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Controversial Aspects of Pater's "Style"

Papers on Language and Literature, Fall 2004 by Coates, John

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The fragile and arbitrary nature of these criticisms seems obvious. What Saintsbury describes in pejorative terms might easily be characterized in other ways. To a sympathetic eye, gorgeous and glaring phraseology might seem opulent and stimulating. The "finical analysis of motive" could appear as psychological analysis pursued in unusual and rewarding detail. "Unexpected turns and twists of thought" might well enliven prose.

Saintsbury strongly dislikes "unexpectedness" in itself and chooses some interesting examples of this defect:

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When we hear that a bar of music has "veracity," that there is a finely-executed "passage" in a marble chimney-piece, that someone is "part of the conscience of a nation," that the "andante" of a sonnet is specially noteworthy, the quest for the unexpected has become sufficiently evident, (xvii-xviii)

Saintsbury clearly objects to the transference of terms from one field or art into the discussion of another. Yet, obviously, such transference might quicken interest and offer other ways of thinking about a subject. The fact the expressions Saintsbury condemns as incorrect (someone as "the conscience of a nation," for example) would now pass without notice suggests a process of experiment in language he does not envisage. For him, the faults of "English aestheticism" are affectations "perfectly well-known to critics and admired by the uncritical in the days of Hilpa and Shalum." The experiments of Aestheticism are not risks worth taking in the interests of new perception but perennially recurring errors of taste ("We shall find other things remarkably like them in the history of the past"). For Saintsbury, "there is nothing new in art except its beauties" (xviii), but he does not suggest how, without experiment, writers are likely to achieve them.

The preface to Specimens of English Prose Style gives a confident account of the history of English prose. For all its great successes, sixteenth- and early-seventeenth-century writing had been flawed and uneven. The Elizabethan pamphleteers, such as Greene, Nashe, Harvey, or Dekker, had produced a curious mixture of "slang and learning, of street repartees and elaborate coterie preciousness" (xix). More sober writers "attempted to write English as if it was Latin" thus falling into "inelegancies and obscurities." Although "detached phrases, sentences, even long passages of Milton, of Taylor, of Browne" (xx) excel anything in English prose, these writers and others of the same period produced much that was involved and ungainly, "Out of mere wantonness" (xix) ; they often preferred "a single sentence jointed and rejoined, parenthesised and post scripted" until it expressed as much as a paragraph to "a succession of orderly sentences" each expressing "a simple or moderately complex thought" (xix-xx). In fact, all the authors of the period are full of "wilful and gratuitous obscurities, cacophonies, breaches of sense and grammar" which sometimes "actually vitiate their sense" (xxi). Great as many of them were, they "were not thoroughly masters of their instrument" (xxi). The reason Saintsbury offers for their technical incompetence is interesting: "Most of these writers had a great deal to say" (xx). Presumably, they were disabled by the depth and originality of their thought.

Controversial Aspects of Pater's "Style"

Papers on Language and Literature, Fall 2004 by Coates, John

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