The ‘Right English’ of Charles M. Doughty

LAURA (RIDING) JACKSON The 'Right English' of Charles M. Doughty I I have a story to tell here, the story of a devotion.' But first must corne a historical preamble, since most who will be drawn to try their interest in the story will have little acquaintance with Doughty's work, his work as a whole, and the course of his life and thought in relation to his work - and there will be some who will have no, or hardly any, acquaintance with the fact of Doughty. The name of this English poet (who was born in 1843 and died in 1926) was once, and not very long ago, familiar to the literarily informed, and, generally, to a small but distinguished readership, as that of an author of a prose book to be thought of as a work ofgrand rank-it was, indeed, in a limited way, if not a famous book, instantly, an agreed-on candidate for fame. The title was Travels in Arabia Deserta. The merit of the writing and the interest of the subject were solidly one. There was a strangeness in the writing that made it forbidding for some, the language used being an older English; it was used with scrupulous effort for rightness. 'My chaste and right English of the best time!' Doughty called his language, believing it one that by its nature was itself a guide to the good in language. The story that Doughty told in the Arabia Deserta was one of solitary travellings in Arabia from late in 1876 to far into 1878. With readers who stay with the book, his words and his use of them become necessaryseeming for the report of physical observations, both broad-ranging and fine, such as he made, and the account of his moments, hours, days, lived with unhostile watchfulness for the hostile possibility amidst the stranger's good fortune in friends. They find a story of people and their land and his journeying in it in the telling of which the narrator exacts of himself a uniform achievement of evident truth: they learn to adopt this as their own requirement of him. After this book, years after it, there came poetic works, long poems, each a story of a sort, fashioned with a purpose of narrative fidelity kindred with that which animated the Travels. The objective of truth in .. This article is drawn from a book in progress, of the same title. UTQ, Volum e XLVI, Number 4, Summer 1977 3'0 LAURA (RIDING) JACKSON them is complicated by the spacious ranging and conceptual intensities of the poetic imagination. The narrative burden falls directly upon thought rather than, first, upon observation, and the language is asked to yield an even more forceful quality of truth, with its words, than was sought in the prose work. Those to whom the concern with truth is plain in the Travels can fail to perceive, or be slower in perceiving, the heightened engrossment with it that characterizes the poetic works; but if they apply themselves with close attentiveness to the language of the poetic works, they ought to become aware that the linguistic differences between them and the prose work are not merely differences to be expected between the prose and the poetic employment of language. In the poetic works Doughty emerged from his employment of his 'right English' in the prose work as from an apprenticeship -an apprenticeship extended and improved on in years of private study and preparation for the mature linguistic labours. In the poems is found the full representation of his linguistic ideal of good words in good use. According to this ideal, words are naturally responsive to the urgencies of truth, presumed to be naturally active in the well-conditioned human instinct. But the poetic works, in which is to be found the perfected exemplification of Doughty's conception of what constituted good words in good use, became faster unknown than Travels in Arabia Deserta, which now is only a little less than altogether unknown. Doughty's work in its entirety was not recognized or comprehended as what it was. It was written to excite a new sense of the dignity of language, and...