The plain style or the ornate?

Is it best to write simply?

The next Shakespeare bookclub is now **19th May**—it was pointed out that 12th is Mothers’ Day in the USA… sorry! You can find all the other Shakespeare posts here.

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Some of you will have seen the controversy on Twitter about writing simply. Paul Graham (whose own writing I analysed recently) said that, for most people, using the simplest possible words to express what they mean is the best way to write. Obviously he received a good deal of bad feedback from other users. Let’s put all that to one side and think about how this idea fits in to English prose more broadly.

Graham was advocating for what’s called the plain style. This is contrasted to the ornate style. They are pretty much what they say. The plain style is direct, simple, unadorned. The ornate style is… ornate. Some people will tell you that the history of English prose is one of moving from ornate to simple. This is too simple. Izaac Walton wrote in the plain style in the seventeenth century and Samuel Johnson wrote in the ornate style in the eighteenth. Some people point out that nineteenth century prose was convoluted and that Hemingway was not. They surely must be averting their gaze from James Joyce whose ornate prose stands like a huge cage of rococo cockatoos next to Hemingway’s spare elegance.

One mistake is to confuse syntax with style. Just because a writer uses long, complex sentence, with left-branching sub-clauses, parenthetical clauses, and so on, doesn’t make them ornate. Of course, it can make them ornate, but long sentences alone is not the issue. To make this clear, I’m going to offer you some examples of the two styles.

First, look at Walton, doing very fine work here.

In another walk to Salisbury, he saw a poor man with a poorer horse, that was fallen under his load: they were both in distress, and needed present help; which Mr. Herbert perceiving, put off his canonical coat, and helped the poor man to unload, and after to load, his horse. The poor man blessed him for it, and he blessed the poor man; and was so like the Good Samaritan, that he gave him money to refresh both himself and his horse; and told him, “That if he loved himself he should be merciful to his beast.” Thus he left the poor man; and at his coming to his musical friends at Salisbury, they began to wonder that Mr. George Herbert, which used to be so trim and clean, came into that company so soiled and discomposed: but he told them the occasion. And when one of the company told him, “He had disparaged himself by so dirty an employment,” his answer was, “That the thought of what he had done would prove music to him at midnight; and that the omission of it would have upbraided and made discord in his conscience...”

Modern writers would use more full stops, fewer semi-colons. But otherwise this is as simple as simple can be. It has no rhetoric, no metaphor, makes no claims beyond what it describes: it is direct. Can you believe that Walton extract was published in 1670?

Now, let’s go forward eighty years and see Samuel Johnson as ornate as ornate can be.

Favour is not always gained by good actions or laudable qualities. Caresses and preferments are often bestowed on the auxiliaries of vice, the procurers of pleasure, or the flatterers of vanity. Dryden has never been charged with any personal agency unworthy of a good character: he abetted vice and vanity only with his pen. One of his enemies has accused him of lewdness in his conversation; but if accusation without proof be credited, who shall be innocent?

Johnson is much more rhetorical than Walton. Part of his grandness comes from his syntax, his parallelism; but a lot of it comes from the enormity of his vocabulary and the convolutions of his phrasing. (See how I dropped into the ornate style there, in imitation of the great man?) This is from his Life of Dryden, which was published in 1779, more than a century after Walton.

There is no simple story to be told about English prose here. Remember that in the generation before Johnson, Swift’s advice had been that proper words in proper places make the true definition of a style. Indeed, Johnson himself wrote in both styles, as I wrote about in my Lichfield travel notes. Here is he being rude about the island of Col.

For natural curiosities, I was shown only two great masses of stone, which lie loose upon the ground; one on the top of a hill, and the other at a small distance from the bottom.  They certainly were never put into their present places by human strength or skill; and though an earthquake might have broken off the lower stone, and rolled it into the valley, no account can be given of the other, which lies on the hill, unless, which I forgot to examine, there be still near it some higher rock, from which it might be torn. 

Johnson often becomes more ornate, and thus more subtle, when he moralises, as here: “To be ignorant is painful; but it is dangerous to quiet our uneasiness by the delusive opiate of hasty persuasion.” Here’s what I said in that Lichfield piece (rhetorical is another word for the ornate style):

The rhetorical style has another function. It doesn’t just describe in condensed form the psychology behind the moral—the “delusive opiate” being what we would call the “dopamine hit”—it provides a slowness, a burden, so that you must actually think about the different meanings provided. The plain style says one thing but the ornate style says many things. That’s not quite true; as I said above and as Kenner discusses, the plain style can be ambiguous too: but it’s true that moral lessons in the plain style often lack context and offer no insight into how the morals interact with psychology and other considerations. You must infer that a dopamine hit is delusive; Johnson is able to tell you this. And so the ornate style becomes, obliquely, more direct. There is no quick path to the truth.

In fiction, the plain style is often held up as the best. Here’s Hemingway from A Farewell to Arms,

It stormed all that day. The wind drove down the rain and everywhere there was standing water and mud. The plaster of broken houses was gray and wet. Late in the afternoon the rain stopped and from our number two post I saw the bare wet autumn country with clouds over the tops of the hills and the straw screening over the roads wet and dripping.

There is some clever writing here—verbing the word storm, describing the dripping screen of the straw from his post—but it is almost as plain as it can be. Plain doesn’t mean unliterary. The straw screen is a careful control of perspective: it echoes the Tempest when Ariel says,

The good old lord Gonzalo;
His tears run down his beard, like winter’s drops
From eaves of reeds.

We think of pathetic fallacy as obvious and crude, but Hemingway uses it here with subtlety. Joyce, often ornate, can be plain, as in Dubliners,

A few light taps upon the pane made him turn to the window. It had begun to snow again. He watched sleepily the flakes, silver and dark, falling obliquely against the lamplight. The time had come for him to set out on his journey westward. Yes, the newspapers were right: snow was general all over Ireland.

But Joyce was also a master of the ornate style too. (Warning, this extract is not family friendly.)

Watering cart. To provoke the rain. On earth as it is in heaven.

A cloud began to cover the sun slowly, wholly. Grey. Far.

No, not like that. A barren land, bare waste. Vulcanic lake, the dead sea: no fish, weedless, sunk deep in the earth. No wind could lift those waves, grey metal, poisonous foggy waters. Brimstone they called it raining down: the cities of the plain: Sodom, Gomorrah, Edom. All dead names. A dead sea in a dead land, grey and old. Old now. It bore the oldest, the first race. A bent hag crossed from Cassidy’s, clutching a naggin bottle by the neck. The oldest people. Wandered far away over all the earth, captivity to captivity, multiplying, dying, being born everywhere. It lay there now. Now it could bear no more. Dead: an old woman’s: the grey sunken cunt of the world.

Desolation.

Many great writers can do both (see: T.S. Eliot) and choose when to use the style that fits the subject. Paul Graham is right that for most people, most of the time, who write on the internet, the simplest words in the plainest style will be the best choice. But it is wrong to think that this is the best or the right way to use English. Online writing is, if anything, too plain, too denuded, too obvious. As David Bentley Hart said,

Simplicity is difficult, after all, no less than complexity. Both require taste and skill. Neither is less artificial or more natural than the other. Both are necessary for good writing. And when either becomes a forced regimen, exclusive of the other, the results can be only hideous. Good writing is produced not by forsaking the beautiful for the sublime or the exorbitant for the restrained, but by finding new ways of orchestrating the interplay between them.

Graham is probably right about writing on the internet for popular audiences. (He said his ideas weren’t applicable to fiction.) More people would be able to appreciate that if they knew more about the uses to which the plain and ornate styles can be put.