On Sunday, I claimed to have read Joseph Addison’s essays for pleasure. But, like the cub reporter I am at heart, I failed to give a single example.
I have a collection of Addison’s essays on Sir Roger de Coverley, a country gentleman — or rather a character in Addison’s imagination. But my favorite is “On the Essay Form.”
Addison says that book writers get a pass. Readers expect dull moments — rest stops in the ultramarathon. But if you’re a periodical writer you’ve got to get to the point, and if you don’t the readers will let you hear about it or abandon you in disgust.
Addison wonders what the world would be like if all writers wrote like that: short and to the point.
A million dull volumes would perish, but we’d be able to find the best ideas. The works of an age would take up just a couple of shelves.
If the ancient philosophers had known the art of the press, they’d have gotten the wisdom of the world out of private libraries and into the hands of the public.
Our common Prints would be of great Use were they thus calculated to diffuse good Sense through the Bulk of a People, to clear up their Understandings, animate their Minds with Virtue, dissipate the Sorrows of a heavy Heart, or unbend the Mind from its more severe Employments with innocent Amusements.
He laments that the press of his day seems to have been used only by news-writers and political zealots.
Decades ago, when I was training to be a biologist in college, it dawned on me that lowly news-writers could do a real service by paying attention to what they wrote about and the way they wrote about it. But that’s a long story, not at all brief and to the point.
• Joseph Addison, “On the Essay Form,” was published in 1711. The excellent site Quotidiana has it here:
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