The Best American Essays 2014 Read Online Free PDF Page A

the first place, this title or inscription is quite modest, for if one takes the word “Essay” in the spirit of “coup d’Essay,” or apprenticeship, it sounds very humble and self-deprecating, and suggests naught of either excellence or arrogance; yet if the word be taken to mean instead “proofs” or “experiments,” that is to say, a discourse modeling itself on those, the title remains well chosen.
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    What’s marvelous to observe is how this original dichotomy, which existed fully formed in Montaigne’s mind, between the looser and stricter conceptions of the essay—the flourish and the finished, the try and the trial—transposed itself onto the one that existed between France and England. If the French will largely repent of the essay’s more casual and intimate qualities (and even its name), in the wake of Montaigne, England runs into their arms. 3 Something in Montaigne’s voice, the particular texture of its introspection, opened a vein that had been aching to pop. Ben Jonson describes a literary pretender of the day, writing: “All his behaviours are printed, and his face is another volume of essays.” And notice, it’s clear from the start that the definition of
essay
the English are working with is the looser one, the one having to do with apprenticeship. That original tuning note King James had struck. Or perhaps one should say that the emphasis is on that signification, with the other one, the more serious one, now switching places and assuming the role of subfrequency. It isn’t a unified national definition or anything like that; there are many definitions, as earlier in France, but they all strike that apologetic tone. In fact, in the first English attempt to pin down this odd new creature, the essay—William Cornwallis’s “Of Essays and Books,” from
Discourses upon Seneca
, published in 1601 (the year in which Robert Johnson defines his own
Essais
as “imperfect offers”)—Cornwallis, with a comedy both intentional and un-, begins by arguing that Montaigne had actually been
misusing
the term. Whereas the English were using it correctly, you see. “I hold,” he writes, “none of these ancient short manner of writings, nor Montaigne’s, nor such of this latter time to be rightly termed
essays
, for though they be short, yet they are strong, and able to endure the sharpest trial: but mine are essays, who am but newly bound prentice.” 4    
    From this initial mushroom ring of essayists that crops up on the island around 1600, the infestation spreads. Then comes the Grub Street explosion, and the essay is an eighteenth-century pop form. There are millions of pages of gazettes and daily journals and moral weeklies to fill. The word becomes a blazon for the early Enlightenment. It’s the age of what Thackeray will christen “the periodical essayists of the eighteenth century.” England becomes a nation of essayists every bit as much as it was ever one of shopkeepers, and the essay becomes . . . whatever we say it is. In the words of Hugh Walker—whose
English Essay and Essayists
remains the most lucid single-volume work on the genre a century after its publication—the genre becomes the “common” of English literature, “for just as, in the days before enclosures, stray cattle found their way to the unfenced common, so the strays of literature have tended towards the ill-defined plot of the essay.”
    But always—this is what I’m trying to say—with that original note hanging in the air, as both counterblast and guiding horn. Not King James’s note, mind you. Montaigne’s. The singularity. The word with its fullest, richest, Tiresian ambiguity, and the example of the writer himself, his bravery and rigor, his cheek. The modern essay develops not in any one country but within a transnational vibrational field that