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The Writing of Essays by H.G. Wells
The art of the essayist is so
simple, so entirely free from canons of criticism, and withal so delightful,
that one must needs wonder why all men are not essayists. Perhaps people do not
know how easy it is. Or perhaps beginners are misled. Rightly taught it may be
learnt in a brief ten minutes or so, what art there is in it. And all the rest
is as easy as wandering among woodlands on a bright morning in the spring.
Then sit you down if you would join
us, taking paper, pens, and ink; and mark this, your pen is a matter of vital
moment. For every pen writes its own sort of essay, and pencils also after
their kind. The ink perhaps may have its influence too, and the paper; but
paramount is the pen. This, indeed, is the fundamental secret of essay-writing.
Wed any man to his proper pen, and the delights of composition and the birth of
an essay are assured. Only many of us wander through the earth and never meet
with her--futile and lonely men.
And, of all pens, your quill for
essays that are literature. There is a subtle informality, a delightful
easiness, perhaps even a faint immorality essentially literary, about the
quill. The quill is rich in suggestion and quotation. There are quills that
would quote you Montaigne and Horace in the hands of a trades-union delegate.
And those quirky, idle noises this pen makes are delightful, and would break
your easy fluency with wit. All the classical essayists wrote with a quill, and
Addison used the most expensive kind the Government purchased. And the
beginning of the inferior essay was the dawn of the cheap steel pen.
The quill nibs they sell to fit
into ordinary pen-holders are no true quills at all, lacking dignity, and may
even lead you into the New Humour if you trust overmuch to their use. After a
proper quill commend me to a stumpy BB pencil; you get less polish and broader
effects, but you are still doing good literature. Sometimes the work is
close--Mr. George Meredith, for instance, is suspected of a soft pencil--and
always it is blunter than quill work and more terse. With a hard pencil no man
can write anything but a graceless style--a kind of east wind air it gives--and
smile you cannot. So that it is often used for serious articles in the
half-crown reviews.
There follows the host of steel
pens. That bald, clear, scientific style, all set about with words like
"evolution" and "environment," which aims at expressing its
meaning with precision and an exemplary economy of words, is done with fine
steel nibs--twelve a penny at any stationer's. The J pen to the lady novelist,
and the stylograph to the devil--your essayist must not touch the things. So
much for the pen. If you cannot write essays easily, that is where the hitch
comes in. Get a box of a different kind of pen and begin again, and so on again
and again until despair or joy arrests you.
As for a typewriter, you could no
more get an essay out of a typewriter than you could play a sonata upon its
keys. No essay was ever written with a typewriter yet, nor ever will be.
Besides its impossibility, the suggestion implies a brutal disregard of the
division of labour by which we live and move and have our being. If the
essayist typewrite, the unemployed typewriter, who is commonly a person of
superior education and capacity, might take to essays, and where is your living
then? One might as reasonably start at once with the Linotype and print one's
wit and humour straight away. And taking the invasion of other trades one step
further one might, after an attempt to sell one's own newspaper, even get to
the pitch of having to read it oneself. No; even essayists must be reasonable.
If its mechanical clitter-clatter did not render composition impossible, the
typewriter would still be beneath the honour of a literary man.
Then for the paper. The luxurious,
expensive, small-sized cream-laid note is best, since it makes your essay
choice and compact; and, failing that, ripped envelopes and the backs of bills.
Some men love ruled paper, because they can write athwart the lines, and some
take the fly-leaves of their friends' books. But whosoever writes on cheap
sermon paper full of hairs should write far away from the woman he loves, lest
he offend her ears. It is good, however, for a terse, forcible style.
The ink should be glossy black as
it leaves your pen, for polished English. Violet inks lead to sham sentiment,
and blue-black to vulgarity. Red ink essays are often good, but usually unfit
for publication.
This is as much almost as anyone
need know to begin essay writing. Given your proper pen and ink, or pencil and
paper, you simply sit down and write the thing. The value of an essay is not
its matter, but its mood. You must be comfortable, of course; an easy-chair
with arm-rests, slippers, and a book to write upon are usually employed, and
you must be fed recently, and your body clothed with ease rather than grandeur.
For the rest, do not trouble to stick to your subject, or any subject; and take
no thought for the editor or the reader, for your essay should be as
spontaneous as the lilies of the field.
So long as you do not begin with a
definition you may begin anyhow. An abrupt beginning is much admired, after the
fashion of the clown's entry through the chemist's window. Then whack at your
reader at once, hit him over the head with the sausages, brisk him up with the
poker, bundle him into the wheelbarrow, and so carry him away with you before
he knows where you are. You can do what you like with a reader then, if you
only keep him nicely on the move. So long as you are happy your reader will be
so too. But one law must be observed: an essay, like a dog that wishes to
please, must have a lively tail, short but as waggish as possible. Like a
rocket, an essay goes only with fizzle and sparks at the end of it. And, know,
that to stop writing is the secret of writing an essay; the essay that the
public loves dies young.
"The Writing of Essays" originally appeared in Certain
Personal Matters by H.G. Wells (T. Fisher Unwin, 1901)
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