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ential character of regular composition, and on that consideration thought themselves entitled to neglect the combination of their words into sentences and periods; or because there is a real natural sympathy between the Latin phraseology and a Latin structure of sentence; certain it is and remarkable, that our popular style, in the common limited sense of arrangement applied to words, or the syntaxes of sentences, has laboured with two faults that might have been thought incompatible: it has been artificial, by artifices peculiarly adapted to the powers of the Latin language, and yet at the very same time careless and disordinate. There is a strong idea expressed by the Latin word inconditus, disorganized, or rather unor ganized. Now, in spite of its artificial bias, that is the very epithet which will best characterise our newspaper style. To be viewed as susceptible of organization, such periods must already be elaborate and artificial; to be viewed as not having received it, such periods must be careless.

But perhaps the very best illustration of all this will be found in putting the case of English style into close juxtaposition with the style of the French and Germans-our only very important neighbours. As leaders of civilisation, as powers in an intellectual sense, there are but three nations in Europe-England, Germany, France. As to Spain and Italy, outlying extremities, they are not moving bodies; they rest upon the past. Russia and North America are the two bulwarks of Christendom-East and west. But the three powers at the centre are in all senses the motive forces of civilisation. In all things they have the initiation; and they preside.

By this comparison we shall have the advantage of doing what the French express by s'orienter the Germans by sich orientiren. Learning one of our bearings on the compass, we shall be able to deduce the rest; and we shall be able to conjecture our valuation as respects the art, by finding our place amongst the artists.

With respect to French style, we can imagine the astonishment of an English author, practised in composition, and with no previous knowledge of French literature, who should first find himself ranging freely amongst a French library. That particular fault

of style which in English books is all but universal, absolutely has not an existence in the French. Speaking rigorously and to the very letter of the case, we, upon a large experience in French literature, affirm, that it would be nearly impossible (perhaps strictly so) to cite an instance of that cumbrous and unwieldy style which disfigures English composition so extensively. Enough could not be adduced to satisfy the purpose of illustration. And to make a Frenchman sensible of the fault as a possibility, you must appeal to some translated model.

But why? The cause of this national immunity from a fault so common every where else, and so natural, when we look into the producing occasions, is as much entitled to our notice as the immunity itself. The fault is inevitable, as one might fancy, to two conditions of mind-hurry in the first place, want of art in the second. The French must be liable to these disadvantages as much as their neighbours: by what magic is it that they evade them or neutralize them in the result? The secret lies here; beyond all nations, by constitutional vivacity, the French are a nation of talkers: and the model of their sentences is moulded by that fact. Conversation, which is a luxury for other nations, is for them a necessity: by the very law of their peculiar intellect and of its social training, they are colloquial. Hence it happens, that there are no such people endured or ever heard of in France as alloquial wits; people who talk to but not with a circle; the very finest of their beaux esprits must submit to the equities of conversation, and would be crushed summarily as monsters, if they were to seek a selfish mode of display, or a privilege of lecturing any audience of a salon who had met for purposes of social pleasure. "De monologue," as Madame de Staël, in her broken English, described this mode of display when speaking of Coleridge, is so far from being tolerated in France as an accomplishment, that it is not even understood as a disease. This kind of what may be called irresponsible talk, when a man runs on perpetuo tenore, not accountable for any opinion to his auditors, open to no contradiction, has sometimes procured for a man in England the affix of River to his name: Labitur et labetur in omne volubilis ævum. But that has been in cases where the talking im

pulse was sustained by mere vivacity of animal spirits, without knowledge to support it, and liable to the full weight of Archbishop Huet's sarcasm -that it was a diarrhoea of garrulity, a fluxe de bouche. But in cases like that of Coleridge, where the solitary display, if selfish, is still dignified by a pomp of knowledge, and a knowledge which you feel to have been fused and combined by the genial circumstances of the speaker's position in the centre of an admiring circle,-we English do still recognise the métier of a professional talker as a privileged mode of social display. People are asked to come and hear such a performer, as you form a select party to hear Thalberg or Paganini. The thing is understood at least with us; right or wrong, there is an understanding amongst the company that you are not to interrupt the great man of the night. You may prompt him by a question; you may set him in motion; but to begin arguing against him would be felt as not less unseasonable than to insist on whistling Jim Crow during the bravuras and tours de force of the great musical artists.

In France, therefore, from the intense adaptation of the national mind to real colloquial intercourse, for which reciprocation is indispensable, the form of sentence in use is adjusted to that primary condition; brief, terse, simple; shaped to avoid misunderstanding, and to meet the impatience of those who are waiting for their turn. People who write rapidly every where write as they talk: it is impossible to do otherwise. Taking a pen into his hand, a man frames his periods exactly as he would do if addressing an audience. So far the Englishman and the Frenchman are upon the same level. Suppose them, therefore, both preparing to speak: an Englishman in such a situation has no urgent motive for turning his thoughts to any other object than the prevailing one of the moment-viz., how best to convey his meaning. That object weighs also with the Frenchman; but he has a previous, a paramount, object to watch -the necessity of avoiding des longueurs. The rights, the equities of conversation are but dimly present to the mind of the Englishman. From the mind of a Frenchman they are never absent. To an Englishman, the right of occupying the attention of the company seems to inhere in things

rather than in persons: if the particular subject under discussion should happen to be a grave one, then, in right of that, and not by any right of his own, a speaker will seem to an Englishman invested with the privilege of drawing largely upon the attention of a company. But to a Frenchman this right of participation in the talk is a personal right, which cannot be set aside by any possible claims in the subject: it passes by necessity to and fro, backwards and forwards, between the several persons who are present; and, as in the games of battledore and shuttlecock, or of "hunt the slipper," the momentary subject of interest never can settle or linger for any length of time in any one individual, without violating the rules of the sport, or suspending its movement. Inevita bly, therefore, the structure of sentence must for ever be adapted to this pri mary function of the French national intellect-the function of communicativeness, and to the necessities (for to the French they are necessities) of social intercourse.

Hence it is that in French authors, whatever may otherwise be the differ. ences of their minds, or the differences of their themes, uniformly we find the periods short, rapid, unelaborate_ Pascal or Helvetius, Condillac or Rousseau, Montesquieu or Voltaire, Buffon or Duclos, all alike are terse, perspicuous, brief. Even Mirabeau or Chateaubriand, so much modified by foreign intercourse, in this point adhere to their national models. Even Bossuet or Bourdaloue, where the diffusiveness and amplitude of oratory might have been pleaded as a dispensation, are not more licentious in this respect than their compatriots. One rise in every sentence, one gentle descent,-that is the law for French composition; even too monotonously so and thus it happens that such a thing as a long or an involved sentence could not he produced from French literature, though a sultan were to offer his daughter in marriage to the man who should find it. Whereas now, amongst us English, not only is the too general tendency of our sentences towards hyperbolical length, but it will be found continually, that instead of one rise and one corresponding fall-one arsis and one the. sis-there are many. Flux and reflux, swell and cadence, that is the move. ment for a sentence; but our modern

sentences agitate us by rolling fires, after the fashion of those internal earthquakes that, not content with one throe, run along spasmodically like boys playing at what is called "drakestone."

It is not often that a single fault can produce any vast amount of evil. But there are cases where it does; and this is one: the effect of weari. ness and of repulsion, which may arise from this single vice of unwieldy comprehensiveness in the structure of sentences cannot better be illustrated than by a frank exposure of what often happens to ourselves, and (as we differ as to this case only by consciously noticing what all feel) must often happen to others. In the evening, when it is natural that we should feel a craving for rest, some book lies near us which is written in a style, clear, tranquil, easy to follow. Just at that moment comes in the wet newspaper, dripping with the dewy freshness of its news; and even in its parliamentary memorials promising so much interest, that, let them be treated in what manner they may merely for the subjects, they are often commandingly attractive. The attraction indeed is but too potent, the interest but too exciting. Yet, after all, many times we lay aside the journal, and we acquiesce in the gentler stimu. lation of the book. Simply the news we may read; but the discussions, whether direct from the editor, or reported from the Parliament, we refuse or we delay. And why? It is the subject, perhaps you think, it is the great poli. tical question-too agitating by the consequences it may happen to involve. No. All this, if treated in a winning style, we could bear. It is the effort, the toil, the exertion of mind requisite to follow the discussion through endless and labyrinthine sentencesthis it is which compels us to forego the journal, or to lay it aside until the next morning. Those who are not accustomed to watch the effects of composition upon the feelings, or have had little experience in voluminous reading pursued for weeks, would scarcely imagine how much of downright physical exhaustion is produced by what is technically called the periodic style of writing it is not the length, the arsgarrely, the paralytic flux of words; it is not even the cumbrous involution of parts within parts, separately considered, that bears so heavily upon

the attention. It is the suspense, the holding-on, of the mind until what is called the ads or coming round of the sentence commences-this it is which wears out the faculty of attention. A sentence, for example, begins with a series of ifs; perhaps a dozen lines are occupied with expanding the conditions under which something is affirmed or denied: here you cannot dismiss and have done with the ideas as you go along; all is hypothetic; all is suspended in air. The conditions are not fully to be understood until you are acquainted with the dependency; you must give a separate attention to each clause of this complex hypothesis, and yet, having done that by a painful effort, you have done nothing at all; for you must exercise a reacting attention through the corre sponding latter section, in order to follow out its relations to all parts of the hypothesis which sustains it. In fact, under the rude yet also artificial character of newspaper style, each separate monster period is a vast arch, which, not receiving its keystone, not being locked into self-supporting cohesion, until you nearly reach its close, imposes of necessity upon the unhappy reader all the onus of its ponderous weight through the main process of its construction. The continued repetition of so Atlantean an effort soon overwhelms the patience of any reader, and establishes at length that habitual feeling which causes him to shrink from the speculations of journalists, or (which is more likely) to adopt a worse habit than absolute neglect, which we shall notice immediately.

Meantime, as we have compared ourselves on this important point with the French, let us now complete our promise, by noticing our relation in the same point to the Germans. Even on its own account, and without any view to our present purpose, the character of German prose is an object of legitimate astonishment. Whatever is bad in our own ideal of prose style, whatever is repulsive in our own practice, we see there carried to the most outrageous excess. Herod is out-heroded, Sternhold is out-sternholded, with a zealotry of extravagance that really seems like wilful burlesque. Lessing, Herder, Paul Richter, and Lichtenberg, with some few beside, either prompted by nature or trained upon foreign models, have avoided the besetting sin of German prose. Any

man of distinguished talent, whose attention has been once called steadily to this subject, cannot fail to avoid it. The misfortune of most writers has been, that, once occupied with the interest of things, and overwhelmed by the embarrassments of disputed doctrines, they never advert to any question affecting what they view, by comparison, as a trifle. The rò docendum, the thing to be taught, has availed to obscure or even to annihilate for their eyes every anxiety as to the mode of teaching. And, as one conspicuous example of careless style acts by its authority to create many more, we need not wonder at the results, even when they reach a point of what may be called monstrous. Among ten thousand offenders, who carry their neglect of style even to that point, we would single out Immanuel Kant. Such is the value of his philosophy in some sections, and partially it is so very capable of a lucid treatment, intelligible to the plainest man of reflective habits, that within no long interval we shall certainly see him naturalized amongst ourselves; there are particular applications of his philosophy not contemplated by himself, for which we venture to predict that the Christian student will ultimately be thankful, when the elementary principles have been brought under a clear light of interpretation. Attention will then be forced upon his style, and facts will come forward not credible without experimental proof. For instance, we have lying before us at this moment his Critik der Practischen Vernunft in the unpirated edition of Hartnoch-the respectable publisher of all Kant's great works. The text is therefore authentic: and being a 4th edition, (Riga, 1797,) must be presumed to have benefited by the author's careful revision: we have no time for search, but on barely throwing open the book, we see a sentence at pp. 70, 71 exactly covering one whole octavo page of thirty-one lines, (each line averaging forty-five to forty-eight letters.) Sentences of the same calibre, some even of far larger bore, we have observed in this and other works of the same author. And it is not the fact taken as an occasional possibility, it is the prevailing character of his style, that we insist on as the most formidable barrier to the study of his writings and to the progress of what will soon be acknowledged as important in his principles. A sentence is viewed by him, and by

most of his countrymen, as a rude mould or elastic form admitting of expansion to any possible extent: it is laid down as a rude outline, and then by superstruction and epi-superstruction it is gradually reared to a giddy altitude which no eye can fol low. Yielding to his natural impulse of subjoining all additions, or exceptions, or modifications-not in the shape of separate consecutive sentences, but as intercalations and stuffings of one original sentence, Kant might naturally enough have written a book from beginning to end in one vast hyperbolical sentence. We sometimes see an English Act of Parliament which does literally accomplish that end, by an artifice which in law has a purpose and a use. Instead of laying down a general proposition, which is partially false until it has received its proper restraints, the framer of the act endeavours to evade even this momentary falsehood by coupling the restraints with the very primary enunciation of the truth: e. g. A shall be entitled, provided always that he is under the circumstances of e, or i, or o, to the right of X. Thus, even a momentary compliance with the false notion of an absolute unconditional claim to X. is evaded; a truth which is only a conditional truth, is stated as such from the first. There is, therefore, a theoretic use. But what is the practical result? Why, that when you attempt to read an Act of Parliament where the exceptions, the secondary exceptions to the exceptions, the limitations and the sublimitations, descend seriatim, by a vast scale of dependencies, the mind finds itself overtasked: the energy of the most energetic begins to droop; and so inevitable is that result, that Mr Pitt, a minister unusually ac complished for such process by constitution of mind and by practice, publicly avowed his inability to follow so trying a conflict with technical embarrassments. He declared himself to be lost in the labyrinth of clauses: the Ariadne's clue was wanting for his final extrication: and he described his situation at the end with the simplicity natural to one who was no charlatan, and sought for no reputation by the tricks of a funambulist: " in the crowd of things excepted and counter-excepted, he really ceased to understand the main point-what it was that the law allowed, and what it was that it disallowed."

We might have made our readers merry with the picture of German prose; but we must not linger. It is enough to say, that it offers the counterpole to the French style. Our own popular style, and (what is worse) the tendency of our own, is to the Germán extreme. For those who read German there is this advantage-that German prose, as written by the mob of authors, presents, as in a Brobdignagian mirror, the most offensive faults of

our own.

But these faults-are they in practice so wearisome and exhausting as we have described them? Possibly not; and, where that happens to be the case, let the reader ask himself if it is not by means of an evasion worse in its effects than any fault of style could ever prove in its most exaggerated form. Shrinking, through long experience, from the plethoric form of cumulation and 'periodic' writing in which the journalist supports or explains his views, every man who puts a business value upon his time, slips naturally into a trick of short-hand reading. It is more even by the effort and tension of mind required, than by the mere loss of time, that most readers are repelled from the habit of careful reading. An evil of modern growth is met by a modern remedy. Every man gradually learns an art of catch ing at the leading words, and the car. dinal or hinge-joints of transition, which proclaim the general course of a writer's speculation. Now it is very true, and is sure to be objected that, where so much is certain to prove mere iteration and teasing tautology, little can be lost by this or any other process of abridgement. Certainly, as regards the particular subject concerned, there may be no room to apprehend a serious injury. Not there, not in any direct interest, but in a far larger interest-indirect for the moment, but the most direct and absolute of all interests for an intellectual being, the reader suffers a permanent debilitation. He acquires a factitious propensity, he forms an incorrigible habit of desultory reading. Now, to say of a man's knowledge, that it will be shallow, or (which is worse than shallow) will be erroneous and insecure in its foundations, is to say little of such a habit it is by reaction upon a man's faculties, it is by the effects reflected upon his judging and reasoning powers, that loose habits of reading

tell eventually. And these are durable effects. Even as respects the minor purpose of information, better it is, by a thousand-fold, to have read three score of books (chosen judiciously) with severe attention, than to have raced through the library of the Vatican at a newspaper pace. But, as respects the final habits acquired, habits of thinking coherently, and of judging soundly-better that a man should have not read one line throughout his life, than have travelled through the journals of Europe by this random process of "reading short."

Yet, by this Parthian habit of aim. ing at full gallop-of taking flying shots at conspicuous marks, and, like Parthians also, directing their chance arrows whilst retreating, and revolting with horror from a direct approach to the object,-thus it is, that the young and the flexible are trained amongst us under the increasing tyranny of journalism. A large part of the evil, therefore, belongs to style: for it is this which repels readers, and enforces the short-hand process of desultory reading. A large part of the evil, therefore, is of a nature to receive a remedy.

It is with a view to that practical part of the extensive evil, that we have shaped our present notice of popular style, as made operative amongst ourselves. One single vice of periodic syntax, a vice unknown to the literature of Greece, and, until Paterculus, even of Rome, (although the language of Rome was so naturally adapted to that vice), has with us counterbalanced all possible vices of any other order. Simply by the vast sphere of its agency for evil, in the habits of mind which it produces and supports, such a vice merits a consideration which would else be disproportionate. Yet, at the same time, it must not be forgotten, that if the most operative of all vices, after all it is but one. What are the others?

It is a fault, amongst many faults, of such works as we have on this subject of style-that they collect the list of qualities, good or bad, to which composition is liable, not under any principle from which they might be deduced à priori, so as to be assured that all had been enumerated, but by a tentative groping, a mere conjectural estimate. The word style has with us a twofold meaning; one sense, the narrow one, expressing the mere syn

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