The Best American Essays 2014 (3 page)

This book was first published in 1584, a full thirteen years before the appearance of Francis Bacon's famous 1597
Essayes
, traditionally held to mark the introduction of the essay as a formal concept into English writing. Granted, Bacon doesn't quite hold up as the first English essayist even when we do omit James: some person—we're not positive who, but almost certainly an Anglican divine named Joseph Hall—had published a collection of essays a year before Bacon, titled
Remedies Against Discontentment
,
¹
and it's likely that one or two of the “later” writers—William Cornwallis or Robert Johnson or Richard Greenham—had already begun writing their pieces when Bacon's book came out. Even so, Bacon is the greatest in that little cluster of late-sixteenth-century English essayists and would seem to possess the clearest claim to the word in English. Yet King James's book had preceded them all by more than a decade. Indeed, when James published his
Essayes of a Prentise
, Montaigne was still publishing his own
Essais
(the Frenchman was in between volumes I and II).

The most available conclusion for leaping to is that James is using the word in a general sense. An “essay,” we're frequentl
y told, means an attempt, a
stab.
Perhaps King James had been saying, self-deprecatingly, “I'm a mere
prentise
[an apprentice] here, and these are my
essays
, my beginner's efforts.” It makes sense.

A problem is,
essay
wasn't supposed to be used
that
way either in the 1580s. If we were to impute that meaning to James's use of the word, it would mark the first occurrence of that particular sense in English (or Middle Scots), which is not proof that we shouldn't do it. That may be precisely what's going on. But whatever James means by
essay
, he means something new by it, new in English. That we know.

Could James have meant something closer to what Montaigne did? On the face of it, the idea seems far-fetched. Montaigne's book had been published just a few years before James finished his. An English translation would not appear for another twenty years. Doubtless there existed English men and women who'd already heard about the book, perhaps even seen it, but what are the odds that one of them was the eighteen-year-old king of Scotland?

Rather good, believe it or not. James's tutor in the 1570s, the years during which Montaigne was composing his first volume of pieces, happens to have been a man named George Buchanan, a Scottish classicist and Renaissance giant who'd spent part of his life in France, where his poetry was much admired (“Easily the greatest poet of our age,” said his French publishers, an opinion echoed by Montaigne, among others). Buchanan was placed in charge of young James's education and made on his pupil a lifelong impression of both respect and fear, deep enough that decades later, when James saw a man approaching him at court who looked like Buchanan, he started to tremble (Buchanan had drunkenly beaten the hell out of the boy James on at least one occasion).

Why does this matter? Because James was not the only pupil of Buchanan's who never forgot him. There had been another, in France, in the 1530s and early '40s. For several years George Buchanan had taught at the Collège de Guyenne, in Bordeaux, and one of his students there, a young boarder who also came to him outside of class for private instruction, was a local boy named Michel Eyquem. The boy, whose precocity in Latin astonished his professors, was also a talented actor and performed in a few of Buchanan's plays. Buchanan even considered him something of a favorite student and, running into Montaigne at the French court many years later, honored him by saying that their time together had inspired certain of Buchanan's subsequent theories of humanistic pedagogy. Montaigne returned the compliment by praising his former teacher more than once in the
Essais.
They were well aware of each other, these two men, and remained so. And precisely as the younger was starting to publish in France, the elder became the tutor in Scotland to King James. Who, four years after Montaigne's
Essais
were published, published his own
Essayes.

What was it, then? Could this appearance of two books titled
Essays
—the first two ever titled that way in any language, and within a mere few years of each other, and written by two men who shared a childhood teacher—really be a coincidence? Or was it the case, as seems vastly more plausible, that the two were connected somehow—that King James knew of Montaigne, or at least knew of his book (but probably both), and was appropriating the word from him? And if that's true, why is James's book rarely, if ever, cited in histories of the essay form, from England or France?

Partly it's that the work consists mostly of poems, so it wouldn't have jumped into anyone's mind to link it with Montaigne, apart from the title. On the other hand, the book does include, as mentioned, a piece that today (or in 1600) would be described as an essay, the “Reulis and Cautelis” treatise. And that piece—unsurprisingly, given the bare adequacy of the king's poetry—became by far the best-known part of his book. In fact, at some point later in the sixteenth century, the work appears to have been republished (or rebound) not as the
Essayes
of a Prentise
but instead as
Reulis and Cautelis
, such that its true title could have remained unknown even to one who spotted the work in bibliographies or catalogues.

I wish to argue—or should say, this being an essay, float the suggestion—that something other than either coincidence or appropriation is going on in James's use of the word as a title. Namely, misinterpretation. Or maybe it's more correct to say simply interpretation. James had an acknowledged gift for languages, after all, and the greatest teachers in the world. No one is accusing him of not knowing what
essai
meant in French. The problem is, it meant lots of things—in French, and already in English by then too—but the king in his title seems to have battened on and emphasized one sense above all others, winding up with a usage of the word that differed slightly from what Montaigne had intended. The choice can be seen to have exercised an invisible but crucial effect on the evolving English conception of the essay.

French scholars have been debating what precisely Montaigne meant by
essai
for going on half a millennium, and I don't pretend to be qualified to intervene in that discussion. I've read a lot about it, but as an interested and biased practitioner, not a linguist. Rest assured that when the French see us walk up to the front of our classrooms and intone the familiar explanation, “An essay . . . from the French
essai
. . . meaning ‘attempt'” (as I have watched professors do, as I have done in turn before students), ruthless Gallic laughter is occurring on some level.

You can read about the Latin roots of the word,
exagere
,
exagium
, words that come from the context of Roman coinage, which have to do with measuring and weighing. A sense of “drive out” or “swarm” supposedly knocks around in there somewhere (a swarm of thoughts, like bees, fast and done?). There was the phrase “coup d'essay,” meaning, according to a contemporary bilingual dictionary, the “maister-peece of a young workeman.” And yes, there was also, simultaneously, King James's sense, of “a beginning, entrance, onset, attempt . . . a flourish, or preamble, whereby a tast[e] of a thing is given.” That was undoubtedly present, in both Montaigne's France and his title—but it was not the primary shading, not what Montaigne had foremost in mind (in his ear) when he took that word,
essais
, as a description of his work.

We know what the primary meaning was not only because it comes first in period dictionaries (though it does), nor because it pops up most frequently in period usages (though it does), but also because it's the sense Montaigne himself, when using the word outside of his title—that is, elsewhere in his books—tends to employ, not in every single case but in the vast majority of them. It's the sense of “a proofe, tryall, experiment.” To test something—for purity, or value (going back to coinage; the
essayeur
was “an Officer in the Mint, who touches everie kind of new coyne before it be delivered out”). There was the
essay de bled
, the “trial of grain,” in which the wheat was carefully weighed, a custom Montaigne may have had in mind when he wrote: “Je remets à la mort l'essay du fruict de mes estudes” (“I put off until my death the essay of the fruits of my studies”). The Rabelais scholar E. V. Telle, in a 1968 essay titled with delightful transparency “A Propos du Mot ‘Essai' Chez Montaigne,” pointed out that the usage most ready to mind for many of Montaigne's readers would have come from a university context, in which before a candidate's examination for some degree, placards would be posted reading
ESSAI DE JEAN MARIN
or whoever it was. The students were tested, probed,
essayed
, to find out if they really knew their shit. Montaigne was toying with that meaning too—he would essay himself and his own “jugement” (as he repeatedly writes), become his own essayer. Wasn't this his great guiding question,
Que sçay-je?
(“What do I know?”) Which he seems to have meant both literally and in our idiomatic sense (
You really think I'm gonna die?
“Seems like it, but what do I know?”).

The task is not to say that Montaigne meant
this
and not
that
by
Essais
, but to understand that the above-sketched polysemia of the word was precisely what he was up to with it, and indeed the reason he chose it, for if a book would be a true mirror, it must always reflect back in the direction from which it's approached. He will leave not one but many doors open to his readers. You may enter him through his likable talkativeness, his confessional, conspiratorial intimacy (he remains one of the few writers in history to have possessed the balls to admit he had a small penis), through his learning, through the possibly un-reattained depth of his psychological penetration, through the consolation he offers in times of sorrow—come whichever way you want, the door is there in the writing, and it's there in the title.

Nevertheless, at the center of it all, when you've peeled back every visible layer, there dwells this binary, this yin/yang, this Heisenbergian flickering between two primary meanings, between a stricter definition of the essay (the proof, the trial, the examination) and a looser one (the sally, the amateur work performed with panache, the whatever-it-is). The duality was noticed and articulated by one of Montaigne's earliest and most important readers, François Grudé, or, as he was better known, the sieur de La Croix du Maine. In his influential
Bibliothéques
, a kind of literary-biographical digest, he included Montaigne and praised him. This was in 1584, when the latter was still alive and writing (also the year in which King James's book came out). Grudé had read only Montaigne's first volume, but on that evidence alone put him into a company with Plutarch. Grudé gets credit for being one of the first people to realize that Montaigne was Montaigne. In 1584, among the lettered, the majority report on the writer was: lightweight, garrulous, and—interestingly for us—a woman's writer.
²
But Grudé got it, got that there was something very serious happening in the
Essais
, that here was a man inspecting his mind
as a means of inspecting the human mind.
Helpfully for us, Grudé gets into the meaning of the word, of the title, just a few years after Montaigne had introduced it (the first thing they noticed about it was the ambiguity!). He writes:

 

In the first place, this title or inscription is quite modest, for if one takes the word “Essay” in the spirit of “coup d'Essay,” or apprenticeship, it sounds very humble and self-deprecating, and suggests naught of either excellence or arrogance; yet if the word be taken to mean instead “proofs” or “experiments,” that is to say, a discourse modeling itself on those, the title remains well chosen.

 

What's marvelous to observe is how this original dichotomy, which existed fully formed in Montaigne's mind, between the looser and stricter conceptions of the essay—the flourish and the finished, the try and the trial—transposed itself onto the one that existed between France and England. If the French will largely repent of the essay's more casual and intimate qualities (and even its name), in the wake of Montaigne, England runs into their arms.
³
Something in Montaigne's voice, the particular texture of its introspection, opened a vein that had been aching to pop. Ben Jonson describes a literary pretender of the day, writing: “All his behaviours are printed, and his face is another volume of essays.” And notice, it's clear from the start that the definition of
essay
the English are working with is the looser one, the one having to do with apprenticeship. That original tuning note King James had struck. Or perhaps one should say that the emphasis is on that signification, with the other one, the more serious one, now switching places and assuming the role of subfrequency. It isn't a unified national definition or anything like that; there are many definitions, as earlier in France, but they all strike that apologetic tone. In fact, in the first English attempt to pin down this odd new creature, the essay—William Cornwallis's “Of Essays and Books,” from
Discourses upon Seneca
, published in 1601 (the year in which Robert Johnson defines his own
Essais
as “imperfect offers”)—Cornwallis, with a comedy both intentional and un-, begins by arguing that Montaigne had actually been
misusing
the term. Whereas the English were using it correctly, you see. “I hold,” he writes, “none of these ancient short manner of writings, nor Montaigne's, nor such of this latter time to be rightly termed
essays
, for though they be short, yet they are strong, and able to endure the sharpest trial: but mine are essays, who am but newly bound prentice.”
⁴