Page:The American Essay in War Time, Agnes Repplier, 1918.pdf/2

250 furbelows, thrust him from his pleasant vicarage. The essayist has only the common world in which to rejoice or suffer with the men and women who fill it. The element of artifice in his work unfits it for bitter and blinding truths. If we open an index to periodical literature, and see how many columns are headed "European War," we understand why there is no room left for the essay. If we look next at the columns bearing the sub-title, "Atrocities," we know why there is no heart left in the essayist. The college professor could not have written his paper on Sir Thomas Browne after August, 1914.

The submerging of the essay in the "Great Preoccupation" means a heavier loss to English than to American letters, because this "cadet of literature," to borrow Mr. Curtis's happy phrase, is more in accord with the genius of English than of American prose. Its personality is born of leisure and reﬂection. If Steele were familiar alike with the rough world of the soldier and the thick atmosphere of party strife, there is little to indicate it in his detached and delicate virility. His tentative treatment of Montaigne's "experiment" is a wonderful admixture of freedom and precaution. He seems complete arbiter of his essay's fate, but he deeply respects the laws which give it form. The early prose writers of the United States were by way of thinking that a composition which was not a tale or a sermon became, by this simple process of elimination, an essay. A printed lecture (and lectures were much in favor) was an essay. A spoken essay was a lecture. The terms were interchangeable. This ﬂowing and generous standard has not been wholly abandoned. Letters of Benjamin Franklin's have been ranked as American essays because they deal with generalities instead of details, and are written in a moralising instead of in a gossipping strain. Even his dialogue with the gout, too heavily playful and too relentlessly didactic to be tolerated as conversation, has been presented to American readers as an essay.