How to write English prose (2023)

Blog Post | January 12, 2023 How to Write English Prose by David Bentley Hart On writing well.

David Bentley Hart’s most recent books are Prisms, Veils: A Book of Fables (Notre Dame), All Things Are Full of Gods: The Mysteries of Mind and Life (Yale), and The Light of Tabor: Toward a Monistic Christology (Notre Dame).

There are few if any passages in the works of Sir Thomas Browne that I do not find thoroughly delightful; but two afford me particularly intense pleasure. One is the opening paragraph from his essay “On Dreams”:

Half our dayes wee passe in the shadowe of the earth, and the brother of death exacteth a third part of our lives. A good part of our sleepes is peeced out with visions, and phantasticall objects wherin wee are confessedly deceaved. The day supplyeth us with truths, the night with fictions and falsehoods, which uncomfortably divide the natural account of our beings. And therefore having passed the day in sober labours and rationall enquiries of truth, wee are fayne to betake ourselves unto such a state of being, wherin the soberest heads have acted all the monstrosities of melancholy, and which unto open eyes are no better then folly and madnesse.

And the other is the final paragraph from the second chapter of the fifth book of the immense, glorious, and shamefully neglected miscellany Pseudodoxia Epidemica , entitled “Of the Picture of Dolphins”:

And thus also must that picture be taken of a Dolphin clasping an Anchor: that is, not really, as is by most conceived out of affection unto man, conveighing the Anchor unto the ground: but emblematically, according as Pierius hath expressed it, The swiftest animal conjoyned with that heavy body, implying that common moral, Festina lentè : and that celerity should always be contempered with cunctation.

To my mind, each is in its own way a perfect, exquisitely faceted gem of English prose from an especially glorious literary epoch. The music of the one has haunted me for most of my life; the gleeful perversity of the other has lost none of its power to make me laugh in nearly four decades. And, however great the joy I take in either of these passages in isolation, it is as nothing compared to the idiot bliss I derive from their juxtaposition. Taken together, they ideally illustrate the two extremes of the great man’s voice: on the one hand, its glowing beauty and spacious sonority; on the other, its anfractuous density and heedless flamboyance.

One really would have to have a miserly spirit not to love both. Browne’s prose is a magnificent Baroque palace, by dizzying turns grandiose or lyrical, opulent or elegant, monstrous or precious, inordinate or harmonious, carelessly vast or pedantically exact—and always magnificent. All its outlandish and scintillating mannerisms are just so many volutes and modillions, Solomonic columns and gilded cornices, quadrature and mirrored halls. And all of it is a monument to a brief enchanted period in the seventeenth century when English had achieved the whole range of its expressive powers, and when its greatest writers were not yet burdened by any bad conscience about employing those powers to their fullest. Never again would English letters enjoy such a state of innocent sophistication (or sophisticated innocence).

And yet, of course, it was also the age of the King James Bible, which is so often praised for exhibiting precisely the opposite virtues: simplicity, clarity, plain diction. All of which is true enough, admittedly: the King James is perhaps the greatest feat of pellucid phrasing in the history of English letters. But is that the whole story?

Remember now thy Creator in the days of thy youth, while the evil days come not, nor the years draw nigh, when thou shalt say, I have no pleasure in them; While the sun, or the light, or the moon, or the stars, be not darkened, nor the clouds return after the rain: In the day when the keepers of the house shall tremble, and the strong men shall bow themselves, and the grinders cease because they are few, and those that look out of the windows be darkened, And the doors shall be shut in the streets, when the sound of the grinding is low, and he shall rise up at the voice of the bird, and all the daughters of musick shall be brought low; Also when they shall be afraid of that which is high, and fears shall be in the way, and the almond tree shall flourish, and the grasshopper shall be a burden, and desire shall fail: because man goeth to his long home, and the mourners go about the streets: Or ever the silver cord be loosed, or the golden bowl be broken, or the pitcher be broken at the fountain, or the wheel broken at the cistern. Then shall the dust return to the earth as it was: and the spirit shall return unto God who gave it. Vanity of vanities, saith the preacher; all is vanity.

This, from Ecclesiastes, is definitely a grand and gradual music, luminously clear in many respects; but it is not exactly austere; it is also quite complex in its cadences and syntax. True, its gleaming paratactic flow contrasts strikingly with Browne’s massy hypotactic architectonics. And yet the difference is nowhere near so absolute as one might initially be tempted to think. Read once again the first few sentences of the passage from “On Dreams” above. When one places the King James alongside the prose not only of Browne but of all the great English writers of the period, over a period of a few generations—John Florio (1552–1625), Lancelot Andrewes (1555–1626), John Donne (1572–1631), Robert Burton (1577–1640), Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679), Izaak Walton (1593–1683), John Dryden (1631–1700), Thomas Traherne (c. 1636–1674), Joseph Addison (1672–1719), and so on—one cannot help but feel that one is moving back and forth along a single continuum: running not, as we tend to think of it today, from the gaudily ostentatious to the unpretentiously plain, but rather from the beautiful to the sublime, in the classical, pre-Kantian sense of those terms. Taken in that way, the “beautiful” is a style that abounds in sparkling ornamentation while the “sublime” is a style of majestic restraint, pitched “below the threshold” ( sub limine ) of the temple, a plangent bareness whose rhetorical power somehow exceeds that of the most spectacular oratorical adornments.

Every great national prose, in just about any tongue, reaches its high meridian only by way of a prolonged and constant negotiation of just this tension between beauty and sublimity—between the decorative and the august, or between the splendid and the lucid. And this comes only at the end of long epochs of development. To be able to balance expressiveness and reticence, or to know when to cast that balance away, requires tact and ingenuity and taste on the part of writers; but it also requires a language of sufficient maturity. This is why prose of any consequence invariably arrives far later in a culture’s history than does great poetry. Poetry entered the world almost as early as words did; it is the first flowering of language’s intrinsic magic—its powers of invocation and apostrophe, of making the absent present and the present mysterious, of opening one mind to another. It comes most naturally to languages in their first dawn, when something elemental—something somehow pre-linguistic and not quite conscious—is still audible in them. Prose, however, evolves only when that force has been subdued by centuries upon centuries of refinement, after unconscious enchantment has been largely mastered by conscious artistry, and when the language has acquired a vocabulary of sufficient richness and a syntax of sufficient subtlety, and has fully discovered its native cadences. In English, as in French, this happened in the early modern period, beginning in the late fifteenth century and reaching an unsurpassable zenith in the seventeenth.

By then, moreover, English had amassed the most varied, magnificently farraginous hoard of words in any European tongue, full of Teutonic thunder and purling Latinity, but also enriched with every other verbal plunder it could seize from abroad. No other language could achieve so deep a range of organ-tones, or boast so enormous a collection of pipes and stops, or command so huge an acoustic space. Certainly no other could have produced the sort of wild polyphony and gorgeously wanton dissonances one hears in Macbeth’s

Will all great Neptune’s ocean wash this blood

Clean from my hand? No; this my hand will rather

This is the peculiar genius of the English language: this clash and chaos of radically different tones and textures, and this inexhaustible store of ever more exotic words, with all their ever finer distinctions of association and connotation.

All the great prose stylists of the next couple centuries of English letters would avail themselves freely of this extraordinary instrument’s capacities. Fashions would shift over time. The sensibility of the eighteenth century for a time moved more toward the Latinical registers, that of the nineteenth for a time more toward the Anglo-Saxon; but in every generation writers of any significance understood the magnitude of the musical forces at their disposal. And—well, here, take a typical passage from Thomas De Quincey in Confessions of an English Opium-Eater :

The ocean, in everlasting but gentle agitation, and brooded over by a dove-like calm, might not unfitly typify the mind and the mood which then swayed it. For it seemed to me as if then first I stood at a distance, and aloof from the uproar of life; as if the tumult, the fever, and the strife, were suspended; a respite granted from the secret burthens of the heart; a sabbath of repose; a resting from human labours. Here were the hopes which blossom in the paths of life, reconciled with the peace which is in the grave; motions of the intellect as unwearied as the heavens, yet for all anxieties a halcyon calm: a tranquillity that seemed no product of inertia, but as if resulting from mighty and equal antagonisms; infinite activities, infinite repose.

I do not know exactly why, in the twentieth century, the dominant fashions in English prose moved relentlessly in the direction of ever greater simplification and aesthetic minimalism. I do not even entirely regret it. Tastes change, and some of the change has been a corrective of certain excesses of the past. But, on the whole, the result has been a kind of official dogma in favor of a prose so denuded of nuance, elegance, intricacy, and originality as to be often little better than infantile, not only in vocabulary but also in artistry and expressive power—a formula, that is, for producing writers whose voices are utterly anonymous in their monotonous ordinariness. Most of the fiction one reads today in literary journals is atrociously written, as are most of the essays, principally because writers have been indoctrinated in a style so rigid, barren, brutal, dry, and idiotically naïve that the best it can elicit from them is competent dullness. And who can tell one author from another?

Simplicity is difficult, after all, no less than complexity. Both require taste and skill. Neither is less artificial or more natural than the other. Both are necessary for good writing. And when either becomes a forced regimen, exclusive of the other, the results can be only hideous. Good writing is produced not by forsaking the beautiful for the sublime or the exorbitant for the restrained, but by finding new ways of orchestrating the interplay between them. Now, all the authorities of the age seem to concur, the literary performer should treat the organ’s console as a collection of decadent temptations to be resisted; he or she should confine the performance to a single manual, played with two fingers, with no stops pulled and the pedals never so much as brushed by an errant shoe-tip.

I could, had I but world enough and time, fill volumes with passages from hundreds of masters of English prose to illustrate my noti