Confessional

The art of essay-writing is peculiar: some of the greatest have never

indulged in it and yet literature would be poorer without the essays

of Bacon, Montaigne, Emerson and Schopenhauer. I had never thought of

writing essays; but my friend Esar Levine, who knows my writings

better than I know them myself, insists that my fugitive attempts

are worthy of enduring form. Naturally I was easy to persuade and

they are now assembled in a book for my readers to judge.

I prefer Bacon's Essays to his larger works which indeed I have never

even read through; Schopenhauer's Essays also are more interesting to

me than his masterpiece, and surely everyone prefers Emerson's Essays

to his poetry though now and then he wears the singer's robe with a

certain majesty; but after all, Montaigne, nearly all of whose works

may be called essays, and Bacon are the true types of essayists and

the greatest masters of the art. Both appear to write any thing that

comes into their heads and they always find something interesting to

say.