SOURCE: Monologues, 1913, pp. 9-18.

In the following essay, Middleton reveals his idealistic approach to writing and discusses his views on the value of the essay as a literary genre.

Owing to the general laxity with which men and women use the language they inherit, in the course of years words are apt to be broadened and coarsened in their meaning. Striving against this tendency, every scrupulous writer is in danger of robbing words of a part of their birthright: through fear of letting them mean too much he makes them mean too little. Ultimately, of course, the popular meaning prevails, and we suck our fountain-pens in vain who seek to preserve a kind of verbal aristocracy; but it is a pleasant game while it lasts, and it does no one any harm.

For instance, there is this word "essay." It is used to-day loosely to mean almost any...