the attention of students of education in every section of the country. Scientific studies for the most part have a direct bearing on what the pupil should study and at what stage of his progress he ought to study it. If English curricula in the different cities and states are to keep pace with revisions in science and mathematics, the Council should gather together and make available the results of research in this field. The report should not be drawn up for technical students but for the workaday teacher. In those parts which would guide graduate schools of research the language should be simple enough to be understood by those unacquainted with the refinements of statistical procedure. It should bring out into the light of common sense the bearing of each study and each problem on the exercises of the classroom.

The Council is competent to produce such a summary, for we have within our own number experts acquainted with the crucial questions in English, with the methods and pitfalls of educational research, and with the actual practice and everyday needs of the classroom teacher. We could draw up a summary of investigations containing critical evaluations of research already completed and dependable outlines of essential research yet to be made. Whether we do produce it depends on you. If you, as the leading English teachers of this nation, urge, support, and demand a critical evaluation of scientific studies, the National Council will do its best to supply that demand.

THE ESSAY OF TODAY

SIMEON STRUNSKY

Confronted with the task of defining the novel, you might do much worse than say that a novel, as a rule, is something that is written by a novelist. The generality of mankind is not very well informed on the laws of plot, character, situation, and the inner life; but we know Dickens, Tolstoy, and William Dean Howells when we see them. Similarly, it is possible, in the absence of a thorough acquaintance with the textbooks from Aristotle down, to define drama as something written by a dramatist, and poetry as something offered for sale by a poet, and a picture as something

committed by a painter. People will understand, and nine times out of ten will not go astray.

But now look at the essay. Among a dozen writers brought together by Odell Shepard in Essays of 1925,1 I find one United States senator, three journalists, two or three journalists who have attained the dignity of publicists, one poet and novelist, one literary critic. In the dozen names I find just two which at first sight connote the essay; they are E. S. Martin and Zephine Humphrey. This is not intended to suggest that there is anything in the Constitution of the United States or in the jurisdictional rules of the essayists' labor union to prevent anybody from trying his hand at Montaigne's trade. That there is no such labor organization in this particular field is precisely the point with which I have set out. Freedom from every sort of restriction on immigration from other domains of literature has characterized the essay almost from the beginning. It is particularly true of the contemporary essay.

Nevertheless, Mr. Shepard foresees an air of bewilderment on his reader's face, and he hastens to explain. It appears that he really holds much more rigorous views on the essay than the present writer does:

Really excellent humorous writing is hard to find in the magazines of the year. What is more important, there is little play of mind for its own sake, little amiable and graceful trifling of the kind inherited by English writers from Charles Lamb. . . . . I may as well record that one man at least, while reading his way through the non-fictional prose of recent magazines, has often sighed for more frequent oases of urbane and civilized laughter, little zones of leisure remote from the drum-fire of argument.

Plainly, Mr. Shepard feels that topics like government regulation of business, or prohibition and the Ku Klux, or international peace, or the career of William J. Bryan are not essay topics. It simply happened that 1925 was a poor year. If better essays had been made in 1925 he would have collected them.

What is this ideal essay form which Mr. Shepard has only approximated in the absence of the real thing? It is the thing which Addison and Charles Lamb wrote. It is the thing which Christopher Morley has in mind when he says, in his introduction to the first 'Hartford, Connecticut: E. V. Mitchell.

series of Modern Essays,2 that "the essay is a mood rather than a form." It is the thing which others have in mind when they speak of the essay as "meditation." It is the aggregation of qualities of which most of us think when we think of the essay, though we would turn pale at any peremptory request to define the word. It is the short expository prose that is informal, urbane, tolerant, pedestrian, reverent, quietistic, tentative, concerned with spiritual or emotional values or translating physical circumstance into personal values-Mr. Morley's "mood." It is intuition, speculation, reverie, whimsy, and in every instance easy going. What the essay, as we usually conceive it, must never do is kill its subject. The essayist is a man who does not know where he is going, but is happy to be on his way. Or if he does have some dim sense of the compass directions, he is never in any haste to get there. The essay suggests; but if you don't quite see the point it does not make much difference, and if you disagree there are no bones broken. After all, "What know I?" said the Frenchman who first essayed the essay. So, in true essay fashion, we come back right to where we started from, after a pleasant little promenade. The essay, as we think of it without attempting to define it, is the sort of thing Addison and Elia were so good at turning out.

What this popular impression does is to beg the question— which, in the true essay spirit, we are of course at liberty to do. But if you say only Addison and Lamb, you will have to dismiss perhaps the greater part of your modern essays and a very important number of the Pioneers and the Founding Fathers of the essay. What is the first example of the essay with which the high-school student is confronted? If the fashions in secondary school English have not greatly changed since the war it would still be the Essay on Milton. Perhaps the student has had a touch of Elia; but he has met him as an isolated tidbit in the Dissertation on Roast-Pig, as a reading "selection," and not as an example of the essay. Perhaps the student has met Addison, but by way of the Roger de Coverley Papers; and unless secondary-school psychology has changed greatly, a paper is not often identified as an essay. The boy and the 'Harcourt, Brace & Company.

girl are first directly aware that they are traveling in essay land when they meet Mr. Macaulay on Milton.

Take, then, Thomas Babington Macaulay and test him by the popular specifications laid down previously, specifications drawn from our vague but clinging belief of what an essay should be. It will emerge that Macaulay, one of our super-essayists, is pretty nearly everything that an essayist should not be. He is not exactly urbane. He is not-to put it mildly-tolerant. He has no "mood," unless by mood you mean iron convictions. And on the formal side Macaulay of the swelling organ tones and of the magnificently wrought sequences is not what you would call the ambling wayfarer or the felt-slippered dreamer in the easy chair. Macaulay knows where he is going before he starts out, and he knows every minute of the day that he is on the right road. If Montaigne was an essayist, then Macaulay ought not to be one; yet, unfortunately for our peace of mind at the present moment, he is. That is why we cannot say that something is an essay because it is written by an essayist. Macaulay was not an essayist. Emerson is reputed to have written essays; but how many of us think of Emerson as an essayist?

But if a definition, or a stab at a definition, is unavoidable, then one might reverse Christopher Morley, and say, certainly on the basis of the modern essay and with fair reason on the basis of the entire history of the essay, that the essay is a form rather than a mood. The essay is a short piece of expository prose, and that is as far as we can go. Mood is often present, though, far less frequently in the modern essay than in the earlier record. But mood is not an essential part, if definition is suited to data instead of data to definition. And even if you insist on mood you cannot insist on the mood of Addison, of Elia, of Max Beerbohm, or Hilaire Belloc in his gentler phases, of the late Samuel McChord Crothers-in whom we have just lost the Addison of our own day-of Mr. Morley himself when he is alone at home in Paumanok with old Thomas Burton. You must allow for, and give entry to, other moods: to Chesterton when he is writing about capitalists and vegetarians; to Belloc when he is writing about modernists; and to H. L. Mencken. Why is not the editor of the American Mercury represented in the anthologies? Because he calls his essays Prejudices? Allowing for

historical changes in vocabulary and reticence, Mr. Mencken is not much more prejudiced against Methodists than Macaulay was against Tories, than Ruskin was against the industrial system, or than Chesterton is against this same system. Mr. Mencken, I cannot help feeling, is the victim of established notions among the anthologists. His urbanity, tolerance, quietism, lack of self-confidence, and gift for understatement do not exactly leap to the eye. But by the definition of the essay as a short prose piece he belongs. He has written some very noticeable short pieces. And incidentally, there is a prudential reason. If you refuse Mr. Mencken admission to the anthologies for the use of high-school and college youth, he will bust right in, despite the Polizei, and carry your student youth off with him.

It is, then, with the contemporary essay as it has been with the essay at all times, only much more so. The essay can be, and is, anything and everything. You cannot define the essayist as someone who doesn't know too much about anything but is willing to try. In that case you would have to deport W. C. Brownell, who can be easily convicted of knowing a great deal about literature, and Frenchmen, and the American scene in general. You would have to deport William Beebe because he knows altogether too much about the jungle and the sea and the people who go down to both. You would have to deport Santayana. From nearly every collection of American essays you would have to exclude the late Stuart P. Sherman, because in respect to American literature and American tradition Stuart Sherman knew. And on the other hand you would have to expel an entire host of younger and very young writers whom as a matter of fact you often include in your anthologies. As against Brownell, Beebe, Sherman, who would be disfranchised from the essay on the ground of knowing too much, some of the young men might well qualify. But the difficulty is that although they sometimes do not know very much, and are thus entitled to write essays, they are not willing to wait and try. Because of their irritating refusal to say "What know I?" or "Perhaps," or "Does it not then seem?"-because of their insistence that they do know and are going to tell you whether you like it or not-they would, by the mood and meditation test, be excluded. And yet