May we not indeed allege that this old-fashioned fashion of fine writing, with its lovely phrases, and the cumulative effect of its innumerable minutiae of expression, can be found to possess over modern Prose certain advantages of its own? It would seem in the first place that, unlike the art of Poetry, the art of writing careful Prose can, to a certain extent at least, be learnt by any one who will take the trouble; and that, in whatever pursuit he may afterwards take up, scholarship or history, politics or law or religion, all the skill he may have acquired in expressing himself with grace and elegance will be of advantage to him.
The writing of expressive Prose, the mastery of a rich vocabulary, seems indeed to be much more often the result of taking pains than of natural endowment. Sir Thomas Browne's letters show no signs of that magic of style which, in his more formal writings, was plainly the result of the careful contrivance of a highly developed artistic consciousness; and the impromptu letters of the unsurpassed master of French Prose, Gustave Flaubert, are, French critics tell us, so badly written and so full of faults as to be really shocking.
It follows, therefore, that imaginative Prose can be written in ages (like the present) when the writing of splendid verse seems, for the time at least, to be no longer possible. The Muses of Verse are unaccountable creatures, whose appearances are intermittent. But the Muses of Prose are always ready to respond to the appeal of those who call upon them; and even in the deadest of periods for poets in the eighteenth century they did not refuse their assistance to Sterne, Johnson, Burke and Gibbon. . . .
Many passages, however, could be quoted to support the tentative suggestion that the bid of imaginative Prose is above all a bid to our imaginative reason. There is, for instance, Hamlet's beautiful, idiomatic, ironic speech: "What a piece of work is a man!" which is, perhaps, the finest passage of English Prose which was ever written. Indeed, to this mood or temper of our reason, irony seems specially congenial; and were I ever tempted to dogmatize, I should be inclined to say that an ironic way of writing is the one to which Prose is peculiarly adapted. I could instance among the ancients the irony of Plato, of Tacitus, and Lucian, and among the moderns the irony of Hamlet and of Falstaff, of Pascal, of Burton, Sterne, and Fielding, of Voltaire, of Swift, and of Gibbon, who was perhaps a greater artist than he knew.
Irony, however, is little to the taste of most readers, who do not much care to laugh at themselves and other people. This way of writing has, however, as Saintsbury pointed out, one advantage; the liking for it is one which never palls. The few who enjoy this dry beverage can never have enough; lofty sentiments and noble views of things may satiate them sometimes, but irony is always to their taste.
XI
How few they were in number, Henry James wrote in 1887, and how easily one could name them, the writers whose Prose was personal and expressive! If he felt this fifty years ago, how much more easily, were he living now, could he count among our contemporaries those who show in their writings any signs, save some private jabber, of a style which is their own! The diction, the run of phrase of each of them, seems, with very few exceptions, quite indistinguishable from that of the others, each of whose pages might have been written by any one of his fellows. Nor of that Atticism and happy grace which distinguished some of our earlier writers will he find any trace; almost all contemporary Prose will seem to him to have come from a common waste-paper basket, to which he cannot but think that it will almost immediately return. Where, he asks himself, are the best-sellers of last year? They are as disregarded, he suspects, as the dilapidated nests of last year's birds, who have raised their lively broods and disappeared, whither, no one knows.
More than once, when I have looked upon the map of the British Empire, I have wondered why, amongst all the many millions of its inhabitants, here in England, or in the great Dominions of Canada, South Africa, and Australia, there are to-day so few who have made an effort to acquire distinction in the writing of English Prose. . . .
XII
A critic recently expressed the belief that a great period of English literature was just about to dawn upon us. If the survivor from another age, as he glances at the books which now flood the bookshops, finds in them everything which, as Henry James expressed it, makes for charm and distinction of style, for conviction, for illusion, "every touch that directly evokes and finely presents is unsurpassably absent," he cannot escape the impression that, to borrow another of Henry James's phrases, "the small fry of the day submit to a further shrinkage." He must, of course, take into account the possibility that he may have become the victim of that illusion of a general decline which is so often the accompaniment of declining years. But even if a great day of English literature has dawned without his knowledge, he may legitimately regret that the Prose which was formerly one of its adornments is no longer written, and question the perspicacity of those critics who do their best to discourage and reprobate this method of expression. And though he may surmise that it is vain for him to preach a doctrine which is to-day so out of fashion, he may console himself with the satisfaction of reiterating, however ineffectually, the truism that it is never unprofitable for an artist to study the qualities and possibilities of the medium he works in; and that for a writer to write as well as he can is, after all, at all times and in all conditions, the best way of writing.Source: "Fine Writing" by Logan Pearsall Smith originally appeared as Tract XLVI in the Society for Pure English Tracts, 1936. A revised version was included in Smith's collection Reperusals and Re-collections, published by Constable and Company in 1936.
