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Where Is Good English to Be Found?

Experts in every scientific or learned subject communicate with one another in a distinct technical dialect; and when, now and then, one of them is asked for a popular lecture or book on his own subject, it is seldom that he is able to translate his ideas into an English immediately intelligible to his readers. Usually he has only a meagre general vocabulary. The language which, say, a theologian, an electrical engineer and a morbid-psychologist would use amongst themselves if they were thrown into contact would probably be a loose, schoolboy slang—their common dialect before they began to specialize. Three hundred years ago a correspondingly diverse group of experts, whenever they had difficulty in making themselves understood to one another in English, could fall back on Latin. The reason for stabilizing all learned terms in Latin, helped out with a little Greek, was to avoid the looseness of vernacular expression: each plant, planet or physical phenomenon was fixed in the corpus of knowledge by being given a unique and inalienable name. Botanists, with great advantage to themselves, have kept faithfully to a single Latin register of terms; other scientists, including zoologists, have not done so, nor have philosophers, and their subjects are consequently full of overlapping, ambiguous and contradictory terms. A conscientious scientist, historian or philosopher, wishing to master every aspect of his subject, must now learn not merely one language, Latin, but three or four—French, German, Italian, perhaps Russian—often more. Even so, he cannot always be sure that the meaning of a certain word in a foreign language is exactly equivalent to its counterpart in his own. There is no international lexicon of scientific and learned terms, and the international Scientific Congress of 1922 failed to agree even to a proposal for limiting to nine the languages in which scientific works might be written in order to qualify for international recognition.

The recent substitution in most British schools of French and English for Latin has had on the whole a vicious effect on English prose. The pupil in the old-fashioned grammar-school was faced with the problem of finding English equivalents to Latin phrases and so became aware of the peculiar properties of English. The teaching of French does not have the same illuminating effect, either because it is closer in structure and spirit to English than Latin is or because it has been taught without the tradition of scholarly discipline that clings to a long-studied dead language. The clue to the appropriate use of a great many English words is to be found in their Latin originals, which occur in French only in degenerate forms: especially important is a knowledge of the effect of Latin prepositions on the verbs to which they are prefixed. Moreover, Latin, though surpassed by English in richness of vocabulary and flexibility of grammar, did for centuries put a useful check on any literary bad manners in which writers of English might feel inclined to indulge. A useful test of the logic of metaphorical English prose is to translate it into Latin.

The following editorial comment from a leading London weekly (1941) is typical of what will not pass the test:

‘The next few weeks may decide whether the Easter egg which Matsuoka and Molotoff laid in the Kremlin last Sunday is just a shell, or full of dynamite. Although fresh from the nest, it already emits several displeasing odours.’

The Latin point of view would be that a man cannot lay an egg, still less can two men; that Easter eggs are either real eggs, in which case they contain a yolk and a white, or artificial eggs, in which case they are not ‘laid’; that if the egg were just a shell it would not smell, nor would it if it were filled with dynamite; that one egg can only emit one odour, not several. The passage is therefore untranslatable. The Romans, though they had a broad sense of stage humour and enjoyed absurd jokes at the baths and at banquets, kept their prose free from extravagance.

It is unfortunate that English, which has for some time been the most widely used language in the world—the chief language of trade, and the national or administrative language of six hundred million people—should be so difficult a one—and that there should be no short cuts to learning it.¹ There are, however, compensations for this difficulty. Frenchmen who make errors in English are not obliged to feel the same embarrassment as Englishmen who, speaking French, mistake the gender of some simple household utensil: for, however strange their accent, they are unlikely to use English more clumsily than a great many people whose mother-tongue it is.

Situations arise in English unparalleled in more rigidly grammatical languages. If an intelligent foreigner were asked to translate into English a simple Latin sentence ‘Mala fortuna semper obruet talem qualis ego’, he would probably write: ‘Misfortune will always overwhelm such as I’, and justify it grammatically by pointing out that ‘such’ was accusative, the object of the word ‘overwhelm’, and was followed by an independent clause ‘as I’, with the word ‘am’ understood. He would be right; and only wrong if he decided that ‘such as me’ was ungrammatical—on the ground that in no sane language can nominative and accusative be used alternatively in the same phrase, and that in all Romance and Germanic languages the nominative would be used. However, such as me’, treated as a declinable compound pronoun, has been used in English since at least 1412, when Hoccleve wrote:

Earthern vessel, to such a man as me,

Full fitting is….

It may be assumed that, though grammatically there are two alternatives, ‘such as I’ and ‘such as me’, one of them will be more suitable than the other to the context. In no book of usages will the foreigner find any ruling upon this. However, a writer sensitive to the emotional logic of English would probably write ‘Misfortune will always overwhelm such as me’, but (if the sense had to be reversed) ‘Misfortune will never overwhelm such as I’. His feeling would be that the phrase ‘such as me’ bows passively before misfortune, whereas ‘such as I’ resists it actively and uprightly.

Or, what is the plural of ‘formula’? The dictionary allows a choice of either ‘formulae’ or ‘formulas’, but suggests no rule for deciding when to use which. Probably most sensitive people would write: ‘Professor Brown advised his pupils to memorize a number of thermodynamic formulae,’ but ‘The Foreign Minister, before signing the pact, was offered a choice of three formulas.’ The Latin plural tends to be used in scientific contexts, the English plural in non-scientific ones. Prose-writers, however, meet this sort of problem less frequently than poets, nor are they obliged so often to transcend conventional usage or to coin new words.

One of the differences in English between prose and poetry is that, while the prose writer must nowadays assume his reader to be a busy person whose eye sweeps along the page at a fairly steady rate, seldom pausing long even at key passages, the poet, unless he is a suicidal Hart Crane, still assumes his reader to have perfect leisure and patience for dwelling on each word in a poem and appreciating its relation with every other. Prose, in fact, is expected to reveal its full content at first reading: poetry only at third or fourth. The first glance at a poem takes in its prose sense as a base on which to build up the poetic sense. For example, the following stanza from Keats’s La Belle Dame Sans Merci presents a simple story situation:

I saw pale kings and princes too,

Pale warriors, death pale were they all—

They cried “La Belle Dame Sans Merci

Hath thee in thrall.”

Having grasped so much, one considers the lines in poetic terms. ‘What literary context do these pale kings, princes and warriors recall? What force has the repetition of the word “pale”? And who or what is La Belle Dame Sans Merci? Why has she a mediaeval French name?’ One is free to interpret her fatal person according to personal experience. To Keats, she seems to have been a mixture of Fanny Brawne, with whom he was hopelessly in love, Consumption, which had carried off his brother Tom and was to kill him too, and the intractable Spirit of Poetry. One notes how the conventional phrase ‘She has enthralled you’, by being resolved into its original elements, recovers its metaphorical force of ‘has you in slavery’; and how the subsidiary rhyme of merci with thee echoes in the mind and gives ‘thee’ the force of ‘thee too’; and how the variation of vowel-sounds gives iridescence to the lines; and how well-suited to the sense the alliteration is; and what a shiver comes with the word ‘warriors’.

Poetic meaning, then, is contained in the complicated correspondence between the words used, regarded both as sense and as sound, and in latent meanings of the words evoked by the rhythmic spell. The unusual juxtaposition of two words may carry a weight of meaning over which a thoughtful reader will spend as much time as over a page or more of prose argument. In ordinary prose one does not look for correspondences of this sort, or for latent meanings. Reading as prose the sentence ‘La Belle Dame Sans Merci hath thee in thrall’ one would miss the rhyme of merci and ‘thee’ and, mentally accentuating the first syllable of merci, would give no greater stress to ‘thee’ than to ‘hath’.

If, therefore, a prose writer has some thought to express that has occurred to him with poetic knottiness, he must either prepare the reader for this knot by unmistakable warnings, and help him slowly to disentangle it by subsequent comment; or he must withhold the knot and provide a prose equivalent instead. It would, for example, be unwise to write in prose: ‘Reprisals in war are a mad and vicious spiral’, and expect the reader to take this odd metaphor in his stride. Either he would automatically read it as ‘a vicious circle’; or his reaction would be ‘Why not “vicious circle”? Can a spiral be vicious, in the sense that it always comes back to the same point? Surely it advances as it revolves?’ He would read on, mystified and perhaps annoyed. Yet a reader of poetry confronted with the couplet:

War’s vicious spiral

Of mad reprisal …

would lay his book down for a moment. He would think: ‘Yes, if in war both belligerents wage a secondary war of reprisals for some original act of wantonness, a vicious circle results, and not so much a vicious circle as a vicious spiral: as hysteria mounts, the first punishment returns in ever heightened form to the punisher—so that the conflict is prolonged to a point of common exhaustion that could hardly have been reached had either side shown restraint at the outset.’ This reflection is the prose equivalent of the poetic couplet.

There should be two main objects in ordinary prose writing: to convey a message, and to include in it nothing that will distract the reader’s attention or check his habitual pace of reading—he should feel that he is seated at ease in a taxi, not riding a temperamental horse through traffic. But there is a form of prose called, at different times, ‘the conceited style’, ‘the grand style’, ‘prose-poetry’ and ‘aesthetic prose’, the aim of which is to divert leisured readers by ingenious or graceful feats with language. It originated in Graeco-Roman schools of forensic oratory where young men learned the art of dressing up an argument for the benefit of a judge or jury so that it might seem stronger than it really was. In this sort of prose, correspondences of sound and meaning are exploited, rhythms are imposed on the sense rather than created naturally by it, and the reader is amused by literary references, witty turns of language and farfetched metaphors.

There were three sorts of prose in Latin while it was still a living language: the plain, the polished and the florid. Plainness of language was a virtue under the early Republic, but after the conquest of Greece the Romans became embarrassed by their lack of culture and took to polishing their speeches and letters. By the time of the Early Empire, the plain style was held pedestrian and boorish and the polished also had gone out of fashion: Cicero’s admired works, which had been composed on careful rhythmic principles, now seemed pompous and boring. Then, as orators and historians found less and less to say, original thinking being dangerous under the Empire, every sort of bright decoration—‘tropes’ as they were called in the schools—was used to enliven the safe but threadbare themes. At English universities, where from the Middle Ages until late Victorian times the chief ostensible aim of education was to make the boys fluent public speakers in Latin, the polished and the florid styles were taught. In general, the plain style, as found in the works of Caesar and Sallust, was reserved for grammar-school boys. In the next chapters we shall show how strong an effect oratorical education had on English prose: for several centuries few writers who had been to the University refrained from decorating their work with Senecan flourishes and flowers or from cultivating a sonorous Ciceronian grace.

Rhetoric is meant to be spoken, or at least read with an attentive mental ear. Though speeches and sermons are still publicly delivered and the radio has even enlarged their audiences, no novelist or historian now expects his work to be read aloud as in Classical times. It is obviously futile to use rhetorical devices which are meant for the ear and expect them to catch the eye—especially an eye that reads three times faster than ordinary talking-pace. We are confident that few of our readers noticed a trick played on them on line 10 of page 35, where we introduced into ordinary prose a highly stylized sentence connected by a complex system of interlaced alliterations: they were reading for sense, not style. A company report or a newspaper leader might be published in blank verse and, so long as the lay-out was a prose one, nobody would notice the metre. A sentence in a Victorian mathematical work ran something like this:

‘It may at first seem unlikely that the pull of gravity will depress the centre of a light cord, held horizontally at a high lateral tension; and yet no force, however great, can stretch a cord, however fine, into a horizontal line that shall be absolutely straight.’

It was years before someone discovered that the second part of the sentence was a perfect In Memoriam rhymed stanza.

We have no quarrel with rhetoric: it is a legitimate and honoured pastime like acrostics or card-play. But since English by its simplicity of structure permits a greater mobility of thought than other languages, and so can express subtler insinuations and more powerful thrusts of meaning, an English writer with something to say needs no rhetorical art. That the hurry of modern life has put both the florid and the polished styles out of fashion, except for very special audiences, is not to be deplored if this leads to a more general appreciation of the capacity of the plain style. By ‘plain’ we do not mean bald (as, say, the style of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle is bald), but simple and neat. For example, neither rhythmic repetition, adjectival profusion, nor quaintness of metaphor will convince a reader nearly so easily that such and such a house was disgustingly dirty and its proprietor an old wretch, as a simple, unemphatic anecdote of what happened early one Monday morning between the kitchen and the backdoor.

Towards the end of the nineteenth century Samuel Butler recorded in his notebook as a private eccentricity that, unlike his contemporaries Pater and Ruskin, he had never cultivated his literary style but tried instead to make his handwriting as clear as possible. Nowadays it is difficult to read Pater or Ruskin at all, because the information and ideas (many of them valuable) that they have to offer are so overlaid with painfully cultivated styles as to confuse rather than enchant; whereas Butler, who carried his aim of simple clarity past handwriting into prose, is still a modern.

Where is good English to be found? Not among those who might be expected to write well professionally. Schoolmasters seldom write well: it is difficult for any teacher to avoid either pomposity or, in the effort not to be pompous, a jocular conversational looseness. The clergy suffer from much the same occupational disability: they can seldom decide whether to use ‘the language of the market-place’ or Biblical rhetoric. Men of letters usually feel impelled to cultivate an individual style—less because they feel sure of themselves as individuals than because they wish to carve a niche for themselves in literature; and nowadays an individual style usually means merely a peculiar range of inaccuracies, ambiguities, logical weaknesses and stylistic extravagancies. Trained journalists use a flat, over-simplified style, based on a study of what sells a paper and what does not, which is inadequate for most literary purposes.

As a rule, the best English is written by people without literary pretensions, who have responsible executive jobs in which the use of official language is not compulsory; and, as a rule, the better at their jobs they are, the better they write. Some command a much larger vocabulary than others, are more eloquent and more aware of historic precedent in the use of words; but faults in English prose derive not so much from lack of knowledge, intelligence or art as from lack of thought, patience or goodwill. Though often letters, speeches and reports must be written in a hurry and, because of the countless considerations that clear writing involves, are bound in some way to fall short of the full intended meaning, conscientious people will always regret this necessity and arrange their affairs as far as possible to avoid it. Arnold Bennett in his Literary Taste pointed out that faults of style are largely faults of character.

‘How often has it been said that Carlyle’s matter is marred by the harshness and eccentricities of his style? But Carlyle’s matter is harsh and eccentric to precisely the same degree as his style. His behaviour was frequently ridiculous, if not abominable.’

The writing of good English is thus a moral matter, as the Romans held that the writing of good Latin was. And the British people, though at times it recognizes and applauds the first-rate in art, literature, statesmanship, technical achievement, social conduct and so on, is always overindulgent of the second-, third- or fourth-rate and often taken in by the simply bad. The national instinct is towards what is good, but there is a longstanding aversion to laying down standards in too final a way—cheats, scoundrels, careerists and dunces have profited greatly from this in politics, business, society, art and literature—and though it is generally assumed that there is good and bad writing in the present, as well as in the past, it is felt that nobody should be either hardy enough to define the difference or ill-mannered enough to make a detailed study of the short-comings of his fellow-writers. In fact, a leading trait of the British character is not only to suspend judgement on values but never to think further than is absolutely necessary, and to put off radical change of behaviour or policy until compelled by an acute crisis. We regard the present crisis as acute enough to excuse this book.

The short-term view of writing and public speaking held between 1919 and 1939 corresponded closely with the short-term view of clothes, household belongings and vehicles as temporary conveniences, soon out of date, not worth making well enough to last a lifetime. It was argued that almost every speech was wholly forgotten after three weeks and almost every book after three years. ‘Why then trouble to write really well? Would anyone but a fool make a motor-car to be admired by posterity? The most economical car is the one built to run well and look smart only for the length of time that a car remains up-to-date mechanically—three to five years. The same is true of books.’

The consequent tendency of English—even of the dignified language spoken in Parliament—to become loose, confused and ungraceful was first officially recognized, and condoned, in 1924. Stanley Baldwin, political leader of the business class which had gradually taken over the direction of national affairs from the impoverished land-owning class, then made a statement of appalling frankness to the Cambridge Union, admitting the anti-literary prejudice of his associates, and even glorying in it:

‘If there is one thing which those who have been in any other profession than the Bar distrust more than another, it is the eloquent man. In the business world … the man who has the power of talking is not the man who gets promotion. To be able to express oneself, in business, is always to be written down as not quite first class … it is not necessarily the man most fluent of speech to whom we should entrust the destinies of the country.’

This was a curious reversion to a view which had been held in the Middle Ages by the land-owning class, but was already by Stuart times abandoned in all but a few backward counties. Richard Pace wrote of it in his Latin De Fructu, 1517:

‘One of those whom we call gentlemen, who always carry a horn slung at their backs as though they would hunt during dinner, said: “I swear by God’s Body I would rather that my son should hang than study literature. It behoves the sons of gentlemen to blow the horn tunefully, to hunt skilfully, to train a hawk well and carry it elegantly. But the study of literature should be left to rustics.” ’

When the policies of the anti-literary business party were finally discredited after a few months of the Second World War, and an all-party government was formed, the only Prime Minister acceptable to the Labour leaders was Winston Churchill, who had long been distrusted by the Baldwinian business members and ‘written down as being not quite first class’ because he was the most Classically eloquent member of the House, and who, shortly after his appointment, expressed his impatience with confused, unfluent business English in a strong memorandum to all Government departments.

Chapters Five to Nine will show the unsteady course followed by English prose through the centuries. Every social and political change was marked by a corresponding change in the character of prose; and it may be assumed that the change in British life which follows the Second World War will be as pronounced as the one that followed the First World War. We hope, but cannot prophesy, that the style of prose best suited to the new conditions will be:

Cleared of encumbrances for quick reading: that is, without unnecessary ornament, irrelevancy, illogicality, ambiguity, repetition, circumlocution, obscurity of reference.

Properly laid out: that is, with each sentence a single step and each paragraph a complete stage in the argument or narrative; with each idea in its right place in the sequence, and none missing; with all connections properly made.

Written in the first place for silent reading, but with consideration for euphony if read aloud.

Consistent in use of language; considerate of the possible limitations of the reader’s knowledge; with no indulgence of personal caprice nor any attempt to improve on sincere statement by rhetorical artifice.

Such a style has no chance of immediate adoption in public life, even in contexts where it is realized that officialese is unsuitable and that a simpler, more intimate English must be used. The following Government announcement, which appeared in all the London and provincial daily newspapers on June 1st, 1941, and which combines the technique of the politician with that of the advertising man, is an interesting example of the effect on prose of present social and economic conditions.

‘rationing of clothing, cloth and footwear from june 1st, 1941

‘There is enough for all if we share and share alike. Rationing is the way to get fair shares. Fair shares—when workers are producing bombs and aeroplanes and guns instead of frocks, suits and shoes. Fair shares—when ships must run the gauntlet with munitions and food rather than with wool and cotton. Fair shares—when movements of population outrun local supplies. Rationing is not the same as shortage. Rationing, or fair shares, is the way to prevent a shortage without interfering with full war production.

So, from now on (June 1st, 1941) you will have to present coupons to buy clothing, cloth, footwear and knitting-wool. At present the coupons to be used are the Margarine Coupons in your Food Ration Book. (You don’t need these for margarine and it is a great saving of paper to use this page for the clothing ration.) There are 26 coupons on the margarine page. The numbers printed on them are to be ignored; each coupon counts 1 only. You will receive 40 more coupons making 66 to last you for a full year.’

This is not good prose. Indeed, it caused confusion for a day or two, in some districts. Many people were under the impression that to the ‘guns or butter?’ choice, which had been semi-officially put before them some months before, a new choice was now added: ‘clothing or margarine?’ Some clothiers had to explain that they could not give a customer a pair of socks, say, in exchange for three coupons’ worth of margarine; and grocers that they were not authorized to give extra margarine to customers who had enough clothing for the whole of the ensuing year. Yet if the advertisement had been written in better prose it would not have served the Government’s purpose so well. It was the work of a skilled advertising man, whose business it was to ‘sell’ the rationing scheme to the public. Advertising men admit that they can rarely afford either to tell the truth or count on the intelligence of the public. The appeal must largely be to the passions. Whether the passions appealed to are mean or generous depends on the nature of the goods advertised; but in either case the style will necessarily be loose.

If the Government had not decided to introduce clothes-rationing gently to the unintelligent masses, but had instead given a practical summary of the situation which made rationing necessary, something like the following might have been issued:

‘rationing of clothing, cloth and footwear from june 1st, 1941

‘Many of the ships which once brought us wool, cotton and hides from overseas have been sunk; others are now carrying food and munitions instead. And many of the workers who used these raw materials for making frocks, suits, shoes, etc. have been called up to do more important war work. Far fewer of these goods are therefore being manufactured, which has caused inconvenient local shortages—for example, in country districts crowded with evacuees—and selfish hoarding. Since nobody must go short of these goods while others have more than enough, we have decided to ration them.

So, from to-day, if you want to buy cloth, knitting-wool, clothes, boots, shoes, etc.—let us call this “Clothing, etc.”—you will have to give up coupons. The first twenty-six coupons for you to use are those on page 10 of your ration book. They are headed “Margarine” and have numbers printed on them. Cross out the word “Margarine”, writing instead “Clothing, etc.”, and pay no attention to the numbers, since all the coupons are of the same value and can be used whenever you please. You will continue to get your usual ration of margarine from the coupons on page 11. Later, each of you will be given a sheet of forty more coupons for “Clothing, etc.”, making 66 in all, to last you until June 1st, 1942.’

In this slightly longer version several important points left out from the original are restored: that some workers are still producing clothing and footwear, and some ships still importing the raw materials; that there is a national shortage, as well as local shortages, of clothing and footwear, the inconveniences of which can be mitigated by rationing; that there has been some hoarding; that the term ‘Clothing’ includes cloth and footwear; that the so-called ‘margarine coupons’ are now to be used for clothing, not margarine; that ‘this page’ means the Margarine Page and not the page of the newspaper on which the advertisement appears; that the margarine ration can be got as usual with the help of another page of coupons; that the numbers printed on the so-called Margarine Coupons do not limit the time during which these can be used for buying ‘Clothing, etc.’

Yet, despite its greater clarity as prose, this version would be regarded as ‘bad advertising’. The theory of advertising, which has been gradually deduced from a practical analysis of sales-statistics, is that most people do not read carefully, and to sell them popular commodities in a competitive world one must take advantage of their carelessness: one must give them not careful prose, but prose that has the effect of conversational haste and catches the eye with one or two alluring phrases. In this case, the Government copy-writer did his job well enough. He avoided telling unpalatable truths, namely that there was a national clothing shortage, that the evacuation-scheme had caused serious local shortages, that many ships had been sunk, and that there had been hoarding. This would have had a depressing effect, ranged popular feeling against evacuees, and encouraged the hoarding of still uncontrolled goods. He politically refrained from saying even that the Government had decided to ration clothing; to do so might have made people grumble at the Government. He wrote instead in a way suggesting that fate and the public themselves were jointly responsible for the scheme. By the elementary tricks of repeating and italicizing fair shares, mentioning the saving of paper, and focusing attention on the ships that gallantly ran the gauntlet, he made his point: that justice, gratitude and economy alike required that the nation should cheerfully submit to further rationing inconveniences. The sketchiness of the instructions about the use of coupons did not matter much: broadcast explanations of the scheme and detailed instructions issued to clothiers and grocers would be sufficient to clear up any serious misunderstanding. By the middle of the week, indeed, even the stupidest people had got the idea into their heads and the scheme was working well.

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¹ One well-advertised expedient is ‘Basic English’ (‘British American Scientific International Commercial’), a self-denying restriction of language to a vocabulary of 850 words—carefully selected as serving all international needs and designed to have technical vocabularies built on to it, like a sectional bookcase. This may have its advantages as a simply-learned, artificial language for foreigners to use to foreigners, but it does not help English-speaking people to speak or write English better. They find it extremely difficult to confine themselves to such a meagre ration of words, especially of verbs: to remember that they must say not ‘I wrote a letter’ but ‘I put a letter down on paper’; and not ‘I read a letter’ but ‘I went through a letter’. If there is any virtue in a dialect that dispenses with a number of common words, ‘Basic’ is outdone by the picturesque trade-English used in West Africa. The Nigerian official who wishes to announce a total eclipse of the sun to his black subordinates says: ‘Him kerosene b’long Jesus Christ by’m-by all done, b——r up, finish.’