Philip Toynbee
THE NOVELS OF HENRY GREEN
A Golden Age in literature might be defined as a period
in which there was no
necessary
struggle betwten a writer and his
medium. In the first half of the seventeenth century English writers
could say what they wanted to say in a language which was naturally
both apt and beautiful.
It
is equally true that English politicians
spoke with a natural eloquence which should be distressing to their
modern counterparts. Whatever may be said about the English lan–
guage in our own time, it is bitterly clear that it no longer offers
itself as a willing bride but cowers coyly and unalluringly behind
an armory of chastity belts. Jean Paulhan discovers the same in–
tractability in modern French, and he has invented a useful term
to describe one method of approaching the recalcitrant and unap–
petizing victim of our passion. The Terrorists are those writers who
confront their language as a wrestler confronts his adversary, know–
ing that they must twist it and turn it, squeeze it into strange shapes
and make it cry aloud, before they can finally bring it to the boards.
An opposite view is provided by the few surviving dandies among
us, and was perhaps most eloquently expressed by Mr. Logan Pearsall–
Smith. To them the present English vocabulary is like a box of de–
licious sweetmeats, which may be culled one by one in delicate fingers
and exquisitely melted on the tongue. Yet another, and perhaps the
predominant view among modern novelists, is that the language of
contemporary speech must be directly transcribed into literature,
since any deliberate avoidance or transmutation of it will lead inev–
itably to something either dead or at best unnatural. Finally there
remain among us a tiny band of archaists who are so shocked by
the present condition of their language that they prefer to ransack the
past for words and word formations which seem to them more vivid
and more accurate.
