EXAMPLES OF STYLE

Auckland Star, Volume XXIX, Issue 253, 26 October 1898, Page 6

EXAMPLES OF STYLE

Mr Frederick Harrison discourses 'Oiv Style' in English Prose' in the 'Nineteenth. Century' for June. At the head of all prose writers, in all languages, he puts Plato, who is faultless. Voltaire, he considers, -the greatest master of: prose iv an 5 r modern

language,

'His limpid clearness, ease, sparkle and inexhaustible self-possession have no rival in modern tongues, and are almost those of Plato himself. But he is no Plato; he never rises into the pathos, imagination, upper air of the empyrean, to which the mighty Athenian can soar at will. Voltaire is never tedious, wordy, rhetorical, or obscure; and this can' be said of hardly any other modern but Heine and Swift. My edition of Voltaire is in sixty volumes, of which some forty are prose; and in all those twenty-thousand pages of prose not one is dull or laboured. We could not say 'this of the verse. But I take 'Candide' or 'Za.dig' to be the high-water mark of easy French prose, wanting, no doubt, in the liner elements of pathos, dignity and power.' 'Many good .judges,' proceeds Mr Harrison, 'hold Swift to be our Voltaire, without defect, or equal, I should certainly advise the ambitious essayist to study Swift for instruction, by reason of the unfailing .clearness, simplicity and directness of his style. But when we come to weigh him by the highest .standard of all, we find Swift too uniformly pedestrian, too dry; wanting iv variety, in charm, in melody, in thunder, and in flash. The grandest prose must be like the vault of Heaven itself, passing from the freshness of dawn to the warmth of a serene noon, and anon breaking forth into a crashing storm. Swift sees the sun in one uniform radiance ol! cool- light, but it never fills the air with warmth, nor does it even light the welkin with fire.'

Swift, Hume and Goldsmith are the eighteenth century writers Mr Frederick Harrison advises the student to read for style. Among recent or present day writers he gives high place to Thackeray, Fronde and Ruskhi. 'Johnson, Macaulay, Carlyle, Dickens, Jhislun have been the cause of flooding us with cheap copies of their special manner. And even now Meredith, Stevenson, Swinburne, and Pater lead the weak to ape their airs and graces. All imitation in literature is an evil.' The melody of Ruskin'S prose, he thinks, may be matched with that of Milton and Shelley. The great.depojsitory of good English is the Bible. We cannot now write in its language, but its noble prose is the best our literature can give.'

While admitting1 that style is something* which cannot be taught, Mr Frederick Harrison ventures to give young- writers a few 'tips.' 'Supposing; one has something1 to say—something1 that it concerns the world to know —and this, for a young •student, is a considerable claim, 'a large order,' I think lie calls it in the current dialect, all 1 have to tell him is this. Think it out quite clearly in your own mind, and then put it down in the simplest words that offer, just as if you were telling- it to » friend, but "dropping1 the tags of the day with which your spoken discourse would naturally be garnished. Be easy, colloquial if you like, but shun those vocables which come to us across the Atlantic, or from Newmarket and WMteehapel, with which the gilded youth and journalists 'up-to-date' love to salt their language. Do not make us 'sit up' too much, or always 'take a back sent;' do not ask us to 'ride for a fall,' to 'hurry Tip,' or 'boom it all we know.' Nothing is more irritating in print than tho iteration of. slang, and those stale phrases with which 'the half-baked' seek to convince, us that they are 'in the swim' and 'going strong'—if I may borrow the language of the day—that Volapuk of the smart and knowing world. It offends me like the reek of last night's tobacco

'It is a good rule for a young writer to avoid more than twenty or thirty words without a full stop, and not to put more than two commas in each sentence, so that it s clauses should not exceed three. This of course, only in practice. There is no positive law. A fine writer can easily place in a sentence one hundred w rords, and five or six minor clauses with their proper commas and colons. Ruskin wa.s wont to toss oft two or three hundred words and five-nnd-twenty commas without a pause. But, even in the hand of such a magician this ends in failure, and is really grotesque in effect, for no such sentence can be spoken aloud. A beginner can seldom manage more than twenty-live words in' one sentence with perfect ease. Nearly all young writers, just as men did in the early ages of prose composition, drift into ragged preposterous, inorganic sentences, without beginning, middle, or end, which they ought to break into two or three.

'And then they hunt np terms that are fit for science, poetry or devotion. They affect "evolution" and "factors," "the intervention of forces," "the coordination of organs;" or else everything is "weird," or "opalescent," "debonair," and "enamelled," so that they will-not call a spade a spade. I do not say s^ick to Saxon ivords and avoid Latin words as a law of language, because English now consists of both; good and plain Engiish prose needs both. We seldom get tigf highest poetry without a large usi^-of Saxon, and we .hardly reach precise and elaborate explanation without Latin terms. Try to turn precise and elaborate explanation into strict Saxon; and then try' to turn "Our Father which art in Heaven" into pure Latin words.' —Austra-

lasian