英美散文讲义(3)

other world grows dim, while at the same time its attachment to things of this world becomes so strong that the soul tends to retain the form that it had in the body. But that soul which remains only a short time within a body, until liberated by the higher powers, quickly recovers its fire and goes on to higher things.‖

In a narrower and stricter sense of the word, the essay may be considered to be one of the literary spin-offs of the European Renaissance as the movement upheld the emancipation of the self. In terms of a form of self-expression, the essays written by a 16th century Frenchman Montaigne, who was rich and well-read and who traveled extensively are widely considered to be the prototype of the genre. His three volumes of Essais translated by the Englishman Cotton as Attempts serve to establish the essay as a distinctive type of literature and won him a name far and wide. Anachronistically, the above-mentioned Seneca is called the ―Roman Montaigne‖ and he influenced posterity including such distinguished thinkers and writers as Pascal, Descartes, and Rousseau in his own country, Nietzsche in Germany, Shakespeare in England, and Emerson in America. Montaigne’s is a common-sense cynicism, regarding writing as a sort of amusement, believing in neither improving the world nor making it worse by murmuring. He used a wide range of topics such as death, government and travel and all profound thoughts were wrapped up by personal gossip and reminiscences. Montaigne’s case convinces us that the secret of writing good essays lies in familiarity and style. He said the most familiar things in the finest way including using learned quotes. As for this sense of familiarity, Montaigne himself said, ―I am myself the matter of my book‖ and in the preface to his Essais proclaimed: ―This book has a domestic and private object. It is intended for the use of my relations and friends; so that, when they have lost me,which they will soon do, they may find in it some features of my condition and humors; and by this means keep up more completely, and in a more lively manner, the knowledge they have of me.‖ (本书目的在于供诸亲好友私下阅读，这样，当他们失去我的时候——这个时刻行将到来——他们可以在书里发现我的各种处境和喜怒哀乐，由此便可较为完整又生动地保持他们对我的了解。)

Some twenty years after Montaigne the essay was introduced to England as some other outlandish genres of literature such as the sonnet from Italy and the novel from Spain. Francis Bacon is usually considered to be the first English essayist, taking over Montaigne’s ―Of this‖ and ―Of that‖ mantle in form among other things. But Bacon is higher-mannered than Montaigne, his style smacking heavily of the Elizabethan courtly effusiveness and keeping himself away from what he wrote about. ―Reading maketh a full man; conference a ready man; writing an exact man‖ – such Baconian parallelisms abound alongside allusions, quotations, metaphors and witticisms. When he wrote about marriage, he would definitely refrain from mentioning his own marital experience and when he wrote about friendship, he would propagate a utilitarian philosophy and refrain from explaining why he had betrayed his onetime friend Earl of Essex. All in all, Bacon’s are essays with a garb of familiarity but impersonality inside. John Milton’s Areopagitica of the 17th century and Carlyle’s Hero and Hero

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