11 November, 1911
Alain
The French philosopher known as Alain (born Emile-Auguste Chartier) (1868-1951) lived in Mortagne in Normandy where a statue and small museum are a testimony to his continued standing in French intellectual life. He wrote many brief pieces attacking the establishment of his day clerics, academics, politicians - and Brenda Almond has selected and translated some of these for The Philosopher. The first of these appears here and is taken from his Propos Impertinents* which were written between 1906 and 1914. Anyone who has ploughed through a contemporary academic philosophical work will feel some sympathy with Alain's complaint.
Too Long!
All those parliamentary speeches, all those reports people distribute, all the articles you read, all those works you pay so much for, they're all too long. Where does this dreadful word-mongering come from? Where did our brightest schoolkids learn to say in three pages what could be said in one? I dont know.
Our classical authors don't ramble on. Pascal, Moliere, La Rochefoucauld, La Bruyere, Voltaire, Rousseau, say a lot in a few words. Even our tragic poets make a perfectly natural attempt to compress their thought into a single line; all good poems, all the ones you remember and quote, are remarkable for what you might call their density; they pack a lot of meaning into a small space. Even Hugo, who is sometimes long-winded enough to be boring, is, in his best passages, more succinct than anyone. In short, the model that grips and impresses the student is always something that is tightly presented and rich in meaning. How is it that all, or nearly all, of those who have worked the most along those lines finally come round to developing, extending, expanding, repeating, and drawing things out? For every speech is too long, every article is too long, every book is too long.
Scholarly custom, no doubt. You dont usually train pupils to present a point that has been made in two lines in one line, as one should. On the contrary, you tell them to expand it; because their work has to have a certain length. A teacher who awarded the prize for an essay of four lines would be laughed at. So the original statements are forgotten. They are added to rather than slimmed down; three sentences are generated out of one; words are deployed like an army, to occupy as much ground as possible. It's just the opposite you should be aiming at.
You have to take account, too, of the laziness of the reader, who skims through, and expects to understand the whole thing if he understands one sentence in ten picked up at the gallop. On the other hand, the two failings are complementary; the verbose author creates a lazy reader. Similarly, the one who is succinct wakes the readers attention. When we had a radical opposition, it created a rhetoric of attack which could destroy a government minister in three sentences. But once in power these radicals are more long-winded and heavy-handed. The reason is, perhaps, that you have to be long-winded if you want to trick and numb your opponent; the defence strategy is always to draw things out rather than launching the shortest possible attack. The first of these methods produces results; the other just intimidates. Now all our radical thinkers are preparing themselves for public office; so they have to be weighty and serious to the point of boredom.
Let's not forget either the prejudices of historians,
who want to go back to the year dot; this useless history is a dead weight
on all speeches and all reports. You can't propose raising taxes on cotton
or on salted meat by a couple of centimes without giving the history of
taxes, or indeed of tax in all countries. This pedantry of the diplomat
and the historian has to be killed with ridicule.
*Alain, Propos impertinents (1906-1914), Mille et une nuits, Departement de la Librairie Artheme Fayard, septembre 2002. p. 61.
The Alains: