf/187

 is wandering in a wilderness, obscure with blue and gray shadows, where moon calves leap in and out of bramble bushes a-searching for their eyes. But when one has spent a week-end with the new essayists, one comes away, not exactly filled and satisfied, not precisely inspired and uplifted, but feeling, as Pepys would say, "mighty pleasant." In the psychical circumstances created by the two previous movements, this "mighty pleasant" feeling becomes significant and demands consideration.

Why do the essayists leave us with this "mighty pleasant" feeling, so that we are disposed to say to a young woman seeking advice, "Flirt with a poet, engage yourself to a novelist, but marry an essayist"? Well, first of all, the true essayist since Montaigne's time has been a man of even, easy, adaptable temper. Brought to a stand by the opposing pressures of Catholic piety and Renaissance paganism, the French ancestor of all our essayists found an escape from the over-strenuous appeals of faith in a mild but universal skepticism, including in its serenely quizzical consideration his own experience. And so at every recoil from the violence of partisanship, from the fatigue of "strained attitudes," the modern spirit tends to slip into the form of Montaigne.

The essay lends itself better to a balanced representation of life than either free verse or the current realistic novel. For the ordinary life is not like a modern poem—it has more rhythm and reason and regularity. Life is not like a "realistic" novel