NOTES

New Zealand Tablet, Volume L, Issue 32, 16 August 1923, Page 30

NOTES

Belloc’s Clearness Belloc as a writer is to many readers disconcerting because he is so French, or so Latin. If there is one thing on which French teachers insist it is clearness of thought in composition, and in France writing that is not lucid will not be tolerated either by teachers or by critics. In English clearness used to be of first importance and is still admired but no longer essential. Hence we find ourselves wasting much time in trying to find out the meaning of the words of writers who too often have said nothing worth finding out. Belloc got his clearness from France, and France has it from the Latin genius; as England had it as long as her youth were educated. They are not generally educated nowadays, for a system that leaves out not only the allimportant subject of religion but also the teaching of classics is not education, no matter how much money may be spent and no matter how much rhetoric may be wasted on it. Nothing will train a man to write English as well as learning to write or construe Latin prose. It will teach care in the selection of words, attention to the order of words, and estimation for the force of words. And, besides, it will make the mind logical by force of exacting from it a severe train of reasoning at every step in the construction of a sentence. English readers have become so accustomed to loose sentences and to lack of logic that Belloc seems to terrify them by his striking style in which unusual lucidity and argument always have their place. In France he would be just an ordinary gifted writer, with the, proper love for order, but in England he is a ram, avis. A Common Error Hand in hand with lack of logic and lucidity goes love of veribage and of meretricious ornament. It is noticeable here that overloaded poetry, verse that has more sound than sense and more ornament than substance appeals to the average reader. In the same way , there is a tendency to think that big words and sounding phrases are the essentials of style. There could hardly be a greater mistake where sty is concerned. As in poetry the finest things are usually found expressed in simple words, so too in prose the great passages that remain for ever glowing are invariably made up of little v words. Hence not only obscurity of all kinds, but all attempts at the awful thing called “fine writing” ought to be burned out of the soul like weeds. The first thing to aim at is clear thinking. Given that, an average boy or girl can be trained to put down clearly the thoughts that exist clearly. Granted a fair knowledge of English and a fair taste, the effort to write clearly will result in very readable sentences, which will have the merit of being intelligible. But for him or her who does not learn to think clearly and to aim first and foremost at expressing clearly the thoughts in the mind, there is no hope. Paradoxes and purple passages and pet phrases will avail nothing: it will be at best sounding brass. No doubt there are many who love the sounding brass and mistake it for genuine music, but to be content with their approval "is the end of hope. As an example of what good writing means, you may take an essay of R.L.S’s. As a warning in the concrete: of what “fine writing” and obscure writing, and nonsensical writing mean hie thee to Hutchinson whose books are boomed but abominable. When Winter Comes , This Freedom, Once Aboard the Lugger, and id ovine genus, have had enormous sales which are a lasting proof of the stupidity and lack of taste of English readers to-day. The most recent cure for the moral blight that is

threatening the youth is the cultivation of character. But how can character be developed without religious teaching? And some of the advocates of character training are avowed enemies of the only system of education that emphasises religious instruction. -‘■■v. .