Contemporary English Prose

A Discussion of the Development of English Prose from Hobbes and Sir Thomas Browne to Joyce and D. H. Lawrence

T. S. ELIOT

It is often said that there is in English no standard prose style. A more analytic statement of this criticism might be as follows: English prose, in comparison with that of the French, Italian and Spanish languages, developed late. Its early forms were constructed for special and limited uses; and by the time of Hobbes, English sensibility and thought had already expressed themselves in verse: to compare the verse of the time of Shakespeare with its prose is to compare an adult and independent mind with an immature and dependent one. No prose style has ever succeeded in comprehending the English mind even to the extent to which the style of Montaigne contains the French mind; hence at several periods the contrast of styles of minds which have very little in common. Hence the difficulty, at any moment, of assigning a style to that moment. If we read all of the best English prose, we may know how English prose has developed; but we shall find it very difficult to make any generalisations about it.

Nevertheless, we can trace one or two currents in the nineteenth century down to our own generation, and mark their disappearance. Curiously enough, the most original talents in our literature of the greater part of that century were prose talents; neither Tennyson nor even Browning—I speak with deliberation—can occupy the place of importance of Ruskin, Newman, Arnold or Dickens. The great novelty was (perhaps) the style of Carlyle. Hitherto the usual prose style had followed in the tradition of Gibbon and of Johnson; the style of Macaulay is an eighteenth century style debased by journalistic exuberance and theatrical emotion; the style of Landor is an eighteenth century style affected by quaintness. Nevertheless Landor's is a fine style; Macaulay's is the remains of a fine style in the hands of a literary demagogue. Carlyle— a man of intellect without intelligence, and erudition without culture—had a unique and precious sensibility, which he exploited but did not train; but if open licence is better than concealed depravity, his style is healthier than Macaulay's.

The Fever of Carlyle

THE effect of his orgy, however, is visible not only in the work of his authentic descendants—such as George Meredith—but even in the work of those who appear to be of quite another type of mind. The dignified and easy prose style of the classical tradition, of which the chief fault was pomposity, and the most frequent trick antithesis, disappeared. Thackeray is often diffuse; Ruskin often exaggerated and perverse; even Cardinal Newman, the possessor of the finest prose style of the nineteenth century, is limited to the autumnal coloring of his peculiar personal emotion. None of these writers, except Ruskin, can be said to have been influenced by Carlyle; and Ruskin, in vocabulary, structure and sensibility, is indeed very different from Carlyle; nevertheless, they all have something in common with him.

Perhaps the simplest thing to say is that Carlyle partly originates and partly marks the disturbances in the equilibrium of English prose style. In English prose thereafter, no matter how antithetical to the prose of Carlyle it may be there is usually some exaggeration, some peculiar emotional limitation, as it were a slightly feverish temperature, and of no other writer is this more true than of Walter Pater, whose prose was the model for the last ten years of the nineteenth century and the first decade of the twentieth. The result, the effect of Walter Pater's influence, has been in the limitation of prose style to particular moods or things, such as one finds in the seventeenth century. The styles of Clarendon, Sir Thomas Browne, Jeremy Taylor and Hobbes are all limited styles and very different from each other; but each within its own limitations is a balanced and normal style. Walter Pater has a much wider range, but throughout that range his prose is restricted bv its limited emotional range rather than by limited subject matter.

The Influence of Pater

WALTER PATER was a literary descendW ant of Ruskin and Matthew Arnold; and even in the severe and reasoned wit of Arnold there is an occasional feverish glow. An analysis of the work of Pater would lead too far: I must content myself here with merely affirming his great influence. One will find it in the work of writers so different as Mr. F. H. Bradley, Oscar Wilde and William Butler Yeats. Mr. Bradley's books, especially Appcarance and. Reality and Principles of Logic deserve to be recognized as classics in the great tradition of English philosophical writing; but even in the magnificent austerity of Mr. Bradley's dry and honey prose one recognizes here and there a feverish flush, which is wholly alien to the tradition of Hobbes, Berkeley and Locke. The studied ornament of Oscar Wilde and the studied simplicity of Mr. Yeats are alike different from the writing of Mr. Bradley; but they equally reflect the ascetic epicureanism of Walter Pater. (Mr. Yeats' recent Memoirs which have been appearing in The Dial form a document of very great interest for the generation of Oscar Wilde; and Mr. Yeats bears explicit testimony to the influence of Pater upon his generation.)

The influence of Walter Pater has continued almost wholly, mingled with the influence of Renan, in a beautifully written but somewhat out-of-date volume of essays by a writer of our own generation, Frederick Manning, entitled Scenes and Portraits. It is an early example of that quality of modernist realistic prose, agitated and dismembered, which culminates and disappears, I believe, in the work of James Joyce. I am hazarding a contentious statement; I am not at all confident that Mr. Joyce will subscribe to this analysis of his origins; but it appears to me that A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man is the work of a disciple of Walter Pater as well as of Cardinal Newman. In Ulysses this current disappears. In Ulysses this influence, like the influence of Ibsen and every other influence to which Mr. Joyce has submitted, is reduced to zero. It is my opinion that Ulysses is not so distinctly a precursor of a new epoch as it is a gigantic culmination of an old. In this book Joyce has arrived at a very singular and perhaps unique literary distinction: the distinction of having, not in a negative but a very positive sense, no style at all. I mean that every sentence Mr. Joyce writes is peculiarly and absolutely his own; that his work is not a pastiche; but that nevertheless, it has none of the marks by which a "style" may be distinguished.

Mr. Joyce's work puts an end to the tradition of Walter Pater, as it puts an end to a great many other things and it emphasizes the fact that it is for the writers of this generation to evolve either under foreign influence or by the development of some earlier English tradition, to make a fresh beginning. There have been very distinguished aliens to the genealogy which I have traced; such aliens as may appear in England at almost any time. Henry James, Joseph Conrad and Charles Doughty are writers with very personal and incommunicable styles; styles which, like that of M. Proust, may be imitated but will hardly be continued. Doughty is the least known of these writers, partly for the reason that his great work Travels in Arabia Deserta has been rare and extremely expensive. A good essay on Mr. Doughty's prose with quotations, is found in Mr. Middleton Murry's recent book Countries of the Mind. Mr. Doughty's work is strangely isolated. It is a singular exception in the nineteenth century; it is almost seventeenth century prose; and its limitations are of the seventeenth century, limitations of another kind than those of the school of Walter Pater.

The Prose of Wyndham Lewis

IT is difficult to say of any writer whose work is still in the process of formation whether he is to be an exception like Mr. Doughty, or the ancestor of an epoch, like Walter Pater. The writing of Mr. Wyndham Lewis is at present in this interesting state of ambiguity! I know of no contemporary writing to compare with that.of Mr. Lewis; though I have seen some writing, especially from America. which if it had any merit at all would have Mr. Lewis's merit. The prose of Wyndham Lewis, by some odd chance of fortune, is most nearly similar to prose of an even earlier epoch than Mr. Doughty's: its nearest resemblances are not in the seventeenth century but at the end of the sixteenth century; in such work as that of Thomas Nashe, some of the translators of the time, and some of the authors of the Martin Marprelate tracts. It has an abundant vigor, a living significance, a vituperation for which I find no other parallels. Mr. Lewis can use words with the fluency of a Falstaff. I have said "by chance" because I am sure that Mr. Lewis has never devoted any special study to these authors. In his early novel Tan there is manifestly the strong influence of Dostoevski. But the Dostoevski part of the book, although performed with brilliancy and originality, is not representative of Mr. Lewis; the other element in the book, by no means coherent with the former, is an element of that British humor, so serious and savage, to which Baudelaire once devoted a short study. Lewis is in strong sympathy with Hogarth, Rowlandson and Cruikshank; as he is primarily a painter, his imagination is primarily visual. He has some of that humor which appears in Dickens (also a visual writer), when Dickens is humorous and not consciously droll. But a catalogue of resemblances will by no means provide a formula for Mr. Lewis's style, which, still imperfect and unfinished, is seen at its best in his essay upon contemporary art and architecture entitled The Caliph's Design.

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May Sinclair and D. H. Lawrence

IF one examines the best of contemporary English fiction, one finds a tendency toward a style very different from that of Mr. Lewis, a style almost exaggerated in its bareness and simplicity. This is especially apparent among writers who have devoted real care to their vocabulary and their syntax. A most interesting specimen is Miss May Sinclair's Life and Death of Harriet Frean. Miss Sinclair has made great use, indeed all the use that is possible, of the results of psychoanalysis. In this book she reduces the novel to its barest essentials, she insists that not one superfluous description, not one superfluous conversation or monologue, shall avert the readers' attention from the outline of the heroine's mental growth and decay. Another writer who has increasingly aimed at stripping his style of superfluous decoration is Mr. Stephen Hudson in his second book Eleanor Colhouse. Yet, while this method, either with the aim of psychological document or with the aim of bare chronicle is visible in other writers, I cannot feel sure that it represents a direction, or that either of the writers named will not find themselves departing from it. And when I remind myself of certain writers of interest, such as Virginia Woolf and D. H. Lawrence, whom I find it impossible to classify, I am tempted to withdraw any generalisation. In the work of D. H. Lawrence, especially in his last book Aaron's Rod, is found the profoundest research into human nature, as well as the most erratic and uneven writing, by any writer of our generation.

This essay first appeared, in French, in the Nouvelle Revue Franqaise.