CHAPTER XI

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 Boëthius 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 Châteaubriand 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 Châteaubriand, or the dramatic prose of Hugo are safe models for French students. The rich continence of Flaubert, the stippled concision of Mérimée 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 Châteaubriand's in Atala: "Elle répand dans le bois ce grand secret de mélancholie qu'elle aime à raconter aux vieux chênes 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 Æsthetics. 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 pæon, 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 Cézanne; 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, Châteaubriand, 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, Régnier, Stuart Merrill, Vielé 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.