Rilke, The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge

Rainer Maria Rilke, The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge, transl. Stephen Mitchell, Introduction by William H. Gass, Vintage, New York, 1985

But Rilke had begun to slip out of the knot of his marriage in the moment that he tied it; and as time went on his habit of letting go of things even as he reached out for them would become firmly established… vii

When Rilke went to Paris, he was in full retreat form the noise of infants and their insistent needs; from the dull level of everyday life he had reached the instant his romance with the country cottage had subsided and intimacy’s repeated little shamed had reasserted their reality. viii

…Paris grasped his outstretched spirit with a pair of gnarled and beggarly hands which wrung nothing but outcry out of him, mercilessly squeezing him until body and soul were only a dry husk around rented air. / Rilke had written poems on poverty and death, but up to now he had really known neither. viii

…he struck his poses, and handed out pamphlets containing his work to passers-by on Prague’s more notable streets as if giving away bread to the poor in spirit. At 26… ix

Rodin showed him who he ought to be; Paris demonstrated where and what he really was. x

If Rilke had fled his family, it was with his wife’s leave, for she was soon to follow him, after depositing little Ruth on Granny’s stoop like a basket packed with orphan… x-xi

…Rilke was a master of German prose; that he wrote far more prose than he did poetry; that much of it is as astonishingly beautiful as prose can be, and as terrifying too;… xii

These letters are sometimes shaded by self-pity. They are sometimes too supplicating, dandified, indulgent (the poseur is the other side of this poet); but they are invariably sensitive and thoughtful, often full of the unexpected in being raw, direct, and harsh. Certainly, they are rich, intense, frequently breathtaking: letters that could create a passion and stimulate an affair, for real acts of love occasionally covered the white sheets, and his skillful writer’s hand could manage to touch even the most guarded heart. They are letters it must have taken—sometimes—more than a day to compose and copy over; and for their recipients, hours of rereading and rest before they would be able to recover. Rilke’s writing is breathtaking: it falls upon the center of the spirit like a blow. xiii

These long letters to Lou could not have been dashed off. They clearly come from notes, from prose trials and errors, so that when Rilke revises sections of them for inclusion in the novel, they are already in their third kind of existence. xiii

The novel we have now is made of two notebooks of nearly equal length, yet none of these entries is very notelike, unless a musical meaning is meant. xiv

Malte’s extraordinary lucidity may mislead us about the bars which frame is vision. There is no Rodin in this book to humble Malte’s artistic claims; there is no mention of the glory and the menace of Cezanne, who meant so much to the development of Rilke’s art during the time he spent writing this book; there is no intimation of success or greatness; there are no passages, such as those which occur in his letters to Clara, for all their gloomy remonstrances, which evoke the vitality and sensuality of the city. / There is simply a sudden end to the notebooks, as if their author had no interest in beginning a third, or as if the third were lost, or as if Malte Laurids Brigge were no longer alive. xv

Rilke has little idea where his project is heading…And the pain of Paris has receded somewhat. To finish his work he will have to return to Paris eventually, but the old wounds won’t open as widely as before. How to continue? Worse: why continue? The difficulty is familiar. To rebleed isn’t easy. xvi

He becomes a professional guest; he lives in other people’s houses, in hotels, in rented rooms. Unfamiliar mirrors become his temporary friends. For a time, he resides in Rome. Then he visits Scandinavia. He complains about the uglification of Capri. He lectures: first hither, then yon. In Vienna… xvii

What is said, early in the first notebook, to be “the main thing” (that is, to survive), is no longer, in the second, “the main thing” at all (“the main thing is just to keep drawing,” to remain faithful to one’s art). And the initial commandment: to learn to see, is followed by another, later: to take on and learn the task of love. xviii

The final section of the first notebook, and the initial section of the next, are both given over to a description of the Dame a la Licorne tapestries which are on display in the Cluny Museum, and to the girls who come to contemplate and sketch them. xviii

The objects they wish to reflect on their tablets…are, in their way, eternal objects—images which can be safely, purely, loved…These girls, before they have known the fat but actually fragile pleasures of the flesh, are able to lose themselves in their drawings for a moment; lost themselves…Of course, as ordinary girls—as anybody’s kids—they want to change, grow up, have their loneliness embraced by another’s loneliness… xix

Malte remembers when his mother unrolled for him the antique pieces of lace she had collected. Malte, even more susceptible to “ecstacy” and loss of self as a child than he will be as an adult, is gratefully absorbed into the realms their lacelight shapes create. xx-xxi

These epitomal pages, which are so occupied with ghostlike, archetypal, and mystical episodes, also include this epiphany of their novel’s slow unspooling movement. / Like the tapestries, the laces have a fixed yet enrapturing esthetic design, and their delicate art redeems, from a life of merely “what’s expected,” those women who might have been otherwise wholly wasted. xxi

Because you are loved…you are expected to serve your lover, whose feeling have been left like a kitten in your care…Because you are loved, you work, which is a rival much admired but not more jealously betrayed for all that, will have to step aside so that the loving one can be comforted by your attention, assured of your devotion by the degree to which you are prepared to neglect yourself, abandon your principles, release your dreams. xxii
So this is where people come to live; I would have thought it is a city to die in. 3 (opening)

The street began to give off smells from all sides. It smelled, as far as I could distinguish, of iodoform, the grease of pomme frites, fear. All cities smell in summer. 4

The main thing was, being alive. that was the main thing. 4

These are the noises. But there is something here that is more dreadful: the silence. I imagine that during great fires such a moment of extreme tension must sometimes occur: the jets of water fall back, the firemen stop climbing ladders, no one moves. Soundlessly a black cornice pushes forward overhead, and a high wall, with flames shooting up behind it, leans forward, soundlessly. Everyone stands and waits, with raised shoulders and faces contracted above their eyes, for the terrifying crash. The silence here is like that. 5 (complete section)

Today, while I was writing a letter, it struck me that I have been here just three weeks. Three weeks anywhere else, in the country for example, would be like one day; here they are years. 5

When poor people are thinking, they shouldn’t be disturbed. Perhaps their idea will still occur to them. 7

It would be horrible to get sick here, and if someone thought of taking me to the Hotel-Dieu, I would certainly die there…This excellent hotel is very ancient; already in the time of King Clovis people were dying here, in a few beds. Now there are 559 beds to die in. 7-8

When I think back to my home, where there is no one left now, it always seems to me that things must have been different back then. Then, you knew (or perhaps you sensed it) that you had your death inside you as a fruit has its core. The children had a small one in them and the grownups a large one. The women had it in their womb and the men in their chest. You had it, and that gave you a strange dignity and a quiet pride. / If was obvious that my grandfather, old Chamberlain Brigge, still carried a death inside him. And what a death it was: two months long and so loud that it could be heard as far away as the manor farm. / The long, ancient manor-house was too small for this death; it seemed as if new wings would have to be added on, for the Chamberlain’s body grew larger and larger, and he kept wanting to be carried from one room to another, bursting into a terrible rage if, before the day had ended, there were no more rooms that he hadn’t already been brought to. Then he had to go upstairs, with the whole retinue of servants, chambermaids, and dogs which he always had around him, and, ushered in by the chief steward, they entered the room where his dear mother had died. It had been kept exactly as she had left it twenty-three years before, and since then no one had ever been allowed to set foot in it. Now the whole pack burst in. The curtains were pulled back, and the robust light of a summer afternoon examined all the shy, terrified objects and turned around clumsily in the forced-open mirrors. And the people did the same. There were maids who, in their curiosity, didn’t know where their hands were loitering, young servants who gaped at everything, and older ones who walked around trying to remember all the stories they had been told about this locked room which they had now, incredibly, entered. / But it was especially the dogs who were excited by this place where everything had a smell. The tall, slender Russian wolfhounds loped busily back and forth behind the armchairs… 10-11

So now he lay, and one might think that he had died. As it slowly began to grow dark, the dogs had one after another slipped out through the half-closed door. Only the stiff-haired setter with the sullen face sat beside its master, and one of its wide, shaggy forepaws lay on Christoph Detlev’s large gray hand. Most of the servants were now standing outside in the white hallway, which was brighter than the room;… 12-13

But there was something more. There was a voice, the voice that, seven weeks before, no one had known: for it wasn’t the Chamberlain’s voice. This voice didn’t belong to Christoph Detlev, but to Christoph Detlev’s death. / Christoph Detlev’s death was alive now, had already been living at Ulsgaard for many, many days, talked with everyone, made demands. Demands to be carried, demanded the blue room, demanded the small salon, demanded the great banquet-hall. Demanded the dogs, demanded the great banquet-hall. Demanded the dogs, demanded that people laugh, talk, play, stop talking, and all at the same time. Demanded to see friends, women, and people who had died, and demanded to die itself: demanded. Demanded and screamed. 13

…it screamed and groaned, it howled so long and continually that the dogs, which at first had howled along with it, fell silent and didn’t dare to lie down and, standing on their long, thin, trembling legs, were afraid. And when, through the huge, silvery Danish summer night, the villagers heard it howling, they got up out of bed as if there were a thunderstorm, dressed, and stayed seated around the lamp, without a word, until it was over. 13-14

And everyone did their daily work badly and forgot to bring in the hay because they spend the day dreading the arrival of night and because they were so worn out by the sleeplessness and the terrified awakenings that they couldn’t concentrate on anything. And when on Sunday they went to the white, peaceful church, they prayed that there might be no longer a master at Ulsgaard: for this one was a terrifying master. 14

…one of the young men dreamed that he had gone to the manor-house and killed the master with his pitchfork; and they were so exasperated, so overstrained, that they all listened as he told his dream and, quite unconsciously, looked at him to see if he were really brave enough to do that. This is how people felt and talked in the whole district where, just a few weeks before, the Chamberlain had been loved and pitied. But though there was all this talk, nothing changed. Christoph Detlev’s death, which had moved in at Ulsgaard, refused to let itself by hurried. It had come for ten weeks, and for ten weeks it stayed. 15

This was not the death of just any old man with dropsy; this was the sinister, princely death which the Chamberlain had, all his life, carried inside him and nourished with his own experiences. Every excess of pride, will, and authority that he himself had not been able to use up during his peaceful days… 15

Still, it hard for me to think…that strangers are living in the ancient, long manor-house…And you have nobody and nothing, and you travel through the world with a trunk and a carton of books and truly without curiosity. What kind of life is this: without a house, without inherited Things, without dogs. 16-17

Today we had a beautiful autumn morning. I walked through the Tuileries. Everything that lay toward the East, before the sun, dazzled; was hung with mist as if with a gray curtain of light. Gray in the gray, the statues sunned themselves in the not yet unveiled garden. 17

I think I should begin to do some work, now that I am learning to see. I am twenty-eight years old, and I have done practically nothing. To sum it up: I have written a study of Carpaccio, which is bad; a play entitled “Marriage,” which tries to demonstrate a false thesis by equivocal means; and some poems. Ah, but poems amount to so little when you write them too early in your life. You ought to wait and gather one if possible, and then, at the very end, you might perhaps be able to write ten good lines…For the sake of a single poem, you must see many cities, many people and Things, you must understand animals, must feel how birds fly… 19

How ridiculous. I sit here in my little room, I, Brigge, who am twenty-eight years old and completely unknown. I sit here and am nothing…five flights up, on a gray Paris afternoon… 22

The only area that has remained complete in my heart, I think, is the banquet-hall where we used to assemble for dinner every evening at seven o’clock. I never saw this room by day; I can’t even remember if it had windows or where they faced. Whenever the family entered, the candles would be burning in the heavy branched candlesticks, and in a few minutes you forgot the time of day and everything you had seen outside. This high and, I suspect, vaulted room was more powerful than everything else. With its darkening height and its never fully illuminated corners, it sucked all images out of your, without giving you anything definite in return. You sat there as if you had disintegrated—totally without will, without consciousness, without pleasure, without defense. 25-26

But it began with my laughing. I laughed out loud and couldn’t stop. What had happened was that one evening Mathilde Brahe hadn’t appeared for dinner. The old, almost totally blind butler nevertheless held out the serving-dish when he came to her seat. He remained in that attitude for a few moments’ then, content and dignified, and as if everything were in order, he moved on. 32

But it is another poet I’m reading: a poet who doesn’t live in Paris, a very different one. One who has a quiet house in the mountains. Who rings like a bell in a clear air. A happy poet, who tells about his window and the glass doors of his bookcase that pensively reflect a dear, solitary distance. This poet is the one I would have liked to be. He knows so much about young girls, and I too would have known much about them. He knows so much about young girls, and I too would have known much about them. He knows about girls who lived a hundred years ago, it no longer matters that they’re dead, for he knows everything. And that is the main thing. 42

And to think that I too would have been a poet like this if I could have lived somewhere, anywhere in the world, in one of the many closed-up country houses that no one cares about. I would have used just one room (the bright room in the attic), and I would have lived there with my old Things, the family portraits, the books. I would have had an armchair and flowers and dogs and a strong walking-stick for the stony paths. And nothing else. Just a book bound in yellowish, ivory-colored leather with an old flowered design on the endpaper: on its pages, I would have written. I would have written a lot, for I would have had many thoughts, and memories of many people. / But life has turned out differently. 43

It was carnival-time, and evening, and the people, with time on their hands, were roaming through the streets, rubbing against one another…Somehow a woman’s shawl caught onto me; I dragged her along, and people stopped me and laughed; I felt I should have laughed too, but I couldn’t. someone tossed a handful of confetti into my eyes, and it stung like a whip. One the street-corners, people were wedged in, flattened together, with no way to move forward, just a gentle back-and-forth motion, as if they were copulating. 48

I am lying in my bed five flights up, and my day, which nothing interrupts, is like a clock-face without hands. As something that has been lost for a long time reappears one morning in its old place, safe and sound, almost newer than when it vanished, just as if someone had been taking care of it—: so, here and there on my blanked, lost feelings out of my childhood lie and are like new. All the lost fears are here again. / The hear that a small woolen thread sticking out of the hem of my blanket may be hard, hard and sharp as a steep needle; the fear that this little button on my night-shirt may be bigger than my head, bigger and heavier; the fear that the breadcrumb which just dropped off my bed may turn into glass, and shatter when it hits the floor, and the sickening worry that when it does, everything will be broke, forever; the fear that the ragged edge of a letter which was torn open may be something forbidden, which no one ought to see, something indescribably precious, for which no place in the room is safe enough; the fear that if I fell asleep I might swallow the piece of coal lying in front of the stove; the fear that some number may begin to grow in my brain until there is no more room for it inside me; the fear that I may be lying on granite, on gray granite; the fear that I may start screaming, and people will come running to my door and finally force it open, the fear that I might betray myself and tell everything I dread, and the fear that I might not be able to say anything, because everything is unsayable,—and other fears…the fears. / I prayed to rediscover my childhood, and it has come back, and I feel that it is just as difficult as it used to be, and that growing older has served no purpose at all. 63-64

Maman had had Ingeborg’s little secretary-desk brought up and put into her own room. I often found her in front of it, for I was allowed to go in whenever I wanted to. My steps completely disappeared in the carpet, but she felt me over the other shoulder. This hand was entirely weightless, and kissing it was almost like kissing the ivory crucifix that was held out to me before I went to sleep. At this low desk, with its drop-leaf open in front of her, she would sit as if at a harpsichord. 87

“Shall we look at them, Malte?” she would say, and was as happy as if everything in the small yellow-lacquered drawer were about to be given to her as a present. And then she got so overwhelmed with anticipation that she couldn’t even unfold the tissue paper. I had to do that every time. But I too was filled with excitement when the laces appeared. They were wound on a wooden spindle, which couldn’t be seen because of all the laces. Then we would slowly turn it and watch the designs unroll, and we were a little frightened every time one of them came to an end. They stopped so suddenly.
First came strips of Italian work, tough pieces with drawn threads, in which everything was repeated over and over, as clearly as in a peasant’s garden. Then, all at once, a whole series of our glances was latticed with Venetian needlepoint, as if we were cloisters or prisons. But the view was freed again, and we saw deep into gardens that became more and more artificial, until everything was as dense and warm to the eyes as in a greenhouse: luxurious plants, which we didn’t recognize, spread out their enormous leaves, tendrils groped for one another as if they were dizzy, and the large open blossoms of the Points d’Alencon scattered their pollen over everything. Suddenly, tired and dazed, we stepped outside into the long track of the Valenciennes, and it was an early morning in winter, the ground was covered with frost. And we pushed through the snowy thicket of the Binche and came to places where no one had ever been; the branches hung downward so strangely, perhaps there was a grave beneath them, but we hid that from each other. The cold pressed more and more closely upon us, and at last, when the tiny pillow lace came, Maman said, “Oh, now we’ll get frostflowers on our eyes,” and it was true, for inside us it was very warm.
When the time came to roll up the laces again, we both sighed; it took so long; but we weren’t wiling to entrust it to anyone else.
“Just think, if we had had to make them,” Maman said, looking really frightened. I couldn’t imagine that at all. I caught myself thinking about little animals incessantly spinning these Things and which for that reason are left in peace. No, of course they were women.
“The women who made these have certainly gone to heaven,” I said, filled with awe. I remember it occurred to me that I hadn’t asked about heaven for a long time. Maman took a deep breath; the laces once again lay rolled up together.
After a while, when I had already forgotten my last words, she said, quite slowly, “To heaven? I think they are completely in these laces. Each one, looked at the right way, can become an eternal bliss. We know so little about it.” 136-138

It may be that I now know something he was afraid of. Let me explain how I arrived at this supposition. Deep inside his wallet there was a piece of paper that had been folded up for a long time, crumbling, broken at the folds. I read it before putting it in the fire. It was in his most careful handwriting, firmly and regularly written; but I immediately noticed that it was just a copy.
“Three hours before his death,” it began, and it referred to Christian IV. I can’t of course reproduce the contents word for word. Three hours before his death he desired to get up. The doctor and Wormius, his valet, helped him to his feet. He stood a bit unsteadily, but he stood, and they put on his quilted dressing-gown. Then he suddenly sat down on the front end of the bed and said something. It was incomprehensible. The doctor kept constant hold of his left hand to prevent him from falling back on the bed. They sat like this, and from time of time the king, thickly and painfully, this unintelligible word. Finally the doctor began to speak encouragingly to him; he hoped to gradually figure out what the king was trying to say. After a little while, the king interrupted him and said, all at once quite distinctly, “O doctor, doctor, what is your name?” The doctor had some difficulty in remembering.
“Sperling, Your Majesty.”
But this was really not the important point. The king. As soon as he heard that they understood him, stared out of his wide-open right eye (the one he could still use) and said with his whole face the single word that his tongue had been forming for hours, the only word that still existed: “Doden,” he said, “Doden.” [death].
There was nothing more on the page. I read it several times before putting it into the fire. And I remembered that my father had suffered enormously at the end. That is what they had told me. 161-163

Girls in my homeland. May the most beautiful of you, on a summer afternoon in the darkened library, find the little book that Jean de Tournes printed in 1556. May she take the cool, polished-leather volume out with her into the murmurous orchard or to the phlox beyond, in whose oversweet fragrance a sediment of pure sweetness lies. May she find it early. In the days when her eyes begin to be watchful, while her mouth, younger, is still capable of biting into an apple and filling itself with pieces with pieces that are much too big.
And then, when the time of more animated friendships comes, may it be your secret, girls, to call one another Dike and Anaktoria, Gyrinno and Atthis. May someone, a neighbor perhaps, an older man who traveled a great deal when he was young and has long been considered an eccentric, reveal these names to you. May he sometimes invite you to his house, to taste his famous peaches or to go up to the white hallway and look at the Ridinger engravings illustrating horsemanship, which are talked about so much that one ought to have seen them.
Perhaps you will persuade him to tell a story. Perhaps there is a girl among you who can induce him to bring out his old travel-diaries; who can tell? The same girl who one day gets him to disclose that certain passages of Sappho’s poetry have come down to us, and who can’t rest until she learns what is almost a secret: that this secluded man now and then liked to devote his leisure to translating these bits of verse. He has to admit that, for a long time now, he hasn’t given his translations a thought, and what there is of them, he assures her, isn’t worth mentioning. Yet he is happy to recite a stanza for these ingenuous friends, if they insist. He even discovers the Greek text in his memory, and says it aloud, because the translation really doesn’t do it justice, and because he wants to show the young people this authentic fragment of the massive, gorgeous language that was wrought in so intense a fire. 238-240

It would be difficult to persuade me that the story of the Prodigal Son is not the legend of a man who didn’t want to be loved. When he was a child, everyone in the house loved him. He grew up not knowing it could be any other way and got used to their tenderness, when he was a child. / But as a boy he tried to lay aside these habits. He wouldn’t have been able to say it, but when he spent the whole day roaming around outside and didn’t even want to have the dogs with him, it was because they too loved him; because in their eyes he could see observation and sympathy, expectation, concern; because in their presence too he couldn’t do anything without giving pleasure or pain (251)…No, he will go away. For example, while they are all busy setting out on his birthday table those badly guessed presents which, once again, are supposed to make up for everything. He will go away forever. Not until long afterward would he realize how thoroughly he had decided never to love, in order not to put anyone in the terrible position of being loved. He remembered this years later and, like other good intentions, it too had proved impossible. For he had loved again and again in his solitude, each time squandering his whole nature and in unspeakable fear for the freedom of the other person. Slowly he learned to let the rays of his emotion shine through into the beloved object, instead of consuming the emotion in her (254)…How often he though then of the Troubadours, who feared nothing more than having their prayers answered. All the money he had acquired and increased, he gave away so as not to experience that himself. He hurt them by so grossly offering payment, more and more afraid that they might try to respond to his love. For he had lost hope of ever meeting the woman whose love could pierced him (255)…The humble love that his sheep felt for him was no burden; (256)…Now that he was learning to love, learning so laboriously and with so much pain, he could see how careless and trivial all the love had been which he thought he had achieved; (258)…He became totally absorbed in mastering what constituted his inner life; he didn’t want to omit anything, for he had no doubt that in all this his love existed and was growing (258)…Dizzy with fright, they made him stand up, embraced him. They interpreted his outbursts in their own way, forgiving him. It must have been an indescribable relief for him that, in spite of the desperate clarity of his posture, they all misunderstood him. He was probably able to stay. For every day he recognized more clearly that their love, of which they were so vain and to which they secretly encouraged one another, had nothing to do with him. (260)

John Ruskin, On Art and Life

John Ruskin, On Art and Life, Penguin Books, Great Ideas, New York, 2005

…difficulty in doing so which would be encountered by any one who undertook to explain, for instance, the nature of Redness, without any actually red thing to point to, but only orange and purple things…and it is so in a far greater degree to make the abstraction of the Gothic character intelligible, because that character itself is made up of many mingled ideas, and can consist only in their union. That is to say, pointed arches do not constitute Gothic, nor vaulted roofs, nor flying buttresses, nor grotesque sculptures, but all or some of these things, and many other things with them, when they come together so as to have life. 2

And I believe this inquiry to be a pleasant and profitable one; and that there will be found something more than usually interesting in tracing out this grey, shadowy, many-pinnacled image of the Gothic spirit within us; and discerning what fellowship there is between it and our Northern hearts. And if, at any point of the inquiry, I should interfere with any of the reader’s previously formed conceptions, and use the term Gothic in any sense which he would not willingly attach to it, I do not ask him to accept, but only to examine and understand, my interpretation, as necessary to the intelligibility of what follows in the rest of the work. 3

Its elements are certain mental tendencies of the builders, legibly expressed in it; as fancifulness, love of variety, love of richness, and such others. Its external forms are pointed arches, valued roofs, etc. 4

I believe, then, that the characteristic or moral elements of Gothic are the following, placed in the order of importance: 1. Savageness. 2. Changefulness. 3. Naturalism. 4. Grotesqueness. 5. Rigidity. 6. Redundance. / These characters are here expressed as belonging to the building; as belonging to the builder, they would be expressed thus:—1. Savageness or Rudeness. 2. Love of Change. 3. Love of Nature. 4. Disturbed Imagination. 5. Obstinacy. 6. Generosity. And I repeat, that the withdrawl of any one, or any two, will not at once destroy the Gothic character of a building, but the removal of a majority of them will. 5-6

I am not sure when the word ‘Gothic’ was first generically applied to the architecture of the North; but I presume that, whatever the date of its original usage, it was intended to imply reproach, and express the barbaric character of the nations among whom that architecture arose. It never implied that they were literally of Gothic lineage, far less that their architecture had been originally invented by the Goths themselves; but it did imply that they and their building together exhibited a degree of sternness and rudeness… 6

It is true, gratly and deeply true, that the architecture of the North is rude and wild; but it is not true, that, for this reason, we are to condemn it, or despise. Far otherwise: I believe it is in this very character that is deserves our profoundest reverence. 7

Let us, for a moment, try to raise ourselves even above the level of their flight, and imagine the Mediterranean lying beneath us like an irregular lake, and all its ancient promontories sleeping in the sun: here an there an angry spot of thunder, a grey stain of storm, moving upon the burning field; and here and there a fixed wreath of white volcano smoke, surrounded by its circle of ashes; but for the most part a great peacefulness of light…Then let us pass farther towards the north, until we see the orient colours change gradually inot a vast belt of rainy green, where the pastures of Switzerland, and poplar valleys of France, and dark forests of the Danube and Carpathians stretch from the mouths of the Loire to those of the Volga…and then, farther north still, to see the earth heave inot mighty masses of leaden rock and heathy moor, bordering with a broad waste of gloomy purple that belt of field and wood, and splintering into irregular and grisly islands amidst the northern seas, beaten by storm, and chilled by ice-drift, and tormented by furious pulses of contending tide, until the roots of the last forests fail from among the hill ravines, and the hunger of the north wind bites their peaks into barrenness; and, at last, the wall of ice, durable like iron, sets, deathlike, its white teeth against us out of the polar twilight. 7-8

…but not with less reverence let us stand by him, when, with rough strength and hurried stroke, he smites an uncouth animation out of the rocks which he has torn from among the moss of the moorland, and heaves into the darkened air the pile of iron buttress and rugged wall, instinct with work of an imagination as wild and wayward as the northern sea; creatures of ungainly shape and rigid limb, but full of wolfish life; fierce as the winds that beat, and changeful as the clouds that shade them. /There is, I repeat, no degradation, no reproach in this, but all dignity and honourableness:… 9

…this magnificence of sturdy power, put forth only the more energetically because the fine finger-touch was chilled away by the frosty wind, and the eye dimmed by the moor-mist, or blinded by the hail; this out-speaking of the strong spirit of men who may not gather redundant fruitage from the earth, nor bask in dreamy benignity of sunshine, but must break the rock for bread, and cleave the forest for fire, and show, even in what they did for their delight, some of the hard habits of the arm and heart that grew on them as they swung the axe or pressed the plough. / If, however, the savageness of Gothic architecture, merely as an expression of its origin among Northern nations, may be considered, in some sort, a noble character, it possesses a higher nobility still, when considered as an index, not of climate, but of religious principle. 10

And observe, you are put to stern choice in this matter. You must either make a tool of the creature, or a man of him. You cannot make both. Men were not intended to work with the accuracy of tools, to be precise and perfect in all their actions. If you will have that precision out of them, and make their fingers measure degrees like cog-wheels, and their arms strike curves like compasses, you must unhumanize them…On the other hand, if you will make a man of the working creature, you cannot make a tool. Let him but begin to imagine, to think, to try to do anything worth doing; and the engine-turned precision is lost at once. Out comes all his roughness, all his dullness, all his incapability; shame upon shame, failure upon failure, pause after pause: but out comes the whole majesty of him also… 14-15

It is not that men are pained by the scorn of the upper classes, but they cannot endure their own; for they feel that the kind of labour to which they are condemned is verily a degrading one, and makes them less than men. 17

For instance. Glass beads are utterly unnecessary, and there is no design or thought employed in their manufacture…Neither they, nor the men who draw out the rods or fuse the fragments, have the smallest occasion for the use of any single human faculty… 20

So, again, the cutting of precious stones, in all ordinary cases, requires little exertion of any mental faculty; some fact and judgment in avoiding flaw, and so on, but nothing to bring out the whole mind. Every person who wears cut jewels merely for the sake of their value is, therefore, a slave-driver. / But the working of the goldsmith, and the various designing of grouped jewellery and enamel-work, may become the subject of the most noble human intelligence. 21

Grammar and refinement are good things, both, only be sure of the better thing first. And thus in art, delicate finish is desirable from the greatest masters, and is always given by them…But lower men than these cannot finish, for it requires consummate knowledge to finish consummately, and then we must take their thoughts as they are able to give them. So the rule is simple: Always look for invention first, and after that, for such execution as will help the invention, and as the inventor is capable of without painful effort, and no more. Above all, demand no refinement of execution where there is no thought, for that is slaves’ work, unredeemed. Rather choose rough work than smooth work, so only that the practical purpose be answered, and never imagine there is reason to be proud of anything that may be accomplished by patience and sand-paper. 22

Our modern glass is exquisitely clear in its substance, true in its form, accurate in its cutting. We are proud of this. We ought to be ashamed of it. The old Venice glass was muddy, inaccurate in all its forms, and clumsily cut, if at all…though some Venetian glass is ugly and clumsy enough when made by clumsy and uninventive workmen, other Venetian glass is so lovely in its forms that no price is too great for it; and we never see the same form in it twice. Now you cannot have the finish and the varied form too. 22-23

We are always in these days endeavouring to separate the two; we want one man to be always thinking, and another to be always working, and we call one a gentleman, and the other an operative; whereas the workman ought often to be thinking, and the thinker often to be working, and both should be gentlemen, in the best sense. As it is, we make both ungentle, the one envying, the other despising, his brother; and the mass of society is made up of morbid thinkers, and miserable workers. 24

But, accurately speaking, no good work whatever can be perfect, and the demand for perfection is always a sign of a misunderstanding of the ends of art. / This is for two reasons, both based on everlasting laws. The first, that no great man ever stops working till he has reached his point of failure: that is to say, his mind is always far in advance of his powers of execution, and the latter will now and then give way in trying to follow it…The Elgin marbles are supposed by many persons to be ‘perfect’. In the most important portions they indeed approach perfection, but only there. The draperies are unfinished, and hair and wool of the animals are unfinished, and the entire bas-reliefs of the frieze are roughly cut…The second reason is, that imperfection is in some sort essential to all that we know of life. It is the sign of life in a mortal body, that is to say, of a state of progress and change…All admit irregularity as they imply change; and to banish imperfection is to destroy expression, to check exertion, to paralyze vitality. All things are literally better, lovelier, and more beloved for the imperfections which have been divinely appointed. 26-27

I would not impeach love of order: it is one of the most useful elements of the English mind; it helps us in out commerce and in all purely practical matters; and it is in many cases one of the foundation stones of morality. Only do not let us suppose that love of order is love of art. It is true that order, in its highest sense, is one of the necessities of art, just as time is a necessity of music; but love of order has no more to do with our right enjoyment of architecture or painting, than love of punctuality with the appreciation of an opera. 29

…there is, however, nothing inconsistent between the two instincts, and nothing to hinder us from retaining our business habits, and yet fully allowing and enjoying the noblest gifts of Invention. We already do so, in every other branch of art except architecture, and we only do not so there because we have been taught that it would be wrong. Our architects gravely inform us that, as there are four rules of arithmetic, there are five orders of architecture…The idea of reading a building as we would read Milton or Dante, and getting the same kind of delight out of the stones as out of the stanzas, never enters our mind for a moment…The verses were neither made to order, nor to match, as the capitals were; and we have therefore a kind of pleasure in them other than a sense of propriety. 29-30

…we must no more expect to derive either pleasure or profit from an architecture whose ornaments are of one pattern, and whose pillars are of one proportion, than we should out of a universe in which the clouds were all of one shape, and the trees all of one size. 31

The pointed arch was not merely a bold variation from the round, but it admitted of millions of variations in itself; for the proportions of a pointed arch are changeable to infinity, while a circular arch is always the same. 32

We must, however, herein note carefully what distinction there is between a healthy and a diseased love of change; for as it was a healthy love of change that the Gothic architecture rose, it was partly in consequence of diseased love of change that it was destroyed. 33

Lastly: if the pleasure of change be too often repeated, it ceases to be delightful, for then change itself becomes monotonous, and we are driven to seek delight in extreme and fantastic degrees of it. This is the diseased love of change of which we have above spoken. / From these facts we may gather generally that monotony is, and ought to be, in itself painful to us, just as darkness is; that an architecture which is altogether monotonous is a dark or dead architecture… 35

If they wanted a window, they opened one; a room, they added one; a buttress, they built one; utterly regardless of any established conventionalities of external appearance, knowing (as indeed it always happened) that such daring interruptions of the formal plan would rather give additional interest to its symmetry than injure it. 37

The building of the bird and the bee needs not express anything like this. It is perfect and unchanging. But just because we are something better than birds or bees, our building must confess that we have not reached the perfection we can imagine, and cannot rest in the condition we have attained. If we pretend to have reached either perfection or satisfaction, we have degraded ourselves and our work. God’s work only may express that;… 39

The vital principle is not love of Knowledge, but the love of Change. It is that strange disquietude of the Gothic spirit that is its greatness; that restlessness of the dreaming mind… 39

…so this naturalist portraiture is renderd more faithful by the humility which confesses the imperfection of the subject. The Greek sculptor could neither bear to confess his own feebleness, nor to tell the faults of the forms that he portrayed. 44

…Egyptian and Ninevite sculpture…in all the scenes portrayed by the workmen of these nations, vegetation occurs only as an explanatory accessory; the reed is introduced to mark the course of the river, or the tree to mark the covert of the wild beast…But to the Gothic workman the living foliage became a subject of intense affection, and he struggled to render all its characters… 45-6

But here is a softer element mingled with them, peculiar to the Gothic itself. The rudeness or ignorance which would have been painfully exposed in the treatment of the human form, are still not so great as to prevent the successful rendering of the wayside herbage; and the love of change, which becomes morbid and feverish in following the haste of the hunter and the rage of the combatant, is at once soothed and satisfied as it watches the wandering of the tendril, and the budding of the flower…In that careful distinction of species, and richness of delicate and undisturbed organization, which characterize the Gothic design, there is the history of rural and thoughtful life… 46-7

Gradually, as that monkish enthusiasm became more thoughtful, and as the sound of war became more and more intermittent beyond the gates of the convent or the keep, the stony pillar grew slender and the vaulted roof grew light, till they had wreathed themselves into the semblance of the summer woods at their fairest… 48

Most of us do not need fine scenery; the precipice and the mountain peak are not intended to be seen by all men,—perhaps their power is greatest over those who are unaccustomed to them. But trees and fields and flowers were made for all, and are necessary for all. 49

The fourth essential element of the Gothic mind was above stated to be the sense of the GROTESTQUE; but I shall defer the endeavour to define this most curious and subtle character until we have occasion to examine one of the divisions of the Renaissance schools, which was morbidly influenced by it. 49

RIGIDITY…tension and communication of force from part to part, and also a studious expression of this throughout every visible line of the building…nervous entanglement; but even when most graceful, never for an instant languid…There is, first, the habit of hard and rapid working; the industry of the tribes of the North, quickened by the coldness of the climate, and giving an expression of sharp energy to all they do…There is also the habit of finding enjoyment in the signs of cold, which is never found, I believe, in the inhabitants of countries south of the Alps. Cold is to them an unredeemed evil, to be suffered and forgotten as soon as may be; but the long winter of the North forces the Goth (I mean the Englishman, Frenchman, Dane, or German), if he would lead a happy life at all, to find resources of happiness in foul weather as well as fair, and to rejoice in the leafless as well as in the shady forest…instead of seeking, like the Southern sculpture, to express only the softness of leafage nourished in all tenderness, and tempted into all luxuriance by warm winds and glowing rays, we find pleasure in dwelling upon the crabbed, perverse, and morose animation of plants that have known little kindness from earth or heaven, but, season after season, have had their best efforts palsied by frost. 50-52

…the employment of a rougher material, compelling the workman to seek for vigour of effect, rather than refinement of texture or accuracy of form, we have direct and manifest causes for much of the difference between the Northern and Southern cast of conception: but there are indirect causes holding a far more important place in the Gothic heart, though less immediate in their influence on design. Strength of will, independence of character, resoluteness of purpose, impatience of undue control, and that general tendency to set the individual reason against authority, and the individual deed against destiny, which, in the Northern tribes, has opposes itself throughout all ages, to the languid submission, in the Southern, of though to tradition, and purpose to fatality…There is virtue in the measure, and error in the excess, of both…the best architecture, and the best temper, are those which unite them both. 52-53

Last, because the least essential, of the constituent elements of this noble school, was placed that of REDUNDANCE, — the uncalculating bestowal of the wealth of its labour. There is, indeed, much Gothic, and that of the best period, in which this element is hardly traceable, and which depends for its effect almost exclusively on loveliness of simple design and grace of uninvolved proportion; still, in the most characteristic buildings, a certain portion of their effect depends upon accumulation of ornament; and many of those which have most influence on the minds of men, have attained it by means of this attribute alone…an unselfishness of sacrifice, which would rather cast fruitless labour before the altar than stand idle in the market… 54-55

The Work of Iron, in Nature, Art, and Policy; A Lecture delivered at Tunbridge Wells, February 16th, 1858

When first I heard that you wised me to address you this evening, it was a matter of some doubt with me whether I could find any subject that would possess any sufficient interest for you to justify my bringing you out of your comfortable houses on a winter’s night. When I venture to speak about my own special business of art, it is almost always before students of art, among whom I may sometimes permit myself to be dull, if I can feel that I am useful… 57

The subject is, of course, too wide to be more than suggestively treated; and even my suggestions must be few, and drawn chiefly from my own fields of work; nevertheless, I think I shall have time to indicate some courses of thought which you many afterwards follow out for yourselves if they interest you; and so I will not shrink from the full scope of the subject which I have announced to you—the functions of Iron, in Nature, Art, and Policy. 58

That hand is the most perfect agent of material power existing in the universe; and its full subtlety can only be shown when the material it works on, or with, is entirely yielding. The chords of a perfect instrument with receive it, but not of an imperfect one; the softly bending point of the hair pencil, and soft melting of colour, will receive it, but not even the chalk or pen point, still less the steel point, chisel or marble. The hand of a sculptor may, indeed, be as subtle as that of a painter, but all its subtlety is not bestowable nor expressible: the touch of Titian, Correggio, or Turner is a far more marvelous piece of nervous action than can be shown in anything but colour, or in the very highest conditions of executive expression in music. 70

…if you don’t want the qualities of the substance you use, you ought to use some other substance: it can be only affectation, and desire to display your skill, that leads you to employ a refractory substance, and therefore your art will all be base…marble is eminently a solid and massive substance. Unless you want mass and solidity, don’t work in marble. If you wish for lightness, take wood; if for freedom, take stucco; if for ductility, take glass. Don’t try to carve feathers, or trees, or nets, or foam, out of marble. Carve white limbs and broad breasts only out of that…And in general, leaf sculpture is good and admirable, if it renders, as in Gothic work, the grace and lightness of the leaf by the arrangement of light and shadow—supporting the masses well by strength of stone below; but all carving is base which proposes to itself slightness as an aim, and tries to imitate the absolute thinness of thin or slight things, as much modern wood-carving does. I saw in Italy, a year or two ago, a marble sculpture of birds’ nests. 70-72

Last summer I was lodging for a little while in a cottage in the country, and in front of my low window there were, first, some beds of daisies, then a row of gooseberry and currant bushes, and then a low wall about three feet above the ground, covered with stone-cress; outside, a cornfield, with its green ears glistening in the sun, and a field path through it, just past the garden gate. From my window I could see every peasant of the village who passed that way, with basket on arm for market, or spade on shoulder for field. When I was inclined for society, I could lean over my wall, and talk to anybody, when I was inclined for science, I could botanize all along the top of my wall—there were four species of stone-cress alone growing on it; and when I was inclined for exercise, I could jump over my wall, backwards and forwards. That’s the sort of fence to have in a Christian country… 75

Now there are a certain number of this class whom we cannot oppress with much severity. An able-bodied and intelligent workman—sober, honest, and industrious,—will almost always command a fair price for his work, and lay by enough in a few years to enable him to hold his own in the labour market. But all men are not able-bodied, nor intelligent, nor industrious; and you cannot expect them to be…There will always be in the world some who are not altogether intelligent and exemplary; we shall, I believe, to the end of the time find the majority somewhat unintelligent, a little inclined to be idle, and occasionally, on Saturday night, drunk; we must even be prepared to hear of reprobates who like skittles on Sunday morning better than prayers; and of unnatural parents who send their children out to beg instead of to go to school. / Now these are the kind of people whom you can oppress, and whom you do oppress, and that to purpose,—and with all the more cruelty and the greater sting, because it is just their own fault that puts them into your power…remember this is literally and simply what we do, whenever we buy, or try to buy, cheap goods—goods offered at a price which we know cannot be remunerative for the labour involved in them. Whenever we buy such goods, remember we are stealing somebody’s labour. Don’t let us mince the matter. I say, in plain Saxon, STEALING…the first and commonest way of doing so is to try to get the product of other people’s work, and enjoy it ourselves, by cheapening their labour in times of distress; then the second way is that grand one of watching the chances of the market; —the way of speculation. Of course there are some speculations that are fair and honest—speculations made with our own money, and which do not involve in their success the loss, by others, of what we gain. 85-89

George Orwell, Why I Write

George Orwell, Why I Write, Penguin Books, Great Ideas, New York, 2005

Why I Write

…more one is conscious of one’s political bias, the more chance one has of acting politically without sacrificing one’s aesthetic and intellectual integrity…Anyone who cares to examine my work will see that even when it is downright propaganda it contains much that a full-time politician would consider irrelevant. I am not able, and I do not want, completely abandon the world-view that I acquired in childhood. So long as I remain alive and well I shall continue to feel strongly about prose style, to love the surface of the earth, and to take pleasure in solid objects and scraps of useless information. It is no use reconcile my ingrained like and dislikes with the essentially public, non-individual activities that this age forces on all of us. 8-9

The Lion and the Unicorn

When you come back to England from any foreign country, you have immediately the sensation of breathing a different air. Even in the first few minutes dozens of small things conspire to give you this feeling. The beer is bitterer, the coins are heavier, the grass is greener, the advertisements are more blatant. The crowds in the big towns, with their mild knobby faces, their bad teeth and gentle manners, are different from a European crowd…English civilization. It is a culture as individual as that of Spain. It is somehow bound up with solid breakfasts and gloomy Sundays, smoky towns and winding roads, green fields and red pillarboxes. It has a flavour of its own…Spaniards are cruel to animals, Italians can do nothing without making a deafening noise, the Chinese are addicted to gambling. Obviously such things don’t matter in themselves. Nevertheless, nothing is causeless, and even the fact that Englishmen have bad teeth can tell something about the realities of English life. 12-14

…English characteristic which is so much a part of us that we barely notice it, and that is the addiction to hobbies and spare-time occupations, and privateness of English life. We are a nation of flower-lovers, but also a nation of stamp-collectors…One thing one notices if one looks directly at the common people, especially in the big towns, is that they are not puritanical. They are inveterate gamblers, drink as much beer as their wages will permit, are devoted to bawdy jokes, and use probably the foulest language in the world. They have to satisfy these tastes in the face of astonishing, hypocritical laws (licensing laws, lottery acts, etc., etc.) which are designed to interfere with everybody but in practice allow everything to happen. Also the common people are without definite religious belief, and have been so, for centuries. The Anglican Church never had a real hold on them, it was simply a preserve of the landed gentry… 15-16

The gentleness of the English civilization is perhaps its most marked characteristic. You notice it the instant you set food on English soil…always written off by European observers as ‘decadence’ or hypocrisy, the English hatred, and it is strong in the lower-middle class as well as the working class. 17

In England all the boasting and flag-wagging, the ‘Rule Britannia’ stuff, is done by small minorities. The patriotism of the common people is not vocal or even conscious. They do not retain among their historical memories the name of a single military victory. English literature, like other literatures, is full of battle-poems, but it is worth noticing that the ones that have won for themselves a kind of popularity are always a tale of disasters and retreats. There is no popular poem about Trafalgar or Waterloo, for instance. Sir John Moore’s army at Corunna, fighting a desperate rearguard action before escaping overseas (just like Dunkirk!) has more appeal than a brilliant victory. The most stirring battle-poem in English is about a brigade of cavalry which charged in the wrong direction. 18

It is quite true that the English are hypocritical about their Empire. In the working class this hypocrisy takes the form of not knowing that the Empire exists. But their dislike of standing armies is a perfectly sound instinct. A navy employs comparatively few people, and it is an external weapon which cannot affect home politics directly. Military dictatorships exist everywhere, but there is no such thing as a naval dictatorship. What English people of nearly all classes loathe from the bottom of their hearts is the swaggering officer type, the jingle of spurs and the crash of boots. Decades before Hitler was ever heard of, the word ‘Prussian’ had much the same significance in England as ‘Nazi’ has today. So deep does this feeling go that for a hundred years past the officers of the British army, in peace time, have always worn civilian clothes when off duty. 19

Here one comes upon an all-important English trait: the respect for constitutionalism and legality, and the belief in ‘the law’ as something above the State and above the individual, something which is cruel and stupid, of course, but at any rate incorruptible. / It is not that anyone imagines the law to be just. Everyone knows that there is one law for the rich and another for the poor. But no one accepts the implications of this, everyone takes it for granted that the law, such as it is, will be respected, and feels a sense of outrage when it is not. Remarks like ‘They can’t run me in; I haven’t done anything wrong’, or ‘They can’t do that; it’s against the law’, are part of the atmosphere of England…The totalitarian idea that there is no such thing as law, there is only power, has never taken root. 21

Nearly every Englishman of working-class origin considers it effeminate to pronounce a foreign work correctly. During the war of 1914-1918 the English working class were in contact with foreigners to an extent that is rarely possible. The sole result was that they brought back a hatred of all Europeans, except the Germans, whose courage they admired. In four years on French soil they did not even acquire a liking for wine. 25-26

Except for Shakespeare, the best English poets are barely known in Europe, even as names. The only poets who are widely read are Byron, who is admired for the wrong reasons, and Oscar Wilde, who is pitied as a victim of English hypocrisy. 26

…‘idle rich’, the people whose photographs you can look at in the Tatler and the Bystander, always supposing that you want to. The existence of these people was by any standard unjustifiable. They were simply parasites, less useful to society than his fleas are to a dog. 33

It is worth noticing that the navy and, latterly, the air force, have always been more efficient than the regular army. But the navy is only partially, and the air force hardly at all, within the ruling-class orbit. 34

Several dukes, earls and whatnots were killed in the recent campaign in Flanders. That could not happen if these people were the cynical scoundrels that they are sometimes declared to be…What is to be expected of them is not treachery, or physical cowardice, but stupidity, unconscious sabotage, an infallible instinct for doing the wrong thing. 37

It should be noted that there is now no intelligentsia that is not in some sense ‘left’. Perhaps the last right-wing intellectual was T.E. Lawrence. 39

Patriotism and intelligence will have to come together again. It is the fact that we are fighting a war, and a very peculiar kind of war, that may make this possible. 41

Crudely: the State, representing the whole nation, owns everything, and everyone is a State employee. This does not mean that people are stripped of private possessions such as clothes and furniture, but it does mean that all productive goods, such as land, mines, ships and machinery, and the property of the State. 47

…approximate equalities of incomes (it need to be more than approximate), political democracy, and abolition of all hereditary privilege, especially in education. These are simply the necessary safeguards against the reappearance of a class system. 48

Fascism, at any rate the German version, is a form of capitalism that borrows from Socialism just such features as will make it efficient for war purposes…the State, which is simply the Nazi Party, is in control of everything. It controls investments, raw materials, rates of interest, working hours, wages. The factory owner still owns his factory, but he is for practical purposes reduced to the status of a manager. 49

Hitler…has never persecuted the rich, except when they were Jews or when they tried actively to oppose him…The State controls industry, but there are still rich and poor, masters and men. 63

Politics and the English Language

This mixture of vagueness and sheer incompetence is the most marked characteristic of modern English prose, and especially of any kind of political writing. As soon as certain topics are raised, the concrete melts into the abstract and no one seems able to think of turns of speech that are not hackneyed: prose consists less and less of words chosen for the sake of their meaning, and more of phrases tacked together like the sections of a prefabricated hen-house. 105

DYING METAPHORS…which have lost all evocative power and are merely used because they save people the trouble of inventing phrases for themselves. 105-106

OPERATORS, OR VERBAL FALSE LIMBS…the elimination of simple verbs. Instead of being a single word, such as break, stop, spoil, mend, kill, a verb becomes a phrase, made up of a noun or adjective tacked on to some general-purposes verb such as prove, serve, form, play, render. In addition, the passive voice is wherever possible used in preference to the active, and noun constructions are used instead of gerunds (by examination of instead of by examining). The range of verbs is further cut down by means of the –ize and de- formations… 107

PRETENTIOUS DICTION. Words like phenomenon, element, individual (as noun), objective, categorical, effective, virtual, basic, primary, promote, constitute, exhibit, exploit, utilize, eliminate, liquidate, are used to dress up simple statements and give an air of scientific impartiality to biased judgments…unnecessary words like expedite, ameliorate, predict, extraneous, deracinated, clandestine, sub-aqueous and hundreds of others constantly gain ground from their Anglo-Saxon opposite numbers…the normal way of coining a new word is to use a Latin or Greek root with the appropriate affix and, where necessary, the –ize formation. It is often easier to make up words of this kind (deregionalize, impermissible, extramarital, non-fragmentatory and so forth) than to think up the English words that will cover one’s meaning. The result, in general, is an increase in slovenliness and vagueness. 107-108

MEANINGLESS WORDS. In certain kinds of writing, particularly in art criticism and literary criticism, it is normal to come across long passages which are almost completely lacking in meaning. Words like romantic, plastic, values, human, dead, sentimental, natural, vitality, as used in art criticism, are strictly meaningless, in the sense that they not only do not point to any discoverable object, but are hardly even expected to do so by the reader. When one critic writes, ‘The outstanding feature of Mr. X’s work is its living quality’, while another writes, ‘The immediately striking thing about Mr. X’s work is its peculiar deadness’, the reader accepts this as a simple difference of opinion. If words like black and white were involved, instead of the jargon words dead and living, he would see at once that language was being used in an improper way. 108-109

Here is a well-known verse from Ecclesiastes: ‘I returned, and saw under the sun, that the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, neither yet bread to the wise, nor yet riches to men of understanding, nor yet favour to men of skill; but time and chance happeneth to them all.’ Here it is in modern English: ‘Objective consideration of contemporary phenomena compels the conclusion that success or failure in competitive activities exhibits no tendency to be commensurate with innate capacity, but that a considerable element of the unpredictable must invariable be taken into account.’ …The whole tendency of modern prose is away from concreteness. 110-111

If you use ready-made phrases, you not only don’t have to hunt about for words; you also don’t have to bother with rhythms of your sentences, since these phrases are generally so arranged as to be more or less euphonious. 112

To begin with, it has nothing to do with archaism, with the salvaging of obsolete words and turns of speech, or with the setting-up of a ‘standard English’ which must never be departed from. On the contrary, it is especially concerned with the scrapping of every word or idiom which has outworn its usefulness. It has nothing to do with correct grammar and syntax, which are of no importance so long as one makes one’s meaning clear, or with the avoidance of Americanism, or with having what is called a ‘good prose style’. On the other hand it is not concerned with fake simplicity and the attempt to make written English colloquial. Nor does it even imply in every case preferring the Saxon word to the Latin one, though it does imply using the fewest and shortest words that will cover one’s meaning. 118

i. Never use a metaphor, simile or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print.
ii. Never use a long word where a short one will do.
iii. If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out.
iv. Never use the passive voice where you can use the active.
v. Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent.
vi. Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous. (119)

profligate

profligate

1525–35; < L prōflīgātus broken down in character, degraded, orig. ptp. of prōflīgāre to shatter, debase, equiv. to prō- pro- 1 + -flīgāre, deriv. of flīgere to strike

adj:

1. Broken down in respect of virtue or decency; abandoned, corrupt; openly and shamelessly immoral or vicious, depraved; dissolute
2. recklessly prodigal or extravagant

noun:
1. a dissolute man in fashionable society
2. a recklessly extravagant consumer