In this day’s _Sunday Times_ there is an article on Mrs. Browning’s
letters which begins with some remarks about style. “It is recorded,”
says the writer, “of Plato, that in a rough draft of one of his
Dialogues, found after his death, the first paragraph was written in
seventy different forms. Wordsworth spared no pains to sharpen and
polish to the utmost the gifts with which nature had endowed him; and
Cardinal Newman, one of the greatest masters of English style, has
related in an amusing essay the pains he took to acquire his style.”
I never knew a writer yet who took the smallest pains with his style and
was at the same time readable. Plato’s having had seventy shies at one
sentence is quite enough to explain to me why I dislike him. A man may,
and ought to take a great deal of pains to write clearly, tersely and
euphemistically: he will write many a sentence three or four times
over—to do much more than this is worse than not rewriting at all: he
will be at great pains to see that he does not repeat himself, to arrange
his matter in the way that shall best enable the reader to master it, to
cut out superfluous words and, even more, to eschew irrelevant matter:
but in each case he will be thinking not of his own style but of his
reader’s convenience.
Men like Newman and R. L. Stevenson seem 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 be 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, and do not know or want to know whether it
is a style at all or whether it is not, as I believe 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 the
improvement of my handwriting (which, by the way, 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 up, and I was struck with the
great difference between it and the MS. of _The Authoress of the
Odyssey_. I have also taken great pains, with what success I know not,
to correct impatience, irritability and other like faults in my own
character—and this not because I care two straws about my own character,
but because I find the correction of such faults as I have been able to
correct makes life easier and saves me from getting into scrapes, and
attaches nice people to me more readily. But I suppose this really is
attending to style after all. [1897.]