“In the abstract” — that is to say, a priori, without the prejudice of particular examples, and as a preliminary to a more minute analysis.
Every reader knows that Verse is not necessarily Poetry — that Verse, indeed, is merely an outward form which may, or may not, be inspired with poetic feeling. Verse, therefore, is not an essential thing; it is merely a species of rhythm, and, in the abstract, a static, academic “norm.” No such “norm” is ever postulated for Prose; there is therefore no exact opposition between Prose and Verse.
Poetry is creative expression: prose is constructive expression. But “creative” is a word to be used with discretion in a critical vocabulary, and it is certainly not the antithesis of “constructive.” There is, however, a valuable distinction to be made between mental activities that take in impressions to condense and concentrate them; and mental activities that merely disperse impressions from the store of memory — the activities of condensation and dispersion. Poetry seems to be generated in the process of condensation; prose in the process of dispersion.
“Constructive” implies ready-made materials; words stacked around the builder, ready to use. Prose is a structure of ready-made words. Its “creative” function is confined to plan and elevation — functions these, too, of Poetry, but in Poetry subsidiary to the creative function.
Observation convinces me that in Poetry, as in every other art, the people who recognize the art are few, and that these few recognize it intuitively. Just as the ear in some natural and innate way reacts to melody, and the eye to color, so the intelligence reacts to poetry.
Words, rather than musical scales, are the medium of normal communication between men, therefore the art of words, whether poetry or prose, is in any degree made more accessible to ordinary men than the art of music. All art is difficult, remote, subtle; and though in the process of catharsis it may act as a release for emotions that are common to all men, yet in this process art is to many of us an unknown quantity.
It is curiosity that takes the average reader to a book; it is interest that sustains the effort of reading.
Does he stop to consider the style in which the book is written? Does he realize that there is such thing as style? Is he aware of the hopes and fears of that unknown entity, the author?
What does the mind enjoy in books? Either the style or nothing. But, someone says, what about the thought? The thought, that is the style, too.
The style of an author should be the image of his mind, bu the choice and command of language is in the fruit of exercise.
In this way, being the response to man’s organized and unceasing cravings for strength, clearness, order, dignity and sweetness, for a life intenser and more harmonious, what man writes comes to be greater than what man is.
The marked use of onomatopoeic words is not generally possible, for they stand only for a limited group of direct sense perceptions, and do not reflect all the varieties of thought and feeling involved in even the simplest forms of expression. Yet the appropriate use of such a word will waken up from drowsiness the whle of a sentence.
This symbolism of sounds, the suggestive power of various combinations of vowels and consonants, has never been very carefully studied, but certain associations of suggestions may be briefly stated. It is obvious that long vowels suggest a slower movement than the shorter vowels, and that vowels which we pronounce by opening the mouth convey the idea of more massive objects; while those which are formed by nearly closing the lips suggest more slight movements or more slender objects.
There are at least 3 groups, differing in degree of subtlety:
- Mere onomatopoeia: hiss, whirr, cluck, clap, bubble…
- Movement of lips, tongue and teeth to simulate the action described, plus suggestive sound: blare, flare, peal, rustle, brittle, whistle, creep, patter, scrabble, puddle, shimmer, shiver, shudder, fiddle, sling, globe…
- Sounds not imitative, but suggestive (musical equivalents): glitter, swoon, mood, sheen, horror, smudge, still (tranquil), womb, jelly…
The surcharge of such words is not always base. There are words that have a magic ring of circumstance which no use can use, as honor, glory, courage, victory. The difficulty in the use of these words is that they require a certain elevation of thought to give them their appropriate setting; and to attempt this elevation without the right equipment of mind and emotion is to risk bathos.
There is also a false sense of simplicity involved; the old Saxon words are so sturdy and uncouth, the new Latin words so sophisticated and elegant!
Because our native language is barbarous in its origins it is felt that wherever possible a Latin word should be substituted for a Saxon one, and so we get commencement instead of beginning, and termination instead of end.
Translated foreign idioms, such as “leap to the eyes,” “give furiously to think,” are usually facetious in intention or vulgar in effect, and should therefore be avoided.
A more recent abuse of words comes under the heading of jargon. A pseudo-scientific profundity is given to simple or even obvious statements by translating them into technical phraseology, or merely by latinizing English words.
The style is “colored” by the particular affectation — for example, high faulting’ (bombast), pomposity, slang, jargon, euphuism; but these are questions which will be more properly discussed under the heading of Rhetoric. Not so obvious are polite words — words which by a large volume of sound or syllables convey a false sense of superiority, as, for example, public convenience.
Burke was so far from being a gaudy or flowery writer, that he was one of the severest writers we have. His words are the most like things; his style is the most strictly suited to the subject. He unites every extreme and every variety of composition; the lowest and the meanest words and descriptions with the highest. He exults in the display of power, in shewing the extent, the force, and intensity of his ideas; he is led on by the mere impulse and vehemence of his fancy, not by the affectation of dazzling his readers by gaudy conceits or pompous images. He was completely carried away by his subject. He had no other object but to produce the strongest impression on his reader, by giving the truest, the most characteristic, the fullest, and most forcible description of things, trusting to the power of his own mind to mould them into grace and beauty.
To add an epithet of quality is to progress from the abstract and therefore unvisualized entity of substance to the definite entity of a sense perception. And since this is a progress from vagueness to vividness, it suggests that clear definition is an elementary need in prose style. But not all substantives are vague; and of epithets, not all that are appropriate are necessary.
It might seem to a novice that to introduce as many words as have a bearing on the subject must necessarily enlighten it. But epithets are beautiful in poetry, but make prose languishing and cold. A man crossed the street is a definite statement, vivid enough. To say a man in black crossed the busy street is to lose a certain immediateness of effect.
Another type of unnecessary epithet is not so much redundant, as presumptuous. It attributes to a thing a quality which cannot fairly belong to that thing, either carelessly, or merely fore the sake of the empty resonance of a word. Such epithets are generally either loose personifications of inanimate objects, or dead or collapsed metaphors — in any case, unintended metaphors. “The wrathful sea,” the “sleeping ocean,” “the slumberous roll of the silent swell,” “unconscious humor,” “beautiful craft,” are examples of this very prevalent form of inexactitude.
Much the most important point is to be able to use metaphors, for this is the one thing that cannot be learned from others; and it is also a mark of genius, since a good metaphors implies an intuitive perception of the similarity in dissimilars.
The Simile, in which a comparison is made directly between 2 objects, belongs to an earlier stage of literary expression: it is the deliberate elaboration of a correspondence, often pursued for its own sake. But a Metaphor is the swift illumination of an equivalence. Two images, or an idea and an image, stand equal and opposite; clash together and respond significantly, surprising the reader with a sudden light.
It often happens in exposition that abstract language is inadequate to express a meaning clearly, and then metaphor may be introduced to illuminate the thought. Paradoxically, it is in scientific prose that the illuminative metaphor is most effectively used.
Metaphors are not merely artificial devices for making discourse more vivid and poetical, but are also necessary for the apprehension and communication of new ideas. Metaphors are often the way in which creative minds perceive things, so that the explicit recognition that we are dealing with an analogy rather than a real identity comes later as a result of further reflection and analysis.
I can imagine no more striking, simple, and heroic example of animal faith; especially when the bull is what is technically called noble, that is, when he follows the rule again and again with eternal singleness of thought, eternal courage, and no suspicion of a hidden agency that is mocking him. What the red rag is to this brave creature, their passions, inclinations, and chance notions are to the heathen. What they will they will; and they would deem it weakness and disloyalty to ask whether it is worth willing or whether it is attainable.
The sentence as a unit in prose style is best approached from the evolutionary standpoint. The further back we go in the history of known languages, the more we find that the sentence was one indissoluble whole in which those elements we are accustomed to think of as single words were not yet separated. Jespersen says that we must think of primitive language as consisting of very long words, full of difficult sounds, and sung rather than spoke.
I had to discover for myself why Shakespeare’s English was so immeasurably superior to all others. I found that it was his persistent, natural, and magnificent use of hundreds of transitive verbs. Rather will you find an “is” in his sentences.
Sentences in their variety run from simplicity to complexity, a progress not necessarily reflected in length: a long sentence may be extremely simple in construction — indeed, must be simple if it is to convey its sense easily.
Other things being equal, a series of short sentences will convey an impression of speed, and are therefore suited to the narration of action or historical events; while longer sentences give an air of solemnity and deliberation to writing.
They have seen the French rebel against a mild and lawful monarch, with more fury, outrage and insult, than ever any people has been known to raise against the most illegal usurper, or the most sanguinary tyrant. Their resistance was made to concession; their revolt was from protection; their blow was aimed at a hand holding out graces, favors, and immunities.
The danger with all long and complex sentences is that they may lack balance. The sense may be logically clear, the rhythm may be easy, but still they try our patience or offend our sensibilities.
The paragraph is a device of punctuation. The indentation by which it is marked implies no more than an additional breathing space.
Rhythm is not a priori construction. It is not an ideal form to which we fit our words. Above all it is not a musical notation to which our words submit.
Rhythm is more profound than this. It is born, not with the words, but with the thought, and with whatever confluence of instincts and emotions the thought is accompanied. As the thought takes shape in the mind, it takes a shape. It has always been recognized that clear thinking precedes good writing. There is about good writing a visual actuality. It exactly reproduces what we should metaphorically called the contour of our thought. The metaphor is for once exact: thought has a contour or shape. The paragraph is the perception of this contour or shape.
The writer has towards his materials, words, the same relation that an artist, say a modeler, has towards his material, clay. The paragraph is a plastic mass, and it takes its shape from the thought it has to express: its shape is the thought.
The arrangement of paragraphs within a larger unit of composition is mainly a question of rhetoric. But in rhetoric we consider arrangement as a means to secure a particular effect; from the point of view of composition we have to consider arrangement as an end in itself, as a pattern of aesthetic worth, a “good” gestalt independent of the ideas expressed.
An essay is an “attempt at” — an attempt at the expression of an idea or mood or feeling lurking unexpressed in the mind. It is an informal attempt to create a pattern in words which shall correspond with an idea, mood or feeling.
An impressionist painting, for example, is one into which the spectator “enters” with all the sensations and emotions that accompany the actual scene depicted. An impressionist prose style is one that gives the illusion that the reader is participating in the events, scenes or actions described.
The essence of all these different modes of subordination is persuasion to a static view of things, to a condition of logical, moral, rational or emotional satisfaction. The writer submits to a scale of values which he finds ready-made in the world he lives in. But another type of writer does not wish to measure himself against an objective reality; all he desires is to be assured of his own reality, of the positive existence of his own individuality and his own unique reactions to the phenomenal world. His aim is to project himself, to persuade us not to this view or that view of the world, but to the microcosm that he himself is.
The style is the man.
Two things are essential to an expressionistic rhetoric: sensibility enough to be aware of one’s individual reactions, and emotion enough to enlarge this sensibility, to magnify and exploit it in the interests of self-projection, self-expression, self-”creation.”
A state of sensibility is generally a state of passivity. We receive the impressions which stream in through the senses, and our body automatically responds. We even go so far as to express a state of satisfaction, or some other feeling aroused in us. We look at a landscape, we “feel” obscurely, and then perhaps we say “How lovely!” But this is not at all the process of a writer bent on self-expression. The obscure sensation which he experiences must itself be defined, analyzed and described. It must be distinguished from all other sensations, whether the writer or of other people.
A personal style may be clear and concrete, but it is not ordered. The images, though hard and distinct, are haphazard. They form a picturesque ruin, not a symmetrical structure. The details of this disorder we may call the idiom of the writer. And just as the idiom of one language cannot be translated into the idiom of another without giving an impression of falsity, so a writer’s idiom is personal to himself, and cannot be copied or assimilated by other writers.
The art of exposition is the mere logic of thought, but when this art is heightened in any way, we must seek other terms. The first of these is eloquence, which is the art of exposition animated by an intuitive grasp of the greatness of its theme.
There are 2 sorts of eloquence; the one indeed scarce deserves the name of it, which consists chiefly in labored and polished periods, an over-curious and artificial arrangement of figures, tinseled over with a gaudy embellishment of words, which glitter, but convey little or no light to the understanding.
The other sort of eloquence is quite the reverse of this, and which may be said to be the true characteristic of the holy Scriptures; where the eloquence arise from a surprising mixture of simplicity and majesty, which is a double character, so difficult to be united, that it is seldom to be met with in compositions merely human.
Elegance is a play with words; wit a play on words. Elegance, which is concerned with the position of words, disposes them in various “figures.” Wit is concerned with the meaning of words, which it deflects or deforms.
The more innocent forms of wit play on unexpected conjunctions and oppositions of words. There is again a need for the sparing use of this type of wit; it grows wearisome and facetious if kept up too long.
Poetry deals with primal and conventional things — the hunger for bread, the love of woman, the love of children, the desire for immortal life. If men really had new sentiments, poetry could not deal with them. If a man, instead of falling in love with a woman, fell in love with a fossil or a sea anemone, poetry could not express him. Poetry can only express what is original in one sense — the sense in which we speak of original sin. It is original, not in the paltry sense of being new, but in the deeper sense of being old; it is original in the sense that it deals with origins.
But to return to true eloquence: it is intuitive in its nature, and is “fed by an abundant spring.” It flows when some dominant idea has mastery of the mind and orders the expression to the single purpose of that idea. Everything, every subordination and subtlety of style, is driven into one persuasive unity.
An enthusiasm for a poor theme may be genuine to the extent of the writer’s intelligence— he is then eloquent because he cannot rejoice in restraint. But in this second order of mock-eloquence the writer, suspecting the means of his theme, attempts to magnify it by grand phrases, thereby hoping to invest his own poor thoughts with the quality of this magnificence.
A noble theme does not unite with a sincere and impassioned mind by casual chance, but they come together naturally, by a process of fruition which is expressed in the word character.
Eloquence is, indeed, closely related to glory, for one is the expression in deeds, as the other is in words, of the same animating principle of human conduct.
All the laws of good writing aim at a unity or identity of the mind in all the processes by which the word is associated to its import. To give the phrase, the sentence, the structural member, the entire composition, song, or essay, a similar unity with its subject and its self — style is in the right way when it tends towards that.
No matter how beautiful the thought, nor, taken singly, with what happiness expressed, you do not know what writing prose is. At bottom what you do is to think aloud, to think with pen to paper.
But Newman does not follow the common tradition — of writing. His tradition is that of cultured, the most highly educated, conversation; it is the flower of the best Oxford life. Perhaps this gives it a charm of unaffected and personal sincerity that nothing else could.
We might say that all the modes of rhetoric which we have been considering become proofs of original genius only so far as they are modified by a predominant passion in the writer. The sense of the quality of words; the use of appropriate epithets and images; the organization of the period, the paragraph and the plot; the arts of exposition and of narrative; all the gifts of thought and sensibility — these are only dry perfections unless they are moved by a spirit which is neither intelligence nor emotion, but the sustained power of reason.
A life of reason is more than a life of self-development, because it is also a life of self-devotion, of service to outer and autocratic abstractions.
A certain degree of passion is to be found in a writer like Walter Pater; his style is everywhere definitely his own; it has character and it has beauty, and we feel that such an outer unity must spring from an inner unity.
It was concerned with life at its finest creative point — the point where moral judgments are formed. The deeper this penetrating mind delved into the psychological complexity of human motives the more involved his world became.
The ordinary use of the word “tradition” implies a “handing down” of something vital — a torch, lit in the remote past, whose light is the only light capable of guiding us in the particular darkness surrounding us at the moment of present existence. There is a good deal to be said for this conception: it implies continuity; it also implies activity. It is not, however, completely satisfactory, if only for the fact that it makes no provision for the athletes of the metaphor, who race from point to point with the burning brand. It assumes, so to speak, that a runner is miraculously there at the relay point, to seize the torch from the exhausted fore-runner.
It is to Michel Angelo that we owe even the existence of Raffaelle; it is to this Raffaelle owes the grandeur of his style. He was taught by him to elevate his thoughts, and to conceive his subjects with dignity.
It is a discipline that needs to be informed by the originating forces of mental energy, clear vision, and fine sensibility.
The perfection of a structure of this kind secures the logical arrangement of ideas and so preserves the unity of the thesis; without such a logical framework, irrelevant matter might be introduced under cover of some passing association of ideas; the wild goose and the red herring are common pests in logical writing, and nets must be constructed to exclude them.
Fiction may therefore be regarded as an art which must translate life into words, put life into a definite shape, without in any way destroying its vital quality. Drama is different in that it abstracts the universal elements from life and constructs from these a rarefied and artificial life of the intellect, which is also in some undetermined way the life of the instincts.
Aristotle defined rhetoric as “the power to see the possible ways of persuading people about any given subject.”
The art of expressing oneself in a logical manner we call exposition, but “logical” is not used here in any precise scientific sense. Indeed, we might say that exposition is the art of expressing oneself clearly, logic being implied in the structure of the sentences employed.
The use of symbols in an exact and consistent way is the foundation of unequivocal expression, and therefore of good prose. Good expository prose is the organization of symbols into a structure which we call reasoning.
There may exist in the writer an emotional bias which compels him towards a certain attitude in life.
The only thing that is indispensable for the possession of a good style is personal sincerity.
In this process of translation, the writer should convey to the reader the speed of events, and the actuality of objects. Both these effects are best secured by economy of expression: that is to say, the words used to convey the impression should be just sufficient. If there are too many words, the action is clogged, the actuality blurred. If too few, the impression is not conveyed in its completeness; the outlines are vague. In either case there is a lack of visual clarity.
These rules seem obvious, but they have seldom been observed, and good narrative writing is comparatively rare in English literature. There is a human failing which urges us to elaborate and decorate our descriptions; it is perhaps merely the desire to infuse an objective activity with something of the personality of the narrator. There is, too, the irresistible attraction of words in themselves, urging us to use them for their own sakes rather than as exact symbols of the things they stand for. With these various dangers waylaying him, the writer can rarely exercise sufficient restraint to enable him to keep his eye on the object, and give to the reader the concreteness of the things he perceives.
Most historians have considered it necessary to eke out the scantiness of their facts with personal affectations. We are given, not a narrative of facts, but a contemporaneous philosophy of history — an amalgam of politics, psychology, metaphysics, and prejudice.