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I'ARTISAN REVIEW
Shropshire Lad for a while bestrode the world, and was welcome
nowhere. But Milton and Mill and Swift and George Eliot and E.
M.
Forster came along as stowaways - "Areopagitica," and"A Vindication of
the Rights of Woman," and "A Modest Proposal," and
Dalliel Deronda,
and
A Passa,Re fo Illdia.
These hardly stand for the arrogance of parochial–
ism - and it is just this engagement with belles-lettres that allows
parochialism to open its arms, so that the inevitable accompaniment of
belles-lettres is a sense of indebtedness. "It takes a great deal of history to
produce a little literature," James noted; everything that informs belles–
lettres is in that remark, and also everything that militates against the
dismissal of either the term or the concept.
If I
began these reflections in curmudgeonly resentment of the virtual
annihilation of what Henry James knew - of the demise of the literary
essay - it is only to press for its rescue and reclamation. Poetry and the
novel will continue to go their own way, and we can be reasonably con–
fident that they will take care of themselves . But the literary essay needs
and merits defense: defense and more - celebrants, revivification through
performance. One way or another, the literary essay is connected to the
self-conscious progression of a culture, whereas the essay's flashy successor
- the article, or "piece" - is in every instance a pusher of Now, a shaker–
off of whatever requires study or patience, or what used to be called,
without prejudice, ambition. The essayist's ambition is no more and no
less than that awareness of indebtedness I spoke of a moment ago - in–
debtedness to history, scholarship, literature, the acutest nuances of lan–
guage.
Is this what is meant by "elitism"? Perhaps. I think of it as work, if
work is construed (as it ought to be) as "the passion for exactitude and
sublimity." The latter phrase I borrow from a young essayist in London–
my daughter's age exactly - who, because of a driven Parnassian ardor and
because he is still in his twenties, has, I trust, the future of belles-lettres se–
creted in his fountain pen.
In
the newest literary generation, the one most
assailed by the journalist's credo of Now, it is a thing worth marveling at:
this determination to subdue, with exactitude and sublimity, the passion–
less trivia of our time.
