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  • Grammar and Usage. A review of Modern English Usage, by H. W. Fowler; The Philosophy of Grammar, by Otto Jespersen; A Grammar of Late Modern English, by H. Poutsma; and Le Langage, by J. Vendryes

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The New Criterion: A Quarterly Review, 5 (Jan 1927) 121-24

A question raised and debated from time to time, and always dropped without any conclusion having been reached, is the question of the kind of education necessary or desirable for the acquisition of a good English style. Appeal is usually made to the evidence of “great writers,” but such appeal is never satisfactory. One or another distinguished writer may be cited to prove that Latin and Greek are essential, or that Latin alone is enough, or that neither is necessary, or that a scientific training is as good or better, or that no training whatever, even the study of English models, is required. Great writers are deceptive: their virtues may blind us to their defects, or their virtues may be so singular as to make trivial in them vices which would be unpardonable in others. Again, no style, especially no English style, is the perfect medium for every content. La pensée, says Gourmont, est l’homme même: 1 nobody thinks about everything, or thinks in every way possible; and the subject matter and the mode of thought determine the style. We can study the styles of great writers, certainly, but we cannot educate ourselves on their model. We educate ourselves largely on instinct; we can educate others only by the humble light of reason.

Reason, if we formulate our problem in a plain and practical way, seems to me to recommend certain general tips and precepts. It recommends in general a classical education. True, some of our best prose is the prose of scientists; but this statement is reserved by several restrictions. One is that in a scientific training superiority of mind counts for everything: the great scientist writes well, the mediocre scientist indifferently, and the hack scientist badly. Another is that the scientist, when he writes on some subject other than that in which he has been trained, and which he has helped to create, may write, and think, in a very slovenly fashion indeed. We are concerned not with the exceptional style but with the moderate style: a humane training should teach a man to write well when he writes at all; it should teach him not to write at all of anything about which he has not thought well. The process of learning to write is the process of learning what we are competent to think about and write about.

A literary or humane education is certainly that most suitable for all but those who expect to occupy themselves with one of the more exact sciences. The more vague and dubious a “science,” the worse its practitioners write, and the more they depend upon jargon. Physicists, mathematicians, chemists, may write extremely well; psychologists, economists, and especially the American pundits of that American science known as “sociology,” more often write badly. The greatest variation occurs perhaps in the study of history, which is usually...

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