The Art of an Essayist by AC Benson – Key to Good Living

Website design By BotEap.comAn essay is something that the writer writes himself. According to Benson, from the very birth of the essay as a genre in Montaigne’s hands, the essay has been a comfortable blend of the personal and the subjective, and in fact it has been the most personal of all genres. The personal touch gives life and charm to the essay through the personality of the essayist. The charm is evident because the essay is something that the writer writes himself where he reveals his heart in the most confidential way. An essay can be on a variety of topics, but above all, it must show an interest in life. It should reflect the pleasant personality of the author and also change the perspective of the reader. Thus writes Benson, Montaigne, the father of the essay in literature, while writing his essays he worries about the “Montaigne man”. Thus, the essay is a reverie for the essayist: it is a loose sequence of thoughts, of an irregular nature, that stops in the moment and allows the writer to dwell within and correspond with himself. Montaigne used this technique wonderfully as he wrote his essays, presenting a certain frame of mind and infusing charm with being intimate and personal.

Website design By BotEap.comAn essay is something that the essayist does for himself. For the essay we can go back to Cicero or Plato. Cicero tackled abstract themes with a romantic undertone. Plato discussed the speculative and ethical problems of life and tried to find a philosophical interest. The English temperament lacks the charm of Montaigne. They are too judgmental, reserved, very guarded for their privacy. But Lord Brougham proved that one can maintain privacy while showing off.

Website design By BotEap.comSir Thomas Browne’s Religio Medici or Urn Burial contained essays of elaborate rhetorical style. Addison in The Spectator dealt with delicate humor. Charles Lamb dealt with the romantic and the homey. De Quincy wrote a passionate autobiography, while Pater used the essay to achieve an exquisite artistic feel. In all these writings the common strain is the personal element, the essay reflects the personality of the author.

Website design By BotEap.comAn essayist is not a poet. An essayist deals with humor to some extent. But humor is alien to poetry, which is more sacred and solemn. The poet is emotional, reverential, excitable, in search of the sublime and the elevated. He wants to transcend the little mundane everyday worries, the jarring and unworthy elements of life. The similarity of the essayist to the poet is that an essayist can also make an effort to ignite emotion. But an essayist uses life’s most common materials and transforms simple experiences with fairytale delicacy and romantic sparkle. Behind all forms of art, be it poetry or prose, is the principle of wonder, of attentive attention. It has to be not only the sense of beauty, but also the sense of fitness, strangeness, fullness, effective effort. The amazement a savage feels at seeing a civilized city is not the sense of beauty but the sense of strength, mysterious resources, incredible products, unintelligible things. He also sees the grotesque, absurd, funny and humorous. The essayist deals with these basic emotions. It filters out the salient subjects of these instinctual emotions and records them in impressive language.

Website design By BotEap.comSo, an essayist is a spectator of life. As cataloged in Browning’s poem “How It Strikes A Contemporary”, the essayist’s material is to see the shoemaker in the shop, the man who cuts lemon, the brazier of the coffee roaster, the books on the stalls, the posters in bold on the wall, a man hitting his horse or cursing a woman, etc. The essayist selects his setting, perhaps a street, a field, or a picture gallery. But once you choose, you have to get to the heart of the matter.

Website design By BotEap.comThe essayist must be broad-minded. You cannot simply go about your business, be it a politician or a thief, with the sole objective of making a profit. You cannot be prejudiced in your favors, that is, you should not hate your opponents and favor your friends. If you condemn, despise, disapprove, you lose sympathy. You must have an all-encompassing mind to enjoy everything that you think is worth recording, and not be narrow-minded. Jacketed people like a banker, a social reformer, a forensic defender, a fanatic, a madman, or a puritan cannot be essayists. The essayist has to be open-minded but not moral. You must be tolerant, you must discern quality, you must be concerned with the overall picture of life in relation to the environment and people, not goals and objectives.

Website design By BotEap.comThe charm of the essayist lies in translating the sense of good humor, gentleness, reasonable character and in the effort to establish a pleasant friendship with the reader. One does not read the essay for information or definition, but to find an acceptable solution to a host of tangled problems that arise in our daily lives and in our relationships with people. The essayist would address some problem in everyday life and delve into it to find out the reasons for our irregular actions, the reasons for our attraction or repulsion towards people and would try to suggest a theory about it. When reading an essay, the reader should be forced to confess that he had thought in the same vein, but had never discerned the connection. The essayist must realize that most people’s convictions are not the result of reason, but a mass of confused associations, traditions, half-understood sentences, loyalties, whims, etc.

Website design By BotEap.comThe essayist must consider human weakness, not human strength. But while accepting human weakness, you must try to infuse them with glimpses of idealism. You must keep in mind that the human mind, despite weakness, is capable of idealism, passionate visions, irresponsible humor that can spring from cloudy and dull minds. The essayist’s task is to make the reader realize his self-esteem, that every human mind is capable of grasping something great and remote that, however, cannot always be clear in our minds. Human nature is indecisive, hesitates. The confessed objective of the essayist is to make the reader see that each person has a role to play in life, that he has an interest to assume in life, that life is a game full of pulsating outputs and channels and that life is not only for millionaires or politicians.

Website design By BotEap.comThus, the essayist ultimately teaches that life is not just about success, but about fulfillment. Success can cloud our outlook on life and make a person full of self-importance. What matters is how much a person can give to receive.

Website design By BotEap.comThe similarity between an essayist and a poet is that both perceive the greatness of life. But the essayist works with more humble material. The essayist is not a romance because it is not elegant but homey material. The essayist has to detect the sublimity of life. Life is not always exciting, you are not always looking forward to something that is about to happen. There are monotonous gaps in the middle. The task of an essayist is to extract something rich and strange from those monotonous holes.

Website design By BotEap.comTherefore, an essay as a genre cannot be strictly classified either. It’s like an organ prelude that can be tempered, modulated, and colored. To some extent, it is also a critique of life. It is a learning process that teaches not to condemn the negative, but to perceive the fullness of life and embrace all experience. An essayist is an interpreter of life. He is within a short space a combination of historian, philosopher, poet, novelist. He observes and analyzes life, colors it with his fantasy, enjoys the charm and quality of simple things, and strives to make others lead better lives.