The Collected Works of Ambrose Bierce, Volume 10 The Opinionator — Key Ideas to Explore

A Voice of Calculated Irritation

Bierce’s prose is built on a foundation of deliberate exaggeration and precise disdain. In “The Novel,” he asserts that the annual output of books is “something terrible,” and that the best seller is “always a novel and a bad one.” The phrasing is blunt, almost conversational, yet the rhythm is carefully controlled. He uses short, declarative sentences to land his points, then expands into longer, more elaborate constructions when he wants to mock or dissect. In the essay on Shakespeare, he praises George Bernard Shaw’s condemnation of Shakespeare’s blank verse, but immediately corrects Shaw on a technical point: Shakespeare wrote “dramatic blank,” not proper blank verse. This move—agreeing with a target only to correct him—is typical of Bierce’s method. He positions himself as the sole clear-eyed critic in a crowd of idolaters.

Pace and the Polemical Turn

The essays shift rapidly between assertion and qualification, creating a rhythm that keeps the reader off balance. In “A Dead Lion,” Bierce begins with a long, winding sentence about religious controversy and a fool who “shouted out views so typical and representative as to justify a particular attention.” The sentence builds through clauses and comparisons, then lands on the image of a “noontide locust cutting through the cackle of a hundred hens.” This is Bierce at his most ornate. But he can pivot to plainness: “That he happened to be an editorial writer was irrelevant, for it was impossible to suspect s—” The sentence breaks off, as if he has lost patience with his own elaboration. These abrupt shifts in pace—from baroque to clipped—mirror his argumentative strategy: he builds a case, then undercuts it with a blunt fact or a dismissive aside.

Recurring Targets and a Consistent Lens

Throughout the excerpts, Bierce returns to a handful of obsessions: the stupidity of the reading public, the overvaluation of Shakespeare, and the hypocrisy of moral critics. In the Shakespeare essay, he calls Juliet “a moral idiot” and describes her frankness as “hideous,” yet he concedes that Shakespeare’s genius makes such characters acceptable to modern audiences. This is not simple iconoclasm; it is a critique of the gap between what readers claim to admire and what they actually enjoy. Similarly, in “The Novel,” he mocks the “patriot who ‘points with pride’ to the fact that Americans are a reading people” without considering quality. The same lens—a suspicion of received opinion and a delight in exposing contradictions—applies to his treatment of Ingersoll, where he focuses on the absurdity of the controversy rather than the merits of the man.

Readers approaching this volume should expect no systematic treatise. Bierce’s essays are occasional pieces, written for newspapers and magazines, and they carry the heat of immediate argument. The pleasure lies in watching him work: the sudden pivot from a lofty sentence to a crude joke, the way he uses a technical correction to assert superiority, the relentless focus on the gap between what people say and what they do. These are not balanced reviews; they are performances of intelligence and irritation.

Reading Bierce’s sharp, lonely essays, I remembered sitting on my grandfather’s porch, his old copy of Speeches, Addresses, and Occasional Sermons, Volume 2 (of 3) — Themes and Context beside me. Both had voices that argued with the world, yet felt like quiet company. That paradox — fierce words, soft afterglow — stayed with me all evening.