ENGLISH PROSE STYLE
C. L. R. SASTRI
“Though
I have been haunted by the gnawing sense of guilt ever since that Christmas
morning when I stole a chocolate elephant from the Christmas tree and let my
parents think it was one of my younger brothers, I have always been willing to
embezzle £ 10,000 provided my victim was wealthy. On the other hand, my
artistic conscience will never
let me leave a sentence less good than I know I can make it by taking trouble.”
–The late Mr. James Agate: Bad Manners
The
art of expression is an art like any other. If anything, it is the greatest and
the most arduous art of all. There are some well-defined courses of study for
the other arts. Yet, 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 recognised text-books: the
guiding hand is nowhere distinctly seen. The writer has nothing for it but to
fall back, in the last resort, upon his own resources, rich or poor as the case
may be: and to make his spoon, or spoil his horn, according to circumstances.
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 finest style is that
which has the finest manner. The thought, the internal content, alone is not
sufficient. As Anatole
This,
in my view, requires not a little emphasising.
Certain reputed critics have laid it down as their considered opinion, as their
unshakeable 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 overmuch to the serious student. One of my objects in penning this
article is to expose the utter hollowness and absurdity of this theory.
Obscurity
and Profundity
It
is high time people recognised that obscurity of expression does not necessarily
connote profundity of thought.
Every person that writes is permitted certain peculiarities of style to match
the particular idiosyncracies 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 upon 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 totally
exempt from it.
The
function of literature, I make
bold to suggest, is to entertain the reader, not to puzzle him. Nor is profound
thought any the worse for lucid expression. If the expression is not lucid, one
of two inferences follow. 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 arrogant pretences. There has never yet been any
thought that was incapable, in the right hands, of pellucid expression. As
Herbert Paul, referring to Jonathan Swift, says, in his admirable book, Men and
Letters:
“Until Swift became a
lunatic, his mind cut like a diamond through the hardest substances in its way.
No sophistry ever deceived 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 tile
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)
Philosophy
and Literature
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 being taken unto its capacious
bosom, they are made to
“......suffer
a sea-change
Into
something rich and strange;”
and what emerges ultimately
is literature, 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 presented than for itself. Literature consits of “what oft was thought but ne'er so well express’d.”
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 expressed 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 general terms. There may,
indeed, be circumstances that palliate even the molt atrocious writing imaginable.
Authors have been known to exist – as Balzac, for instance, who was not guilty it
would seem, of having written a single beautiful sentence in all his
innumerable books–who have written in a very turgid and unattractive style: yet
they do stand high in the esteem of litterateurs. But, I plead, they are only
exception, and, as such, cannot appreciably 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 George Moore puts it beautifully
in his “Epistle to the Cymry”, included in his
famous Confessions of a Young Man:
“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.”
He
goes on:
“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.”
The Simple
and the Familiar
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 relates 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 make one as short and the other as light as is consistent with
felicity of expression. 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 or paragraphs abruptly–with a bang, as it were. There is no knowing
where one train of thought ceases and an entirely new one takes over. This is a
grave falling in composition: and even some otherwise admirable writers not seldom fall a prey to it. The sentences, considered by themselves, may be striking enough, but the writing taken as
a whole, the tout ensemble, in short, leaves much to be desired. A
well-known instance is that of Emerson.
Emerson
Emerson’s
sentences are, usually, extremely simple: though, it is only fair to admit, his
thoughts are not. They are, as it happens, charged fully with matter. Emerson,
indeed, seems to have profited immensely from the famous advice of Keats to
Shelley to “load every rift with ore.” He suffered, in other words, from an
excess, from a repletion of ideas. We may say of his
immersion in them what Chapman said of
Marlowe’s (comparable) immersion in poetry: that “he stood up to the
chin in the Pierian flood.” This is all, no doubt,
very well in its own way: but, unfortunately, when he came to the arrangement of those ideas he sometimes (as has
been testified by quite a few commentators) failed miserably. Of course, his
method of piecing together his essays is–partly at least–responsible for this.
He would, it appears, jot down stray thoughts of his in a notebook and, when
engaged on his essay, bodily transfer them (or such of them as were apposite)
to it. Naturally, his essays lack coherence. As Augustine Birrell
pertinently observes:
“For,
let the comparison be made with whom you like, the unparalleled non-sequaciousness of Emerson is as certain as is the Coregiosity of Corregio. You
never know what he will be at. His sentences fall over 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.”
My
whole point is that, in such a style of writing, both the sentences and the ideas
have an incorrigible habit of leaving ragged edges of themselves behind. They
are not “rounded off” as they ought to be. They do not, so to speak, “cease
upon the midnight with no pain,” but go on and on, as it were, making rambling
noises in our brains when they ought, by rights, to be comfortably asleep.
Figures of
Speech
Figures
of speech are the bane of most writers of prose. Aristotle, we know, put a
premium on metaphor, elevating 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. What is good for poetry is not equally good for prose. “There is one
glory of the sun and another of the moon;” and prose has its distinct glory,
which, incidentally, is harder to be attained than the one appertaining to
poetry.