Nor are the exponents of the grand manner, of an ornate style, to be patterned after. If elevation of theme is not present, then the peril of "fine writing" is scarcely to be avoided. Better follow such writers as Bacon, Bunyan, Hobbes, Swift in preference. Or the Augustan group, Dryden, Addison, Shaftesbury, and Temple. But Doctor Johnson, Burke and Gibbon are not models for the beginner, any more than the orotund prose of Bossuet, the musical utterance of Châteaubriand, or the dramatic prose of Hugo are safe models for French students. The rich continence of Flaubert, the stippled concision of Mérimée or the dry-sherry wit of Voltaire are surer guides. And the urbane ease and flowing rhythms of Thackeray are preferable to the baphometic verbal baptisms of Carlyle the Boanerges.
Yet what sweet temptations are to be found in the golden age of English prose, beginning with the evocation of Sir Walter Raleigh, "O eloquent, just, and mighty death; whom none could advise, thou hast persuaded"; surely not far beneath the magnificent prose of the sixtieth chapter of Isaiah in the Authorised, "Arise, shine; for thy light is come, and the glory of the Lord is risen unto thee," which is so mighty in rhythm that even those "dolefullest of creatures ... utterly ignorant of English literature, the Revisers of 1870-85, hardly dared to touch at all," blandly remarks Professor Saintsbury. And to balance the famous "Now since these dead bones" of Sir Thomas, there is the tender coda to Sir William Temple's Use of Poetry and Music, "When all is done, human life is at the greatest and best." Those long, sweeping phrases, drumming with melody and cadences, like the humming of slow, uplifting walls of water tumbling on sullen strands, composed by the masters of that "other harmony of prose," are not mere "purple panels" but music made by immortals. (And I am convinced that if R. L. S. were alive and condemned to read this last sentence of mine, with its monotonous "run" of M's, he would condemn it.) Consider Milton and his majestic evocation: "Methinks I see in my mind a noble and puissant nation arousing herself, ... an eagle mewing her mighty youth ..." and then fall down and worship, for we are in the holy of holies. Stevenson preferred the passage, "I cannot praise a fugitive and cloistered virtue," and who shall gainsay him? And Stevenson has written a most inspiring study of the Technical Elements of Style in Literature, to be found in the Biographical Edition. In it he calls the Macaulay "an incomparable dauber" for running the letter "k" through a paragraph, and in it he sets forth in his chastened and classic style the ineluctable (Henry James revived this pretty word) perils of prose. Also its fascinations. "The prose writer," he says, "must keep his phrases large, rhythmical, comely, without letting them fall into the strictly metrical; harmonious in diversity, musical in the mouth, in texture woven into committed phrases and rounded periods." The stylist may vault airily into the saddle of logic, or in the delicate reticulation of his silver-fire paragraphs he may take, as an exemplar, John Henry Newman.
Stevenson is a perfectionist, and that way lies madness for all save a few valiant spirits. Sir Walter Raleigh, formerly Professor Raleigh, has written a crystal-clear study on Style, an essay of moment because in the writing thereof he preaches what he practises. He confesses that "inanity dogs the footsteps of the classic tradition," and that "words must change to live, and a word once fixed becomes useless.... This is the error of the classical creed, to imagine that in a fleeting world, where the quickest eye can never see the same thing twice, and a deed once done can never be repeated, language alone should be capable of fixity and finality." The Flaubertian crux. Nevertheless, Flaubert could write of style in a fluid, impressionistic way: "A style ... which will be as rhythmic as verse, as precise as the language of science, which will have undulations, modulations, like those of a violoncello, flashes of fire. A style which would enter into the idea like the stroke of a stiletto, ... all the combinations of prosody have been made, those of prose are still to make." Flaubert was not obsessed by the "unique word," but by a style which is merged in the idea; as the melodic and harmonic phrases of Richard Wagner were born simultaneously and clothed in the appropriate orchestral colours. Perhaps the cadenced prose of Pater, with its multiple resonance and languorous rhythms, may be a sort of sublimated chess-game, as Saintsbury more than hints; yet, what a fair field for his carved ivory pieces. His undulating and iridescent periods are like the solemn sound of organ music accompanied from afar by a symphony of flutes, peacocks, and pomegranates.
No wonder Stevenson pronounces French prose a finer art than English, though admitting that in the richer, denser harmonies of English its native writers find at first hand the very quality so eagerly sought for by Flaubert. French is a logical language, one of distinction and clarity, and one in which metre never intrudes, but it lacks the overtones of our mother speech. The English shares in common with the Russian the art of awakening feelings and thoughts by the resonance of words, which seem to be written not in length but in depth, and then are lost in faint reverberations.
But artistic prose, chiselled prose, is a negligible quantity nowadays. It was all very well in the more spacious times of linkboys, sedan-chairs, and bag-wigs, but with the typist cutting one's phrases into angular fragments, with the soil at our heels saturated in slang, what hope is there for assonance, variety in rhythm, and the sonorous cadences of prose? Write "naturally," we are told. Properly speaking, there is no such thing as a "natural style." Even Newman, master of the pellucid, effortless phrase, confesses to laborious days of correction, and he wrote with the idea uppermost and with no thought of style, so-called. Abraham Lincoln nourished his lonely soul on the Bible and Bunyan. He is a writer of simple yet elevated prose, without parallel in our native literature other than Emerson. Hawthorne and Poe wrote in the key of classic prose; while Walt Whitman's jigsaw jingle is the ultimate deliquescence of prose form. For practical every-day needs the eighteenth-century prose men are the best to follow. But the Bible is the Golden Book of English prose.
Quintilian wrote: "We cannot even speak except in longs and shorts, and longs and shorts are the material of feet." All personal prose should go to a tune of its own. The curious are recommended to the monumental work of George Saintsbury, A History of English Prose Rhythm. Prose may be anything else, but it must not be bad blank verse. "Numerous" as to rhythms, but with no hint of balance, in the metrical sense; without rhythm it is not prose at all. Professor Oliver Elton has set this forth with admirable lucidity in his English Prose Numbers. He also analyses a page from The Golden Bowl of Henry James, discovering new beauties of phrasing and subtle cadences in the prose of this writer. Professor Saintsbury's study is the authoritative one among its fellows. Walter Pater's essay on Style is honeycombed with involutions and preciosity. When On the Art of Writing, by Arthur Quiller-Couch, appeared we followed Hazlitt's advice and reread an old book, English Composition, by Professor Barrett Wendell, and with more pleasure and profit than followed the later perusal of the Cornish novelist's lectures.
He warns against jargon. But the seven arts, science, society, medicine, politics, religion, have each their jargon. Not music-criticism, not baseball, are so painfully "jargonised" as metaphysics. Jargon is the fly in the ointment of every critic. Even the worthy fellow of Jesus College, Sir Arthur himself, does not altogether escape it. On page 23 of his Inaugural Address he speaks of "loose, discinct talk." "Discinct" is good, but "ungirded" is better because it is not obsolete, and it is more sonorous and Saxon. On page 42 we stumble against "suppeditate" and gnash our teeth. After finishing the book the timid neophyte will be apt to lay the flattering unction to his soul that he is a born stylist, like the surprised Mr. Jourdain, who spoke prose so many years without knowing it.
II
Fancy a tall, imposing man, in the middle years, standing before a music-desk, humming and beating time. His grey, lion-like mane is in disorder; his large eyes, pools of blue light, gleam with excitement. The colour of his face is reddish, the blood mounts easily to his head, a prophetic sign of his death by apoplexy. It is Gustave Flaubert in his study at Croisset, a few miles down the Seine below Rouen. He is chanting a newly composed piece of prose, marking time as if he were conducting a music-drama. "What are you doing there?" asked his friend. "Scanning these words, because they don't sound well," he replied. Flaubert would spend a day over a sentence and practically tested it by declaiming—spouting, he called it—for as he wisely remarked: "A well-constructed phrase adapts itself to the rhythm of respiration." His delight in prose assonance and cadence manifested itself in his predilection for such a phrase as Châteaubriand's in Atala: "Elle répand dans le bois ce grand secret de mélancholie qu'elle aime à raconter aux vieux chênes et aux rivages antiques des mers." There's a "mouther" for you! as George Saintsbury would say. But in this age of uninflected speech the louder the click of the type-machine the better the style.
If modern prose were written for the ear as well as the eye, chanted and scanned, it might prove more sonorous and rhythmic than it does, and more artistic. Curiously enough, Professor Saintsbury in his magisterial work writes: "I rather doubt myself whether the very finest and most elaborate prose is not better read than heard." That is, it must be overheard by the inner ear, which statement rather puts a damper on Flaubert's contention. What saith the worthy Aristotle? "All things are determined by number." Prose should have rhythm but should not be metrical ("Rhetoric"); which Robert Louis Stevenson thus paraphrased in his Technical Elements of Style in Literature: "The rule of scansion in verse is to suggest no measure but the one in hand; in prose to suggest no measure at all. Prose must be rhythmical, and it may be as much so as you will; but it must not be metrical. It may be anything, but it must not be verse." (Probably if he had read the amorphous stuff by courtesy named "vers libre" Stevenson would have written a stronger word than "anything.") Or, again, Saintsbury: "The Rhythm of Prose, like the Metre of Verse, can, in English as well as the classical languages, be best expressed by the foot system, or system of mathematical combinations of 'long' and 'short' syllables." A fig for your "ancient trumpery of skeleton scanning," cries Professor William Morrison Patterson in his The Rhythm of Prose: "Amphibrachs, bacchics, antibacchics, antipasts, molossi, dochmiacs, and proceleusmatics, which heretofore have been brandished before our eyes, as if they were anything more than, as stress-patterns, merely half the story."