Page:The American Essay in War Time, Agnes Repplier, 1918.pdf/5

Rh fifty-four unflinching pages to "Mechanism in Thought and Morals," and fifty-two pages to the "Seasons," a theme pre-empted—and exhausted—by Thomson.

If the American essay is to include our best political utterances, as well as our noblest thinking and our most acute criticism, Mr. Wister is right in assigning it a high place in the world of letters. Through this medium Emerson taught us superbly his austere philosophy. Whether we accept this philosophy or reject it, whether it ignites our souls or chills them, we are equally aware that "great men taken up in any way are proﬁtable companions." The essay was the chosen field in which Mr. Lowell displayed his urbane scholarship, his sanity and wit. Mr. Henry James turned from the despotism of fiction long enough to give us two volumes of essays which Mr. Brownell rightly says, "stand at the head of American literary criticism." There is nothing to put by their side, unless, indeed, it be Mr. Brownell's own studies of Victorian and American prose, so sure, so balanced, so immaculately free from personal preference as a basis of criticism. To escape from the portentous solemnities of Poe's "Philosophy of Composition," and read the crystal-clear sentence in which Mr. Brownell disposes of the situation, "An incurable dilettante coldly caressing a morbid mood," is not merely to understand the "Raven"; it is to step from the ordered and intricate nothingness of a labyrinth to the naked and open land.

The personal essay, the little bit of sentiment or observation, the lightly offered commentary which aims to appear the artless thing it isn't—this exotic, of which Lamb was a rare exponent, has withered in the blasts of war. England and France paid scant heed to its unresisting decay. In the United States our long cherished neutrality offered it a precarious foothold. Mr. Henry Dwight Sedgwick has perhaps striven longest and striven hardest to preserve its imperilled life. He has turned a smiling and resolute face to permanent things; to the breakfast table, which we hope