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how do you do是什么意思Lucidity, Simplicity, Euphony
conditionallyBy W. Somert Maugham
I have never had much patience with the writers who claim from the reader an effort to understand their meaning. You have only to go to the great philosophers to e that it is possible to express with lucidity the most subtle reflections. You may find it difficult to understand the thought of Hume, and if you have no philosophical training its implications will doubtless escape you; but no one with any education at all can fail to understand exactly what the meaning of each ntence is. Few people have written English with more grace than Berkeley. There are two sorts of obscurity that you find in writers. One is due to negligence and the other to wilfulness. People often write obscurely becau they have never taken the trouble to learn to write clearly. This sort of obscurity you find too often in modern philosophers, in men of science, and even in literary critics. Here it is indeed strange. You would have thought that men who pasd their lives in the study of the great masters of literature would be sufficiently nsitive to the beauty of language to write if not
forkedbeautifully at least with perspicuity. Yet you will find in their works ntence after ntence that you must read twice to discover the n. Often you can only guess at it, for writers have evidently not said what they intended.
Another cau of obscurity is that the writer is himlf not quite sure of his meaning. He has a vague impression of what he wants to say, but has not, either from lack of mental power or from laziness, exactly formulated it in his mind and it is natural enough that he should not find a preci expression for a confud idea. This is due largely to the fact that many writers think, not before, but as they write. The pen originates the thought. The disadvantage of this, and indeed it is a danger against which the author must be always on his guard, is that there is a sort of magic in the written word. The idea acquires substance by taking on a visible nature, and then stands in the way of its own clarification. But this sort of obscurity merges very easily into the wilful. Some writers who do not think clearly are inclined to suppo that their thoughts have significance greater than at first sight appear. It is flattering to believe that they are too profound to be expresd so clearly that all who run may read, and very naturally it does not occur to su
comment什么意思ch writers that the fault is with their own minds which have not the faculty of preci reflection. Here again the magic of the written word obtains. It is very easy to persuade onelf that a phra that one does not quite understand may mean a great deal more than one realizes. From this there is only a little way to go to fall into the habit of tting down one's impressions in all their original vagueness. Fools can always be found to discover a hidden n in them. There is another form of wilful obscurity that masquerades as aristocratic exclusiveness. The author wraps his meaning in mystery so that the vulgar shall not participate in it. His soul is a cret garden into which the elect may penetrate only after overcoming a number of perilous obstacles. But this kind of obscurity is not only pretentious; it is short-sighted. For time plays it an odd thick. If the n is meagre time reduces it to a meaningless verbiage that no one thinks of reading.
Simplicity is not such an obvious merit as lucidity. I have aimed at it becau I have no gift for richness. Within limits I admire richness in others, though I find it difficult to digest in quantity. I can read one page of Ruskin with delight, but twenty only with weariness. The rolling period, the stately epithet, the noun rich in poetic associations, the subordinat
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proceede claus that give the ntence weight and magnificence, the grandeur like that of wave following wave in the open a; There is no doubt that in all this there is something inspiring. Words thus strung together fall on the ear like music. The appeal is nsuous rather than intellectual, and the beauty of the sound leads you easily to conclude that you need not bother about the meaning. But words are tyrannical things, they exist for their meanings, and if you will not pay attention to the, you cannot pay attention at all. Your mind wanders. This kind of writing demands a subject that will suit it. It is surely out of place to write in the grand style of inconsiderable things.
But if richness needs gifts with which everyone is not endowed, simplicity by no means comes by nature. To achieve it needs rigid discipline. So far as I know ours is the only language in which it has been found necessary to give a name to the piece of pro which is described as the purple patch, it would not have been necessary to do so unless it were characteristic. English pro is elaborate rather than simple. It was not always so. Nothing could be more racy, straightforward and alive than the pro of Shakespeare; but it must be remembered that this was dialogue written to be spoken. We do not know how 特有
he would have written if like Corneille he had compod prefaces to his plays. It may be that they would have been as euphuistic as the letters of Queen Elizabeth. But earlier pro, the pro of Sir Thomas More, for instance, is neither ponderous, flowery nor oratorical. It smacks of the English soil. To my mind King James's Bible has been a very harmful influence on English pro. I am not so stupid as to deny its great beauty. It is majestical. But the Bible is an oriental book. Its alien imagery has nothing to do with us.
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美国大选最新消息Tho hyperboles, tho luscious metaphors, are foreign to our genius. I cannot but think that not the least of the misfortunes that the Secession from Rome brought upon the spiritual life of our country is that this work for so long a period became the daily, and with many the only, reading of our people. Tho rhythms, that powerful vocabulary, that grandiloquence, became part and parcel of the national nsibility. The plain, honest English speech was overwhelmed with ornament. Blunt Englishmen twisted their tongues to speak like Hebrew prophets. There was evidently something in the English temper to which this was congenial, perhaps a native lack of precision in thought, perhaps a naive delight in fine words for their won sake, an innate eccentricity and love of embroidery, I do
not know; but the fact remains that ever since, English pro has had to struggle against the tendency to luxuriance. When from time to time the spirit of the language has reasrted itlf, as it did with Dryden and the writers of Queen Anne, it was only to be submerged once more by the pomposities of Gibbon and Dr. Johnson. When English pro recovered simplicity with Hazlitt, the Shelley of the letters and Charles Lamb at his best, it lost it again with De Quincey, Carlyle, Meredith and Walter Pater. It is obvious that the grand style is more striking than the plain. Indeed many people think that a style that does not attract notice is not style. They will admire Walter Pater's, but will read an essay by Matthew Arnold without giving a moment's attention to the elegance, distinction and sobriety with which he t down what he had to say.
