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_ (Pall Mall Gazette, January 15, 1886.) I am very much pleased to see that you are beginning to call attention to the extremely slipshod and careless style of our ordinary magazine-writers. Will you allow me to refer your readers to an article on Borrow, in the current number of Macmillan, which exemplifies very clearly the truth of your remarks? The author of the article is Mr. George Saintsbury, a gentleman who has recently written a book on Prose Style, and here are some specimens of the prose of the future according to the systeme Saintsbury: 1. He saw the rise, and, _in some instances, the death, of Tennyson_, Thackeray, Macaulay, Carlyle, Dickens. 2. _See a place_ which Kingsley, _or_ Mr. Ruskin, _or_ some other master of our decorative school, _have_ described--_much more_ one which has fallen into the hands of the small fry of their imitators--and you are almost sure to find that _it has been overdone_. 3. The great mass of his translations, published and unpublished, and the smaller mass of his early hackwork, no doubt _deserves_ judicious excerption. 4. 'The Romany Rye' _did not appear_ for six years, _that is to say, in_ 1857. 5. The elaborate apparatus which most prose tellers of fantastic tales _use_, and generally _fail in using_. 6. The great writers, whether they try to be like other people or try not to be like them (_and sometimes in the first case most of all_), succeed _only_ in being themselves. 7. If he had a slight _overdose_ of Celtic blood and Celtic-peculiarity, it was _more than made up_ by the readiness of literary expression which it gave him. He, if any one, bore an English heart, though, _as there often has been_, there was something perhaps more than English as well as less than it in his fashion of expression. 8. His flashes of ethical reflection, which, though like _all_ ethical reflections _often_ one-sided. 9. He certainly was an _unfriend_ to Whiggery. 10. _That it contains_ a great deal of quaint and piquant writing _is only to say_ that its writer wrote it. 11. 'Wild Wales,' too, because of _its_ easy and direct _opportunity_ of comparing its description with the originals. 12. The capital _and_ full-length portraits. 13. Whose attraction is _one_ neither mainly nor in any very great degree one of pure form. 14. _Constantly right in general_. These are merely a few examples of the style of Mr. Saintsbury, a writer who seems quite ignorant of the commonest laws both of grammar and of literary expression, who has apparently no idea of the difference between the pronouns 'this' and 'that,' and has as little hesitation in ending the clause of a sentence with a preposition, as he has in inserting a parenthesis between a preposition and its object, a mistake of which the most ordinary schoolboy would be ashamed. And why can not our magazine- writers use plain, simple English? _Unfriend_, quoted above, is a quite unnecessary archaism, and so is such a phrase as _With this Borrow could not away_, in the sense of 'this Borrow could not endure.' 'Borrow's _abstraction_ from general society' may, I suppose, pass muster. Pope talks somewhere of a hermit's 'abstraction,' but what is the meaning of saying that the author of Lavengro _quartered_ Castile and Leon 'in the most interesting manner, riding everywhere with his servant'? And what defence can be made for such an expression as 'Scott, and other _black beasts_ of Borrow's'? Black beast for bete noire is really abominable. The object of my letter, however, is not to point out the deficiencies of Mr. Saintsbury's style, but to express my surprise that his article should have been admitted into the pages of a magazine like Macmillan's. Surely it does not require much experience to know that such an article is a disgrace even to magazine literature. George Borrow. By George Saintsbury. (Macmillan's Magazine, January 1886.) _ |
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