Bosphorus

A recent Scrivener post on language and liquor made me notice this from Chesterton’s Orthodoxy:

Most of the machinery of modern language is labour-saving machinery; and it saves mental labour very much more than it ought. Scientific phrases are used like scientific wheels and piston-rods to make swifter and smooter yet the path of the comfortable. Long words go rattling by us like long railway trains. We know they are carrying thousands who are too tired or indolent to walk and think for themselves. It is a good exercise to try for once in a way to express any opinion one holds in words of one syllable.

And this made me think of a comment of W. M. Spackman’s (writing of Henry James):

There is, finally, the vice James was never free from, the over-use of metaphor for what he must have thought of as the invigoration of the passage before him. Where Homer expanded James distorts and distends, and never oftener than when the paragraph is flaccid or flat: it calls for something, God knows, and what it gets is a stucco duro of surface decoration.

Olive had taken her up, in the literal sense of the phrase, like a bird of the air, had spread an extraordinary pair of wings, and carried her through the dizzying void of space. Verena liked it, for the most part; like to shoot upward without an effort of her own and look down upon all creation, upon all history, from such a height.

The heavy sentences take on a megatherian life of their own; whatever else was going on stops, for James as for his reader, until the thing has rumbled past.

Trackback URI | Comments RSS