ABOUT THE BODY AND ABOUT STYLE.

Dominion, Volume 1, Issue 193, 9 May 1908, Page 12

ABOUT THE BODY AND ABOUT STYLE.

A most interesting series of extracts from Samuel Butler's Note Books is published. 111 tho now.issue of tho "New Quarterly," which is a most readable and learned number. Here is'what Butler wrote on "The Body a Small Part of One," and'also On "Stylo." "Though we think so much of our body, it is in reality a small part of us. Boforo birth we get together our 'tools, in life wo use • them: arid thus fashion our true life, which consists not'in our tools and tool-box, but in -the, work,i\ve : i haVo done with our tools . -It is-Handel's work, not tho body with which he did'the work, that pulls us half over London; :"jThere is not an action of a nmsclo in a horso's leg upon a winter's night as it drags,.a .carriage to, tho Albert Hall but what is in,connection with ftnd part outcome of the force-generated when Handel sat in his room atGopsall and wrote tho ■Messiah.' all the forced which

that force has controlled, and think, also, how small was the amount of molecular disturbance from which it proceeded. . It is as though we saw a conflagration which a spark has kindled. . This is tho true Handel, who is a moro living power among us one hundred and twenty-two years after his death than during tho time he was amongst us in tho body. "I never knew a writer yet who took the smallest pains \yith his style and was at tho samo timo_ readable. Plato's having had soventy shies at one scntenco is quite enough to explain to mo why I dislike him. A man may and to take a great deal of pains to write clearly, tersely, and euphemistically : he will write many a sentenco thrco or four times over—to do much moro than this is worse than not re-writing at all j he will be qt great pains to see that ho docs not repeat himself, to arrango his matter in the way that shall best enable tho reader to master it, to cut out superfluous words, and, even more, to eschew irrelevant matter, but in each l case he will bo thinking not, of his own stylo but of his reador's convenience. "Mon like Newman and R. L. Stovenson seom to have taken pains to acquire what they called a style as a preliminary measure —as something that they had to form before their writings could bo of any value. I should like to put it on record that I never took the smallest pains with my style, have never thought about it, arid dn lift ltrow or want to know.whothor it is a stylo at all or ■Whether it is not, as I beliove and hope, just common, simple straightforwardness. I cannot conceive how any man can take thought for his style without loss to himself and his readers. "I have, however, taken all the pains that I had patience to endure in tho impro-/imont of my hand-writing (which, by the ivuy, has a constant tendency to resume feral, characteristics) and also with my.MS. generally to keep it clean and legible. ' I am';having a great tidying just now, in the course of which the MS. of'Erewhon' turned lip, and I was struck with the great .difference between it and tho MS. of 'Tho Authoress of, the Odyssey.'"