The Art of an Essayist

An essay is something the writer writes himself. According to Benson, since the very birth of the essay as a genre in the hands of Montaigne, the essay has been a comfortable mixture of the personal and the subjective, and in fact has been the most personal of all genres. The personal touch breathes life and charm into the essay through the personality of the essayist. The charm is evident because the essay is something the writer writes himself where he lays bare his heart in a most confidential manner. An essay can be on a variety of subjects but it should above all exhibit an interest in life. It should reflect the pleasing personality of the author and also change the outlook of the reader. Thus Benson writes, Montaigne, the father of the essay in literature, while writing his essays is concerned with the 'man Montaigne'. Thus the essay is a reverie for the essayist - it is a loose sequence of thoughts, irregular in nature which dwells on the moment and allows the writer to dwell within and correspond to himself. Montaigne employed such a technique wonderfully while he wrote his essays, presenting a certain mood of the mind, and infusing charm by being intimate and personal.

An essay is something the essayist does by himself. For the essay we may go back to Cicero or Plato. Cicero dealt with abstract topics with a romantic background. Plato discussed speculative and ethical problems of life and tried to find a philosophical interest. The English temperament lacks the charm of Montaigne. They are too prejudiced, secretive, closely guarded about their privacy. But Lord Brougham proved that one can maintain privacy at the same time display oneself.

Sir Thomas Browne's Religio Medici or Urn Burial contained essays of elaborate rhetorical style. Addison in The Spectator dealt with delicate humour. Charles Lamb dealt with the romantic and homely. De Quincy wrote impassioned autobiography while Pater used the essay for exquisite artistic sensation. In all these writings the common strain is the personal element, the essay reflects the personality of the author.

An essayist is not a poet. An essayist deals to some extent with humour. But humour is alien to poetry which is more of a sacred and solemn mood. The poet is emotional, reverential, excitable, in search of the sublime and the uplifted. He wants to transcend the mundane petty daily frets, the discordant, undignified elements of life. The similarity of the essayist with the poet is that an essayist can also make an effort to kindle emotion. But an essayist uses the commonest materials of life and transforms simple experiences with a fairy tale delicacy and romantic glow. Behind all forms of art whether, whether poetry or prose lies the principle of wonder, of arrested attention. It need not only be the sense of beauty, but also the sense of fitness, strangeness, completeness, effective effort. The amazement a savage feels on seeing a civilized city is not the sense of beauty but the sense of force, mysterious resources, incredible products, unintelligible things. He also sees the grotesque, absurd, amusing and jocose. The essayist deals with these basic emotions. He filters out the salient matters from these instinctive emotions and records them in impressive language.

So an essayist is a spectator of life. As catalogued in Browning's poem "how It Strikes A Contemporary" the essayist's material is watching the cobbler at trade, the man who slices lemon, the coffee-roaster's brazier, the books on stalls, the bold-print posters on the wall, a man beating his horse or cursing a woman and so on. The essayist selects his setting, maybe a street, countryside or picture gallery. But once he selects he has to get into the heart of it.

The essayist must have largeness of mind. He cannot simply indulge in his activity whether of a politician or a thief with the sole objective of making profit. He cannot be prejudiced in his favours, i.e. he should not hate his opponents and favour his friends. If he condemns, despises, disapproves he loses sympathy. He must have an all encompassing mind to enjoy all he thinks worth recording, and not be narrow minded. Close jacketed persons like a banker, social reformer, forensic pleader, fanatic, crank or puritan cannot be an essayist. The essayist has to be broadminded but not moral. He must be tolerant, he must discern quality, he must be concerned with the general picture of life in connection with setting and people, not aims and objectives.

The charm of the essayist lies in translating a sense of good humour, graciousness, reasonable nature and in the effort to establish a pleasant friendship with the reader. One does not read the essay for information or definition, but to find an acceptable solution to a mass of entangled problems which arise in our daily lives and in our relationships with people. The essayist would take up some problem of daily life and delve into it to find out reasons for our fitful actions, reasons for our attraction or repulsion towards people and try to suggest a theory for it. Reading an essay a reader should be compelled to confess that he had thought in the same vein but had never discerned the connection. The essayist must realize that most people's convictions are not a result of reason but a mass of jumbled up associations, traditions, half understood phrases, loyalties, whims etc.

The essayist must consider human weakness, not human strength. But while accepting human weakness he must try to infuse flashes of idealism in them. He should keep in mind that human mind in spite of weakness is capable of idealism, passionate visions, irresponsible humour which may shoot from dull cloudy minds. The task of the essayist is to make the reader realize his self worth, that every human mind is capable of getting hold of something big and remote which however may not always be clear in our minds. Human nature is indecisive, it vacillates. The confessed aim of the essayist is to make the reader see that every person has a part to play in life, they have an interest to take in life, that life is a game full of outlets and pulsing channels and life is not only meant for millionaires or politicians.

The essayist therefore ultimately teaches that life is not just about success but in fullness. Success may blur our vision of life and make a person full of self importance. What matters is how much a person can give than take.

The similarity between an essayist and a poet is that both perceive the greatness of life. But the essayist works with humbler material. The essayist is not a romancer because he does not deal with fancy but homely material. The essayist has to detect the sublimity of life. Life is not always exciting, not always expectant of something about to happen. There are monotonous gaps in between. An essayist's task is to bring out something rich and strange out of those monotonous gaps.

Thus an Essay as a genre cannot be strictly classified too. It is like an organ prelude that can be moderated, modulated and coloured. It is to some extent criticism of life too. It is a learning process that teaches not to condemn the negative but perceive the fullness of life and encompass all experience. An essayist is an interpreter of life. He is within a short compass a combination of the historian, philosopher, poet, novelist. He observes and analyses life, colours it with his fancy, enjoys the charm and quality of simple things and endeavours to make others lead a better life.

English : Chandalika

Plot

• Ananda, the famous disciple of the Buddha, was one day returning from a visit when he felt thirsty and, approaching a well on the way, asked for water from a chandalika, a girl belonging to the lowest untouchable caste.
• The girl gave him water and fell in love with the beautiful monk.
• Unable to restrain herself, she made her mother, who knew the art of magic, work her spell on him.
• The spell proved stronger than Ananda’s will and the spell-bound monk presented himself at their house at night; but, as he saw the girl spread the couch for him, he was overcome with shame and remorse and prayed inwardly to his master to save him.
• The Buddha heard the prayer and broke the magic spell and Ananda went away, as pure as he came.

Abstract: 

The Tagore family was a leading follower of Brahma Samaj, a new religious sector in the 19th century. Rabindranath Tagore develop an early love for literature, and had begun reading biographies, poems, history, Sanskrit and several others by the age of 12. Tagore is essentially a river-poet so far as his love for nature is concerned. The theme of the play Chandalika is the realization by a chandal girl that she is a human being like others, and that it is a mistaken on her part to think herself beneath the notice of human beings who belong to upper castes. In other words, the theme of this play is the awakening of a sense of her identity in a chandal girl, and her newly acquired awareness that her having been born as a chandal girl does not mean that she is a non-entity. The chandal girl in this play is Prakriti who discovers that she is as much a human being as anybody else and that she too has the right to give water anybody high or low, who asks for it. This realization by her not only makes her feel that she is somebody with an identity to her own but also leads her to fall in love with a Buddhist monk who is responsible for having brought this new awakening  in her . However, Prakriti’s love for the Buddhist monk is not in itself the theme of the play. Her love for that man derives from her new knowledge, imparted to her by him, that she is a human being .But her falling in love with him shows also her presumptuousness. A woman commits no fault if she falls in love with a man, whoever he may be; but Prakriti’s falling in love with a Buddhist monk is certainly a fault, and a serious fault too, because Buddhist monks are pledged to celibacy. The play evokes Hindu, Buddhist, and Christian notions of creative, renunciatory, and sacrificial Love.

Through this play, Tagore has given massage of equality without discrimination of caste and creed. He also pointed that everyone has have one identity and willingness to live according to his/her own perspective. Emotions like caring, sharing and loving are also too natural. In Chandalika, Tagore interfaces Love's manifold forms creating a conflict verging on violence. The characters' names - Prakriti, Mother and Ananda - are unmistakable symbols unraveling the action of the play.

Characters of the play: Prakriti, Buddhist monk- Anada ( bhikshu), Prakriti’s mother.

English: A Bachelor's Complaint of the Behavior of Married People

As we know that Charles Lamb was a bachelor and worked at The South Sea House and India House, he had experiences some bitter and humorous experiences from there. These experiences sometimes seem humorous and sometimes seem pathetic. In the essay “A Bachelors Complaint”, he tells about some of the bitter experiences and expresses his agony for the behavior of the married people whom he thinks pretend lovers. Here he says, " What oftenest offends of at the houses of married persons where I visit, is an error of quite a description:- it is that they are too loving". He thinks that the married people generally show that they “too loving" and they show these things to the unmarried people "so shamelessly". This type of behavior of the married people is painful to him

A Bachelor's Complaint of the Behavior of Married People
Charles Lamb's essay "A Bachelor's Complaint of the Behavior of Married People" is just what the title suggests: it is indeed "a bachelor's complaint of the behavior of Married People." Lamb emphasizes his single status in the start of the essay “As a single man"and in doing so, separates himself from the "Married People." He talks about Married People as if they are despicable and offensive and gives both hypothetical and personal examples to back up his points. He believes that Married People "prefer one another to all the world" and openly flaunt it, thus offending singles such as Lamb by implying that they "are not the object of this preference." Furthermore, Lamb believes that overall, singles are looked down onMarried People are undoubtedly more favored and knowledgeable. The main complaint that Lamb is making throughout the whole essay is the Married People's attitudes and how they demonstrate their status. He goes as far as to "the airs which these creatures give themselves when they come to have children “and, by using the negative aspects of children, he furthers his disapproval of Married People and their actions.
Lamb's purpose in writing "A Bachelor's Complaint of the Behavior of Married People" is to bring to attention the attitudes of Married People. He wishes for his audience to realize how Married People subconsciously flaunt themselves in their love, offending those who are single. Ultimately, he hopes that Married People will bring themselves to correct their mistakes and be more considerate towards others. He structures his argument by stating his main reason for decrying Married People is because he believes them to be overly involved with each other and their love that they disregard and "perk it up in the faces of [singles] so shamelessly." From this claim, Lamb offers personal anecdotes as well as hypothetical situations that illustrate and support his points. He concludes his essay stating that although he despises their attitudes, he is still willing to "forgive their jealousy and dispense with toying with their brats"but thinks it "unreasonable to be called upon to love them." Through Lamb's willingness to forgive these people whom he disapproves of, he is seen to be credible with good valuesand his readers are more inclined to believe his words and work to correct the attitudes of Married People.
The structure of Lamb's argument logically appeals to his readers, for it flows and clarifies his points through examples. However, Lamb fails to address any possible counterarguments. His argument addresses only the negative aspects of Married People, but surely there are positive sides as well. By failing to address and disprove these possibilities, Lamb leaves room for doubt. Despite this, his argument stands strong the examples he gives are cogent and, through his personal anecdotes, he is able to establish a connection with the audience. He also appeals emotionally especially to the singles, for he is a bachelor himself. The injustice that he sometimes feels can appeal to others who have felt the same way. Overall, Lamb appeals effectively to his readers through his use of pathos, ethos, and logos. Although there are some flaws in his arguments, they are overlooked and undermined by his credibility and emotional appeal.
Lamb's style of writing in this essay is fairly colloquial. He is very assertive in his argument, and states his points with conviction and support. These assertions are highlighted by his occasional use of italics throughout the essay. At the beginning of the essay, Lamb firmly establishes a line between him and Married Peoples imply by capitalizing "Married People." In doing so, he sets them apart in their own group of Married People, symbolizing that this is truly how it is in reality too: Married People set themselves apart in their own groups through their attitudes. They really do seem to be off in their own little world of love, and this is what Lamb dislikes. Towards the end of the essay, Lamb brings up the subject of children and how they also contribute to the Married People's attitudes. He brings out all the negative aspects of children and emphasizes them by listing them continuously with dashes as separation. He also bring in a simile from "the excellent office in [the] Prayer-book” “Like as arrows in the hand of the giant, even so are the young children “and uses it in his favor. He takes this idea of arrows and extends it into a metaphor to support his argument. Like "double-headed" arrows with "two forks, to be sure to hit with one or the other", how one acts with children will always be wrong; "with one or other of these forks the arrow is sure to hit you." Whether you act stoic to a child's attention or shower them with affection, "some pretext or other is sure to be found for sending them out of the room." Through this comparison of double-headed arrows and children, Lamb effectively conveys his opinions of Married People and their attitudes that are shown in everything, including the way they handle their children.
Personally, I do not agree with Lamb for the most part. Although I can see why he views married people in this way, I don't think that they should be decried in this manner. Sure, it may seem like those who are married are flaunting their love to others, but I don't think that they do it to offend others. Lamb makes it sound like married people intentionally target singles and taunt them for not having a significant other like themselves. But think of it in the married people's perspective how can they possibly suppress the love that they are feeling? Love is a very strong feeling, and it is impossible to suppress. I'm sure that if Lamb got married and was finally allowed to show his love unconditionally, he would act like the "Married People" he discussed in his essay. He merely looks at the negative aspects of marriage from the perspective of an outsider but what about the positives aspects from the perspective of a married person? Furthermore, his discussion of the children, to me, was not very convincing. His views of children would most likely change after having some children of his own. To conclude, I don't agree with Lamb's views and arguments because he is a biased source. I think that he should get married and have children first, before making these kinds of assertions.
Overall, "A Bachelor's Complaint of the Behavior of Married People" is effectively portrayed through Lamb's arguments and claims. His complaints are easy to understand, thanks to the examples that he gives. He makes many good points about Married People, and most likely is able to persuade many readers of his views. Although I personally am more skeptical of his views, it is because I am also biased. I think of love as one of the most important and potent feelings, but not everybody thinks of love as strongly as I do. Despite my views, I still think that Lamb's points are overall strong and assertive. I feel that the connection he makes with his readers is also very effective, and I believe his argument will continue to affect people of today, as marriage is a large part of society