Engliterarium

Bertrand Russell is one of the greatest masters of English Prose. He revolutionized not only the subject matter but also the mode of expression. He has in him a happy blend of greatest philosopher and a great writer. He was awarded Nobel Prize for literature in 1950. The subject matter of his essays may be very difficult but his manner of expression is so lucid and simple that even a layman can understand him without any special difficulty. It is a rare privilege which only few prose masters enjoy. The precision and clarity which Russell’s prose style possesses are very rare in the bulk of English prose.

Russell has justly been regarded as one of the great prose stylists of the 20th century. Although he is not a literary writer yet his work devoted mainly to problems of philosophy, ethics, morality, political, social life and economics, etc. impresses us greatly by its literary qualities.

Of course, Russell's style sometimes becomes difficult for the average reader who comes across sentences which he has read for more than once in order to get the meaning. Russell’s style appeals mainly to our intellects and very little to our feelings or emotions. He uses words simply as tools, to convey his meaning plain and effective and not to produce any special effects. It is not a coloured or gorgeous style. Nor is there any passion in it. It is somewhat cold.

There are no “jeweled phrases” in his writings nor sentences over which we would like to linger with the aesthetic pleasure. Russell’s style is intellectually brilliant. He can condense an idea or a thought in a few words if he so desires. Russell is always direct, simple and lucid. He knows that the complexity of expression leads to ambiguity. Nothing can be more lucid than such opening lines:

Russell’s sentences clearly show Bacon’s terseness. They are replete with so deep thoughts like those of Bacon that we may elaborate them in countless pages. Many sentences are like proverbs, replete with deep meanings like:

Russell’s quotations from the Bible, Shakespeare, Roman and Greek writers are harmoniously woven into the texture of his thoughts. The Biblical phrases and quotations lend sublimity to his prose and make his style scholarly. Russell manipulates such allusiveness in order to make his ironical onslaughts more effective.

Irony is a principal instrument of his style. He ironizes the so-called modern minded people. Russell makes frequent uses of wit and humour but his humour is generally not pure fun or frolic.

Russell writes chaste prose and there is a rationalistic approach to life. As a deep thinker and a man with scientific mood, he has infused into his style a new depth and a stream-like continuity and clarity.

His chief concern is to convey his ideas to his readers. That is why his prose style exhibits his balanced personality. ‘Style is the man’ applies to him more logically.

Russell makes long sentences to pour out his feelings with a poetic flash. He thinks deeply and expresses the matter in a logical manner. The sentence is definitely long but the main link of the thought is not broken anywhere. All subordinate clause move towards the main clause with the definite aim of making the sense more clear. No part of the syntax is loose.

Russell does not use metaphors and similes frequently. To him, they are the matter of necessity. These are to be used only when there is a dire necessity of using them. Russell makes a great use of the art of rhetoric to emphasize his point. He does not make his rhetoric pompous and exaggerated.

Bertrand Russell always argues his case in a strictly logical manner and his aim always is exactitude or precision. As far as possible, he never leaves the reader in any doubt about what he has to say. He stresses the need of rationality, which he calls scepticism in all sphere of life.

Each essay is logically well knit and self-contained. In each essay the development of the thought is continuous and strictly logical, with a close interconnection between one paragraph and another. It is a style best suited to an advocate. There are no superfluities in his style at all.

To conclude, Russell is one of the great prose writers of the last century, who wrote an almost all kinds of varied subjects with great force and confidence. The unity of his thoughts goes hand in hand with the unity of his style.

Bacon challenged the basic beliefs of man e.g. truth, love, friendship, honesty, secrecy and reshaped them. He challenged the most established norm and ideals of mankind.

He questioned everything; he questioned what was, generally, considered unquestionable. He was an iconoclast. His approach was revolutionary. He begins his essays with a challenging statement i.e. what is truth, what is friendship and what is love.

He was very skeptical. He believed that the test of the truth of everything is in practical observation. He believes that experience is the basis of every judgment. This is called empirical approach. And no doubt he was an empiricist. His way of thinking was inductive. It was based upon facts and upon data. His spirit of inquiry and spirit of skepticism was the outcome of Renaissance. Bacon was very utilitarian. Like a scientist, he did only what was useful.

His training had been as a scholastic but his approach was anti-scholastic. He was bitterly against the scholastic approach. He said that the arguments of scholastics appear to be very intelligent and philosophical but actually these are nothing but only mental luxury. He said that scholastic try to prove the proven, means, who is God, what is sin or reward. In philosophy, this attitude is called begging in question. What is to be proved, it is taken as supposed.

Bacon says the reasoning of schoolmen is in fact very smart and full of life but actually this life is like the life of worms in rotten flesh. They appear to be very active but this is a very deadly activity. They are not agent of life rather they are the agents of death. The arguments of scholastics kill the mind than to develop the mind. Thus Bacon demolished the scholasticism with their own tools.

Bacon gave the theory of “duality of truth”. He proved that ideals are definitely good but ideals are only for ideal and perfect people. Imperfect people can’t follow the ideals and when they can’t follow them they go reverse and tell lies. Bacon said that everyone should try to be as good as possible. One must realize his faculties. An imperfect man must compromise with his imperfection. Instead of cursing himself one should compromise with his imperfection. This is called “expediency”. That truth is only for ideal people and for common man expediency should be the principle.

Bacon said that there are two kinds of truths – heavenly truth and earthly truth. He further said that heavenly truth is contained in Bible and it is for “salvation”. But earthly truth is in the laws of nature and in the means of science and it is necessary for earthly success. And this earthly truth is different from heavenly truth. Both are opposite to each other and can’t function for its opposite and one must be able to differentiate between them. This is called relativity of truth or duality of truth. L. C. Knight wrote that Bacon did not give the theory of the duality of truth but he only stated the facts who actually believe in their conducts.

What Bacon’s essays reveal is that:

1. Man in relation to the world and society.
2. Man in relation to himself
3. Man in relation his Maker.

Lytton Strachey, an English biographer, critic and essayist, is best known for his ironic attitude towards the subject of his biographical studies. Strachey’s targets of irony were evangelicalism, liberalism, humanitarianism, education and imperialism. Strachey proposed to write lives with brevity which excludes everything that is redundant and nothing that is significant. He is best known for “Eminent Victorians”.

Treating his subject ironically he was fascinated by personality and motive. His aim was to paint a portrait; and through this he led to an ironical caricaturing. He taught biographers a sense of form and of background, and he sharpened their critical insight.

Strachey ironically shows us General Gordon including in his secret passion for fame and becoming a willing instrument not of God but of the extreme imperialist faction of the British Government. The messianic religiosity inspiring Gordon was well known by a weary generation just back from the trenches and sickened by the chauvinism of bishops and journalists declaring that God had been in the trenches on their side.

Strachey said:

My notion is to do a series of short lives of eminent persons of that kind. It might be entertaining if properly pulled off. But if will take a very long time.

Some of the eminent persons were to be admired while others like Manning were to be exposed ironically. To Ottoline Morrell he wrote:

I am … beginning a new experiment in the way of a short condensed biography of Cardinal Manning – written from a slightly cynical point of view.

The impact of ‘Eminent Victorians’ on literary circles was tremendous. The world was weary of big guns and big phrases, and Strachey’s witty polemic was especially attractive to the younger generation. In his preface, which was a manifesto for 20th century biographers, Strachey wrote:

Human beings are too important to be treated as mere symptoms of the past. They have a value which is independent of any temporal process.

Yet the four Victorians he chose for treatment were not independent of the moral system of the Victorian Age. His verbal attack against Cardinal Manning is an attack on the evangelicalism that was to be the defining characteristic of 19th century culture, an exposure of its hypocrisy and the emptiness of self-regarding ambitions.

Strachey toppled Florence Nightingale from the pedestal where she was placed as the legendary lady with the lamp, having saintly and self-sacrificing qualities. He replaced her with a twentieth century neurotic. Thus Strachey struck ironically at the popular mythology of Victorian England, in particular its conscience-saving humanitarianism.

His irony towards the Dr. Arnold probably arose from his own unhappy schooldays. He depicted Arnold as the most influential teacher of the Victorian public school system whose cult distorted middle-class intelligence and set hard the principle of Victorianism into the 20th century.

Strachey has ironically presented his sinister picture of Manning’s formal interview with the Pope. He ironically mentioned Manning as an ‘eagle’ and Newman as a ‘dove’.

There are times, however, when Strachey’s sharp sense of the ridiculous does find its way into his irony. It is a definite undercurrent in this treatment of the Chinese diplomatist Li Hung Chang:

It was Gordon who gave him his first vision of Europe. Nothing could be more ironical. The half-inspired, half-crazy Englishmen, … the irresponsible knight-errant whom his countrymen first laughed at and neglected, then killed and canonized – a figure staying through the perplexed industrialism of the nineteenth century like some lost “natural” from an earlier Age.

Thus irony with its marked possibilities for variation, served Strachey admirable not only for comic purpose of suggesting change and dissimilarity which could be significantly and effectively relate to a background of uniformity in style.

Strachey’s great weapon was irony and ‘Eminent Victorians’ set the tone for subsequent biographers. It made ‘debunking’ fashionable. Few of Strachey’s imitators possessed his gift of sharp irony or his picturesque humour. They inherited from him nothing but his shallow scepticism. Strachey was in high favour with the wound because they relished the breaking of ‘Eminent Victorians’ praised till then like idols.

P. M. Jack wrote in praise of Strachey that he had a faculty for sharpening the readers’ critical sense and often proved to be right.

We doubt if another miscellany of this sort could possess half the wit and distinction of a biographical style that we find here.

In 1937 Edgar Johnson praised Strachey’s ironical sense of values and the largeness of his opinion:

In Strachey the old Elizabethan lion refines down to a cat. The lion singles out the enemy to be destroyed; it is the cat, however, that plays slyly and patiently with the victim.

Andre Maurois had already spoken of him not only as an iconoclast using the method of irony but also as a highly gifted writer in the tradition of the great humorist and as “a very deep psychologist”.

In fact, Lytton Strachey is best known for his ironic attitude towards the subjects of his biographical studies. His point of view was highly personal and some of his judgments have been described as exaggerated. But his sense of form and his witty, ironic style inspired a host of imitators who were eager to reduce historical figures to life size. He established the ironical writing of biography as a literary art.

The biographer Lytton Strachey belonged to the Bloomsbury Group. He inaugurated the new era of biographical writing at the close of World War I. In his preface, Strachey enunciated the two fold principle of selection and scrutiny which was to mark all his work.

Strachey proposed a briefness which excludes everything that is superfluous and nothing that is significant. The completion of this mission made Strachey the greatness of modern biographers.

Strachey has certainly revolutionized the art of writing a biography. Before him, the biographer used to neglect like a hagiographer the darker side of their heroes because they generally used to idealize their heroes by representing them as angels of virtue. Strachey was the first to realize that in order to give a complete and human portrait.

Strachey did not hesitate to include in his biographies the failings, jokes and whims of his heroes. He believed that a biographer must have a psychological insight into his character.

A biographer must neither suppress vital facts nor obscure those aspects of his character which help us visualize his true picture as he lived. Instead of giving abstractness, Strachey indeed gave a creature of flesh and blood.

Strachey has suggested that the biographies must be primarily a form of literary art capable of giving the pleasure. In biography, it is not so much the subject as the treatment of the subject that really matters.

Strachey suggested that the biographies of eminent men should not be immediately written after their death because their relatives and friends are naturally reluctant to disclose the relevant confidential details. Thus he was of the opinion that:

Strachey had a gift of irony which has hardly been equaled in literature by anyone since the eighteenth century masters.

Strachey has made biography a literary medium. His biographical style has the appeal of a fine work of art.

Strachey has brought us face to face with men and women, who are nonetheless fallible human beings and not infallible saints or gods. We watch them live, think, and quarrel like us. Sometimes they behave meanly and foolishly and sometimes nobly and wisely.

Strachey’s objectives were to make biography an unmistakable channel for the truthful transmission of personality; to write it as the most authentic footnote to history; to make it a vivid and complete story; to make it a source of inner satisfaction to the reader. In most of his experiments in biography Strachey certainly succeeded in attaining them. Strachey’s achievement in biography was indeed a challenge to dullness and incompetence.

Charles Richard Sander says:

His intensely personal sketches shocked many critics but delighted many readers. M. Forster says:

Instead of using the conventional method of detailed chronological narration, Lytton Strachey carefully selected his tact to present “Eminent Victorians”.

These deliberations suffice to signify that Strachey is the greatest biographer of the Victorian age.

An epic is the tragedy of a conspicuous man, who is involved in adventures events and meets a tragic fall on account of some error of judgment i.e. Hamartia which throws him from prosperity into adversity; his death is not essential.

Humour is one of the essential prerequisite of a mock-epic and this tale is full of humour. Most of the comedy is introduced through the incongruity and disproportion between grand style and trivial subject. The trivial events have been enlarged to look lofty and grand. For example, the fox has been called “The False Murderer” and the false dissembler and has been compared to various notorious rascals of the past – Judas, Iscariot, Simon, Gauclon, etc. Likewise, the ordinary event of the taking away of the cock has been equated with well-known, historical events of the past e.g. the capture of Troy, the murder of King Priam etc. The outcry and lamentation raised by Pertelote at the event is louder than the hue and cry raised by Hasdrubal’s wife at his painful death. The sorrowful cries of the hens have been identified with the woeful lamentation, uttered by the senators’ wives when their husbands were burnt alive by Nero. On the taking away of the cock whole village – human beings as well animals – madly run after the fox and there is a stale of chaos as if it is the day of judgment whereas the carrying away of the cock by the fox is not a grave event. The awful noise produced at that time has been compared with the uproar created by the members of the Peasant’s Revolt. The chase of the fox is described in an inflated tone.

Dreams are the backbone of “Nun’s Priest’s Tale”. The story begins with a dream and ends up in a dream. Dreams were also present in the source fable but there the focus of attention was the fate of Chanticleer, whereas the dream had a secondary role to play. While, in “Nun’s Priest’s Tale” the dreams make the basis of the story and the fate of Chanticleer is not much important. Here, the dream is the main source through which a lot of humour flows. So, by making artistic use of dreams, Chaucer makes it the part and parcel.

Humour is an essential ingredient of Chaucer's poetry and the back-bone of “The Prologue and The Canterbury Tales”. All the characters in The Prologue have been humorously described. Humour, infact, makes Chaucer’s characterization distinct. A humorist is one who is quick to perceive the funny side of the things and who has the capacity to laugh and makes other laugh at what is absurd or ridiculous or incongruous.

My wit is short, ye may well understonde

And full pleasant and amiable of port;
And peyned hire to counterfete cheere
Of court, and been es’attich of manere,

Homer and Virgil were the two great masters of the Classical epic. Homer’s Iliad and Virgil’s Aeneid have invariably served as models for all writers of the classical epic. Milton was a great classical scholar and he sought to write an epic. He dreamt of immortality and he aspired to be one with Homer and Virgil as the author of a classical epic. Milton turned his great classical and Biblical learning to a poem to “assert eternal providence, and justify the ways of God to men”.

And chiefly thou, O Spirit, that dost prefer
Before all temples the upright heart and pure,
Instruct me, for thou know’st:

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -: what in me is dark
Illumine, what is low raise and support,

- - - - - - - - - - - What though the fields be lost?
All is not lost

The mind is its own place, and in itself
Can make a Heaven of Hell, a Hell of Heav’n

Better to reign in Hell, than serve in Heaven.