Jaques Barzun on Prose

I am currently, (slowly), reading Jaques Barzun’s ‘From Dawn to Decadence, 500 years of European Cultural Life’. Its a chunky story.

Barzun is a kind of humanist megamind. Born in France 1907 and educated later in the U.S. He read the Canon. The whole thing. For the 500 years of European cultural life he was there for twenty per cent of it. I would say he was a dying breed but he’s dead. He published ‘Dawn to Decadence’ when he was 93 years old. No-one else could have written it because no-one else knew as much as he did.

Its a lovely book. In the middle of his chapter on ‘The Baroque’ is this essay about the origins and nature of prose;

“One 17C creation that was neither Baroque nor a pretended imitation of the ancients was its prose. Monsieur Jourdain in Moliere's Bourgeois Gentilhomme is amazed when he is told he has been speaking prose his whole life. The joke is excellent on the stage but his surprise is well-founded; he is right, as he so often is. What he spoke all his life was not prose but speech. Prose is the written form of deliberate expression, a medium that can become an art. It is as artificial as verse. Whereas speech is halting, comes in fragments, repeats, puts qualifiers after the idea, and often leaves it half expressed, prose aims at organizing thought in complete units. The qualifiers of each idea often come before or during its exposition, as required by clarity, the sound of the words, or their rhythm.

The modern languages took a much longer time to develop a prose worthy of the name than to find poetic meters that suited their idiom. True, writers who described action produced readable works fairly early; they were guided by the sequence of what happens in the world. But with rare exceptions they failed when they tried to impart what happens among feelings and ideas. In early modern times they were hampered by their virtually native mastery of Latin; it spoiled the vernacular syntax. Thanks to its case endings, Latin leaves the writer free to throw the makings of his sentence into one spot or another without changing the sense. That cannot be done when meaning depends on the right sequence and right linking of words. As late as Milton in his political pamphlets, English prose makes hard reading; sentences are long and cluttered with clause after clause: the mind has to detach and realign, which slows understanding; the prose does not breathe but chokes.

The same was true in French until the time of Pascal. it is generally agreed that it was his Letters from a Provincial that gave the nation a model of modern prose, rapid and rhythmic. Dryden rendered the same service to English prose a little later. Italian and Spanish started from a simpler syntax and reached the goal sooner. German was kept from it altogether by its retention of case endings and a glutinous syntax. As the young Jones on his travels in the 19C wrote to his parents, the language "is in fact without any of the modern improvements." In technical terms, German did not become analytic like the other modern languages. Few of the great poets and thinkers using German have been masters of both their subject and their prose. [The little book to read is German Style (with annotated examples) by Ludwig Lewisohn.]

It is thoughtlessly repeated that writers of fine English prose have learned their art from the King James Version of the Bible, issued in 1611. Nothing can be more easily seen to be false. When English writers sound biblical, they are quoting, consciously or not,isolated turns of phrase; they are not adopting a coherent style found in the Bible. The prose of the 17C Authorised Version is a composite of wordings that go back over 300 years of successive translations of the text. The committee appointed by King James did not start from scratch; it borrowed from Wycliffe and Coverdale and Tyndale - from this last, the ablest, more than from the others. The Preface said that the aim was simply to make a good version better. [The book to read is Translating for King James (a participants notes) edited by Ward Allen.] The result was a language that never was the vernacular of any period. Often, the turns of phrase, instead of being English equivalents, are word-for-word renderings of Greek or Hebrew idioms; and common sense is flouted in deference to the original; "When they arose early in the morning, behold, they were all dead corpses."

What did help to shape English prose was Cranmer's Book of Common Prayer (= prayer in common). Its tone and phrasings were heard during the service more often and at greater length than the biblical, and they were in a language spoken outside the church as well as inside. Cranmer laboured to make his renderings of the collects and litanies of the Roman missal plain and easily remembered. It was a work of art, as one can see by comparing it with his other writings. Good prose means hard work; as a modern practitioner put it, it is "heavy lifting from a sitting position".

It should be added that the English prose that suggests the influence of Scripture is of the ornate type, halfway between prose and poetry, and not for common use. An outstanding 17C example is Sir Thomas Browne's Urn Burial. Closer to us, Ruskin occasionally employed the style. Indifferent transparency, reserved for impressiveness, it awaits the opportunity for lofty reflection - the rejoicing over a victory, the solemnity of regretful death - these alone afford sufficient warrant for the ortund periods, the concatenation of awesome images, and the cadences that close gratefully to the ear in a studied succession of polysyllables. Such utterance should have a special name, and a third one should designate the clotted abstractions of the modern trades and specialities. The term prose, it should be remembered, comes from prosa orato, which means discourse that goes in a straight line.

The French followed that line, and it is clear why they found it easier to do so than the English. As Catholics they were not subjected to the weekly sermon; they had no Book of Common Prayer, the service being in Latin and entirely spoken by the priest. Only on great occasions such as state funerals was the ornate style required. Fenelon's enemy Bossuet and his fellow prelates used it, but only for religious purposes. All other writers (with one conspicuous exception), cultivated the simple and direct. They were not bound like the poets to use only noble words and euphemisms - flame or chains for love, feathered kind for birds, and the like.

To achieve lucidity the spontaneous surge of ideas must be sorted out and the parts fitted into sentences not longer than a normal breath, the connections shown by clear syntax. With correct usage and a minimum of imagery (which might distract the reader) the words seem the natural way to think and to speak. But it is not natural. It is a product of extreme self-consciousness, as in Descartes Method. The good sentence is the clockwork put back together again after careful analysis. The one 17C exception to this achievement is the Duke of Saint-Simon. He is perhaps the only writer of genuine stream-of-consciousness prose in all literature. he violates all the guidelines for clarity and he must be read in French, because his translators comb out his sentences and distil his meaning.

But like a 20C novelist, like Proust in some ways, he persuades the reader that his mode of utterance is the natural one, truer than they analytic. yet the duke was at times a self-conscious worker, as we know from his own lips; and the vast Memoirs -41 volumes unpublished till the 18C - are a work of art. Profusion of detail, richness of substance, order in apparent disorder, put it among the masterpieces of the Baroque.”