Quote of the Day (Virginia Woolf, on the Spell Cast by the Essay)

“Of all forms of literature…, the essay is the one which least calls for the use of long words. The principle which controls it is simply that it should give pleasure; the desire which impels us when we take it from the shelf is simply to receive pleasure. Everything in an essay must be subdued to that end. It should lay us under a spell with its first word, and we should only wake, refreshed, with its last. In the interval we may pass through the most various experiences of amusement, surprise, interest, indignation; we may soar to the heights of fantasy with Lamb or plunge to the depths of wisdom with Bacon, but we must never be roused. The essay must lap us about and draw its curtain across the world.”—English essayist-novelist Virginia Woolf (1882-1941), “The Modern Essay,” in The Common Reader (1925)

I picked up The Common Reader while browsing in a bookstore late this afternoon, and read “The Modern Essay” on a subway ride home. From first to last, I was cast under the kind of spell that Virginia Woolf was talking about in the quote above. In one sense, I was captivated by her images (“words coagulate together in frozen sprays which, like the grapes on a Christmas-tree, glitter for a single night, but are dusty and garish the day after”).
 

In another instance, I was swept along by her argument that for an essay to succeed, it required “an obstinate conviction which lifts ephemeral sounds through the misty sphere of anybody’s language to the land where there is a perpetual marriage, a perpetual union.” 

But I was also struck by two other aspects of this essay:

*Woolf’s notion that Victorians “wrote at greater length than is now usual, and they wrote for a public which had not only time to sit down to its magazine seriously, but a high, if peculiarly Victorian, standard of culture by which to judge it.” In other words, she is taking notice of the shorter attention span of the modern (i.e., post-WWI) reader. If Woolf felt this way then, what in Heaven’s name would she think of the age of Twitter?

*Woolf thrills at the vigor of personality that shines through the essay. The great accomplishment of Max Beerbohm, she notes, was giving ‘himself.” What she is talking about is the quality that writing teachers nowadays call “voice.” From their essays, one would not have called Matthew Arnold “Matt” or Walter Pater “Walt,” but with Beerbohm, “the spirit of personality permeates every word that he writes.”

 

For anyone like me who has longed pondered how to make our work—not just the essay but even the more humble blog post—this piece is striking and inspirational.