Essay and Essayist
Part-(a)
The aim of the essayist must be to make people interested in themselves, that life is a fine sort of a game.
The essayist makes one realize that everything is not success, but actually living a joyful and peaceful life.
The end is all in giving rather than receiving.
The essay's attempts aim is to keep a homely atmosphere and this faces actual conditions. Not to fly from them.
We think meanly of life if we believe that it has no Sublime moments but if we think sentimentally of it, we believe that it has nothing but sublime effects.
The essayists hold the balance.
If he is apt to neglect the sublimities of life, it is. because one is apt to think that they can take care of themselves. The lies in adventure.
The adventure of the thrill of the start in the foreshots. of the morning, the rapture of ardent ( ) companionship the gladness of the arrival.
The readers of the essays must feel that there is something rich and strange about the monotonous spaces() the lengths of the road of the journey of life.
An essayist has said that 'Essays in literature stands. outside classification as Argon ( ) among the elements simply makes its presence there.
Justice in Plato's Republic is a thing that the talkers set out to define. This Justice ends up being the one thing left in a state when the definable qualities are taken away.
The essays may follow any mood and may look at life in fifty different ways.
But the only thing and the important thing is not to despise and not to decide out of Ignorance and Prejudice, the influences which affect others.
The essence of all experience is that we should perceive something which we do not begin by knowing.
We learn that life has a fullness and a richness in all sorts of diverse ways, which we do not at first even dream of suspecting.
The essayists should be an interpreter of life, a critic of life.
Essays are not novels, philosophy, or history and yet it has all the touches of these streams ()
Essays do not seek a theory of life. Essays are observations and interpretations of life.
The essayists are deeply concerned with the charm and quality of things. So that the essays make others love life a little better and prepare them for its infinite variety- the joyful and mournful surprises also.
Coleridge has observed, "The opposite of poetry is not prose but science".
What lies behind all art is the principle of wonder and of arrested attention.
It needs not only a sense of beauty but, it may not be a sense of fitness and effective effort.
The essayist is therefore to a certain extent bound to be a spectator of life.
He must take note of everything, look at new things and poke in all things.
The essayist may select as per his own choice.
But then whatever he selects he must devote himself to it.
The essayist must have the power of giving a reason and to establish a sort of pleasant friendship with his reader.
The writer must not be too much interested in the action and conduct of life.
The essayists must believe in what he enjoys.
He must not believe in the necessity and importance.
A reader of essays expects to find a companionable treatment. A treatment of the vast mass of little problems that we keep facing in this world.
The essay ought to deal with the sight of beauty, scenery, the impressions of art and books.
The interplay of human qualities and characteristics.
The essayist needs to refer to the hopes, desires, fear & joy that play a large part of our daily life & thoughts.
The good essayist is the man who makes a reader realize that their thoughts must have some connection, and thus put them in words.
The essayists must be interested in the differences between human beings.
The essayist must recognise that the people's. Conviction is not by reason but by their associations.
The essays should deal with what people think and not what ought to think.
That people should be ashamed of their weakness, and realize.. humanity is above anything else.
The supreme fact of human nature is its duality; the tendency to pull in different ways.
There is the tug of war between 'Devils and Baker', which lies inside our brains.
The thought that is apprehended by an essayist must be felt enjoyed and expressed by certain guests ()
The essay follows no rules.
All literature answers to something in life, some form of human experience.
The stage imitates life as Shakespeare has said.
It calls the service of the eye and ear.
There is the narrator of the tale, the minstrel, or song, the talk. It includes all forms of human experiences and communications.
The essay is the reverie, the frame of the mind in which a man says, in the words of an old song, "I to myself says. "
Montaigne is the first writer of essays; he is the philosopher of the French Renaissance.
But his inspiration was Cicero. Cicero treated abstract topics in a conversational way.
Montaigne owed to Plato also, Plato had in his works the features of novel and essay, both Montaigne Plato Cicero.
Essays & Essayist
Part - (b)
Plato is the forerunner of the novels rather than a philosopher.
He made the background of life, he populated his scenes with bright boys and amiable elders.
The essayists discuss ethical and speculative () problems of life and character with a vitality rather than a philosophical interest.
The essence of the essay is soliloquy.
Cicero's De Senectute ( had a slight dramatic interest. But the major part was near to the essay than the novel.
Cicero supplied both to his readers, essay and novel.
The charm of the essay lies in the charm of the personality-frankness, gusts, acute observations, and lively acquaintances With men and women.
Montaigne was ashamed of recording things () that he did not know.
There should be a certain discreet () shamelessness in the characteristic of the essayists.
The essence of the art is to say what has pleased the essayist.
It should be without being too prudent!) considering whether it is worthy of the attention of the well-informed.
The English temperament is wholly favourable to the development of the essayist.
An Anglo-Saxon likes doing things better. than thinking.
And in his memories, he is sept to recall how a thing was done rather than why it was done.
We have a horror of giving ourselves away and we like to keep ourselves to ourselves.
The English man's home is his castle says a proverb. But the essayist must not live in a castle & if he does the windows and doors must be opened.
An essayist must enjoy privacy, but he is too less delighted that people should see him enjoying it.
Essays have taken various forms -
Sir Thomas Browne in his Religio Medici s wrote essays of an elaborate, rhetorical style.
Addicon treated his essays with the delicate humous of life and its problems.
Charles Lamb showed how the simplest and commonplace experiences were rich in emotion and humour.
Pater used his essay for the expression of exquisite artistic sensation.
There are many other ways in which the essays have been used.
The essence. of an essay is its personal sensation, the personal impression evoked by something beautiful or amusing.
There we can say that Essays are somewhat similar to poetry.
Humour is alien to poetry. But in essays. we need to have humour.
Bacon used skillfully the adaptation of Latin idioms and phrases. He had the art of saying maximum in minimum words.
There are different types of belays. The main types are - argumentative - expository - narrative and descriptive.
II
"This seems, looks as if someone has been doing it himself." This sentence holds within it the key to the whole mystery of essay writing.
An essay is a thing in which someone does himself.
The point of the essay is not the subject.
It is the charm of the personality.
Essays must concern with something jolly.
The essayist forms his own impressions.
The essay takes the shape of the mind of the essayist.
The charm of the essay depends on the charm of the mind.
This charm of the mind an essayist conceived and records.
The essay is not concerned with anything definite. It has no next if whatsoever.
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