How to Write English Prose

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Blog Post |

January 12, 2023

How to Write English Prose

by

David Bentley Hart

On writing well.

About the author

by

David Bentley Hart

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).

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The Ideals

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...