OPENING SENTENCES

Ashburton Guardian, Volume 55, Issue 285, 14 September 1935, Page 6

OPENING SENTENCES

SIMPLE AND UNEXCITING. Authors are often at great pains to open their novels with something special in the way of sensational sentences, conversation, or exclamation. In contrast to these are the simple, matter-of-fact sentences with which most of the masterpieces oF fiction have opened. To take our earliest favourites first, how simple and unaffected is the opening of “Robinson Crusoe.” ‘‘l was born in the year 1632, in the city of York, of a good family,” it runs.

Scott begins “Ivanhoe” with equal simplicity: “In the pleasant district of Merry England which is watered by the River Don,” and so on. “Westward Ho,” opens with a sentence of quite the same kindl: “ALI who have travelled through . . North Devon . . must needs know the little town of Bideford.”

“Gulliver’s Travels” leads off with

“My father had a small estate in Nottinghamshire. I was the third of five sons.” These four works represent fairly well youthful tastes in literature, and yet in neither case has the author found it necessary to get excited in order to -attract his readers. Nearly always, however, we shall find that tho great author manages to let you know pretty well in his first sentence exactly wlia.t he is going to write about. Samuel Smiles introduces us to “Self Help” as follows. “ ‘Heaven, helps those who help themselves’ is a well-tried maxim, embodying in a small compass the results of vast human experience.” The “Vicar of Wakefield” gets at once to the subject: “I was ever of opinion that the honest man who married and brought up a large family did more service than lie who continued single and only talked about population.” Boswell modestly opened Ins monumental “Life of Johnson : “To write the life of him who excelled all mankind in writing the lives of others ... is an arduous, and may be reckoned in me a presumptuous task.” In a very quiet, unostentatious waj does Darwin begin that work; which was to revolutionise scientific religious thought, the “Origin of Species. “When on board H.M.S. Bteagle as a naturalist, I was much struck with certain facts in the distribution or the organic beings inhabiting boutfi America.” „ . , „ The opening of the “Pilgrim s Progress” is, as everybody knows, as simple, as it is beautiful: “As I walked, through the wilderness of this world, I lighted on a certain place, where was a den, and I laid me down in that place to sleep.” References to the weather are a very popular form of opening a work of fiction. For instance, “Pendennis’ starts off with: T “Ono fine morning, m the dull London season.” “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” also opens on weather, but not so cheerfully: “Late in the afternoon of a chilly day in February.” For quaint openings we have that ot Thackeray’s “The Newcomes” : _ “A crow who had flown away with a cheese from a dairy window sate perclied on a tree looking down at a o-reat big frog in a pool underneath him.” “The Woman in White” has a suggestive opening: “This is a story of what a woman s. patience can endure and what a man s resolution can achieve.” ’ Dickens’ openings were not the least eh arm features of his works. Two of these may he given. “Dombey and Son” explains itself in the first sentence : “Dombey sat in the corner of the darkened room in the great armchair by the lied side, and Sou lay tucked up ill his jittle basket, bedstead.” _ . “Martin Ghuzzlewit” leads off with the following curious statement: “As no lady or gentleman with any claim to polite breeding can possibly sympathise with the Chuzzlewit family without being first assured' of the extreme antiquity of ,the race, it is a great satisfaction to know that it is undoubtedly descended in a direct line from Adam and EHve.”