Controversial Aspects of Pater's "Style"

The Restoration remedied the uncouth and uneven quality of English prose by introducing "the study and comparison of French." Far less removed than Latin from English, French had "already gone through its own reforming process with signal success." Lacking an equivalent of the French Academy, English prose might benefit by proxyfrom its work. Fortunately, too, "the period of original and copious thought ceased in England for a time," which was helpful since "men having less to say became more careful in saying it." Saintsbury is quite resigned to the loss of outstanding originality since he prefers talent "well-furnished with its weapons" (xxii). Throughout his life "a constant critical student of language and style," Dryden was the chief reformer who, together with Halifax and Temple, "left little to be done." Saintsbury's objection to literary changes brought about by intellectual or artistic minorities leads him to praise the (supposed) reform of the Restoration as having "hardly anything that was pedantic about it." Rather, it was the "ordinary English of the streets" that helped Restoration writers to "reform the long sentence" (xxiii) of their predecessors.

With the coming of the "Queen Anne men," Addison, Steel, and Arbuthnot, we reach the Golden Age of English prose, which set the standard for all succeeding times. Not merely great in itself, this era was "the schoolmaster of all the periods to follow. It settled what the form, the technical form of English prose was to be, and settled it once for all" (xxv).

The standard Saintsbury believed had been set in the early eighteenth century had two notable features. Firstly, prose had been drilled into correct and appropriate behavior, neatness, and punctuation. (The term "schoolmaster" is obviously significant.) Although examples of the "old slovenliness" remained, even in Dryden, by the reign of Queen Anne writers were producing correct compositions. "There is hardly anything in the structure of their clauses, their sentences or their paragraphs which is in any way obsolete." Their "more frequent use of the full-stop" is particularly praiseworthy (xxii).

Secondly, Saintsbury singles out as the special virtues of this model prose "order, lucidity and proportion," "ease and well-bred loquacity," the ability to tell a story or set a scene in "so sober and yet so vivid a manner" (xxiv). It is prose operating within fairly strict limits, ordered, urbane, and well balanced. One could be talkative but one must also be polite. A clear intense vision might be acceptable if it was also restrained. Saintsbury also values its elegant conversational rhythm.

His attempt to define effective prose rhythm technically is one of the most curious and interesting parts of his preface. Although, unlike poetry, prose does not have an "equivalence of feet within the clause answering to the line," perfect prose rhythm does admit "of vindication by quantity marks and even by division into feet." The rhythm is a "harmony of perfectly modulated speech" (xxxix).