Inspiration and Effort

English Style

An English friend has written for the benefit of foreign aspirants to authorship in his language:

"In English, and especially in Modern English, one has to be very careful about over emphasis and over-statement. The word 'great', for example, which makes such a show in many other languages, is but sparingly used. We may apply it to men or women whose importance resides not in their position, not even in the stir they may have made in the world, but in the genuineness of achievement tested by time. It is felt to be too big, too judicial a word to be lavished on what is contemporary.

"A critic in a review will hesitate before describing a writer of the eminence of, say, Mr. T. S. Eliot, as a 'great poet' although he may be acknowledged to be one of the best writing in English. This is so much a characteristic of the English as to be a fact of usage, in spite of the cry from other peoples using the language for a richer, more elaborate, more ornate, even more verbose style to accomodate Oriental or American tastes. But I suppose, after all is said and done, it is a matter of 'taste in ties' — or there is no other go than to leave one to one's own certitude."

Two-thirds of the above pronouncement — the reference to the word "great" and to T. S. Eliot — echoes almost the words of Bernard Blackstone in his Advanced English for Foreign Students (page 264). And there is some sound advice in the pronouncement. But one is afraid Blackstone himself is a little too anxious to save the expansiveness of foreigners from ringing false in an acquired tongue which lets itself go less often than theirs; and, when the advice is cut off from Blackstone's own context to be given a still sharper and more exclusive turn at the beginning and also at the end where English usage is sought to be pin-pointed, it loses its value further by the very fault underlined — over-emphasis and over-statement. Not that the expression runs away with the

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writer; but the fault can lie in the thought no less than in the expression. And what is here counselled strikes one as an extreme view. Even the conclusion with its moderating air does not really balance it: the Oriental or the American is allowed his own "taste in ties", his own "certitude", but not quite granted that he is using English in the truly English way. The English way in all ages and yet more in modern times is believed to be symbolically summed up in the sparing use of epithets like "great".

A recent issue (October 31, 1958) of the Times Literary Supplement is at hand. On glancing through its advertisement columns one finds short quotations made from reviews of several books by writers of less eminence than T. S. Eliot. Still, what does one observe? On page 619 The Human Condition by Hannah Arendt is advertised and underneath we have the opinion of Philip Toynbee as expressed in the Observer: "A great work of the mind and the imagination." On page 623 Dr. Leslie D. Weatherhead is cited as saying about John Magee's Reality and Prayer: "A great book... Its insights again and again are startling in their originality." As for equivalents of "great" or else at least approximations to it, we light upon them almost everywhere. On page 628 Dr. J. H. Plumb characterises A Study in English Kingship by J. P. Kenyon: "A remarkable book, based on very sound scholarship... immensely readable". On page 620 we have J. B. Priestley pronouncing J. G, Cozzens' By Love Possessed to be "one of the major pieces of fiction of our post-war age".

Priestley on Cozzens' book is worth pausing over for a minute. He is admitted by all to be very English, and Cozzens is an American whose novel has received considerable slating from some English reviewers for what was regarded as over-writing and pretentiousness. Priestley evidently takes another view of the qualities seen thus by them and finds also merits they have overlooked; nor does he merely give grudging praise, as if to say, "The book is good, considering it is after all American". Could it be that there is no sharply fixed English attitude to style? Might

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there be not Englishmen and Englishmen, with one or the other of two opposite sides in prominence, and might not both these constitute in a subtle harmony the genuine English genius? Do we not also find responsible English critics ready to let themselves go in the matter of superlatives?

Over-emphasis and over-statement are defects, but in the review of books one must discriminate between a false encomium and a true or at least a plausible one and not be too facile in condemning a writer's phrases if they are not restrained. It is the quality of mind brought by a critic to bear upon a book, that should determine one's acceptance or rejection of words like "great" in his piece. And also there is no reason why a book, if it deserves enthusiastic recommendation, should be covered with a wet blanket for fear of slipping into an un-English style. It would seem that to be habitually restrained in writing is not necessarily to be English.

Even apart from the question of giving a fair amount of praise where praise appears due, the quality of restraint requires careful analysis. The exaggerative and the effusive are always to be avoided. However, to equate over-emphasis and over-statement with certain orders of style — the rich, the elaborate, the ornate — is an error. A style that is rich, elaborate and ornate need imply no more than a mode of thought and vision and emotion different from the mode that gets expressed in a bare and clipped style. Several sorts of styles can each make authentic literature and be in a fundamental sense sincere, whereas over-emphasis and over-statement always bring in falsity. Who would think of censuring out of hand a prose style like Sir Thomas Browne's, Jeremy Taylor's, Donne's, Gibbon's, De Quincy's, Landor's, Car-lyle's, Ruskin's, Meredith's, Henry James's, Chesterton's, Charles Morgan's, Sir Winston Churchill's?

These very names — three of them contemporary — should make one hesitate also to declare that the typically English style is the opposite of the rich, elaborate and ornate.

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In our own day the simpler, more curbed, more conversational style has found greater favour, but here too there are degrees and few modern styles are quite as bare and restrained as Swift's at his best. Even Bernard Shaw who has been most compared with Swift has his flourishes, his rhetorical colours and complications. And, apropos of Sparkenbroke, at once the most richly and the most subtly written of Charles Morgan's novels, did not James Agate in the Daily Express describe its author as "probably the most distinguished [living] master of English prose"? Then there is the very recent phenomenon of Lawrence Durrell, poet turned novelist, whose Justine, Balthazar and Mountolive have obtained an unusually good press. On Mountolive, which is hardly four months old, Elspeth Huxley1 spoke on the BBC: "I am lost in admiration at Mr. Durrell's superb use of details... and, above all, at his sheer imagination." The Times² hailed this novel as "a delight" and the Manchester Guardian³ as "masterly". But Durrell is far indeed from writing a plain hand. Richard Mayne,⁴ in the Sunday Times, declares: "His prose beguiles us with marvels of virtuosity." And even Pamela Hansford Johnson,⁵ who finds the book wanting in a centre, criticises it by saying that one reads it for just "the glittering, elaborate, lyric beauty of the style".

Yes, even today richness of expression is still with us and earns bouquets from good English critics — and may it never leave us! The least likely are imagination and eloquence in diverse manifestations to leave England of all countries, in favour of a single order of style and that too the subdued functional. For, English is especially a many-strata'd many-strained affair. The stratum and the strain our friend has in mind are mostly those of Englishmen at common talk among themselves about ordinary things: there the bare and clipped have much play. But when Englishmen pass from quotidian speech to the finer and deeper utterance of literature, many other elements in the complex English consciousness come up — modes of thought and vision and emotion that are Celtic, Greco-Roman, Italian, Hebrew, even Oriental, in

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addition to the Anglo-Saxon, the Teutonic, the French. All of course are assimilated into something that can be distinguished as English, but to define what is English so trenchantly as our counsellor has done is rather an injustice to the veritable solar spectrum that is the English spirit in its creative mood.

Besides, English invites by just its flexibility and varied responsiveness the play of personality and individual character. There is indeed some sort of norm, but it is never very clear-cut and never rules the writer very strictly as for instance the easily recognisable norm of nettete and ordonnance may rule the writer in French. This is dangerous doctrine and not to be shouted from the teacher's chair — hardly even to be whispered without serious caveats to the Indian student lest the already luxuriant Indian mind run riot, forgetting that in English we cannot indulge in luxuriance with absolute impunity. Even to the English student it should be offered with care, for, where the writing of literature is concerned, people to whom a language is native are not proof against going astray (any more than they are invariably apt to write better in it than foreigners of genius, like Conrad, Santayana, Madariaga, Maurois, Saurat, Cape-tanakis, Nehru, R. K. Narayan, Tagore, Radhakrishnan, Sri Aurobindo). But the doctrine remains true and, provided the writer has sufficient mastery over the elements of the language and a living sense of its genius, individual idiosyncrasy no less than psychological "Orientalism" or "Americanism" may be given its head and asked only to attend to four fundamental "No"s: it should see that there is no excess of sound over significance, no intricacy of word that does not really answer to an intricacy of idea or experience, no weakly trailing movement of clauses, no gaucherie of rhythm.

In certain small matters which are more syntactical than stylistic, the feel of the form — the feel of how a sentence would shape if it ran in one way or another — may be the only guide. We should refrain from making a fetish of "common usage", though we may not encourage habitual

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flouting of it. Grammar books and pundit manuals deserve respect: they help us to learn a language. What, however, they can at most do is to equip us to write a workman-like prose. Surely such prose is not to be disdained, but in itself it is not style. It can be the basis of a certain type of style when the artist-sense takes it up and makes an effective instrument out of it. But all literature is not called upon to be a transfiguration of such prose and its syntactical conventionalism. A sentence can be structured in various manners: a manner is not incorrect just by being unusual. Wide and intimate acquaintance with literature will guard us from being extra-suspicious of the unusual and from running our blue pencil too sharply through a student's phrases. Style is a creative, not a stereotyped, activity; and, so long as the four "No"s we have mentioned are kept in view, the less rules we make about it the better.

To those that are creatively inclined let us teach a double capacity: to be simple and restrained or to be subtle and splendid, as the occasion demands. And let us teach also a blend of the two powers, a blend faithful to the specific spirit of prose as distinguished from poetry and yet not devoid of the essential poetic touch — the style perhaps which Sir Herbert Read6 in our own day recommends when he praises as the finest prose in the language the Centuries of that Restoration mystic, William Traherne. Thus only can a multi-shaded and individualistic tongue like English be rendered fully alive for the Indian turned creative in it.

Notes and References

1. Quoted in the New Statesman, 1 November 1958, p. 597.

2. Ibid.

3. Ibid.

4. Ibid.

5. The New Statesman, 25 October 1958, p. 567.

6. Quoted by Kathleen Raine in the New Statesman, 1 November 1958, p. 598.

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