'They Were Just, and Clear'

“Style means the necessary word. The rest matters little.” 

I sometimes conduct an informal test on a piece of prose that either pleases me or somehow stylistically offends me. In either case, how does the writer achieve his effect? What can I learn from the successful sample? What would I change in the failed passage, if anything, that might improve it? Like many reader-writers, I’m an editor of other people's words.

 

John Ruskin tells us in his eccentric and beautifully written autobiography Praeterita (1885) that when he was a boy his father required him to pack four volumes of Dr. Johnson’s periodical essays in his baggage whenever the family traveled. Instead of complaining, Ruskin approves of the paternal stricture. He writes of Johnson:

 

“I valued his sentences not primarily because they were symmetrical, but because they were just, and clear; it is a method of judgment rarely used by the average public, who ask from an author always, in the first place, arguments in favour of their own opinions, in elegant terms.”

 

I wouldn’t change a thing, and not simply because I agree with Ruskin’s assessment. He identifies Johnson’s customary clarity. I can’t recall a single passage of purple prose in Johnson’s work. That’s not always the case with Ruskin, especially the earlier work, but here every word is in its proper place and “necessary,” to use the criterion mentioned at the top. His final sentence, in a move decidedly Johnsonian, broadens the observation to much of humanity. We all wish to see our precious opinions substantiated, truth be damned.

 

I recently reread Thomas Macaulay’s 1831 review of John Croker’s edition of Boswell’s Life of Johnson. Macaulay famously concluded it was “immoral” that so great a book should be authored by such “a great fool.” His judgment of Johnson’s prose is comparably misguided and, incidentally, overwritten:

 

“His constant practice of padding out a sentence with useless epithets, till it became as stiff as the bust of an exquisite; his antithetical forms of expression, constantly employed even where there is no opposition in the ideas expressed; his big words wasted on little things; his harsh inversions, so widely different from those graceful and easy inversions which give variety, spirit, and sweetness to the expression of our great old writers—all these peculiarities have been imitated by his admirers, and parodied by his assailants, till the public has become sick of the subject.”

 

Is it possible to be mistaken in one’s conclusions while still writing well? Of course. Macaulay is wrong on both counts. His prose becomes a parody of the charges he levies against Johnson. It might be stylistically improved by breaking the one long sentence into several shorter ones. “Big words wasted on little things” is embarrassing in this context.

 

[The passage quoted at the top is from a journal entry Jules Renard made on September 5, 1893. See his Journal 1887-1910 (trans. Theo Cuffe, selected and introduced by Julian Barnes, riverrun, 2020).]