Some Thoughts on English Prose Style

Some Thoughts on English

Prose Style

I

The art of expression is an art like another; if anything, it is the greatest and most difficult art of all. There are some well-defined courses of study for the other arts; and, with all these, surprisingly few persons, strange as it may seem, are ever able to make a name for themselves. In regard to style, however, there are no recognized text-books, the guiding hand is nowhere distinctly seen. The writer has nothing for it but to fall , in the last resort; upon his own resources, whatever these may be; and to make his spoon or spoil his horn, according to circumstances.

II

The word ‘style’ connotes a way of writing. It touches not the matter but the manner of a given piece of writing. It follows that the best style is that which has the best manner. The thought, the internal content, alone is not sufficient, be it ever so noble. This, in my view, requires emphasising. Certain reputed critics have laid it down as their considered opinion, as their unshakable conviction, that the manner is nothing so long as the matter is precious; that the idea is the chief thing; and that ‘style’, being only a kind of outward dressing, a sort of extraneous ornament, does not, and ought not, to appeal to the serious student. One of my objects in writing this article is to expose the utter hollowness and absurdity of this theory.

III

It is, I venture to think, high time people recognized that obscurity of expression does not necessarily connote profundity of thought. Every person that writes is allowed certain peculiarities of style (to match the particular idiosyncrasies of his mind) but it only stands to reason that he should not push these peculiarities beyond a more or less well defined limit. All arts enjoin on their practitioners some amount of discipline, of self-restraint, and I do not see why, amongst them all, writers alone should regard themselves as being exempt from it. The function of literature is to entertain, not puzzle, the reader. Nor is profound thought, I imagine, any the worse for lucid expression. If the expression is not lucid, then one of two things follows: either the thought of which it is, ex hypothesi, the vehicle, is not so profound, is not so world-convulsing, as it feigns to be, or it is, as yet, not clear enough to the writer himself. Let us not be taken in by such pretences. There never yet was any thought which was incapable, in the right hands, of the most lucid expression. As Mr. Herbert Paul, referring to Swift, says, in his admirable book, Men and Letters (John Lane, 1915) :

"Until Swift became a lunatic, his mind cut like a diamond through the hardest substances in its way. No sophistry ever deceived him. No difficulty ever puzzled him. There was nothing he thought which he could not express. The pellucid simplicity of his style, both in prose and in verse, came of clear thinking and sound reasoning, assisted by the habit of daily explanation to unlettered women. It is easy to understand him, because he understood so easily himself. A great deal of time is wasted by the' general reader' in guessing at the meaning of authors who did not mean anything in particular. Uncertainty is the fruitful parent of obscurity, and many people write obscurely in the hope that they will be thought profound. Like the subaltern who would not form his letters distinctly lest his correspondents should find out how he spelt, there is a class of writers who will not be plain lest the poverty of their thoughts should be exposed." (My italics: pp. 282-283).

In philosophy thought may be more important. Nay, it is more important. But literature is not philosophy. Literature may be many things; and, amongst these, may be philosophy also. But, in the process of their being taken to its capacious bosom, they are made to

"…….suffer a sea change
Into something rich and strange,"

and what emerges ultimately is literature and not any-ism or -ology. Thought, indeed, need not be absent from literature. But there it is more valuable for the garb in which it is conveyed than for itself. Literature consists of "what oft was thought but ne'er so well expressed." Literature, in short, is of the word wordy: it is thought Plus style; and sometimes, even, it is all style and no thought—if, that is, anything written or spoken can be said to be completely devoid of thought. The silliest thing uttered well becomes literature: whereas the profoundest thing spoiled in the telling remains outside literature's porch. (I am, of course, to be understood as speaking in the most general terms. There may, indeed, be circumstances, which palliate even the worst writing imaginable. Authors have been known to exist–as Balzac, for instance, who, it would seem, was not guilty of having written a single beautiful sentence in all his numerous books–authors, I say, have been known to exist that have written in a very atrocious style, yet they stand high in the ranks of literature. But, I plead, they are only exceptions, and, as such, cannot invalidate my argument). Literature, then, by its very nature, by the very law of its being, deals rather with the outside of things than with their inside. As the late Mr. George Moore says, in his Epistle to the Cymry, included in his famous Confessions of a Young Man: ¹

"The thought that sustains a book is but a small part of the book; a thought is but common property, but the words belong to the writer, and he cannot be dispossessed of his verbal beauty any more than a sculptor and a painter can be robbed of their surfaces."

Again, in the same "Epistle," he says:

"An idea is mine today, it is yours tomorrow, the day after tomorrow it belongs to the whole world; but a beautiful sentence is always the property of him who made it. ²

IV

Coming now to the practical part of it, of all kinds of style the simple and the familiar is the most to be recommended. The simplicity should relate not only to the length of the sentences but also to the size of the individual words. One cannot to be sure, be always measuring one's sentences with a foot-rule, or weighing one's words in a balance, but the safe rule is to try to make the one as short and the other as light as is consistent with beauty of expression. This, of course, does not mean that there should be no variety in the structure of one's sentences. If there is no variety, and, further, if there is no imperceptible gradation from one sentence to another, the reading will not be smooth, and there will, inevitably, be considerable jarring on one's ears. The writer must guard particularly against such loose, careless, and haphazard endings to his sentences, or paragraphs. There are authors that end their sentences as well as their ideas most abruptly,–with a bang, as it were. There is no knowing when one train of thought ceases and a fresh one begins. This is a serious fault in composition; and even some otherwise admirable writers often fall a prey to it. The sentences, considered by themselves, may be beautiful enough, but the writing taken as a whole, the tout ensemble, in short, is seen to be defective. A well-known instance in that of Emerson. Emerson's sentences are usually very simple: though, it is only fair to say, his thoughts are not. They are charged fully with matter. Emerson, indeed, seems to have profited immensely from the famous advice of Keats to Shelley, namely, to "load every rift with ore." He suffered, in other words, from an excess, a repletion, of ideas. We may say of this immersion in them, what Chapman, I think, said of Marlowe's immersion in poetry, that "he stood up to the chin in the Pierian flood." This is all, no doubt, very good in its own way: but, unfortunately, when he came to the arrangement of his ideas he sometimes (as has been testified by innumerable critics) broke down. Of course, his method of piecing together his essays is partly, at least, responsible for this. He wouuld, it appears, jot down stray thoughts of his in a note-book and, when engaged on his essay, bodily transfer them (or such of them as were apposite) to it. Naturally, his essays lack development. As Mr. Augustine Birrell pertinently remarks:

"For, let the comparison be made with whom you will, the unparalleled non-sequaciousness of Emerson is as certain as the Corregiosity of Corregio. You never know what he will be at. His sentences fall over you in glittering cascades, beautiful and bright, and for the moment refreshing, but after a very brief while the mind, having nothing to do on its own account but to remain open and see what Emerson sends it, grows first restive and then torpid. Admiration gives way to astonishment, astonishment to bewilderment, and bewilderment to stupefaction. ³

My whole point is that, in such a style of writing, both the sentences and the ideas have a bad, an incorrigible, habit of leaving rugged edges of themselves behind: they are not "rounded off" as they ought to be: they do not, if I may say so, "cease upon the midnight with no pain," but go on, as it were, making rambling noises in our brains when they ought, by rights, to be comfortably asleep. For perfectly good writing, your thoughts need not be multitudinous: they need not be legion: if you have the right stuff in you, a fraction of them will usually suffice. I do not, indeed, imply that you can make bricks without straw. But I do say that an abundance, an overplus, of that material is riot necessary: or, if there is an abundance of it, you must know how to space it out. A wise and even distribution, rather than local and haphazard accumulation, is the gist of the matter. As De Quincey puts it:

"Eloquence resides not in separate or fractional ideas, but in the relations ofmanifold ideas, and in the mode of their evolution from each other. It is not indeed enough that the ideas should be many, and their relations coherent; the main condition lies in the key of the evolution in the law of the succession. The elements are nothing without the atmosphere that moulds, and the dynamic forces that combine."⁴

V

I was saying that, of all kinds of style, the simple and the familiar is the most to be recommended. It is not easy to write a simple style. One of the simplest of styles that I have come across is that of the distinguished journalist, historian, and critic, Mr. Herbert Paul; and it is necessary only to try to write like this to see how difficult it is. A simple style is not, as some imagine, an insipid style. There is an ornament that pertains to simplicity, and there is a simplicity that is at the same time scholarly. There is, I am aware, a widespread opinion that the more grandiose the language is, the lovelier, ipso facto, is the style. Prince Harry said of Falstaff that he was a "tun of a man." There are writers who would go any length to introduce a "tun of a word," into their compositions. They are all for magnificence in writing. They, evidently, are followers in real life of that well-known character in Messrs. Stevenson's and Osbourne's The Wrecker, Jim Pinkerton, the typical hustling Yankee. Turn to his comments on the word ‘hebdomadary’:

"That's a good catching phrase, ‘hebdomadary,’ tho’ it’s hard to say. I made a note of it when I was looking in the dictionary how to spell ‘hectagonal.’ ‘Well, you're a boss word,’ I said. ‘Before you're very much older I'll have you in type as large as yourself.’ And here it's, you, see."

"A boss word", that is it: that is the ideal of many writers.

A gaudy style, if we analyse it carefully, will usually be found to be, after all, not the wonderful thing it looks at first sight. Many faulty and unnecessary things often go to make it. As a general rule, I may say that to use two words where only one grew before, or to employ a word of four syllables where, previously; a word of only two syllables was known to exist, is not conducive to chaste writing. In literature, as elsewhere, economy is of the essence of the thing. I shall even go so far as to say that in writing (I refer to prose, not to poetry), it would be well to have a sort of birth-control of words; and the State, I am convinced, would be assisting the cause of letters were it to impose some kind of penalty on too too prolific writers.

VI

Figures of speech are the bane of most writers of prose. Aristotle, we know; put a premium on metaphor, raising it almost to the level of a divine gift; and poetry, perhaps, becomes all the more poetical for it. But in that (as Dryden calls it) "other harmony of prose," metaphor (or for that matter, any figure of speech) is not such a prime necessity. Nay, it is often a positive hindrance. Some of the most exquisite writers of prose have avoided metaphor as they would have done the devil: they have let it severely alone. Swift is a case in point. "The rogue never hazards a metaphor," said Johnson; and right he was not to hazard it. People are apt to forget that what is good for poetry is not always equally good for prose. "There is one glory of the sun and another of the moon"; and prose has its distinct glory, and it is harder to be attained than the one appertaining to poetry.

VII

There are those who are the exponents of the ornate style of writing, Burke, and De Quincey, and Ruskin,–not to mention Jeremy Taylor, and Sir Thomas Browne, and that curious poet-preacher, John Donne. With Burke, indeed, it was more or less a case of overflow of mind: the thought and the style had to keep pace with each other: images crowded upon him "not single spies, but in battalions." And what exquisite images, too. Burke, I am inclined to think, could not help writing a pompous style: he was to the manner born. There have been, and are, those that have tried to write like De Quincey and Ruskin, but they have succeeded only as far as the length of the sentences go: sentences that, as Mr. Chesterton happily remarked, "lengthen out like night-mare corridors, or rise higher and higher like impossible eastern pagodas."⁵ But they have not been able (as how should they?) to copy those masters’ felicity of expression, or their mastery over phrase and idiom. The mischief of this kind of style is that, apart from lack of elegance, mistakes are bound to creep in, despite, the best care in the world. Take Newman. Newman's style has been extolled to the skies by almost all the critics of English literature. And, no doubt, it deserves at least part of the praise. But read the late Mr. George Moore's Hail and Farewell ⁶and note the fault he finds in Newman, and in Newman’s best book. It is not, it will be perceived, enough if one's writing is fine at places: it must be uniformly fine, and, at least, it should be exempt from mistakes–of whatever kind. Sonority (let it be remembered) is not always sense; and volume (or voluminousness), by itself, is seldom a recommendation.

VIII

The more ordinary amongst us will do well not to aspire too high. Rhetoric is a dangerous mistress to woo, and he only should woo her who is fairly confident of success; else, there is every likelihood of a sudden and ignominious retreat. We should, on the contrary, try to write a simple and elegant style: the sort of style that such great masters of prose as Shakespeare and Swift and Cowper and Goldsmith and Hazlitt and Lamb and Thackeray and Stevenson wrote. If such a style of writing was good enough for them, it will, I fancy, serve us, too, well. Hazlitt writes in his well-known essay, "On Familiar Style," included in his Table Talk:

"The proper force of words lies not in the words themselves, but in their application. I hate anything that occupies more space than it is worth. I hate to see a load of band-boxes go along the street, and I hate to see a parcel of big words without any meaning in them.

That is to say, we ought to exercise an economy in words, as in everything else: there should be a self-restraint in language, what Pater, I think, calls "the beauty of a frugal closeness of style." This is what Stevenson meant when he advised the late Sir Edmund Gosse in the following terms. The occasion was a perusal of the latter's Father and Son, which that gentleman had sent him. Stevenson, in his letter of acknowledgment, writes:

"Beware of purple passages . . . And in a style which (like yours) aims more and more successfully at the academic, one purple word is already too much; three—a whole page–is inadmissible. Wed yourself to a clean austerity: that is your force. Wear a linen ephod, splendidly candid. Arrange its folds, but do not fasten it with any brooch. I swear to you, in your talking robes there should be no patch of adornment; and where the subject forces, let it force you no further than it must."⁷ (My italics)

Elsewhere also he writes to the same effect;

"There is but one art–to omit! If I knew how to omit, I would ask no I other knowledge. A man who knew how to omit would make an Iliad of a daily paper." ⁸ (My italics)

  

1 Heinemann: 1928: P. 290.

2 300.

3 The Collected Essays and Addresses of the Rt. Hon. Mr. Augustine Birrell, Vol. II, P. 61: J. M. Dent.

4 De Quincey’s Works: Edited by Masson; A. & O. Black, 1897: Vol. 5. 231.

5 The Victorian Age in Literature: By Mr. G. K. Chesterton: The Home University Library: pp. 24-25.

6 Vol, II. "Salve", Heinemann, 1920: pp.240-254.

7 Letters of R. L. Stevenson, Vol. III, pp. 70-71. Tusitala Edition.

8 Letters of R. L. Stevenson, Vol. II. p. 271: Tusitala Edition.