MARGINAL COMMENT
By HAROLD NICOLSON
ALL essayists seek to give to their productions a certain symmetry of form. I have been abused by my friends on the giound that my Marginal Comments begin with one subject and end with
another. I refute this imputation. What I try to do, while remain- ing strictly marginal, is to relate the general to the particular or the particular to the general: I tend, therefore, either to start with a general principle which I illustrate by a particular experience, or else to begin with an account of some particular event which I there- after relate to some general principle. Surely this is a defensible procedure? The ideal essay should, I suppose, combine an account of individual action or character with some implicit or explicit criticism of life. It is not that it deals with two distinct experi- ences ; it is that it endeavours, clumsily enough it may be, to describe the same experience from the individual and the general point of view. If this be well done, then an agreeable pattern should result, in which the end links with the beginning as a snake biting its own tail. If this pattern be too obviously or too often repeated it becomes a wearisome trick of composition ; but the main principle is, I affirm, a correct principle and one which should give to an essay a certain uniformity of impression coupled with a diversity of content. It is interesting to observe how consciously a supremely gifted essayist, such as Guy de Maupassant, is preoccupied with this very pattern. His stories always possess a deliberate shape, the con- clusion being linked to the beginning in terms either of expectation or surprise. Heine also, both in his poems and in his prose, was constantly preoccupied by the relation between his first line and his last ; and it was in order to break the monotony of this cadenced relation between the opening and the closing sentences that he indulged so frequently in the Trugschluss, namely, a deliberate dis- cord at the end. I do not see that such devices are meretricious : it would be no fun at all writing essays unless one tried to give them a certain shape.
Previous page
