Modern Essays — Context and Discussion

The Anthologist's Dilemma

Morley's preface is a rare behind-the-scenes look at editorial decision-making. He admits to having taken down Chesterton's The Victorian Age in Literature at least twenty times, reconsidering whether certain passages were essential. He also considered excerpts from The Education of Henry Adams and Wells's Outline of History, but concluded that would not be quite fair. His criteria are revealing: he prizes fiction that expresses feeling and character rather than action, fiction ripened by the essayist's mood. He mentions George Gissing's The House of Cobwebs as a volume he reads again and again with unfailing delight, only to fall asleep over and forget. The preface thus becomes a miniature essay on taste, compromise, and the pleasures of lingering over prose.

A Voice Too High: Beerbohm's Johnson

Max Beerbohm's contribution reconstructs a famous dinner-table scene from Boswell's Life of Johnson. A young, shy clergyman asks Johnson: "Were not Dodd's sermons addressed to the passions?" Johnson roars back: "They were nothing, Sir, be they addressed to what they may." Beerbohm speculates on the cause: the clergyman's high, thin voice, which he imagines soaring into a scream. He notes Johnson's deafness and the likelihood that the question was piped in an unnatural register. The essay is a comic exercise in historical detection, blending sympathy for the unnamed curate with a vivid sense of Johnson's physical presence. Beerbohm pictures the clergyman sitting on the edge of a chair, with colorless eyes and mouse-colored hair, his knuckles standing out sharply. The essay's humor arises from its meticulous, almost forensic attention to vocal tone and social dynamics.

The Essay as a Flexible Form

Morley's preface and Beerbohm's piece together illustrate the range of the early twentieth-century essay. Morley defends the essay as a mood, not a fixed form, and includes fiction that is "beautifully ripened by the lingering mild sunshine of the essayist's mood." Beerbohm's essay, though ostensibly about Johnson, is really a character study of an obscure figure—the clergyman whose name even Boswell did not retain. It demonstrates how the essay can blend biography, speculation, and comedy. The collection as a whole, with contributors ranging from Joseph Conrad to Stephen Leacock, from Hilaire Belloc to A. A. Milne, suggests that the essay could accommodate travel writing, literary criticism, personal reflection, and historical reconstruction. Morley's own editorial voice, self-deprecating and precise, serves as a guide to this varied terrain.

Readers approaching this collection should attend to the interplay between the preface and the essays that follow. Morley's choices reflect his belief that the essay is a mood, and many selections blur the line between fiction and nonfiction. Beerbohm's piece, for instance, is as much a comic invention as a historical reconstruction. The anthology rewards those who read for voice, detail, and the subtle tensions between the personal and the public.

That Morley collection stayed with me—how an essay is really a mood you carry home. It reminded me of another quiet piece, the way Lincoln’s centennial address feels less like a speech and more like a held breath. Sometimes old words linger precisely because they weren’t trying to persuade anyone. That Address of President Roosevelt on the occasion of the celebration of the hundredth anniversary of the birth of Abraham Lincoln, Hodgenville, Ky., February 12, 1909 — Edition Insights has that same unhurried sincerity, like a hand resting on your shoulder.