University of Virginia Library

FOREWORD
The Ego in the Essay

We are each launched in life with an elfin shipmate — set jogging upon earth beside a fairy comrade. When our ears are clear, he pipes magic music; when our feet are free he pleads with us to follow him on witching paths. We cannot often hear, we cannot often follow, but when we do, we know him for what he is; when we sail or run or fly with him, we know him for the gladdest fellow with whom life ever paired us, a companion rarely glimpsed, but glorious, for he is our own true Self. Poets and dreamers have sometimes snared him in a sonnet, but for the most part, for his waggishness and his wanderings, he demands, not the strait-jacketing of poetry, but the flexible garment of prose. It is the shifting subtleties of the essay that have ever best expressed him.

One man there was in that peopled past, where friendship's best doors fly open at our knock, who knew how to catch his elusive Ego and keep it glad even on ways that led

through sordid counting-house and sadder madhouse; and who knew also, better than any one since has ever known, how to envisage and investure that exquisite Self of his, sweet, quaint sprite that it was, in an essay. Ever since that time those of us who love essays say, of one possessing special grace, it is like Elia's, meaning not that it imitates Lamb's style, the inimitable, but that it reveals, as only the essay can do, personality.

Of all literary forms the personal essay appears the most artless, a little boat that sails us into pleasant havens, without any sound of machinery and without any chart or compass. To read is as if we overheard some one chatting with that little merry-heart, his own particular Ego. We do not stop to think what childlike simplicities any grown-up must attain before he can hear that fairy divinity, his own Self, speak at all, for the only true tongue in which the Self speaks is joy. Only childlike feet can follow the feet of fairies. The self-annalist whose essays warm our hearts with friendship, must be one who sips the wine of mirth when all alone with his own Self. Not many such are born, and fewer of them write essays. The essay is no easy thing. The true mood and the true manner of it are rare. It is as difficult to write an essay on

purpose as it is to be a person on purpose, a teasing game and unsatisfactory.

Yet the difficulties of essay-writing are offset by the delights: for there is nothing so compelling to expression as chuckle, and that is what the true essay is, sheer chuckle; it is what we felt and saw that time the elfin Ego floated in on a sun-mote, and showed us, laughing, how all our life is gilded with fun. Then off we fly to write it, with the spell still upon us! The poising of a word on the tip of our pen until the very most genial sunbeam of all shall touch it, the weaving the thread of a golden thought in and out through all the quips and nonsense, the wrapping a whole life experience in the hollow shaft of some light-barbed phrase! The best quality of the humorous essay is that the reader shall smile, not laugh, and, moreover, that he shall remember no one passage at which he smiles: it is far better that he should feel that he has touched a personality tipped with mirth. Ariel never laughed. The fun that makes the soul expand must have in it the lift of wings and the glimpsing fantasy of flight.

More than any other of the shapes prose takes, the essay should give the reader a sense of good-fellowship. Probably the writer who as an actual man is shyest, gives this comradeship

best. The shy man sheds forth his personality most opulently in print, and preferably, as certain wise editors have perceived, in anonymous print. One is sensitive to having an everyday friend see one's soul in public, because the everyday friend knows too well the everyday self, to which the elusive essay-self is too often a stranger.

That skittish elfin Ego, so alien to the humdrum man or woman who bears our mortal name, if he only came to visit us oftener, stayed with us longer, what essays we might write! A snatch of song, a tinkle of laughter, a flutter of wings, if he would only linger until I could clearly see what he is, this Ego of mine, who tells such happy secrets! Poor babykin, poor fairykin—that Ego sent forth with us to make blithe the voyage, we cannot go a-dancing with him out to fairy fields, because our feet are heavy with Other People's clogs and fetters, we cannot hear when he would whisper at our ear gentle philosophies—our own Self's and no one's else, because of the grave grubby Book-people who thunder at us from our shelves. Sometimes I catch him casting a waggish twinkle at me over the very shoulder of my blackest worry, rainbow wings and head that is devil-may-care trying to get at me from behind her sable-stoled form.

Even in the thought of death I catch his cherub chuckle, "Could a grave hold me?" For is not death also a bugbear of Other People, not at all of my own Self's making?

Gay little voyager! He seems, when he visits me, to be the prince of the kingdom of fun. He does not stay long, but long enough sometimes for me to write an essay. But whence he comes, or whither he goes, or what he is, whether demonic or divine, I only know that he is mine.