Light, Not Too Light

I

The path of the essayist is not, let me suggest, exactly strewn with roses. In his case the difficulty is not a dearth, but a plethora, of subjects. His terms of reference do not hedge his fancy in by finicking restrictions of this or that nature: they are wide as the overhanging canopy itself. He may, metaphorically speaking, roam the heavens above, the earth below, and the waters underneath the earth; and if still he cannot hit upon a theme, or, hitting upon it, cannot ‘expand’ it to the ‘measure of his intention,’ the fault, certainly, lies in himself, not in his stars. Imaginatively, he may range, at his sweet will, not only from China to Peru and from Khorasan to Kidderminster, but he may with equal freedom, tackle, while so doing, matters as diverse as a lady’s commerce with her looking-glass and a man’s intercourse with his Maker. He may elect either to be learned or to be light: to be ponderous or to be merely playful. It is touch and go whether he chooses to be ‘sober, steadfast, and demure’ and to keep his ‘wonted state,’

‘With even step, and musing gait,
And looks commercing with the skies,’

or else to drench his essay through and through with a merciless shower of

‘Quips, and cranks, and wanton wiles,
Nods, and becks, and wreathed smiles,’

and generally to give full rein to the spirit of delight. Today he may, with becoming gravity, discourse upon Plato and Aristotle, Xenophon and Longinus, and tomorrow, without so much as a ‘by your leave,’ or a ‘with your leave,’ write ecstatically on the Beaumont Committee’s Report on the Indian Cricket tour in England, or the clove trade in Zanzibar, If he is a capable fellow he can make even a column of statistics interesting, and can deal with Freud and Jung, Jeans and Eddington, to excellent purpose; and, given this necessary condition again, the state of the American cotton market, and the decline and fall of the gold standard, and the romantic history of the devaluation of the franc, will be all the same to him. The fact is that essayists, like others, have their lean periods, their fallow times; and it is then that their inherent worth comes out. One cannot always be at the top of one’s form. Take Mr. Robert Lynd, for instance. He has been contributing an essay every week to the New Statesman since auld lang syne: which, being interpreted, means, since the year 1913, when that famous weekly was started. He has himself modestly estimated that up to April 1934, he must have written about 1,600,000 words by way of ‘middles’ to that paper; and safeguarded himself by saying: ‘If this be imputed to me as a crime my excuse must be that my poverty, and not my will, consented."

II

Well, what does Mr. Lynd do? He has, if we are to believe him, a rooted habit of procrastination. He has a job to do, but is averse from doing it, and so willy-nilly postpones it till the last avoidable moment; and, what is more, has an excuse ever ready–connecting the delay with the mislaying of his fountain-pen, or the dropping of a bottle of ink on to the sheets on which he had been writing, or the kitten’s lapping up all the milk in the cupboard, or the falling asleep of the man in the moon. These are my own fancies, but it would appear that ‘Y.Y.’ is really ingenious in his apologies. He confesses:

"From an early age, I wanted to write, but I always hated–and still hate–beginning to write…..I am like a man who wants to go somewhere in his motor car, and whose engine needs cranking up, and who would gladly, avoid the effort of cranking up the engine. Hence, even if I had a week in which to write an article, I should find it difficult to begin writing till the last hours of the last day of the week. Expected to deliver my article by the first post on Thursday morning, I still found myself late on Wednesday night doing my utmost to dodge the necessity of work. How often have I succeeded so well that I have had to set the alarm clock for six and to go down and compel myself to tackle the detested task on a wintry Thursday morning!" (See his Essay, ‘A Thousand and one "Middles"’ in the New Statesman of April 14, 1934.)

This constitutional lethargy I also share: and if only I had a tenth part of Mr. Lynd’s skill. I should have no hesitati6n in saying that this passage expresses myself–more or less. But that is not the point. The point is that, his temperament being such, he finds himself now and then in a fix: on what should he write? If nothing better offers, and the last minute has arrived, he takes up a dictionary and fills up three columns with what comes in handy; and yet contrives that the resulting attempt shall be both readable and reasonable. Therein lies the secret of your master-essayist. Did I begin my article by positing that an essayist suffers, not from a dearth, but from a plethora, of subjects? It is illustrated most aptly in the example I have chosen. Mr. Lynd would have had his work cut out for him if he had a subject of limited scope to handle: he would not, then, have had to run after it himself and be in a perpetual state of suspense about it, The essayist’s job is really not so easy as it looks. Having a veritable universe of themes to select from, he is ever on the horns of a dilemma; and probably ends up by selecting the least suitable. On the other hand, it is comparatively simple if you have to dissertate on the economic condition of the Neolithic man, or the fashion in ladies’ hats in the eighteenth century, or the decline and fall of the Moghul Empire. You have to mug up your subject, that is all, and to take care not to botch it too conspicuously in telling the world what Mr. A or Mrs. B has already told it in a more authoritative and, withal, a more convincing, style. But an essayist has both to choose his subject and to illuminate it from unexpected angles. His is a pioneer’s work; and, like it, the more praiseworthy.

III

I do not, of course, pretend to be an essayist ‘as to the manner born.’ We, in India, do not encourage essayists in our midst: we are much too serious for that. We are, as a race, not only not capable of the light touch, but are prone, on the rare occasions when we do meet with it, to look down upon it as though it were of baseness all compact. While articles on Bimetallism and the Binder Report are welcomed with both hands, essays are strictly taboo. I am a lover of essays. I think that I may legitimately boast that I have read as many English essays–especially modern English essays–as anybody else. In English Literature I am fondest of essays and literary criticism and belles-lettres generally: even fiction comes only after these. We have to deal with another difficulty. An essay, by its very nature, is lavish of the first person singular: because, in a manner of speaking, it is a record–a haphazard record, but a record nonetheless–of one’s own experience. Consequently, the element of autobiography cannot be altogether dispensed with. Now, this is not misunderstood in England: in India it is far otherwise. The vice of egotism is easily attributed here, and when once it is attributed it is pretty difficult for the condemned fellow to wriggle himself out of that label. I have myself met many youngsters–as well as oldsters, if I may say so–who did not feel the slightest compunction in gesticulating away the essays of Messrs. Lynd, Lucas, and Gardiner, Belloc, Chesterton, and Priestley. They brushed them aside like things of no moment–mere flotsam and jetsam floating on the sea of one’s mind. "Why," they would say, "there is not much stuff in this: there is nothing for the teeth of the intellect to bite on. It is neither a feast of reason nor a flow of soul. It is a mere rambling discourse, a will o’ the wisp, a flimsy gossamer, a bed of feathers, thistledown, what you will, not a serious effort, nor does it make any show of harnessing the forces of man’s thought down the ages to its particular requirements. Away with it!" The truth is that this criticism misses its mark. These essays, in the first place, are not so devoid of ideas as we are asked to believe. Secondly, the writers concerned have nowhere indicated that they have, in penning them, set out to instruct mankind in all the arts and sciences that ever were. Their purpose was the humbler one of entertaining their readers for the space of half an hour or so, and if, in the process, they managed not to go off the deep end they were quite content. As for this mania for ideas, I have long since arrived at the conclusion that it does not amount to much. My experience has been that very few of those who complain of this deficiency in others are themselves chockfull of them: the current of their beings cannot be said to be overflowing with what Browning has called

‘Thoughts hardly to be packed
Into a narrow act,
Fancies that broke through language and escaped.’

Your self-styled serious person is, really, in the majority of instances, shallow at bottom. No ideas in Mr. Hilaire Belloc’s essay on ‘Nothing’? No ideas in Mr. Priestley’s essay on ‘A Fish in Bayswater’? No ideas in the late Mr. Gerald Gould’s essay on ‘Lenglen v. Wills’? No ideas in Mr. Lynd’s essay on ‘Intolerance’? As well say that there is no genuine poetry in:

‘Ay, but to die, and go we know not where;
To lie in cold obstruction, and to rot;
This sensible warm motion to become
A kneaded clod; and the delighted spirit
To bathe in fiery floods or to reside
In thrilling regions of thick-ribbed ice;
To be imprisoned in the viewless winds,
And blown with restless violence round about
The pendant world;…….’ (Measure for Measure)

(My Italics)

IV

In sober truth, to encompass the light touch is not easy. Most often, the temperament for that is lacking. The first essential is to educate ourselves to be in a holiday mood now and then: to give free rein to our fancies. The mind should be allowed to wander where it pleases, and it is enough if there is just a wee bit of continuity from beginning to end. Shakespeare puts into the mouth of Dogberry these wise words: "To be a well-favoured man is the gift of fortune; but to write and read comes by nature." The capacity to impart a light touch to one’s essays also ‘comes by nature.’ When one peruses the productions of the gentlemen I have named above, one feels that the whole affair is as simple as may be and that it could have been dashed off in a trice. The error is perceived when one sits down to attempt the same oneself. Then only will one begin to have respect for the authors of these so-called flimsies. The fact is that in this world nothing is as easy as it seems; and writing, least of all. Mr. Desmond MacCarthy has revealed that behind the apparently effortless ease of Mr. Lynd’s writings, there is an amount of genuine labour that would have to be seen to be believed. And why not? The gift of mellifluity does not drop down from the heaven like manna from the skies. It has to be carefully cultivated. There is but one way of adding brick to brick. But there are several ways of adding word to word. Has not Kipling recorded that there are as many as ninety-nine of writing tribal lays? There is one of paring down as well as one of filling up; and there is one, besides, of imparting a musical quality to the written stuff. Mr. Lynd has, by incessant labour, attained to a prose-style of such grace that it is the envy of many of his contemporaries. Yes; ‘grace’ is the word. Think you that any of his sentences and paragraphs can be managed as nonchalantly as, say, shelling beans or peeling potatoes? What an imperceptible gradation there is between one sentence of his and another? Mr. Lynd, indeed, like the generality of his countrymen, is a master of English prose. Is it realised by the majority of readers that some of the best English prose has been written by Irishmen? Burke and Goldsmith were Irish. So, if I am not mistaken, was Sheridan. In our own day Mr. Shaw and Mr. Yeats are Irish: the late Mr. George Moore and the late Mr. C. E. Montague ditto; Mr. Robert Lynd and Mr. Desmond MacCarthy the same. There is no doubt that, though England has conquered Ireland, the Irish have proved themselves superior to the English in the matter of the latter’s language. Perhaps there is something in the air of Erin that is conducive to this.

V

I am, however, not in favour of too much lightness. That is why I am not a great admirer of Mr. E. V. Lucas’s essays. I am an admirer of Mr. Lucas himself, of his style, of his scholarship. But I draw the line at his essays. For one thing, he rarely writes what I may call a ‘straight’ essay. He concentrates his attention almost exclusively on birds and beasts and towns and villages and churches and paintings: I am loth to give the name. ‘essays,’ to the resulting stuff. It is only on very, very, rare occasions that he condescends to treat of the usual themes; and then he is certainly charming. But his touch is too, too, light. That, I think, is a mistake. There must be some thought, some idea, even in an essay. It need not, indeed, set out to be brimful of notions from the start; but it ought, undoubtedly, to gather some on the way. In a typical essay what happens is that some slight thing or another leads the author on to at least one or two profound speculations. One may begin with trivial incidents, but one ought to end on a more serious note. Mr. Priestley is the essayist for this sort of thing. His collection of essays called Open House is full of it–so full of it that Mr. H. M. Tomlinson could not contain his joy when reviewing it in the old Saturday Review. He said that there was so much thought in it that a dozen novels could be made out of it. The praise was not excessive. Take another collection of his essays, The Balconinny. There is an essay there that is highly representative of this trait in Mr. Priestley. It is entitled: ‘A Fish in Bayswater.’ The first sentence is: "The other morning found me walking down Queen’s Road, Bays-water, in a deep fit of depression." Well, that is harmless enough, and the subject, indeed, suggests it. Immediately follow these sentences:

"I cannot remember now why I was feeling so depressed, and I do not suppose that I knew at the time. These are the days when we weep and know not why. Not Bass nor Worthington nor all the foaming brewage of the world shall ever medicine us to that sweet peace that we knew yesterday. We may assume that I had discovered that I was not fit for life or that life was not fit for me. I usually incline towards the latter view, and when I am out of spirits I see myself as a baffled idealist, betrayed by the very nobility of my mind, in short, as Hamlet in modern dress…..Some people, whose digestive processes happen to be excellent, advise you to search for the cause during the actual fit of depression and assure you that once the cause is found the mood will pass. Such people, however, forget that you will probably be too depressed to examine yourself, for at such times nothing is worth the trouble it involves. Even the psycho-analyst would make no headway because his first conviction in this state would be that psycho-analysis was useless. Knowing how blasphemous we can become at these moments, I can even imagine him damning the Unconscious."

Then he came to a fishmonger’s shop, ‘putting out a delightful cool reek of the foreshore,’ and saw a very large flat fish.

"The fish itself is not important. I do not know what kind of fish it was, and can only say that it was very large, and very flat, and unusually fishy. The point is, though, that when I saw that fish immediately thought of the sea......There came to me, in one glorious rush, thoughts and images of white cliffs on our South Coast, the Yorkshire caves and coves I knew as a boy, great Atlantic rollers a day out from the Azores, Conrad’s Typhoon, spray shooting over the Cornish, rocks, the overture to the Flying Dutchman, the smell of dying sea-weed and the feel of sand between my toes, the flying fish in the Caribbean, Melville’s Moley Dick……

Then he enlarges on this vision that the sight of the fish gave I rise to, "I felt a little rush of ecstasy…..Immediately, then, the lights went up everywhere and all life was rich and strange and a marvel, and I was out of spirits no longer." Then he goes on: "These moments are essentially moments of aesthetic vision, and it is out of them that literature and art and music are produced." This leads to a discussion of aesthetics. And he ends in this fashion:

"There was a time when I read and thought about nothing but aesthetics, but once I had recovered I swore that I would never approach the subject again, But if ever I weaken and bring out a thesis, I feel sure that it will open most strangely–with a fish in Bayswater."

Well, this is what I mean by an ‘essay.’ Light enough, but not too light, at places even thoroughly profound, touching, so to speak, ‘the kindred points of Heaven and Home.’