William Temple and the Literary History of the English Essay
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The aim of the present essay is to rethink the early history of the English essay as well as to restore William Temple to his rightful place in that history. This essay argues that Temple’s eclipse is partly due to the overemphasis on the ‘origins’ of the English essay in the late sixteenth to early seventeenth century. While the early seventeenth century continues to receive critical attention due to its proximity to its origins and the eighteenth century is celebrated as “the great age of the English essay,” the latter half of the seventeenth century has largely gone missing in literary history. Another reason for the relative neglect of Temple’s essays is their eclectic and heterodox character. He wrote in a variety of different prose modes and used the word ‘essay’ rather indifferently to refer to his writings on government, politics, history, health, gardening, and poetry. His essays cannot be defined strictly in terms of subject matter or form; they vary in length as well as tone; and they are exceptionally tolerant of cultural differences. For this very reason, however, the essays of Temple provide an important link between the early seventeenth century and the eighteenth century. In particular, Temple’s “free and easy,” “loose” style set an important standard for the informal, chatty, and conversational essay that would be popularized in the eighteenth century. Unfortunately, Temple’s prime role in the quarrel between the ancients and the moderns meant that after him the essay would always be plagued with doubt about the author’s learning, and associated increasingly with individual taste defined in tension with knowledge and expertise. Temple’s essays can be seen as the culmination of the self-consciously English culture of the essay that associated the genre with the cultivated gentleman’s manners and mores. At the same time, his essays clearly mark the moment when this gentlemanly ethos of the essay began to come under attack for its amateurism and defective knowledge. Essayists after him would come under pressure to distinguish more clearly between the treatise-like essay (or essay of ideas) and the personal essay, between the professional, scholarly essay and the amateur essay. Temple straddled this divide, for he was neither a scholar nor a professional literary writer. This is why he is apt to go missing in literary histories that privilege either lineage. Nonetheless, the best of Temple’s essays should be recognized for their felicitous expression of a recognizably modern, polite English sensibility that saw itself as irrevocably severed from the classical past, that struggled to recognize itself as a particular version of vernacularized northern Gothic culture, and that identified ironically with a ‘humorous’ Englishness in a modern global world.
Abstract
The aim of the present essay is to rethink the early history of the English essay as well as to restore William Temple to his rightful place in that history. This essay argues that Temple’s eclipse is partly due to the overemphasis on the ‘origins’ of the English essay in the late sixteenth to early seventeenth century. While the early seventeenth century continues to receive critical attention due to its proximity to its origins and the eighteenth century is celebrated as “the great age of the English essay,” the latter half of the seventeenth century has largely gone missing in literary history. Another reason for the relative neglect of Temple’s essays is their eclectic and heterodox character. He wrote in a variety of different prose modes and used the word ‘essay’ rather indifferently to refer to his writings on government, politics, history, health, gardening, and poetry. His essays cannot be defined strictly in terms of subject matter or form; they vary in length as well as tone; and they are exceptionally tolerant of cultural differences. For this very reason, however, the essays of Temple provide an important link between the early seventeenth century and the eighteenth century. In particular, Temple’s “free and easy,” “loose” style set an important standard for the informal, chatty, and conversational essay that would be popularized in the eighteenth century. Unfortunately, Temple’s prime role in the quarrel between the ancients and the moderns meant that after him the essay would always be plagued with doubt about the author’s learning, and associated increasingly with individual taste defined in tension with knowledge and expertise. Temple’s essays can be seen as the culmination of the self-consciously English culture of the essay that associated the genre with the cultivated gentleman’s manners and mores. At the same time, his essays clearly mark the moment when this gentlemanly ethos of the essay began to come under attack for its amateurism and defective knowledge. Essayists after him would come under pressure to distinguish more clearly between the treatise-like essay (or essay of ideas) and the personal essay, between the professional, scholarly essay and the amateur essay. Temple straddled this divide, for he was neither a scholar nor a professional literary writer. This is why he is apt to go missing in literary histories that privilege either lineage. Nonetheless, the best of Temple’s essays should be recognized for their felicitous expression of a recognizably modern, polite English sensibility that saw itself as irrevocably severed from the classical past, that struggled to recognize itself as a particular version of vernacularized northern Gothic culture, and that identified ironically with a ‘humorous’ Englishness in a modern global world.