Henry Seidel Canby - The Writing of English 汉译

If rhetorics, composition books, manuals, guides could of themselves assure the writing of good English, our prose style should now be purer than Chaucer’s well; but a multitude of textbooks is no more a guarantee of good writing than a million of books on etiquette is a warrant of good manners. It remains to be proved that the congregations who heard two sermons each Sunday were more moral thaw their agnostic descendants.

That there is so much imperfect English after such a pressure of honest endeavor in teaching, is best explained by the vast number now to be educated, who in the past would not have written at all, and who may properly regard their slovenly grammar and stilted phrasing as so much won from illiteracy. But what of the more fortunately gifted who surely with the impact of so many books, such determined counsellors from earliest youth up to correspondence courses for thee middle-aged, should have developed a new prose style for modern America arid justified the concern of their elders? We have good writers of course, but only the least fastidious in our tongue could name this an age of supple, or beautiful, or rich, or forceful, or anything but varied and useful styles in English.

If we get little style in English, the textbooks teach even less. Good English in their view is first and last clear English, which means English where the meaning jumps to the eye at a glance. Not the infinite complexities of my emotions, nor the baffled struggling of my thought, but what I can readily express in easy sentences neither too long nor too short, is what the rhetorics teach.

They are right to teach thus, for the mind of thee young writer is a yeasty mass of unformulated desires and undirected emotions. It surges with aspirations which begin as mighty heavings of the dough and emerge as bursting bubbles. Order, restraint, clarity are steps in a discipline which the most imaginative need most; and failure to mark them would result in floods of wild words. Fortunately undisciplined writers like clocks without pendulums, soon tick themselves into silence.

Yet the textbooks are wrong when they make, in effect they do make, a sermon on accuracy sum of good English. Accuracy is enough for the dictator of business letters; for the professional writer it is only the first step. He can be as accurate as a slate roof and as clear as a plate glass window and yet have no more life in him than a billboard or a declension. He will never develop a style worthy of the name unless he struggles with half meanings, gropes in personality, yields to passion, fancy, intuitions, and much else opposed in every way to simple clarity.

There must be two Muses at the elbow of every writer ambitious of the best in English, one to back while the other pulls on, one for discipline the other for expansiveness; one to teach grasp, the other reach; one with a set of principles, the other with a vision of truth, beauty, hope, and unlimited accomplishment.

And if one asks why so many clear and simple books produce so many dull and flat writers, the answer may be that there is too much starching and ironing of poor material. We laugh at the older rhetorics with their talk of the sublime, of the great style, of dignity, of eloquence. But at least the authors of these treatises promised to able writers something more inspiring than unity, coherence, and emphasis. They implied, even if they took no means to secure it, an active intellect, stirred by passionate ideas, and quite as desirous to express itself as to discover how to be obvious to others.

The weakest element in American literary prose is its style. In the novel, in drama, in poetry, in the essay, whether our work is superior or inferior to the English product, it is usually inferior in this respect. And if Americans lack style it is partly because they have been taught for a generation that good writing is clear writing, which is true, and that clear writing must be excellent writing, which is false. Water, except by the miracle of style, does not become wine.