The Essay

The essay is the only literary form which confesses, in its very name, that the rash act known as writing is really a leap in the dark. When men try to write a tragedy, they do not call the tragedy a try-on. Those who have toiled through the twelve books of an epic, writing it with their own hands, have seldom pretended that they have merely tossed off an epic as an experiment.

But an essay, by its very name as well as its very nature, really is a try-on and really is an experiment. A man does not really write an essay. He does really essay to write an essay. One result is that, while there are many famous essays, there is fortunately no model essay. The perfect essay has never been written, for the simple reason that the essay has never really been written.

Men have tried to write something, to find out what it was supposed to be. In this respect the essay is a typically modern product and is full of the future and the praise of experiment and adventure. In itself it remains somewhat elusive, and I will own that I am haunted with a faint suspicion that the essay will probably become rather more cogent and dogmatic, merely because of the deep and deadly divisions which ethical and economic problems may force upon us.

But let us hope there will always be a place for the essay that is really an essay. St. Thomas Aquinas, with his usual common sense, said that neither the active nor the contemplative life could be lived without relaxation, in the form of jokes and games. The drama or the epic might be called the active life of literature; the sonnet or the ode the contemplative life. The essay is the joke.