A MIRROR FOR JOURNALISTS.
JT is a truism that the written word differs from the spoken word, but it is too often forgotten that the written word has many types, and that the standard rightly varies in each. We do not expeot to find lyrical prose in a Report or a Blue-book, nor do we seek in a leading article, written to edify the man in the train, the polished, jewel-like form of an essay composed for the delight of the man of leisure. We have full-dress and undress writing, and the merits of one kind are the vices of the other. Somewhere, " laid up in Heaven," like the Platonic ideas, is a standard of pure English prose, to which at rare intervals the masters seem to attain. But there is also a working model, consciously imperfect, a kind of compromise between colloquial speech and a. more formal statement, which is, or should be, the standard for journalism, pamphleteering, and ordinary expository work written for a practical end. We wish to see this second standard kept at a high, but not an impossible, level. Gross faults should be reprobated, but minor blemishes overlooked. For the essence of such work is that it makes an appeal to a certain sort of mind, and its language must be intelligible to its audience. While refusing to pander to the vulgarity of the mob, it should be equally free from is vulgaire des sages. Good journalism ought to have many points of kinship with good talk, and some of the looseness and colloquialism of our common speech is not out of place. The anonymous authors of "The King's English" (Oxford : at the Clarendon Press, 5e. net) have subjected the everyday writing of English to a rigorous analysis, and have found it wanting. The book is delightful reading, if only for its wit and urbanity of style. Its logio is unsparing, but there is no hint of the doctrinaire. The faults of popular prose are lucidly expounded and delicately ridiculed. None the less, it is a book to make all whose business it is to write rapidly—journalists, teachers, politicians—horribly self-con- scious. And since self-consciousness means the cessation of their activity, it is worth while to consider whether the tests are not too bard.
With much of the criticism we are in full agreement. Many of the "awful warnings" are taken from our own pages, and with sorrow we confess our sins. For blunders in syntax, of which every one is guilty, there is no defence. He who through carelessness sins against the light can only plead the force majeure of overwork in his defence. The best writers may slip at times,—Stevenson, for example, has singular verbs with plural substantives, and Matthew Arnold has split infinitives. The distinction between good and bad writing is the frequency of such errors. Every one, too, is capable of " howlers," for which the printer cannot always be blamed. But no educated writer will translate scandalum maguatum as "a shocking affair," and Cui bond ? as " What's the good of it P " Certain technical mistakes in syntax seem to us to be almost defensible. It was wrong for Mr. Meredith to write : " I am she, she me, till death and beyond it," and yet there is a certain justification from common habit, and from the cacophony of the correct alternative. One danger of harping too much on grammatical errors in &particular form of speech is that writers become shy of the form altogether. "And which," for example, requires, to be correct, a previous relative; but so many people have been so often warned against the error of its use without a predecessor, that they refuse to conjoin relatives altogether and are driven to cumbrous circumlocution. So also with the split infinitive. This is generally so ugly that few dare consciously to use it. But there are cases where the true verb introduced by the particle " to " is not the verb alone, but a verbal phrase containing an adverb, which it may be right for the sake of emphasis to insert immediately after the particle. Grammar, after all, was made for man, and not man for grammar, and we should see to it that its rules are wide enough to satisfy the exigencies of life.
When we come to vocabulary and style we are on more debatable ground. A sentence in the preface comforts us greatly., " The frequent appearance," the authors write, " of any author's or newspaper's name does not mean that that author or newspaper offends more often than others against rules of grammar or style ; it merely shows that they have been among the necessarily limited number chosen to collect instances from." Now this is not good writing. It is cumbrous, wordy, and platitudinous, and the ending on " from " gives it an , almost Gampish air. If doctors can err, the humble citizen may plead for a lenient sentence. Certain admirable rules are laid down for our guidance,—prefer the familiar word to the farfetched, the short word to the long, the concrete word, to the abstract. But many will differ on the instances chosen.. The writers condemn the use of " save" in the place of "except." To our mind, the first word is as familiar as the second, and there may be a very good reason for its use, for " except " is a bard, aggressive word which may well spoil the euphony of a sentence. Nor can we see why it should be wrong to use
" wind-flowers" instead of " anemones." A sentence from our own columns, " We will here merely chronicle the pro- cession of events," is taken as an instance of a malapropism,— "procession" for "progress "; but surely it is a quite legiti- mate metaphor.. But though we may quarrel with an instance here and there, we have no fault to #nd with the general criticism of current blunders. "Journalese" is one class,— sonorous words used inaccurately or tastelessly, like "in the contemplated eventuality " for " if so," " transpire " for " happen," " visualise" for "see." On the subject of " Neo- logisms" the authors take up a liberal-conservative attitude. New words must . come, but only when the . new need has arisen. " A writer should not indulge in them unless he is quite, sure that he is a good writer." "Americanisms," when they mean the introduction of Transatlantic vulgarisms, are not to be encouraged, and it is no defence to say that they are found in Chaucer. They may be good old English, but they are not good English. Each must be taken on its merits, and only if it, is beautiful or useful does it deserve to survive. The same thing is generally true of our native slang. Its proper place is in real life, and not in the more formal sphere of writing, though when it contains a vivid metaphor it may be justified on the merits. One remark of the authors is well worth quoting :—" The effect of using quotation marks with slang is merely to convert a mental into a moral weakness." "Solecisms," again, which mean the absence of the literary sense, are at all times to be condemned. Such is the use of " individual" for "person," and of phrases like ."rather unique." But the authors are at their best in their chapter on " Airs and Graces," those sad and futile attempts of the literary man to relieve the tedium of the world. Polysyllabic humour,, which saw something funny in speaking, as Poe sometimes did, of the nose as an "olfactory organ," has, we hope, departed with the Victorian era. Once it was a disease, and even George Eliot could write: " You refrain from any lacteal addition and. rasp your. tongue with unmitigated bohea." One vice which still flourishes in our midst is that which the authors call "elegant variation." You begin by writing " Mr. Chamberlain" ; in the next sentence you call him "the great Imperialist," in the next "the Birmingham dictator,"—until in the end neither you nor your readers know what you are at. "Archaism" is mainly the vice of the writer of historical. novels, and it results in obscurity or in a plunge into modern slang. It was Mr. Crockett who once spoke of a " house-party " at a French castle in the fifteenth century, and his works make a happy hunting-ground for the lover. of such lapses. Last come those flowers of speech which the authors can only . call "antics,"—the inappropriate word, preciousness, irrelevant poetry, intrusive smartness, and the ." determined picturesque," as when Mr. E. F. Benson writes : "A. carriage drive lay in long curves like a flicked whip. lash, surmounting terrace after, terrace set with nugatory nudities." All these are conscious sine of commission, flagrant, aggressive sins, for which no serious defence can be made.
The reading of "The liing's English" is a wholesome but saddening experience. "If thou 'Amu ldest mark iniquities," we may ask of it in the Psalmist's words, " who shall stand P" Probably in every sentence we have written there lurks some error which will be added to future, editions. Our, one consolation is that we are in good company. Mr. Morley can write " continuation " for " continuance," " continuance " for "continuation," "irreparable" for "irreplaceable," and he can translate esprit d'escalier as "the spirit of tho staircase," which, as the authors justly remark; sug- gests a goblin lurking in the hall clock. George Eliot wrote " euphuistically " for "euphemistically," and Borrow talked of having ." resource to vice " instead of recourse." Mr. Meredith speaks of "a mutually sensitive nerve," which is impossible, and Emerson gaily writes esprit du corps. Even so careful a writer as Stevenson has "demean" when he meant "degrade," misled by a false philology, and Mr. Balfour, the purity of whose English is remarkable, revels in the use of " individual " for " person." The truth is that without a blunder now and then there can be no good writing. A man should endeavour to write English as a master, not as a schoolmaster, and it is only the schoolmaster who never slips. Again, every member in good standing of the great Guild Merchant of Literature should remember Dryden's magnificent boast : " I trade both with the living and the dead for the enrichment of our tongue." When the river ceases to be fed by new streams it inevitably stagnates.
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