The Central Tradition Of English Prose

Press, Volume CVI, Issue 31161, 10 September 1966, Page 4

The Central Tradition Of English Prose

(Revtetred by R A C.J ! lan A. Gordon. The Movement of English Prose. Longmans. Longmans’ English Language Series, of which six titles are published or announced,; began with this study of English prose by Professor Gordon of Wellington. There are two broad aims, both of them implicit in thei word ‘’movement” of the title:! “It is the movement of prose within the utterance, the sentence, the paragraph, the major prose unit. It is also, the movement of English prose through time.” The aims are in fact complementary. The first is to establish that certain syntactical pat-; terns are distinctively Eng-; lish. The second is to demonstrate that these patterns exist in earliest j records and have persisted j down to the present day.

In his passage through the history of English prose Professor Gordon sheds so much light that his point of departure and the principle he steers by would be justified in the result even if they remained controversial as assumptions. By adopting them he is able for example to pronounce firmly against those historians who date the origins of modern English prose from the fourteenth century. He insists upon a tradition continuing from the earliest Old English documents and so brings the study of English expression profitably into line with the study of the language itself. Of the centuries' of comparative silence after the Conquest he declares. “The tremendous fact is that English survived. ... It re-emerged because it had never disappeared.” This insistence on continuity produces a statement th3t would once have been heresy. It used to be received as dogma that English was once a heavily-inflected language, that word-order was therefore free, that encounters between;

dialectal and foreign forms produced a “rubbing off’ of inflexional particles that wordorder then by necessity became fixed. Professor Gordon, to whom at least one sceptic is grateful, suggests: ‘“The truth is more likely to be the other way round. The fixed word-order made the inflexional redundant.” From this acceptance of an indigenous word-order the author proceeds to trace, century by century’, the “central tradition of English prose,” bringing his study up to the present day. Every century produces its aberrancies, whether into the alliterative and incantatory i rhythms of the tenth-century sermon, the modish fantasticality of the sixteenth-century romance, the baroque splendour of seventeenth-century i moralists or the classical rhetoric of eighteenthi century pedants. But always I there is a return to the “firm 'English line,” the explanation being that wherever the prosestylists may be wandering to, the river of the spoken word flows on: and prose derives always from it. And this of course is why anu how English prose “continued” through the Conquest era—the English people, like the Bourgeois Gentleman, were speaking prose without knowing it. If prose is “words in their best order” it is a matter of deciding whether this “bestness” is a syntactical absolute or a psychological preference. This in turn prompts speculations about the whole relation between national language and national character: for this book reveals as much of an English tradition of mind and temperament as it does of an English tradition of syntax. To which do the words “native simplicity” and “an insistent bias towards plainness” ultimately refer? With subtlety in its detail and sureness in its direction this attractively-produced book has considerable substance for the specialist while providing a lucid exposition for anyone with an interest in the English language.