Less Is More: The Modernity of the Early Modern Essay

As the superfluous "of" in the title implies, Of Essays is conceived as a Baconian essay: a short book, a terse book, an exploratory book, a book disinclined to make foundational claims. It is an ambitious book for all that, rejecting the received idea that the essay is all about personal expression or empirical observation. Such qualities might characterize the modern, post-Cartesian essay where human experience is organized around the categories of self and world. The "early modern" essay, Scott Black argues, had different priorities that begin to approximate our now-familiar modes of postmodern critical discourse. Black's ruminations on these unexpected connections make his essay on essays a timely and compelling exercise in criticism.

Seventeenth- and eighteenth-century essays were less exercises in framing notions of self and world than occasions for reading texts or, to use their own language, occasions for digesting books: "The genre doesn't facilitate originality or authority but digestion, enabling a kind of work off the page instead of a new work on the page" (19). Black derives the genealogy of the English essay less from Montaigne (self) or Bacon (world) than from the humanist practice of assembling commonplace books in which fragments of found writing were collected, ordered, and modified for occasional use. Finding and using: the essay was Janus-faced, looking backwards to classicizing imitatio and ahead to the exigencies of contemporary print culture. Authorship was doubly displaced; the matter was commonplace and the manner left unpolished: "Essays require a different sort of reading, not one geared to observing an author on display, but to learning a skill" (23).

Commonplace books, obviously, and essays, only slightly less obviously, are records of their writers' reading. Originality was seldom the point except insofar as a source might supply a starting point for appropriating an old sentiment or trope. Essayists might display skill in adapting their found materials, and a similar skill might be demanded of readers attempting to digest their pithy, elliptical, or meandering utterances. Digesting an essay was tantamount to composing an essay: the thought processes and literary skills required were much the same. For this reason, essays proliferated with the growth of the reading public; the reciprocity between the essayist's acts of reading and writing explains why the essay would eventually become the primary genre used in literary criticism after 1750, which is where Black terminates his survey.

The essays in Of Essays are arranged in chronological sequence beginning with a chapter, "Draughts of Reading," that collects comments on the essay form by seventeenth-century practitioners such as Cornwallis, Tuvill, Culpeper, Felltham, and Richard Whitlock. Whitlock's commonplace ideas (in both senses) about the essay might stand in for the others:

It is a kind of voluntary Tiding of, not Pumping for; Notions flowing, not forced; like Poets unconstrained Heats and Raptures; such is mine, rather a running Discourse than a Grave-paced Exactnes; having in them this Formality of Essayes (as Sir W. Cornwallyes saith of his) that they are Tryals of bringing my hand and Fancy acquainted in this using my Paper, as the Painters Boy a Board he blurs with Tryals. I may say in my defence as another before me. . . . As in Hunting he is the best Huntsman that catcheth most, and not bad because he catcheth not all: To comprehend all, or most can be said on any of these Themes, I professe not.

(26-27)

"As an other before me"—not Baconian discovery, but humanist invention was of the essence. Essays were indeed trials or experiments, but, Black emphasizes, they were trials of reading: "One reads in order to get material to work with, but one must digest what one reads, making it one's own. One writes in order to aid this process of digestion; reading is a mechanism of digestion" (33).

The second chapter, "By Way of Essays," illustrates digestion at work in close readings of essays by Henry Peacham and Abraham...