Abstract

I have often wondered what would happen if one of our students were to hand in an assessed essay which followed the form and style of one of Montaigne's. First and second marker would pronounce it so disorganised as to be unmarkable, and the external examiner would fail it. Only at the final examiners' meeting would we confront the fact that we had confidently rejected one of the masterpieces of the genre. This story illustrates potentially destructive paradox. When teachers are defending essay writing, they argue that their students are practising the same genre as such great writers as Montaigne, Addison, Lamb, Woolf and Orwell. But when we mark students' essays we have different and at times rigid expectations, expectations which many of the classic essayists would not meet. This paradox is related to another. most commonly accepted formulae for educational essays are extremely strict, and look as though they derive from rhetorical precepts on the outline of the oration. In the English model this is the four-part essay (Introduction, points for, points against, conclusion)' which appears to derive from the model of the four-part oration (exordium, narration, proof and refutation, peroration) by omitting the narration and altering the function of the refutation. American model of the five point essay (Introduction, three arguments, conclusion) presumably derives from the same source, together with the often repeated instruction to restrict divisions to three headings.2 These popular (and in their way appalling) instructions run quite counter to Montaigne's open hostility to the rules of rhetoric, when he founded the genre. They are also opposed to the views of many practitioners. Sir William Williams prefaces his A Book of English Essays (Harmondsworth 1951), by saying that the essay has multitude of forms and manners, and scarcely any rules and regulations (p. 11). It should be short piece of prose which is not devoted to narrative. (There are plenty of exceptions even to rule as permissive as this.) Maurice Hewlett's celebrated The Maypole and the Column describes the essay, as a theme set up, and hung with loving art; then round about it measure trodden, sedately for the most part, but with involuntary skips aside as the whim takes him (ibid., p. 238). He prefers dance and digression to order and structure. Lamb is his admired model. My argument in this essay is that rhetoric, argument and ideas of structure have been involved with the essay (often as imperatives to react against) right from the beginning and that rhetorical ideas can help us understand the relationship between the belles-lettres essay and the schoolroom exercise. I shall raise the historical question of how genre which originated in opposition to rhetoric came to be taken over by rhetoric. For the sake of brevity my narrative will concentrate on four moments of the story: the birth of the essay, the English essay of the