The truth remains that the relation, or the lack of relation, between the economic result of a literary effort and its success as a piece of craft is of very much less importance than the consideration of the canon, the attempt to achieve a standard. To get a canon is the first requirement of letters. For though it is said that time will test literature for us in any case, this is not universally true; and, even in so far as it is true, it is better to have the good things to our hand than to wait for time to establish them. Such a canon requires not only intelligent analysis, but a common philosophy into which our rules must fit. It is, therefore, with great difficulty arrived at, or perhaps not to be arrived at at all, in a period of confusion like ours. But the attempt to arrive at it never loses interest—no, not even today.
One of the things which always seem to me best worth saying in connection with letters is that prose should be distinguished, not only from verse, but also from rhetoric; and that prose in itself, mere lucid, economic, unornamented prose, is the foundation of good letters.
If the national prose is sound, the rest of national expression will come of itself. But this matter of prose has today been nearly forgotten. For most of us perhaps the phrase “good prose,” or “fine prose,” really means rhetoric. It means a passage in which the soul is stirred by a choice of rhythm and sound, and a mystical connotation of words in some passage not definitely reduced to versification. Thus, all the great passages from the Jacobean translation of the Hebrew Scriptures which are familiar as examples to our generation are essentially rhetoric; so are the excerpts quoted from Bunyan, such as the fine closing passage of the “Pilgrim’s Progress”; so is every single passage quoted from Carlyle; so are even those quoted from Newman and (I am sorry to say) those quoted from the greatest of our modern prose writers, Huxley.
But prose is rightly to be distinguished from anything of that kind. The excellence of prose lies in its adaptation to the function of intelligent expression or of narration. It is a statement; the end of it is not the exciting of emotion but the clear presentation, whether of a record (in fiction or fact) or of an idea, which the writer desires to communicate to his fellows.
He that succeeds in presenting the idea lucidly, so that no modification or subsidiary idea confuses the process; he that succeeds in presenting vividly to the reader an image of particular fact, or of imagined fiction, vividly arisen in his own mind, is a writer of good prose; and the better he succeeds in this faculty of mere exposition, the more he excels in the supreme character of lucidity, the better his prose. Prose which is redundant is worse than prose which is economic in the use of words, simply because economic prose is the better statement. Exactitude of word and idea makes better prose than the use of many synonyms and of vague terms, simply because it ministers to lucidity. A mass of adjectives or adverbs is usually (not always) ill in prose, because usually (not always) the idea which the writer has to express does not involve all these modifications; they only slip from his pen through laziness or through his having heard them before. It is obviously better prose to say, “I was tired out,” than to say, “I was wholly tired out,” unless for any particular reason you wish to express complete exhaustion. It is obviously better prose to say “the sky” than “the blue sky,” unless for any particular reason you are concerned in your description with the colour of the sky.
But the worst enemy of prose today is the snobbishness of rules and forms, the Mumbo-Jumbo of hieratic prescription. The influence of these is a very good example of that excellent rule laid down by Saint Thomas Aquinas that all evil exists in mistaking, or misusing, the means for the end. This plague of pedantry does not rage quite as severely as it did when I was young, but it is still pretty severe. You are told that it is good prose, for instance, to have as few adjectives as possible. That is nonsense. It is good prose to have as many adjectives as you need, and no more. You are told, as a sort of eleventh commandment, never to split an infinitive; the rule is that of an excellent master of English, the late Professor Ker, who adds, “except when euphony demands it.” I would go further; I would say that when the spoken language has arrived, as ours has today, at the universal use of the split infinitive, the written language may follow at some little distance behind. We are told that prose must never be emphatic, or excited, or this, or that, or the other. All that is nonsense. Prose must be emphatic when special emphasis is to be expressed, excited when excitement is to be expressed, and so forth. But certainly the character of good prose is the subordination of everything in it to the end, which is expression of what you have to say; and that is the distinction between good prose and rhetoric and verse. For in rhetoric
