The Glory of English Prose | Page 2

Any Englishman with a love of his country and a reverence for its

language can say things in a few words that will find their way straight
into our hearts, Antony, and make us all better men. I will tell you a
few of such simple sayings that are better than any more
laboured
writings.
On the 30th of June, 1921, in the Times In Memoriam column there
was an entry:--
"To the undying memory of officers, non-commissioned officers and
men of the 9th and 10th battalions of the K.O.Y.L.I.[1] who were killed
in the attack on Fricourt in the first battle of the Somme"; and below it
there were placed these splendid words:--
"Gentlemen, when the barrage lifts."
In February of 1913 news reached England of the death, after reaching
the South Pole, of four explorers, Captain Scott, their leader, among
them.
Shortly before the end, Captain Oates, a man of fortune who joined the
expedition from pure love of adventure, knowing that his helplessness
with frozen feet was retarding the desperate march of the others
towards their ship, rose up and stumbled out of the tent into a raging
blizzard, saying, "I dare say I shall be away some time."
This was greatly said. His body was never found; but the rescue party
who afterwards discovered the tent with the others dead in it, put up a
cairn in the desolate waste of snow with this inscription:--
"Hereabouts died a very gallant gentleman, Captain L.E.G. Gates,
Inniskilling Dragoons, who, on their return from the Pole in March,
1912, willingly walked to his death in a blizzard to try and save his
comrades beset with hardship."
All this was done, said, and written, very nobly by all concerned.
In St. Paul's Cathedral there lies a recumbent effigy of General Gordon,
who gave his life for the honour of England at Khartoum, and upon it

are engraven these words:--
"He gave his strength to the weak, his substance to the poor, his
sympathy to the suffering, his heart to God."
Even the concentrated terseness of Latin cannot surpass these examples
of the power of the simplest and shortest English sentences to penetrate
to the heart.
English can be used, by those who master it as an organ of expression,
to convey deep emotion under perfect control, than which nothing is
more moving, nothing better calculated to refine the mind, nothing
more certain to elevate the character.
Whenever a man has something fine to communicate to his fellow-men
he has but to use English without affectation, honestly and simply, and
he is in possession of the most splendid vehicle of human thought in
the world.
All the truly great writers of English speak with simplicity from their
hearts, they all evince a spirit of unaffected reverence, they all teach us
to look up and not down, and by the nobility of their works which have
penetrated into every home where letters are cultivated, they have done
an incalculable service in forming and sustaining the high character of
our race.
Clever flippant writers may do a trifling service here and there by
ridiculing the pompous and deflating the prigs, but there is no
permanence in such work, unless--which is seldom the case--it is
totally devoid of personal vanity.
Very little such service is rendered when it emanates from a writer who
announces himself as equal if not superior to Shakespeare, and
embellishes his lucubrations with parodies of the creeds.
"A Gentleman with a Duster," has in his "Glass of Fashion" shown us
that the Society depicted in the books of Colonel Repington and Mrs.
Asquith is not the true and great Society that sustains England in its

noble station among civilised peoples, and we may be sure that neither
do these books in the faintest degree represent the true and living
literature of the times. They will pass away and be forgotten as utterly
as are the fashion plates and missing-word competitions of ten years
ago.
Therefore, Antony, be sure that the famous and living literature of
England, that has survived all the shocks of time and changes of
modern life, is the best and properest study for a man to fit him for life,
to refine his taste, to aggravate his wisdom, and consolidate his
character.
Your loving old
G.P.
[Footnote 1: King's Own Yorkshire Light Infantry.]
2
MY DEAR ANTONY,
I alluded, in my first letter to you about English literature, to the
necessity of your learning from the beginning the wide distinction
between what is good and what is bad style.
I do not know a better instance of a display of the difference between
what is fine style and what is not, than may be made by putting side by
side almost any sentence from the old authorised translation of the
Bible and