Controversial Aspects of Pater's "Style"

Saintsbury concedes that the eighteenth-century writers he admires had lost powers their Elizabethan and Jacobean predecessors possessed: "Unrivalled in vigour, not easily to be beaten in sober grace, abundantly capable of wit . . . as a rule they lacked magnificence." Apparently, however, this was a price worth paying for so desirable a result. In order to obtain formal grace, prose writers had to lessen their ambitions. If the authors Saintsbury admires "spoiled nothing they touched" it was because they generally "omitted to touch subjects for which their style was not suited" (xxiv). Here and elsewhere in his essay, Saintsbury suggests that prose improves when not overloaded with novel thought. The "bald, dull, plebeian style" (xxiv) of Locke or the "curious and inimitable badness" (xxvi) of Butler's writing offers cautionary examples of an excess of intellectual substance.

Saintsbury praises especially the practice that "began with Dryden and was perfected in Gibbon, of balancing and proportioning the sentence" (xxvii). The reason for his praise is intriguing. Much of what the generality of writers have to say is dull and inept, so that it is fortunate English prose has developed a method for making their pronouncements at least sound graceful. Since the formal cadences of eighteenth-century prose passed out of fashion and "every man became a law unto himself," the quantity of "foolish speech and writing in the world has not appreciably diminished" (xxviii). It would have been better to have retained the old balancing and proportion in which a platitude "seems as if it might have some meaning and at any rate sounds well as sound" (xxviii). Saintsbury's willingness to see formally accomplished prose as a means to camouflage empty thought is disconcerting. It suggests a nothing-new-under-the-sun refusal to accept the possibility of change or discovery and a preference for form over substance.

The significance of his preferences becomes clearer in Saintsbury's account of nineteenth-century prose. He narrows the reasons for the growth of a "laboured and ornate manner" (xxvii) to purely literary (and negative) factors. The growing "neglect of a regular and orderly style" is due to "increasing specialisation" (the "increasing subdivision of the subjects of literature"), the decline of Greek and Latin as "main instruments of education," and the unfortunate example of some great writers who have encouraged a "return of individualism" (xxvi).

Significantly, Saintsbury ignores the possibility of any link between changes in prose and changes in religious belief, in the nature and distribution of political power, in economic conditions, or in social mores. The revived fashion for "numerous" prose was in its origins "partial and casual," resulting from the efforts of "one man of genius, Thomas de Quincey," whose example others followed "without much of a set purpose" (xxx).

The oddity of Saintsbury's view may be easily seen in particular instances. It is perverse, for example, to describe Carlyle as a writer who introduced "Germanisms" and broke down the traditional "sobriety" of English prose out of some mere whim. However one rates Carlyle's success, his style was a deliberate rejection of eighteenth-century norms of polite discourse and of the moral and social values those norms embodied. His verbal disruptions, abrupt changes of tone and register, turbulence, passion, and caustic irony were chosen as the appropriate medium in which to describe the French Revolution or the onset of an industrialized economy. De Quincey's theorizings about prose in "Rhetoric" (1828), "Style" (1840), and "Language" (probably 1840) develop a view that a particular style (such as the one he arrived at), planning and orchestrating its effects, weaving together in connected sentences a web of sonorous images, was the natural medium for the "enormous power and splendour" that had followed the last "volcanic eruption" of British genius "since the year 1793" (De Quincey 10: 240). Such prose was appropriate to an age of national peril and heroic achievement. One might question De Quincey's success in what he attempted, as one might question Carlyle's, but it is clear that, in both cases, style was an instrument chosen for serious and specific reasons.