“So long as no words are uttered but in faithfulness, so long the
art of language goes on exalting itself; but the moment it is shaped
and chiselled on external principles, it falls into frivolity, and
perishes.”... “No noble nor right style was ever yet founded but out
of a sincere heart.”... “No man is worth reading to form your style,
who does not mean what he says; nor was any great style ever invented
but by some man who meant what he said.”
Now here Thoreau again:
“We are often struck by the force and precision of style to which
hard working men, unpracticed in writing, easily attain when required
to make the effort. As if plainness and vigor and sincerity, the
ornaments of style, were better learned on the farm and in the
workshop than in the school.”
Reading that, consider Jack London the virile, Robert Burns the boy on
the stone bruised farm, John Bunyan the tinker, Masefield the sailor
and bartender, W. H. Davies the hobo, Caradoc Evans the boy who was
always hungry and tired. The last named mastered English through the
study of the Bible. The passage below is taken from his book, “My
Neighbors.” Except perhaps Bunyan, no better example could be given of
sheer force and precision of style.
“Our God is a big man: a tall man much higher than the highest chapel
in Wales and broader than the broadest chapel. For the promised day
that He comes to deliver us a sermon, we shall have made a hole in
the roof and take down a wall. Our God has a long, white beard, and
he is not unlike the Father Christmas of picture books. Often He lies
on his stomach on the Heaven’s floor, an eye at one of his myriad of
peep holes watching that we keep his laws. Our God wears a frock
coat, a starched linen collar and a black necktie, and a silk hat,
and on the Sabbath He preaches to the congregation of Heaven.
“Heaven is a Welsh chapel: but its pulpit is of gold, and its walls,
pews, floor, roof, harmonium, and its clock--which marks the days of
the month as well as the hours of the day--are glass. The inhabitants
are clothed in white shirts in which they were buried and in which
they arose at the Call: and the language of God and his angels and of
the Company of the Prophets is Welsh, that being the language spoken
in the garden of Eden and by Jacob, Moses, Abraham, and Elijah.
“It is no miracle that we are religious. Our God is just behind the
preacher, and He is in the semblance of the preacher and we believe
in Him truly. It is no miracle that we are prayerful. Our God is
by us in our hagglings and cheatings. Bacca Pehffos prays that the
dealers’ eyes are closed to the disease of her hen; Shon Porth asks
the Big Man to destroy his pregnant sister into whose bed Satan
enticed him; Ianto Tybach says: ‘Give me a nice bit of haymaking
weather, God bach. Strike my brother Enoch dead or blind and see
I have his fields without any old bother. A champion am I in the
religious and there’s gifts I give the preacher. Ask Him. That’s all.”
Now consider a very different style. It is from Charles Lamb who came
nearer achieving perfection than anyone in literature. His art is so
cunningly concealed that it has the appearance of almost careless
discourse.
“I am no Quaker at my food. I confess I am not indifferent to the
kinds of it. Those unctuous morsels of deer’s flesh were not made to
be received with dispassionate services. I hate a man who swallows
it, affecting not to know what he is eating. I suspect his taste in
higher matters. I shrink instinctively from one who professes to like
minced veal. There is a physiognomical character in the tastes for
food. C---- holds that a man cannot have a pure mind who refuses
apple dumplings. I am not certain but he is right. With the decay of
my first innocence, I confess a less and less relish daily for those
innocuous cates. The whole vegetable tribe have lost their gust for
me. Only I stick to asparagus, which still seems to inspire gentle
thoughts.”
At this point I spent a full half hour trying to hit upon a paragraph
for reproduction here from Stevenson’s “Virginibus Puerisque.” But
without success. You can no more tear a paragraph from that admirable
essay than you can take a jewel from its setting and have the thing as
it was. So you must turn to his essay for yourself. You should also
read his “Travels with a Donkey.” And, while you are about it, do not
forget to read much of De Quincey, and also of Goldsmith.