A TREATISE ON ENGLISH PROSE.*
To those who are familiar with Professor Earle's charming little book, The Philology of the English Tongue, the present volume needs no commendation. It displays to the full the qualities of ease, simplicity, and grace which lent such attrac- tion to the earlier work, and with equal mastery deals with a subject of wider and deeper importance. As the Rawlinsonian Professor well says, English prose is the greatest instrument of communication that is now in use among men upon the earth. English prose, moreover, has the longest and proudest history of any written speech whereof we have record, and is among the most glorious of the many noble heritages of Anglo-Saxon folk. For it assumed definite form nearly eleven hundred years ago, and from the days of Aethelbald of Mercia to Victoria has followed a course of development in -which, despite the accidents of English history, it has pre- served almost intact the essential featnres of the Wessex Chronicles of the eighth century. The language has parted with its inflections, many words have been lost, others replaced by French and Latin forms, but it would still be no very diffi- cult task to turn a leader of the Times, with some slight modifications of spelling and vocabulary, into a prose that would be nearly as intelligible to an Englishman of the eighth as to an Englishman of the nineteenth century.
Yet of this wonderful instrument of human thought, as plastic as Greek, as puissant and almost as terse as Latin, our literature has hitherto furnished no systematic exposition, showing what it is, how it has become what it is, what it can do. In these pages its story is eloquently told, its capacities and excellences lovingly, yet without any trace of undue partiality, set forth. Some one is sure to ask Why attempt to teach the art of writing ?—if a man has the stuff of thought in him, let him utter it as best he may. Just so,—if he has anything to say, his utterance will be the less cramped and marred, the more ample the mastery he has of his means of expression. But many who, not having much to say, or not caring to say what they have, yet are lovers of literature, will find their powers of criticism and appreciation greatly enlarged by a study of this volume ; they will at the least be the better able to detect the subtle beauties of the technique of composition. And, lastly, Professor Earle's pages may, by a happy possibility, do some- thing towards removing from the minds of educators the prejudice which seems for the moment rooted in them against systematic training in the right use of the English language.
Perhaps the most attractive chapter in the book is the ninth, dealing with the always fascinating subject of style. Yet, strictly speaking, style is the differentia of an author's total presentment of the whole or of a distinct tract of his thought, rather than the means and mode of its presentment, and has apparently no place in a treatise on prose. Diction, in a sense, is opposed to style; the latter, as we have said, is the characteristic of the whole, the former denotes the method of the parts of a literary performance, or of some separate por- tion thereof. The distinction is one of importance, and is properly insisted upon by Professor Earle. Yet the respective connotations of the two expressions touch each other, and style may be said to he the specific structure of the paragraph and the total work, as diction relates to the texture of the para- graph as made up of word, phrase, and sentence. Thus, though style may shows itself within the paragraph, and within the sentence, nay, even in the word—as we see most markedly in Carlyle—it can do so only as a relation of parts to each other viewed as portions of a whole. Hence an exhaustive definition of style is impossible, and style and diction are often confused with each other, as in a well-known passage quoted by Pro- fessor Earle from Herbert Spencer's essay on "The Philosophy of Style." In Carlyle, style and diction may be said to be inextricably interfused,—his very vocabulary is an element in his style.
• English Prose its Elements, Motor'', and Usage. By .Tohn Enrle, M.A., Eawlinsonian Professor of AngloMaxon in the University of Oxford. London : Smith, Elder, and Co. MO. The importance of the distinction between style and diction lies in this : diction can be learned; style, though it can be imitated, cannot be learned. "The young writer," says Pro- fessor Earle, "should attend to his diction very carefully, but leave his style to take care of itself." Style depends on natural idiosyncrasy conjoined with knowledge of the world, of books, and of men. By improving your knowledge, you may improve your style ; if you attempt improvement by direct means, you are sure to tumble into imitation, which is fatal to style. Buffon, himself a great master of style, said in effect, " Quot homines tot styli," and the remark is axiomatic. The school of Flaubert regarded style and diction as one. There was a perfection of word and phrase, which attained—and Flaubert would spend a week in hunting after a perfect phrase to express his thought—made a perfect style. Such a system made style, not a quality of the man, but a trick to be acquired. It is not, indeed, true that such perfection of word and phrase exists. The content of an utterance is never absolutely limited and definable ; it varies more or less con- siderably with the point of view, with the nature of the per- cipient mind, and with conditions of time and place. And unless all suggestiveness be eliminated—and that would be fatal to literary excellence—every utterance must be more or less variable in what may be termed its amplitude of significa- tion.
Le style c'est l'homme, however, though true, is not the whole truth. There are other styles,—of time, nationality, avocation, and so forth. We wish Professor Earle had said something about these styles. But then, strictly speaking, and save as illustrative of what diction is not, style has no place in a treatise on prose. The two principal forms of prose of the modern world are French and English prose. A somewhat detailed comparison of these forms would be both interesting and instructive. They differ greatly, as any one may see who compares an essay in the Revue des Dews Mondes with one in the Quarterly Review. Then there are scientific styles on which something might have been said. Most books of a scientific character are without style, but not all. Sir Thomas Watson's Lectures on the Practice of Medicine, for instance, display an admirable style. We may say the same of Sir James Paget's Lectures on Surgical Pathology. Darwin's Origin of Species, again, though poor in diction, is redolent of the man in every sentence ; but here the style can only be felt by the trained biologist. A little book recently pub- lished, called Modern Views of Electricity, though deficient iit diction, is eminently characteristic of its author,—incisive, bold, imaginative in a singular degree. But these qualities again, which are truly qualities of style, can be properly appreciated by the physicist alone. The style, lastly, of the author of Lay Sermons and Addresses is too well known to need any com- mendation here. There is another kind of style which is not of the man, and is of a very remarkable character ; the " corporate " style, Professor Earle terms it,—the style, that is, of a united body of writers. The style of the great dailies, from the Times downwards, for instance, is neither of the man, nor even of any existing body of writers, but of a long succes- sion of writers. "The Spectator," says Professor Earle, "could hardly be more homogeneous than. it is in tone, if week by week it flowed from the pen of one man from the first word to the last." We must leave our readers to judge of the accuracy of this statement. The Saturday Review, on the other hand, is said to have no unity of style. With this opinion it is not easy to agree ; for our part, we should have said that few periodicals are more distinctly characterised by idiosyncrasy of style.
We have left ourselves no space for comment upon Professor Earle's exposition of Diction. His treatment of the subject leaves nothing to be desired ; the eight chapters dealing with it are full of interest to the ordinary reader, and full of instruction to the writer, young or old. One is never too old to learn, and the best of us may draw profit from them, especially from the chapter on "Idiom," which simply demonstrates the advantage of writing English in as English a manner as possible, avoiding Latinism's, Gallicisms, and all other " isms " except Anglicisms. The chapters on "The History of English Prose" will to many be the most interesting of ; the most curious feature of them is the proof they afford of the essential oneness of English speech during eleven centuries. The volume appro- priately closes with some words of kindly and wise advice to those who desire to state their thought with grace and lucidity, to be at once interesting and intelligible in their utteranc,es, to use the noble vehicle of English without bigotry and without pretentiousness, and to avoid every appearance of hypocrisy, affectation, or false decoration. Like every other art, the art of writing must have its moral code.
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