Academic professionalism and the triumph of the specialist have greatly reduced the role of the gifted generalist, and with exceptions such as Malcolm Muggeridge, P. J. Kavanagh, or a few writers for such journals as the
Spectator or the
Listener, the essay as a practiced literary art has almost disappeared. The newspaper or even journal article is often no longer seen as, and rarely is, a literary work. And past classics in the genre are mainly embalmed in collections, nowadays not usually studied in universities, though valued as a source of literary history, and, in the case of a few luminaries, admired as models of "personal" style.
Chesterton himself, never claiming to be more than a journalist, but nonetheless a prolific writer of essays (most of them written to meet deadlines in newspapers and journals), expressed misgivings about the essay. Admitting that he took perhaps his "greatest literary pleasure" in reading essays, Chesterton, in a late Illustrated London News "Notebook" piece ("On the Essay," 1929), described the essay as "wavering and wandering" like a serpent, and lacking a definite form.
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