The Best of the Worlds Classics, Restricted to Prose. Volume I - Greece | Page 5

the fertility of the printing-press, the multiplication of cheap magazines, and the flood of printed words poured out daily in the newspapers all tend strongly in this direction. This is an era of haste and hurry stimulated by the great inventions which have changed human environment. Form and style in any art require time, and time seems the one thing we can neither spare nor wisely economize. Yet, in literature above all arts, to abandon form and style is inevitably destructive and entails misfortunes which can hardly be estimated, for loose, weak and vulgar writing is a sure precursor of loose, weak and vulgar thinking. If form of expression is cast aside, form in thought and in the presentation of thought is certain to follow. Against all this the fine English prose amply represented in these selections offers a silent and convincing protest to every one who will read it attentively.
We can begin with the splendid prose of the age of Elizabeth and of the seventeenth century. It is irregular and untamed, but exuberant and brilliant, rich both in texture and substance. We find it at its height in the strange beauties of Sir Thomas Browne, in the noble pages of Milton, stiff with golden embroidery, as Macaulay says, and in the touching and beautiful simplicity of Bunyan's childlike sentences. Thence we pass to the eighteenth century, when English prose was freed from its involutions and irregularities and brought to uniformity and to a standard. The age of Anne gave to English prose balance, precision and settled form. There have been periods of greater originality, but the eighteenth century at least lived up to Pope's doctrine, set forth in the familiar line:
"What oft was thought but ne'er so well exprest."
As there is no better period to turn to for instruction than the age of Anne, so, if we must choose a single writer there is no better master to be studied than Swift. There have been many great writers and many fine and beautiful styles since the days of the terrible Dean of St. Patrick's, from the imposing and finely balanced sentences of Gibbon to the subtle delicacy of Hawthorne and the careful finish of Robert Louis Stevenson. But in Swift better than in any one writer can we find the lessons which are so sorely needed now. He had in the highest degree force, clearness and concentration all combined with a marvelous simplicity. Swift's style may have lacked richness, but it never failed in taste. There is not a line of false fine-writing in all his books. Those are the qualities which are so needed now, simplicity and clearness and a scrupulous avoidance of that would-be fine writing which is not at all fine but merely vulgar and insincere.
The writing in our newspapers is where reform is particularly needed. There are great journals here and there which maintain throughout a careful standard of good and sober English. Most of them, unhappily, are filled in the news columns at least with a strange jargon found nowhere else, spoken by no one and never used in daily life by those who every night furnish it to the compositors. It is happily compounded in about equal parts of turgid fine writing, vulgar jauntiness and indiscriminate slang.
I can best show my meaning by example. A writer in a newspaper wished to state that a man who had once caused excitement by a book of temporary interest and who, after the days of his notoriety were over, lived a long and checkered career, had killed himself. This is the way he said it:
His life's work void of fruition and dissipated into emptiness, his fondest hopes and ambitions crumbled and scattered, shunned as a fanatic, and unable to longer wage life's battle, Hinton Rowan Helper, at one time United States consul general to Buenos Ayres, yesterday sought the darkest egress from his woes and disappointments--a suicide's death.
In an unpretentious lodging-house in Pennsylvania avenue, near the Capitol, the man who as much, if not more than any other agitator, is said to have blazed the way to the Civil War, the writer who stirred this nation to its core by his anti-slavery philippics, and the promoter with the most gigantic railroad enterprise projected in the history of the world, was found gript in the icy hand of death. The brain which gave birth to his historic writings had willed the stilling of the heart which for three-quarters of a century had palpitated quick and high with roseate hopes.
That passage, taken at hazard from a newspaper, is intended, I think, to be fine writing of an imposing and dramatic kind. Why could not the writer have written it, a little more carefully perhaps, but still in just the language which he would have used naturally in describing