In Arthur Quiller-Couch’s Oxford Book of English Prose (1925), there is a one-paragraph selection by Arthur Clutton-Brock arguing that the cardinal virtue of poetry is love and that of prose justice. Poetry, I take Clutton-Brock at least in part to be saying, is for affirmation and asseveration, for emotion heightened, heated, even hyperbolic; prose is for calm explanation and cool elucidation, for, above all, the measured perfection of expression that goes under the name of precision.

For the editor of an anthology of English prose, the more pertinent point is that the beauty of poetry is more easily grasped in brief examples, whereas that of prose is generally available only in lengthy passages. Cogitating upon this point, Quiller-Couch asks: “Can any anthology of short passages rightly illustrate an art of which the property is to be long?” It’s a good question, and implicit in it is the larger question of what is the use of a collection of English prose whose organizing principle is not stories, essays, or any other single form but prose per se: what is the use of a book, essentially, of sentences whose only true justification is their intrinsic quality as language—language beautifully, powerfully, amusingly or otherwise interestingly deployed, but finally sentences merely?

Arthur Quiller-Couch’s Oxford Book of English Prose differs substantially from John Gross’s recent New Oxford Book of English Prose[1] in two serious ways: the first is that Quiller-Couch’s volume is weighted heavily in favor of English writers, whereas Mr. Gross opens his pages to all writers of English. Each editor has done so by design. “I have tried to make this book as representatively English as I might,” Quiller-Couch wrote. He printed only fifteen American writers—Irving, Emerson, Thoreau, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr., the usual nineteenth-century suspects—next to 320 English writers. John Gross has greatly internationalized his anthology, making it truly Anglophone, including not only many Americans but also East Indians, Africans, Australians, a few Caribbeans, and one Russian—a chap with a butterfly net calling himself Nabokov—who may have been the most felicitous modern English prose stylist of all. “I hope that the present anthology is reasonably international in outlook,” John Gross writes, adding “but I would be disappointed if it wasn’t also regarded as unmistakably British in origin.”

The other way in which the two volumes differ is that John Gross’s is more heavily weighted—I refer to pure poundage—and this, in my view, is not necessarily in its favor. The first Oxford Book of English Prose is short, solid, and stout, resembling the books of Edmund Wilson (books that were shaped, come to think of it, rather like Wilson himself). The New Oxford Book of English Prose, the same size as The Oxford Dictionary of Quotations and The Oxford Companion to English Literature, gives the more leadenly feeling of a tome. The Quiller-Couch book provides the happy illusion that one might toss it into a suitcase for reading while traveling, or slip it into the ample pocket of an outer-coat; the John Gross book, even though it has, as we should (regrettably) say nowadays, a “reader-friendly” dustjacket and is happily bereft of the barbed-wire feel that elaborate scholarly apparatus sometimes bestows, has a heft that makes for unportability. Pity, for the book, solid but never stolid, is, in the best sense, light in spirit and buoyant in content.

Lest I violate the truth-in-advertising laws, I had better go no further before announcing that John Gross is my friend, which has not in the least got in the way of his being someone whose work I continue to admire. He is a writer, as he is a friend, of exquisite tact; subtle, amusing, informative, a man of great charm who doesn’t require more than the normal allotment of oxygen in any room he enters. He also happens to be immensely knowledgeable, which is merely another way of saying wonderfully —perhaps it does not go too far to say astonishingly—well read, especially in English literature. Whereas a decently well-read person has read the first line of good books (as deep down, say, as Trollope and Aldous Huxley and Lytton Strachey), a rather better-read person (myself, actually) goes further down (to, say, Goncharov and Firbank and Lord Berners). John Gross’s reading goes yet a third lever deeper—and I should be delighted to provide the names of three writers here if only I knew them. As befits a former editor of the London Times Literary Supplement (which he was from 1974–1981), he appears to have read and taken the measure of just about everything of any seriousness written in English.

John Gross is also a writer and editor with a nice sense of subject. The latter is on display in two of his books: The Rise and Fall of the Man of Letters (1969; rev. ed. 1991), a study of the now dying tradition of literary workers who earn their living outside the university and of whom he is himself indubitably one; and Shylock (1992), a history of the performance of that great and controversial role written with the aim of arriving at the playwright’s true intentions in creating the character. He can be instructive and persuasive on subjects both heavy (Hitler and the Holocaust) and light (popular music). If his prose has a dominant tone, it is one of companionable suavity, in which he never preaches, scolds, explains, or talks down in any way, but instead, in the course of providing high intellectual entertainment, occasionally reminds his readers of fundamental or learned or amusing things they just may have forgot, without for a moment suggesting we may, poor dear idiots, never have heard of them in the first place.

All these qualities have helped make John Gross an editor of literary reference works and an anthologist of the highest quality. I have long owned, and taken great pleasure in, his Oxford Book of Aphorisms, and am unashamedly proud to be among the contributors to his Oxford Book of Essays. The New Oxford Book of English Prose is, characteristically, a rich and valuable work, and it is quite impossible to think of anyone else in our day editing such a volume with the same easy aplomb, splendid range, and winning touch.

The New Oxford Book of English Prose contains nearly every category of prose: fiction along with nonfiction, English translations of the Bible, letters, entries from journals, but no prose from plays excepting Shakespeare, from whose plays four pages of prose-like dialogue have been extracted, an exception with which no one is likely to wish to argue. (What one does wish, of course, is that Shakespeare had written long stretches of pure prose, which would doubtless have done a vast deal to advance the development of prose style.) Surprises pop up early, as in the printing of three Biblical translations—William Tyndale’s, the Authorized Version, and the New English Bible—which provides reinforcement for the truism that there is no progress in art, for Tyndale’s still seems the best. The 1549 “Solemnization of Matrimony” is also included; seeing it on the page is a reminder of its perfection as pure prose; having read it one really is prepared hereafter for ever to hold one’s peace.

The comprehensiveness of the book is, as one would have expected from John Gross, impressive. The best check on comprehensiveness is to think of those less than obviously famous writers whose style one admires or finds amusing whom the editor may have forgotten or perhaps did not know. I could think of only four such exclusions, one highly obscure and one entitled to entry in the book only for an oblique reason: H. W. Fowler, the lexicographer; Sir Steven Runciman, the historian of the Crusades; Colonel John R. Stingo, the pseudonym of the columnist of the Racing Form much quoted by A. J. Liebling; and F. R. Leavis, whose generally wretched prose somehow did not stop him from making powerful arguments—a salutary sign, perhaps, of the limits of style itself.

Style, surely, must have been the chief criterion for entry into The New Oxford Book of English Prose, though, as its editor allows, so, too, was excerptability. Attempting to fit as many contributors into this volume as was feasible, John Gross looked, as he said, for “material which makes its impact quickly, and which can stand up by itself —the scene where it is immediately clear what is going on, the passage which doesn’t call for further explanation.” Some of his selections are as short as a paragraph, and a small number are only a sentence or two long.

Still, style reigns—prose as an art is what is on exhibition. That the writing of prose is a high art is not in dispute, yet what does one call a prose artist? It is a question that stumped even Max Beerbohm. The English language, sad to report, is in this particular inept in not providing a single word that is the parallel and equivalent of the word poet. Prosaist won’t do, and neither will prosist, proser, the straightforward prose-writer, and, comically most pretentious of all, proseur. The problem inheres in the word prose, with its unsunderable connection to the word prosaic, which has itself always sounded like nothing so much as a lower-middle-class town in New Jersey. “Only connect the prose and the passion, and both will be exalted,” wrote E. M. Forster in Howards End, “and human love will be seen at its height.” But for certain people, among whom I count myself, the prose is the passion; and prose artfully written satisfies almost all the demands of poetry and quite a few not to be found in poetry at all.

“We are a numerous band,” remarks the narrator of Henry James’s story “The Next Time,” “partakers of the same repose, who sit together in the shade of the tree, by the plash of the fountain, with the glare of the desert around and no great vice that I know of but the habit perhaps of estimating people a little too much by what they think of a certain style.” Of course, there is no one certain style—only certain styles, manifold and multivarious styles. John Middleton Murry, who is in neither Arthur Quiller-Couch’s nor John Gross’s book, is good on this point, when, apropos of prose style, he writes: “There are styles, but no style; there are great styles and there are little ones: there are also non-styles. And, alas, no one can have a great style or a little one for the asking, nor even by taking pains … but the smallest writer can do something to assure that his individuality is not lost, by trying to make sure that he feels what he thinks he feels;—that he thinks what he thinks he thinks, that his words means what he thinks they mean.”

Style, wrote Flaubert, who put the matter more succinctly, “c’est une manière de voir,” a manner of seeing. As for the style for which he himself longed, the trophy for which this most famous of literary complainers engaged in his daily eight- or ten-hour wrestles with the language, Flaubert once described it for his mistress, Louise Colet, in a single sentence:  

I envision a style that would be beautiful, that someone will invent some day, ten years or ten centuries from now, one that would be rhythmic as verse, precise as the language of the sciences, undulant, deep-voiced as a cello, tipped with flame: a style that would pierce your ideas like a dagger, and on which your thought would sail ahead over a smooth surface, like a skiff before a good tail wind.

“Cut and print that,” as they used to say at Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. “It’s a wrap.”

Despite its wide range of styles, the history of English prose style has been a remarkably coherent one, with occasional radical deviations and no successful permanent revolutions whatsoever. Robert Burton (the not all that melancholy Anatomy of Melancholy man), Thomas Carlyle, James Joyce, Ernest Hemingway, all played with prose style, altered it here and there, but none caused it to jump the track and head off in a fundamentally different direction. The formidable Gertrude Stein, whose program for prose—to make it like painting by putting it in the continuous present and by attempting to apply language to the page as if it were paint on the canvas—was the most radical attempt of all, succeeded in making only a few converts to this program, and today her prose exists chiefly as an historical curiosity.

Styles that had to have seemed odd, and to some immensely attractive, when they first arose, picked up imitators and altered the course of the Heraclitean river of English prose a bit, but those waters have flowed on, for the most part unchanged. “Some styles,” wrote Middleton Murry, “will appear more peculiar than others, either because the writer’s mode of feeling is unusually remote from the normal mode, or because the particular emotional experiences he is seeking to convey are outside the ordinary range of human experience, or, finally, because the writer, inspired by some impure motive, such as vanity or the desire to astonish the bourgeois, has deliberately made language outré and bizarre.” At the same time, Middleton Murry adds: “The test of a true idiosyncrasy of style is that we should feel it to be necessary and inevitable; in it we should be able to catch an immediate reference back to a whole mode of feeling that is consistent with itself.”

Changes have taken place. The periodic sentence, with its lovely interior architecture of subordinate clauses, is less common now than a century and more ago. (This is, pre-eminently, the style of Samuel Johnson, which Hazlitt compared to walking on stilts.) The passive voice, which has its uses, is thought to be bad form, and school teachers consider best avoided. Contractions, some fairly wild ones—“he’d’ve” shows up in a Bernard Malamud story—are no longer banned. Parallelism is used to less majestic effect than in Gibbon—it gave him his confident cadences—and other of the great prose artists of the eighteenth century. Reform has tended toward a general loosening up. If the formal and the literary were once the goal of ambitious stylists, today it is the informal and conversational toward which prose most commonly aims. The ornate has been on the decline, the plain style in the ascendant, though John Gross argues, persuasively, that this, far from happening overnight, has been in the works since late in the seventeenth century.

Yet the variety of prose possibilities remains vast. Consider, in recent English intellectual life, the distance between the short, well-aimed single-verb sentence-shots that were the stock in trade of A. J. P. Taylor and the Gatling gun loop-the-loop piling up of adjectives, subordinate clauses, and parentheses that is an Isaiah Berlin sentence at its most characteristic. (Both writers are represented in The New Oxford Book of English Prose.) Berlin, in a most uncharacteristically brief sentence, wrote, apropos of Winston Churchill: “A language is individual when its user is endowed with sharply marked characteristics and succeeds in creating a medium for their expression.” English has never failed to allow for the latitude of individual difference. So long as there are different temperaments issuing in different ways of seeing the world new prose styles will continue to arise.

The boundaries between poetry and prose are themselves no longer so clear as once they were. Poetry is of course much older. “Prose was born yesterday,” wrote Flaubert, “this is what we must tell ourselves. Poetry is pre-eminently the medium of past literatures. All the metrical combinations have been tried but nothing like this can be said of prose.” Today the only formal distinction between poetry and prose is the former’s use—now of course far from universal— of meter. (Prose, noted Aristotle in the Rhetoric, is devoid of meter; but not “destitute of rhythm.”) Poetry was once thought, somehow, finer, more carefully crafted, than prose. But this had begun to break down as early as 1915, when Ezra Pound wrote to Harriet Monroe, then newly editor of Poetry magazine, that “Poetry must be as well written as prose,” which suggests that, even then, it wasn’t—at least not always. Much earlier, Wordsworth, dismissing poetic diction and ready to abandon meter, claimed that excellent poetry is indistinguishable from excellent prose.

The primary principle of prose composition remains variety. Rhythm, syntax, diction—all must be nicely varied to keep the reader on the qui vive. Not even punctuation may be permitted to lapse into the conventional or the entirely expected. “Details?” replied Max Beerbohm, when a copy editor suggested to him that punctuation was a mere matter of minor details. “No, these are not details to me. My choice of stops is as important to me—as important for the purpose of conveying easily to the reader my exact shade of meaning—as my choice of words.” Anyone who has aspirations toward style in prose will concur. Everything—fonts, paper, even the space between words—counts.

“The best part of a writer’s biography is not the record of his adventures,” wrote Vladimir Nabokov, “but the story of his style.” Can a psychological profile be built up on a writer through a careful scrutiny of his style? Does a writer’s penchant for ironic utterance develop in him a dependency on the single dash—allowing him to comment upon, joke about, or even half-retract what has gone before? Does too frequent use of the word indeed suggest a tendency toward pomposity that ought to be fought off? Why does style show up in certain writers through flashing phrases and in others in the discrete sentence and in still others—I think here of Edmund Wilson—only at paragraph length? Why do some writers go in for ornate vocabulary and others (Somerset Maugham, for one) find it quite beyond them? Does too great a concern with prose style itself suggest—or even bring about—its own defects in character? Flaubert’s mother, after all, told him that his mania for sentences had dried up his heart, and there is a good chance she may have been right. “Le style est l’homme même,” wrote Buffon, and that highly intelligent fellow may not have known the half of it.

People who care a little too much about prose style are also subject to snobberies about it. What they fear above all is that style, though never insignificant, may just not be paramount—that really great writers, those capable of touching the profound, do not have need of style, or least not of much of it, the power of their stories and the largeness of their hearts being sufficient unto the day. The more potent the story the less it has need of great style to accompany the telling of it. Style expended on the subject of the Holocaust almost seems an affront; plain words—the plainest possible words—most straightforwardly set out are what is required.

Theodore Dreiser, who could write some extraordinarily awkward sentences, has, I think, suffered from the snobbery of style; and it is pleasing to see that John Gross, no snob, has found room in his book for brief and impressive selections from Sister Carrie, The Financier, and An American Tragedy. Attempts have also been made to diminish Dostoyevsky for his want of stylish prose. In our own time, Solzhenitsyn, too, has suffered similar darts and arrows of outraged snobbery.

For the rest of us, mere scribblers, style is not merely our best but our only chance to have our work survive. This is borne out by The New Oxford Book of English Prose, which is a compendium, a vade mecum, and finally a history of more than six hundred years of English prose style. If the book can be said to have a moral, as I believe it does, it is that style is the great preservative of literature. Without it, language itself is muttering in the rain, stuttering in the wind, mere babble, like the man said, “a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.”

Notes
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The New Oxford Book of English Prose, edited by John Gross; Oxford University Press, 1028 pages, $39.95. Go back to the text.

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