STYLE AND RHYTHM IN ENGLISH PROSE
I
Stylists in prose are privileged persons. They may write nonsense
and escape the castigation of prudish pedants; or, dealing with
cryptic subjects, they can win the favour of the unthinking;
witness, in the brain-carpentry of metaphysics, say, the verbal
man[oe]uvres of three such lucid though disparate thinkers as
Schopenhauer, Nietzsche and William James. The names of these three
writers are adduced as evidence that it is not necessary to be foggy
of style even when dealing with abstract ideas. And Germany has long
been the Nibelheim of philosophy; need we mention Hegel, whose
commentators have made his meanings thrice-confounded? Style in
literature is an antiseptic. It may embalm foolish flies in its
amber, and it is a brevet of immortality--that is, as immortality
goes; a brief thing, but a man's boast. When the shoeblack part of
the affair is over and done with, the grammar, which was made for
schoolmarms in male garb, and the shining rhetoric, what remains?
The answer is eternal: Style cannot be taught. A good style is
direct, plain, and simple. The writer's keyboard is that humble
camel the dictionary. Style, being concerned with the process of
movement, has nothing to do with results, says one authority. And an
impertinent collusion on the part of the writer with his own
individuality does not always constitute style; for individual
opinion is virtually private opinion, notwithstanding its appearance
in editions half a hundred long; Sainte-Beuve and De Quincey here
occur to the memory. Men change; mankind never.
Too close imitation of the masters has its dangers for the novice.
Apes and peacocks beset the way. Stevenson's prose style is highly
synthesised and a mosaic of dead men's manner. He has no esoteric
message beyond the expression of his sprite-like, whimsical
personality, and this expression is, in the main, consummate. The
lion in his pathway is the thinness of his intellectual processes;
as in De Quincey's case, a master of the English language beyond
compare, who in the region of pure speculation often goes sadly
limping; his criticism of Kant proves it. But a music-maker in our
written speech, Robert Louis Stevenson is the supreme mocking-bird
in English literature. He overplayed the sedulous imitator. John Jay
Chapman in a brilliant essay has traced the progress of this prose
pilgrim, a professional stylist as well as a professional invalid.
The American critic registers the variations in style and
sensibility of the Scotsman, who did not always demonstrate in his
writing the fundamental idea that the sole exponent of sensibility
is analytic power. He drew freely on all his predecessors, and his
personal charm exhibits the "glue of unanimity," as old Boethius
would say. Mr. Chapman quotes a passage supposedly from Sir Thomas
Browne, beginning, "Time sadly overcometh all things," which is not
to be found in his collected writings. Yet it is apropos because,
like Stevenson's prose, it is from the crucible of an alchemist,
though at the time Mr. Chapman quoted it was not known to be a
clever Liverpudlian forgery. Since then, after considerable
controversy, the paragraph in question has been shown as the
fabrication of a Liverpool man of letters, whose name we have
forgotten. But it suggests, does this false Browne, that good prose
may be successfully simulated, though essentials be missing.
If style cannot be imparted, what, then, is the next best thing to
do, after a close study of the masters? We should say, go in a
chastened mood to the nearest newspaper office and apply for a
humble position on its staff. Then one will come to grips with life,
the pacemaker of style. There is a lot of pompous advice emitted by
the college professor--the Eternal Sophomore--about fleeing
"journalese"; whereas it is in the daily press, whether New York,
Paris, Vienna, or London, that one may find the soundest, most
succinct prose, prose stripped of superfluous ornament, prose bare
to the bone, and in fighting trim. But not elevated prose,
"numerous" prose, as Quintilian hath it. For the supreme harmony of
English prose we must go to the Bible (the Authorised, not the
Revised, the latter manufactured by "the persons called revisers,"
as George Saintsbury bluntly describes them); to Shakespeare, Jeremy
Taylor, Sir Thomas Browne, Walter Raleigh, Milton, De Quincey,
Ruskin, Swinburne, Cardinal Newman, Pater, and Arthur Symons. And
not forgetting the sweet intimacy of Charles Lamb, the sly charm of
Max Beerbohm, or the harmonious and imaginative prose of W. H.
Hudson, whose Green Mansions recalls the Chateaubriand of Atala,
without its hateful note of morbid egotism.
Nor are the exponents of the grand manner, of an ornate style, to be
patterned after. If elevation of theme is not present, then the
peril of "fine writing" is scarcely to be avoided. Better follow
such writers as Bacon, Bunyan, Hobbes, Swift in preference. Or the
Augustan group, Dryden, Addison, Shaftesbury, and Temple. But Doctor
Johnson, Burke and Gibbon are not models for the beginner, any more
than the orotund prose of Bossuet, the musical utterance of
Chateaubriand, or the dramatic prose of Hugo are safe models for
French students. The rich continence of Flaubert, the stippled
concision of Merimee or the dry-sherry wit of Voltaire are surer
guides. And the urbane ease and flowing rhythms of Thackeray are
preferable to the baphometic verbal baptisms of Carlyle the
Boanerges.
Yet what sweet temptations are to be found in the golden age of
English prose, beginning with the evocation of Sir Walter Raleigh,
"O eloquent, just, and mighty death; whom none could advise, thou
hast persuaded"; surely not far beneath the magnificent prose of the
sixtieth chapter of Isaiah in the Authorised, "Arise, shine; for thy
light is come, and the glory of the Lord is risen unto thee," which
is so mighty in rhythm that even those "dolefullest of creatures ...
utterly ignorant of English literature, the Revisers of 1870-85,
hardly dared to touch at all," blandly remarks Professor Saintsbury.
And to balance the famous "Now since these dead bones" of Sir
Thomas, there is the tender coda to Sir William Temple's Use of
Poetry and Music, "When all is done, human life is at the greatest
and best." Those long, sweeping phrases, drumming with melody and
cadences, like the humming of slow, uplifting walls of water
tumbling on sullen strands, composed by the masters of that "other
harmony of prose," are not mere "purple panels" but music made by
immortals. (And I am convinced that if R. L. S. were alive and
condemned to read this last sentence of mine, with its monotonous
"run" of M's, he would condemn it.) Consider Milton and his
majestic evocation: "Methinks I see in my mind a noble and puissant
nation arousing herself, ... an eagle mewing her mighty youth ..."
and then fall down and worship, for we are in the holy of holies.
Stevenson preferred the passage, "I cannot praise a fugitive and
cloistered virtue," and who shall gainsay him? And Stevenson has
written a most inspiring study of the Technical Elements of Style in
Literature, to be found in the Biographical Edition. In it he calls
the Macaulay "an incomparable dauber" for running the letter "k"
through a paragraph, and in it he sets forth in his chastened and
classic style the ineluctable (Henry James revived this pretty word)
perils of prose. Also its fascinations. "The prose writer," he says,
"must keep his phrases large, rhythmical, comely, without letting
them fall into the strictly metrical; harmonious in diversity,
musical in the mouth, in texture woven into committed phrases and
rounded periods." The stylist may vault airily into the saddle of
logic, or in the delicate reticulation of his silver-fire paragraphs
he may take, as an exemplar, John Henry Newman.
Stevenson is a perfectionist, and that way lies madness for all save
a few valiant spirits. Sir Walter Raleigh, formerly Professor
Raleigh, has written a crystal-clear study on Style, an essay of
moment because in the writing thereof he preaches what he practises.
He confesses that "inanity dogs the footsteps of the classic
tradition," and that "words must change to live, and a word once
fixed becomes useless.... This is the error of the classical creed,
to imagine that in a fleeting world, where the quickest eye can
never see the same thing twice, and a deed once done can never be
repeated, language alone should be capable of fixity and finality."
The Flaubertian crux. Nevertheless, Flaubert could write of style in
a fluid, impressionistic way: "A style ... which will be as rhythmic
as verse, as precise as the language of science, which will have
undulations, modulations, like those of a violoncello, flashes of
fire. A style which would enter into the idea like the stroke of a
stiletto, ... all the combinations of prosody have been made, those
of prose are still to make." Flaubert was not obsessed by the
"unique word," but by a style which is merged in the idea; as the
melodic and harmonic phrases of Richard Wagner were born
simultaneously and clothed in the appropriate orchestral colours.
Perhaps the cadenced prose of Pater, with its multiple resonance and
languorous rhythms, may be a sort of sublimated chess-game, as
Saintsbury more than hints; yet, what a fair field for his carved
ivory pieces. His undulating and iridescent periods are like the
solemn sound of organ music accompanied from afar by a symphony of
flutes, peacocks, and pomegranates.
No wonder Stevenson pronounces French prose a finer art than
English, though admitting that in the richer, denser harmonies of
English its native writers find at first hand the very quality so
eagerly sought for by Flaubert. French is a logical language, one of
distinction and clarity, and one in which metre never intrudes, but
it lacks the overtones of our mother speech. The English shares in
common with the Russian the art of awakening feelings and thoughts
by the resonance of words, which seem to be written not in length
but in depth, and then are lost in faint reverberations.
But artistic prose, chiselled prose, is a negligible quantity
nowadays. It was all very well in the more spacious times of
linkboys, sedan-chairs, and bag-wigs, but with the typist cutting
one's phrases into angular fragments, with the soil at our heels
saturated in slang, what hope is there for assonance, variety in
rhythm, and the sonorous cadences of prose? Write "naturally," we
are told. Properly speaking, there is no such thing as a "natural
style." Even Newman, master of the pellucid, effortless phrase,
confesses to laborious days of correction, and he wrote with the
idea uppermost and with no thought of style, so-called. Abraham
Lincoln nourished his lonely soul on the Bible and Bunyan. He is a
writer of simple yet elevated prose, without parallel in our native
literature other than Emerson. Hawthorne and Poe wrote in the key of
classic prose; while Walt Whitman's jigsaw jingle is the ultimate
deliquescence of prose form. For practical every-day needs the
eighteenth-century prose men are the best to follow. But the Bible
is the Golden Book of English prose.
Quintilian wrote: "We cannot even speak except in longs and shorts,
and longs and shorts are the material of feet." All personal prose
should go to a tune of its own. The curious are recommended to the
monumental work of George Saintsbury, A History of English Prose
Rhythm. Prose may be anything else, but it must not be bad blank
verse. "Numerous" as to rhythms, but with no hint of balance, in the
metrical sense; without rhythm it is not prose at all. Professor
Oliver Elton has set this forth with admirable lucidity in his
English Prose Numbers. He also analyses a page from The Golden Bowl
of Henry James, discovering new beauties of phrasing and subtle
cadences in the prose of this writer. Professor Saintsbury's study
is the authoritative one among its fellows. Walter Pater's essay on
Style is honeycombed with involutions and preciosity. When On the
Art of Writing, by Arthur Quiller-Couch, appeared we followed
Hazlitt's advice and reread an old book, English Composition, by
Professor Barrett Wendell, and with more pleasure and profit than
followed the later perusal of the Cornish novelist's lectures.
He warns against jargon. But the seven arts, science, society,
medicine, politics, religion, have each their jargon. Not
music-criticism, not baseball, are so painfully "jargonised" as
metaphysics. Jargon is the fly in the ointment of every critic. Even
the worthy fellow of Jesus College, Sir Arthur himself, does not
altogether escape it. On page 23 of his Inaugural Address he speaks
of "loose, discinct talk." "Discinct" is good, but "ungirded" is
better because it is not obsolete, and it is more sonorous and
Saxon. On page 42 we stumble against "suppeditate" and gnash our
teeth. After finishing the book the timid neophyte will be apt to
lay the flattering unction to his soul that he is a born stylist,
like the surprised Mr. Jourdain, who spoke prose so many years
without knowing it.
II
Fancy a tall, imposing man, in the middle years, standing before a
music-desk, humming and beating time. His grey, lion-like mane is in
disorder; his large eyes, pools of blue light, gleam with
excitement. The colour of his face is reddish, the blood mounts
easily to his head, a prophetic sign of his death by apoplexy. It is
Gustave Flaubert in his study at Croisset, a few miles down the
Seine below Rouen. He is chanting a newly composed piece of prose,
marking time as if he were conducting a music-drama. "What are you
doing there?" asked his friend. "Scanning these words, because they
don't sound well," he replied. Flaubert would spend a day over a
sentence and practically tested it by declaiming--spouting, he
called it--for as he wisely remarked: "A well-constructed phrase
adapts itself to the rhythm of respiration." His delight in prose
assonance and cadence manifested itself in his predilection for such
a phrase as Chateaubriand's in Atala: "Elle repand dans le bois ce
grand secret de melancholie qu'elle aime a raconter aux vieux chenes
et aux rivages antiques des mers." There's a "mouther" for you! as
George Saintsbury would say. But in this age of uninflected speech
the louder the click of the type-machine the better the style.
If modern prose were written for the ear as well as the eye, chanted
and scanned, it might prove more sonorous and rhythmic than it does,
and more artistic. Curiously enough, Professor Saintsbury in his
magisterial work writes: "I rather doubt myself whether the very
finest and most elaborate prose is not better read than heard." That
is, it must be overheard by the inner ear, which statement rather
puts a damper on Flaubert's contention. What saith the worthy
Aristotle? "All things are determined by number." Prose should have
rhythm but should not be metrical ("Rhetoric"); which Robert Louis
Stevenson thus paraphrased in his Technical Elements of Style in
Literature: "The rule of scansion in verse is to suggest no measure
but the one in hand; in prose to suggest no measure at all. Prose
must be rhythmical, and it may be as much so as you will; but it
must not be metrical. It may be anything, but it must not be verse."
(Probably if he had read the amorphous stuff by courtesy named "vers
libre" Stevenson would have written a stronger word than
"anything.") Or, again, Saintsbury: "The Rhythm of Prose, like the
Metre of Verse, can, in English as well as the classical languages,
be best expressed by the foot system, or system of mathematical
combinations of 'long' and 'short' syllables." A fig for your
"ancient trumpery of skeleton scanning," cries Professor William
Morrison Patterson in his The Rhythm of Prose: "Amphibrachs,
bacchics, antibacchics, antipasts, molossi, dochmiacs, and
proceleusmatics, which heretofore have been brandished before our
eyes, as if they were anything more than, as stress-patterns, merely
half the story."
The Columbia University professor would be far more likely to
indorse the axiom of Remy de Gourmont that style is physiological,
which Flaubert well knew. And now, having deployed my heaviest
artillery of quotation, let me begin by saying that Professor
Patterson's study is a remarkable contribution to the critical
literature of a much-debated theme, Prose Rhythms, and this without
minifying the admirable labours of Saintsbury, Shelley, Oliver
Elton, Ker, or Professor Bouton of the New York University. One of
the reasons that interest the present writer in the monograph is its
strong musical bias. Professor Patterson is evidently the possessor
of a highly organised musical ear, even if he be not a practical
musician. He no doubt agrees with Disraeli's dictum that the key to
literature is music; _i. e._, number, cadence, rhythm. I recall Miss
Dabney's study, The Musical Basis of Verse, dealing as it does with
a certain side of the subject. But the Patterson procedure is
different. It is less "literary" than psychological, less
psychological than physiological. He experiments with the Remy de
Gourmont idea, though he probably never saw it in print. "Rhythm,"
he writes in his preface, "is thus regarded as first of all an
experience, established, as a rule, by motor performance of however
rudimentary a nature." Here is the man of science at work.
He speaks of the "lost art of rhythm," adduces syncopation so easily
mastered by those born "timers," the Indians and Negroes,
pertinently remarks that "no two individuals ever react exactly
alike. The term 'type' is in many ways a highly misleading fiction."
Prose Rhythm, he continues, "must be classed as subjective
organisation of irregular, virtually haphazard arrangement of
sounds.... The ultimate basis of all rhythmic experience, however,
is the same. To be clear-cut it must rest upon a series of definite
temporal units."
Professor Patterson experimented in two rooms: "one the regular
sound-room belonging to the department of psychology at Columbia;
the other an expressly constructed, fairly sound-proof cabinet built
into one end of an underground room belonging to the department of
physics."
It has a slightly sinister ring, all this, has it not? Padded cells
and aural finger-prints!--to make an Irish bull. Max Nordau called
John Ruskin a Torquemada of AEsthetics. Professor Patterson might be
styled a Tonal Torturer. But the experimentings were painless. "The
first object," he informs us, "was to find out, as far as possible,
how a group of twelve people, ten men and two women, differed with
respect to the complex of mental processes usually designated
roughly as the 'sense of rhythm.' After they had been ranked
according to the nature of their reactions and achievements in
various tests, one of the group, who had evinced a measure of ease
in rapid tapping, was chosen to make drum-beat records on a
phonograph. A sentence from Walter Pater, a sentence from Henry
James, a passage of music from Chopin, a haphazard arrangement of
words and a haphazard arrangement of musical notes, were tapped upon
a small metal drum and the beats recorded by the phonograph. The
words were tapped according to the syllables as felt, a tap for each
syllable. 'Hours,' for instance, was given two beats. The notes
were tapped according to their designated time-values. Observer No.
1, having had long training as a musician, found no technical
difficulty in the task. The remaining eleven observers, without
being told the source of the records, heard the five series of
drumbeats and passed judgment upon them. The most significant
judgment made was that of Observer No. 7, who declared that all five
records gave him the impression of regular musical themes. A large
number of the observers, especially on the first hearing, found all
of the records, including even the passage from Chopin, elusive and
more or less irregular. An attempt was then made, by means of
accompanying schedules, to find out how much or how little
organisation each observer could be brought to feel in the beats
corresponding to the passage from Walter Pater and the passage of
haphazard musical notes." All the data are carefully set down in the
Appendices.
The sentence by Walter Pater was chosen from his essay on Leonardo
da Vinci, in The Renaissance. "It is the landscape, not of dreams or
of fancy, but of places far withdrawn, and hours selected from a
thousand with a miracle of finesse"; subtly rhythmic, too much so
for any but trained ears. Some simpler excerpt from Sir Thomas
Browne or John Ruskin might have been selected, such as, in the
former case, the coda from the Urn Burial, or even that
chest-expanding phrase, "To subsist in bones, and to be pyramidally
extant is a fallacy in duration." Or, best of all, because of its
tremendous intensity, the passage from Saint Paul: "For I am
persuaded, that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor
principalities, nor powers, nor things present, nor things to come,
nor height, nor depth, nor any other creature, shall be able to
separate us from the love of God, which is in Christ Jesus our
Lord." The drum-beat is felt throughout, but the pulsation is not
marked as in the pages of Macaulay; nor has it the monotony found in
Lohengrin on account of the prevalence of common or four-four time,
and also the coincidence of the metrical and rhythmic beat, a
coincidence that Chopin usually avoids, and all latter-day composers
flee as dulness-breeding. The base-rhythm of English prose is, so
Professor Saintsbury writes, "the paeon, or four-syllabled foot,"
and, he could have added, provocative of ennui for delicate ears.
Variety in rhythms is the ideal. Our author appositely quotes from
Puffer's Studies in Symmetry: "A picture composed in substitutional
symmetry is more rich in its suggestions of motor impulse, and thus
more beautiful, than an example of geometrical symmetry." And this
applies to prose and music as well as to pictures. It is the very
kernel of the art of Paul Cezanne; rhythmic irregularity,
syncopation, asymmetry.
De Quincey's Our Lady of Darkness and a sentence from Cardinal
Newman's Grammar of Assent were included among the tests. Also one
from Henry James; in the preface to The Golden Bowl: "For I have
nowhere found vindicated the queer thesis that the right values of
interesting prose depend all on withheld tests." If, according to
lovers of the old rhetoric, of the resounding "purple panels" of
Bossuet, Chateaubriand, Flaubert, Raleigh, Browne, and Ruskin, the
cooler prose of Mr. James cannot be "spouted"; nevertheless, the
interior rhythmic life is finer and more complex. The Chopin
nocturne played was the familiar one in G minor, Opus 37, No. 1,
simple in rhythmic structure though less interesting than its sister
nocturne in G, Opus 37, No. 2 (the first is in common, the second in
six-eighths time). Professor Patterson knows Riemann and his "agogic
accent," which, according to that editor of the Chopin Etudes, is a
slight expansion in the value of the note; not a dynamic accent.
In his treatment of vers libre our author is not too sympathetic. He
thinks that "in their productions"--free-verse poets--"the
disquieting experience of attempting to dance up the side of a
mountain" is suggested. "For those who find this task exhilarating
vers libre, as a form, is without rival. With regard to subtle
cadence, however, which has been claimed as the chief distinction of
the new poets, it is still a question as to how far they have
surpassed the refinement of balance that quickens the prose of
Walter Pater." They have not, despite the verbal ingenuity,
banished the impression of dislocation, of the epileptic. In French,
in the hands of Rimbaud, Verlaine, Verhaeren, Gustave Kahn, Regnier,
Stuart Merrill, Viele Griffin, and Jules Laforgue, the rhythms are
supple, the assonances grateful to the ear, the irregular patterns
not offensive to the eye; in a word, a form, or a deviation from
form, more happily adapted to the genius of the French or Italian
language than to the English. Most of our native vers libre sounds
like a ton of coal falling through too small an aperture in the
sidewalk. However, "it's not the gilt that makes a god, but the
worshipper."
For musicians and writers the interesting if abstruse study of
Professor Patterson will prove valuable. After reading of the
results in his laboratory at Columbia we feel that we have been, all
of us, talking rhythmic prose our life long.