The Best of the Worlds Classics, Restricted to Prose. Volume I - Greece | Page 6

the event to his wife or friend? Simply stated, it would have been far more solemn and impressive than this turgid, insincere account with its large words, its forced note of tragedy and its split infinitive. Let me put beneath it another description of a death-bed:
The blood and spirits of Le Fevre, which were waxing cold and slow, and were retreating to their last citadel, the heart--rallied back,--the film forsook his eyes for a moment,--he looked up wishfully into my Uncle Toby's face,--then cast a look upon his boy,--and that ligament, fine as it was,--was never broken.
Nature instantly ebbed again,--the film returned to its place,--the pulse fluttered,--stopt,--went on,--throbbed,--stopt again,--moved,--stopt,--shall I go on? No.
This famous passage is neither unintentional sentiment nor unaffected pathos. The art is apparent even in the punctuation. The writer meant to be touching and pathetic and to awaken emotions of tenderness and pity and he succeeded. The description is all he meant it to be. The extract from the newspaper arouses no emotion, unless it be resentment at its form and leaves us cold and unmoved. The other is touching and pitiful. Observe the manner in which Sterne obtains his effect, the perfect simplicity and good taste of every word, the reserve, the gentleness, the utter absence of any straining for effect. The one description died the day it appeared. The other has held its place for a century and a half. Are not the qualities which produced such a result worth striving for?
Let me take another haphazard selection from a description of a young girl entitled as such to every one's kindness, courtesy and respect. In it occurs this sentence: "The college girl is grammatical in speech, but she has the jolliest, chummiest jargon of slang that ever rolled from under a pink tongue." That articulate sounds come from beneath the tongue is at least novel and few persons are fortunate enough to be able to talk with that portion of their mouths. But I have no desire to dwell either upon the anatomical peculiarities of the sentence or upon its abysmal vulgarity. It is supposed to be effective, it is what is appropriately called "breezy," it is a form of words which can be heard nowhere in the speech of men and women. Why should it be consigned to print? It is possible to describe a young girl attractively and effectively in much simpler fashion. Let me give an example, not a famous passage at all, from another writer:
She shocked no canon of taste; she was admirably in keeping with herself, and never jarred against surrounding circumstances. Her figure, to be sure--so small as to be almost childlike and so elastic that motion seemed as easy or easier to it than rest--would hardly have suited one's idea of a countess. Neither did her face--with brown ringlets on either side and a slightly piquant nose, and the wholesome bloom, and the clear shade of tan, and the half dozen freckles, friendly remembrancers of the April sun and breeze--precisely give us the right to call her beautiful. But there was both luster and depth in her eyes. She was very pretty; as graceful as a bird and graceful much in the same way; as pleasant about the house as a gleam of sunshine falling on the floor through a shadow of twinkling leaves, or as a ray of firelight that dances on the wall while evening is drawing nigh.
Contrast this with the newspaper sentence and the sensation is one of pain. Again I say, observe the method by which Hawthorne gets his effect, the simplicity of the language, the balance of the sentences, the reserve, the refinement, and the final imaginative touch in the charming comparison with which the passage ends.
To blame the hard working men who write for the day which is passing over them because they do not write like Sterne and Hawthorne would be as absurd as it would be unjust. But they ought to recognize the qualities of fine English prose, they ought to remember that they can improve their readers by giving them good, simple English, pure and undefiled, and they ought not to debauch the public taste by vulgar fine writing and even more vulgar light writing. In short, they ought to write for the public as they would talk to their wives and children and friends; a little more formally and carefully perhaps, but in the same simple and direct fashion.
For the prolific authors of the flood of stories, which every month bears on its broad bosom many tons of advertisements, no such allowance need be made. They are not compelled to furnish copy between daylight and dark. They need a course of study in English prose more than anyone else, and they would profit by the effort. As a