The Art of Writing & Speaking the English Language, Sherwin Cody [hardest books to read .TXT] 📗

Notes.

Addison's object in writing this paper is largely serious: he wishes to criticise and correct manners and morals. He is satirical, but so good-humored in his satire that no one could be offended. He also contrives to give the impression that he refers to “the other fellow,” not to you. This delicacy and tact are as important in the writer as in the diplomat, for the writer quite as much as the diplomat lives by favor.

Addison is not a very strict writer, and his works have given examples for the critics by the score. One of these is seen in “begged her not to go on, for-that she had been privately married:” “begged” and “for that” do not go well together. To a modern reader such a phrasing as “If we look into …… I look upon it to be” etc., seems a little awkward, if not crude; but we may excuse these seeming discrepancies as “antique usage,” along with such phrases as “advise her to in a case of such difficulty” and “to hear the lady propose her doubts, and to see the pains she is at to get over them.”

“Fortune whom” is evidently a personification. The use of party in “to the party herself” is now reckoned an Americanism (!) “Engaged in this subject” is evidently antiquated.

We miss in Addison the variety which we found in Ruskin. He does not seem to understand the art of alternating long and short sentences, and following one sentence form by another in quick succession. The fact is, English prose style has made enormous advances since the time of Addison, and we learn more by comparing him with a writer like Ruskin than by deliberately imitating him. At the same time his method is simpler, and since it is so we may find him a good writer to begin our study with. In spite of any little faults we may find with him, he was and is a great writer, and we should be sure we can write as well as he before we reject him.

By Robert Louis Stevenson.

My Dear Mother,—I am here at last, sitting in my room, without coat or waistcoat, and with both window and door open, and yet perspiring like a terra-cotta jug or a Gruy{è}əre cheese:

We had a very good passage, which we certainly deserved no compensation for having to sleep on the cabin floor and finding absolutely nothing fit for human food in the whole filthy embarkation. We made up for lost time by sleeping on deck a good part of the forenoon. When I awoke, Simpson was still sleeping the sleep of the just, on a coil of ropes and (as appeared afterwards) his own hat; so I got a bottle of Bass and a pipe and laid hold of an old Frenchman of somewhat filthy aspect (fiat experimentum in corpora vii) to try my French upon. I made very heavy weather of it. The Frenchman had a very pretty young wife; but my French always deserted me entirely when I had to answer her, and so she soon drew away and left me to her lord, who talked of French politics, Africa, and domestic economy with great vivacity. From Ostend a smoking hot journey to Brussels! At Brussels we went off after dinner to the Pare. If any person wants to be happy, I should advise the Pare. You sit drinking iced drinks and smoking penny cigars under great old trees.

The band place, covered walks, etc., are all lit up; and you can't fancy how beautiful was the contrast of the great masses of lamplit foliage and the dark sapphire night sky with just one blue star set overhead in the middle of the largest patch. In the dark walks, too, there are crowds of people whose faces you cannot see, and here and there a colossal white statue at the corner of an alley that gives the place a nice, artificial, eighteenth-century sentiment. There was a good deal of summer lightning blinking overhead, and the black avenues and white statues leapt out every minute into short-lived distinctness.

My dear Colvin,—Any time between eight and half-past nine in the morning, a slender gentleman in an ulster, with a volume buttoned into the breast of it, may be observed leaving No. 608 Bush and descending Powell with an active step. The gentleman is R. L. S.; the volume relates to Benjamin Franklin, on whom he meditates one of his charming essays. He descends Powell, crosses Market, and descends in Sixth on a branch of the original Pine Street Coffee House, no less; I believe he would be capable of going to the original itself, if he could only find it. In the branch he seats himself at a table covered with waxcloth, and a pampered menial, of high Dutch extraction and, indeed, as yet only partially extracted, lays before him a cup of coffee, a roll, and a pat of butter, all, to quote the deity, very good. Awhile ago, and H. L. S. used to find the supply of butter insufficient; but he has now learned the art to exactitude, and butter and roll expire at the same moment. For this refection he pays ten cents, or five pence sterling (£0 0s 5d).

Half an hour later, the inhabitants of Bush Street observe the same slender gentleman armed, like George Washington, with his little hatchet, splitting kindling, and breaking coal for his fire. He does this quasi-publicly upon the window-sill; but this is not to be attributed to any love of notoriety, though he is indeed vain of his prowess with the hatchet (which he persists in calling an axe), and daily surprised at the perpetuation of his fingers. The reason is this: that the sill is a strong, supporting beam, and that blows of the same emphasis in other parts, of his room might knock the entire shanty into hell. Thenceforth, for from three to four hours, he is engaged darkly with an ink-bottle. Yet he is not blacking his boots, for the only pair that he possesses are innocent of lustre and wear the natural hue of the material turned up with caked and venerable slush. The youngest child of his landlady remarks several times a day, as this strange occupant enters or quits the house, “Dere's de author.” Can it be that this bright-haired innocent has found the true clue to the mystery? The being in question is, at least, poor enough to belong to that honorable craft.

Notes.

The first of these two letters by Stevenson was written very early in his literary career, the second when he may be supposed to have been at the height of his powers. It is interesting to see to what extent he had improved his style.

Note now much suggestiveness (apart from the apparent meaning) is contained in such words and phrases as “the whole filthy embarkation;” “made very heavy weather of it” (speaking French); “Parc”; “artificial” (the peculiar meaning being indicated by italicizing); “pampered menial” (the reference being to just the opposite).

There is a peculiar mechanical sort of humor in omitting the word street after “Bush,” “Powell,” etc., and in giving the cost of his meal so elaborately—“ten cents, or fivepence sterling (£0 0s 5d).”

The chief source of fun is in giving small things an importance they do not deserve. The author is making fun at himself. Of course since he makes fun at himself it is good-natured; but it must be just as good-natured if one is to make fun of any one else. Addison was so successful because no suggestion of malice ever crept into his satire.

By Charles Lamb.

January 9, 1824.

Dear B. B.,—Do you know what it is to succumb under an insurmountable day-mare,—a “whoreson lethargy,” Falstaff calls it,—an indisposition to do anything or to be anything; a total deadness and distaste; a suspension of vitality; an indifference to locality; a numb, soporifical good-for-nothingness; an ossification all over; an oyster-like insensibility to the passing events; a mind-stupor; a brawny de-fiance to the needles of a thrust-in conscience? Did you ever have a very bad cold with a total irresolution to submit to water-gruel processes? This has been for many weeks my lot and my excuse. My fingers drag heavily over this paper, and to my thinking it is three-and-twenty furlongs from here to the end of this demi-sheet. I have not a thing to say, nothing is of more importance than another. I am flatter than a denial or a pancake; emptier than Judge Parke's wig when the head is in it; duller than a country stage when the actors are off it,—a cipher, an o! I acknowledge life at all only by an occasional convulsional cough, and a permanent phlegmatic pain in the chest. I am weary of the world; life is weary of me. My day is gone into twilight, and I don't think it worth the expense of candles. My wick bath a thief in it, but I can't muster courage to snuff it. I inhale suffocation; I can't distinguish veal from mutton; nothing interests me. 'Tis twelve o'clock, and Thurtell* is just now coming out upon the new drop, Jack Ketch alertly tucking up his greasy sleeves to do the last office of mortality; yet cannot I elicit a groan or a moral reflection. If you told me the world will be at an end tomorrow, I should say “Will it?” I have not volition enough left to dot my i's, much less to comb my eyebrows; my eyes are set in my head; my brains are gone out to see a poor relation in Moorfields, and they did not say when they'd come back again; my skull is a Grub-street attic to let,—not so much as a joint-stool left in it; my hand writes, not I, from habit, as chickens run about a little when their heads are cut off. Oh for a vigorous fit of gout, colic, toothache—an earwig{†}¤ in my auditory, a fly in my visual organs; pain is life,—the sharper the more evidence of life; but this apathy, this death! Did you ever have an obstinate cold, a six or seven weeks' unintermitting chill and suspension of hope, fear, conscience, and everything? Yet do I try all I can to cure it. I try wine, and spirits, and smoking, and snuff in unsparing quantities; but they all only seem to make me worse, instead of better. I sleep in a damp room, but it does no good; I come home late o' nights, but do not find any visible amendment! Who shall deliver me from the body of this death?

*Hanged that day for the murder of Weare.

{†}¤An ant

It is just fifteen minutes after twelve. Thurtell is by this time a good way on his journey, baiting at Scorpion, perhaps. Ketch is bargaining for his cast coat and waistcoat; and the Jew demurs at first at three half-crowns, but on consideration that he may get somewhat by showing 'em in the town, finally closes. C. L.

Notes.

The danger of not adapting your method to your auditor is well illustrated by the beginning of Lamb's next letter to the same person:

“My dear sir,—That peevish letter of mine, which was meant to convey an apology for my incapacity to write, seems to have been taken by you in too serious a light,—it was only my way of telling you I had a severe cold.”

Lamb's letter is filled with about every figure of speech known to rhetoricians: It will be a useful exercise to pick them out.

Any person who does not have a well developed sense of humor will hardly see the force of the reference to Thurtell, the murderer. It is a whimsical way of indicating by a specific example how empty the writer's brain was, forcing him to reflect on such a subject in so trivial a manner.

Observe the occasional summing up of the meaning, curiously repeating exactly the same thing—“Did you ever have a very bad cold—?” “Did you ever have an obstinate cold—?” The very short sentences summarize the very long ones.