ON READING GOOD PROSE

Hawke's Bay Tribune, Volume XXV, Issue 124, 11 May 1935, Page 15

ON READING GOOD PROSE

(The Hon. Stephen Coleridge.)

By reading good prose constantly your ear will come to know the harmony of language, and you will find that your taste will unerringly tell you what is good und what is bad in style, without your being able to explain even to yourself the precise quality that distinguishes the good from the bad.

Any Englishman with a love of his country and a reverence for its language can say things in a few words that will find their way straight into our hearts, and make us all butter men. I will tell you a few of such simple sayings that are better than any more laboured writings. On 30th of June, 1921, in the “Times” In Memoriam column there was an entry;—“To the undying memory of officers, non-commissioned officers and men of the 9th and 10th battalions of the K.0.Y.L.1. (King’s Own Yorkshire Light Infantry), who were killed in the ptlack on Fricourt in the first battle of the Somme,” and below it there were placed these splendid words: “Gentlemen, when the barrage lifts.” In February of 1913 news reached England of the death, after reaching the South Pole, of four explorers, Captain Scott, their leader, among them. Shortly before the end, Captain Oates, a man of fortune who joined the expedition from pure love of adventure, knowing that his helplessness with frozen feet was retarding the desperate march of the others towards their ship, rose up, and stumbled out of the tent into a raging blizzard, saying, “I dure say I shall be away some time.” This was greatly said. His body wits never found; but the rescue party who afterwards discovered the tent with the others dead in it, put up a cairn in the desolute waste of snow with this inscription:— “Hereabouts Qied a very gallant gentleman, Captain L. E. G. Oates, Inniskilling Dragoons, who, on the return from the Pole in March, 191’ willingly walked to his death in a bli.l to try to save his comrades besei with haruship.” All this was done, said, and written, very nobly by all concerned. In St. Paul’s Cathedral there lies a recumbent effigy of General Gordon, who gave his "life for the honour of Englund at Khartoum, and upon it the engraven these words:—“He gave his strength to the weak', his substance to the poor, his sympathy to the suffering, his heart to God.” (Taken from the Hon. Stephen Coleridge’s “Letters o My Grandson on the Glory of English Prose,” published by Messrs. Mills and Boon, Ltd., London.)