Page:The American Essay in War Time, Agnes Repplier, 1918.pdf/9

Rh If the personal or social essay—the felicitous study of men and things—has fared ill for the past three years, the critical essay has been well-nigh obliterated. It is certainly easier to read a few pages on commuters' gardens or the perils of precocity than an analysis of Sir Thomas Browne. We can even make shift for the present to do without any further comment on Mr. Bernard Shaw, and this elimination will leave a large free space in our lives. But critical essayists, like Mr. Paul Elmer More, and social essayists, like Mr. Edward Sandford Martin, have long helped us to do our thinking, and their task is not yet done. All essayists have a right to preach a little (the lust for preaching burns in every soul), provided their method be indirect, and their message capably brief. There is an hour's good sermon condensed into Mr. John Jay Chapman's two lines, "Hardy, self-perpetuating ethics must draw constant life from religion." There is another in Mr. Martin's discerning sentence, "A sincerely religious man may become a great money-maker; but it seems a good deal safer to regard his money-making as something concurrent with his religious duty rather than as the realization of it."

Even the delicate tracery of a pen portrait, the most finished if the least inspiring form of essay-writing, conveys its moral to the world. I do not include in this category sketches of public characters or of personal friends, which are journalistic, and belong to an exclusive class of reporting. I have in mind such a triumphant piece of work as Mr. Flandrau's "Mr. and Mrs. Parke," in which a human type, set in its appropriate surroundings, like a jewel in a ring or an island in the sea, is presented without pity and without asperity. The elderly Boston couple whose lives have been spent in "the deification of the unessential, the reduction of puttering to a science," live convincingly in the few pages assigned to them. Mr. Flandrau is as kind to their facile virtues as he is tolerant of their essential unworthiness. He murmurs endearing words while he probes delicately into