CORRESPONDENCE.
ENGLISH PROSE.
[TO THE EDITOR OF THE "SPECTATOR.")
SIR,—He who aspires to conquer style leads a forlorn hope. The world hates it, and the professed critics bate it most bitterly of all. To write verse well, to be a perfectly wise politician, to make large scores at cricket,—all these are achievements which do not disgrace a man. But to write fine and musical prose is the artist's instant condemnation. Whence comes this strange perversity of thought ? Does it proceed from blindness, or from moral reprobation ? We do not know. We only know that an ambition to handle the language as it should be handled is not despised; it is con- sidered an evil-doing which merits no forgiveness.
Here, for instance, is a writer in the Edinburgh Review who professes to discuss "some tendencies of prose style," and whose antipathy to prose style is evident in every line of a long indictment. To verse be is ready to grant every license ; to prose be will grant no license save the restriction of lucidity. He chooses to invent for himself a purely artificial distinction ; to declare that while verse appeals to the emotions, prose has no other objects than to instruct or to convince. He goes even further : he asserts that the less a prose-writer thinks about words the better. What he should think about we are not told ; but we gather tbst prose (in the opinion of the Edinburgh Reviewer) is written speech. "A man," says the Reviewer, "who has an argument to enforce, or a series of facts to relate, ought never in his argument or his relation to lose touch with the spoken speech." Why ? With such an assertion as that discussion is impossible. We can only ask for a reason, and remember with confidence that every artist who ever wrote magnificent pi ose forgot that the language of the tongue and the language of the pen were even distantly similar. The orators have conclusively proved our point. We knew Demos- theme and Cicero and Burke, not because they spoke, bat because they wrote; and the invention of shorthand long since showed how small a pretence to style has the most eloquent speaker. Wonld the Edinburgh Reviewer call a mischievous boy who upset a pot of vermilion on the pave. ment a heaven-born painter?
M. Jourda,in was surprised to discover that he had been talking prose for years. The Edinburgh Reviewer seems to suggest that having talked prose for years a man might always have written it. If the pen is the only obstacle which divides literature from conversation, there seems no reason why all the world does not devote itself to the cultiva- tion of style. We can all talk, and (by Act of Parliament) we can all write; therefore we are all craftsmen, as Milton and Shakespeare were craftsmen. It is a bewildering theory, which happily refutes itself. But it is put forth by an Edinburgh Reviewer, who also declares that the Elizabethan prose-writers wrote "plainly," and that it was Foxes merit not to adorn his narrative. At these pronouncements you rub your eyes, and wonder whether words have lost their meaning. After all, Moliere was a safer guide, who dismissed the notion that prose and speech were the same exercise with a gentle ridicule.
However, the Edinburgh Reviewer believes that no sooner does prose become an art than it ceases to be prose ; and to support this fantastic view he declares that Fielding and Goldsmith were excellent without knowing it; "their excel- lence," says he, "was largely accidental." Now, if ever there were two men who castigated their style, and so separated it from the talk of the tavern, those men were Goldsmith and Fielding. Fielding listened to his prose as attentively as Stevenson or Meredith, and his ear was far more acute to cadence and rhythm than was the ear of Pope. Moreover, if Goldsmith had written as he himself spoke, his prose would have been silence. And how should he write as another spoke ? And this brings us to the obvious conclusion. Prose is an art, more complex and more difficult, because less restrained, than verse. The most of men can write a set of couplets; very few can obey the subtle dictates of the humbler medium, and indite a page of noble prose. To parody Matthew Arnold, style is three-fourths of prose, and prose is only admirable as it recedes from speech. This, in fact, is the main difficulty of prose ; it deals with the same medium as common talk, from which it must be separated; and the indolent man who cares not for beauty will always prefer a solid piece of information to a flash of genius ; so he (the indolent man) will set the directory, which does not differ from speech and rejects ornament, high above the "Areopagitica," "Urn Burial," and the works of Mr. Meredith.
That intelligent people should commit this sin of indiscre- tion is strange enough ; that they should make it a point of honour to commit this sin is stranger still. The Edinburgh Reviewer, by declaring that it is the duty of prose merely to instruct or convince, rules out of his category all the masters. In such a busy hive there is no room for Sir Thomas Browne or Burton, for Milton or Shakespeare (himself a master of prose), for Jeremy Taylor or Donne, for the Swift of " Gnlliver " and the "Tale of the Tub" or Burke or Gibbon, for Hazlitt or Lamb or De Quincey, for Coleridge or Southey or Walter Scott, for Stevenson or Meredith. Indeed, if prose be information, it leaves you alone with the followers of Addison—who marks the decadence of English—with the very worst of fiction, and with the daily paper. But prose is a delicate and beautiful art, which we hesi- tate to define, but which we know has naught in common with statistics or the facts of life. It submits no more easily than verse "to be disciplined into strict conformity with reason, the common faculty of man." It may be, if it will, impas- sioned as verse, and at its loftiest it makes a loud appeal to the sensuous emotions. Thucydides and Tacitus wrote as never men spoke, but they are and will ever remain the
masters of prose. Who in speaking ever invented such phrases as give a sparkle of brilliance to the "Annals," and how would these jewels of language be improved by the mere fact that any one had (or could have) given them utterance ? No, prose is as far as the poles asunder from speech, and it is all the worse if it bear even a faint resemblance to the sound and structure of the sentences which are spoken at the street corner.
What, then, is a mark of style ? All the definitions fail us. "The proper words in their proper places" is an obvious evasion, and not even the name of Swift can give currency to the false coin stamped with the legend: "The greatest concision consistent with lucidity." You can only reach the truth by negatives. There is no style where there is not music, where there is not a perfect and curious choice of phrase, where there is not a proper sensitiveness to the etymological tradition of such words as find a place in a sentence. But these are all qualities which are absent from conversation as they are absent from oratory, and which, though esteemed by Milton and Sir Thomas Browne, are despised by the Edinburgh Reviewer. Above all, music is the secret of great prose as of great verse ; and it is music which enabled Milton to write the "Areopagitica" as it enabled him to write "Paradise Lost." Lucidity is good in the one medium as in the other ; simplicity is good if it does not degenerate into commonness. But these pale qualities will never fashion a mighty style. When the eighteenth century achieved its universal triumph of good sense, it killed for a while our English tongue. Style could not live in an atmosphere which was instant death to personality, since style is always, and must always be, not only artificial, but personal. A reporter, in brief, is not an artist, because he is inexpressive ; and great works, whether of verse or prose, live by their expression. We are born to speak,—that is our birthright. We are not born to write,—that is an accomplishment acquired with pain and forethought. In other words, language is an instru- ment upon which the artist in prose or verse must be taught to play. If the artist's touch and method enable him to express himself, then he has pierced that strange mystery, style. If he steal the touch and method of another, then he need not be considered more care- fully than the imitators of Stevenson or Meredith. But he who writes as be speaks is no better than he who reads as he runs. The divinest narrative colloquially ex. pressed is dead to-morrow, and the argument of Swift merely appears simple to the critic because the profound artifice of Swift eludes him. Style, indeed, is a personal and intimate gift, which proceeds from and is the reflex of a sincere.thought or a clear vision. But he who thinks or sees must under- stand the use of words, and have an ear attuned to music. And the sooner we block such easy cuts to excellence as that "men should write as they talk," or that "a prose-writer has nothing to do with words," the sooner may we look upon an English which is not contemptible. For the newspaper is not yet the ideal of our prose, and the first lesson a writer learns is that literature is something better than conversation materialised in ink.—I am, Sir, &e., CHARLES WHIBLEY.
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