Style- the Art of Writing Well

by F L Lucas

  Hilaire Belloc: ‘The Normans’ from Hills and the Sea (Methuen & Co. Ltd.); G. K. Chesterton: ‘The Battle of the Marne’ from The Crimes of England (Miss D. E. Collins); S. T. Coleridge: Unpublished Letters (Constable & Co. Ltd.); Thomas Hardy: The Woodlanders (Macmillan & Co. Ltd. and the Trustees of the Hardy estate); Geoffrey Keynes and Brian Hill (Ed.): Samuel Butler’s Notebooks (Jonathan Cape Ltd.); D. H. Lawrence: ‘Galsworthy’ from Scrutinies (Lawrence & Wishart Ltd.); George Saintsbury: History of English Prose Rhythm (Macmillan & Co. Ltd.); Lytton Strachey: Queen Victoria (Chatto & Windus Ltd.); A. C. Swinburne: Miscellanies (William Heinemann Ltd.); J. M. Synge: The Playboy of the Western World (George Allen & Unwin Ltd.); Virginia Woolf: The Waves (Mr. Leonard Woolf and The Hogarth Press Ltd.).

  I am also indebted to J. M. Dent & Sons Ltd. for leave to reprint here some translations from my Greek Poetry for Everyman.

  CHAPTER 1: The Value of Style

  ‘IN THIS DAY’s silly Sunday Times,’ says Samuel Butler, [1 ] ‘there is an article on Mrs. Browning’s letters which begins with some remarks about style. “It is recorded,” says the writer, “of Plato, that in a rough draft of one of his Dialogues, found after his death, the first paragraph was written in seventy different forms. [2] Wordsworth spared no pains to sharpen and polish to the utmost the gifts with which nature had endowed him; and Cardinal Newman, one of the greatest masters of English style, has related in an amusing essay the pains he took to acquire his style.” [3]

  ‘I never knew a writer yet who took the smallest pains with his style and was at the same time readable. Plato’s having had seventy shies at one sentence is quite enough to explain to me why I hate him.’

  Few of us are as bold and blunt as Butler (who took an impish delight in pulling the legs or noses of the conventional); and yet when I read examination answers, or Ph.D. dissertations, or some things that are published in books and periodicals even by professional critics of literature, I sometimes wonder if a good many of us, although we give years of our lives to English, do not practise what Butler preached, a good deal more thoroughly than Butler himself. For, in practice, Butler took pains to write well, vividly, amusingly; and even in theory, as we shall see, [4] Butler proceeded to eat a good deal of what he had said in disparagement of style. For he was really rebelling, not against style, but against what he considered preciousness in style. And in art it seems to me true enough that the ‘precious’ is worthless.

  In fact, Butler’s quarrel, like so many quarrels, remains largely verbal. He is here using ‘style’ to mean a deliberately cultivated, individual, peculiar style of one’s own – something that he associated with pretentious aesthetes. In this sense, Hazlitt too denied having a style. [5] And, again, Southey wrote, ‘Of what is called style, not a thought enters my head at any time’ – his only endeavour was, he said, ‘to write plain English, and to put my thoughts in language which every one can understand’. Yet this has not prevented critics from praising both Hazlitt and Southey for their ‘style’. And rightly. Why should we thus narrow a useful word to mean merely a special manner of writing that approaches mannerism – as in Lamb or De Quincey, Pater or Doughty? It robs us of a general term we need.

  Often, indeed, I suspect that those who decry ‘style’ are impelled by that humble-seeming pride which is too proud to make pretensions, and therefore belittles what it disdains to pretend to. Sometimes, too, men have been influenced by an odd belief in the virtue of generality and impersonality. ‘A marked manner,’ says Horace Walpole, denouncing the style of the hated Johnson, ‘when it runs through all the compositions of any master, is a defect in itself, and indicates a deviation from nature. … It is true that the greatest masters of composition are so far imperfect, as that they always leave some marks by which we may discover their hand. He approaches the nearest to universality whose works make it difficult for our quickness and sagacity to observe certain characteristic touches which ascertain the specific author.’ [6 ]

  Fortunately no one practised this less than Walpole himself, in his letters. But we are not at the moment concerned whether this bleak Act of Uniformity is wise or not (though it seems to me no wiser than its opposite extreme, the rage at all costs for originality). The point is that those who dislike any personal mannerism would do better to call it that; and not to confuse matters by calling it, without qualification, ‘style’.

  What, in fact, is ‘style’? A dead metaphor. It meant originally ‘a writing-implement’ [7] – a pointed object, of bone or metal, for inscribing wax. But already in Classical Latin the word stĭlus was extended to mean, first, a man’s ‘way of writing’; then, more generally, his ‘way of expressing himself’, in speech as well as in writing. In modern English, ‘style’ has acquired further senses. As in French, it has been narrowed to signify ‘a good way of expressing oneself’ – ‘his writing lacked style’; and it has been extended to other arts than literature, even to the art of living – ‘her behaviour showed always a certain style’. [8] But the two main meanings which concern us here, are (1) ‘a way of writing’; (2) ‘a good way of writing’.

  Our subject, then, is simply the effective use of language, especially in prose, whether to make statements or to rouse emotions. It involves, first of all, the power to put facts with clarity and brevity; but facts are usually none the worse for being put also with as much grace and interest as the subject permits. For grace or interest, indeed, if the subject is purely practical, like conics or conchology, there may not be much room; though even cookery books have been salted with occasional irony; and even mathematicians have indulged in jests, as of going to Heaven in a perpendicular straight line. [9] But, further, men need also to express and convey their emotions (even animals do); and to kindle emotions in others. Without emotion, no art of literature; nor any other art.

  You may of course answer, like Butler: ‘But this is all affectation – fiddling with phrases and trifling with cadences! Give me simple English and common sense.’ And yet, just as ‘common sense’ is far from common, simple English can prove in practice far from simple to attain. Further, this difficulty has more serious consequences, both public and private, than is sometimes realized. Our verbal communications remain often badly ambiguous; and, in another sense than the Apostle intended, ‘evil communications corrupt good manners’.

  For two thousand years Christendom has been rent with controversy because men could not agree about the meaning of passages in Holy Writ; both Old and New Testaments have been more disputed than any human will. The gardens and porticoes of philosophy are hung with philosophers entangled in their own verbal cobwebs. Statesmen meet at Yalta or Potsdam to make agreements, about the meaning of which they then proceed to disagree. Employers and workers reach settlements that lead only to fresh unsettlement, because they misunderstand the understandings they themselves have made. Sharp legal minds spend their lives drafting documents in a verbose jargon of their own which shall be knave-proof and fool-proof; but it is seldom that other legal minds as sharp cannot find in those documents, if they try, some fruitful points for litigation. Even in war, where clarity may be a matter of life or death for thousands, disasters occur through orders misunderstood. Some adore ambiguities in poetry; in prose they can be a constant curse.

  For example it seems that, within a few hours in the Crimea, first of all Lord Cardigan’s misinterpreting of Lord Lucan’s orders wasted the victory of the Heavy Brigade, and then Lord Lucan’s misinterpreting of Lord Raglan’s orders [10] caused the suicide of the Light Brigade. It is said that Sir Roger Casement was hanged on a comma in a statute of Edward III. And Professor Ifor Evans has adduced the strange case of Caleb Diplock who bequeathed half a million for ‘charitable or benevolent objects’. Clear enough, one would have thought – though needlessly verbose. But the law regularly sacrifices brevity to make sure of clarity – and too often loses both. In this case legal lynxes discerned that ‘benevolent�
�� objects are not necessarily ‘charitable’. The suit was carried from the Court of First Instance to the Court of Appeal, from the Court of Appeal to the Lords; judges uttered seventy thousand words of collective wisdom; and poor Mr. Diplock’s will was pronounced invalid. Much virtue in an ‘or’. Well did the Chinese say that when a piece of paper blows into a law-court, it may take a yoke of oxen to drag it out again.

  But men not only underestimate the difficulty of language; they often underestimate also its appalling power. True, the literary (for very human reasons) are sometimes tempted, on the contrary, to exaggerate it. We may well smile at writers who too confidently claim that the pen is mightier than the sword. Fletcher of Saltoun’s exaltation of the songs of a people as more important than its laws, Shelley’s glorification of poets as the unacknowledged legislators of mankind, Tennyson’s poet whose word shakes the world, O’Shaughnessy’s three men who trample down empires with the lilt of a new song – these, I feel, are somewhat too complacent half-truths. With all his powers of speech, Demosthenes could not save Greece; nor Cicero the Roman Republic; nor Milton the English Commonwealth. Yet it does seem rational to say that Voltaire and Burke became, in a sense, European powers; that Rousseau’s Contrat Social left a permanent mark on the history of Europe, and Paine’s Common Sense on that of America. This, if we brush away the blur of familiarity, remains astonishing enough. And these men, I think, won their triumphs not more (if so much) by force of thought than by force of style. Nor let us forget the influence of the English Bible.

  How different, too, might have been the history of our own time if the written and spoken style of Adolf Hitler, detestable in itself, had been less potent to intoxicate the German people; or if the German people had had enough sense of style to reject that repellent claptrap; or again if Winston Churchill had not possessed a gift of phrase to voice and fortify the feelings of his countrymen in their darkest and their finest hour! Even the curious mind of Communism does not reject style as a bauble of the bourgeoisie. ‘It is the business’, we have been told, ‘of the linguist and the critic to study the style of Stalin.’ ‘Learn to write as Stalin writes.’ In such fulsome hyperboles there is at least a sense of the importance of style; if little sense of any other kind.

  Some years ago, indeed, a distinguished scientist, enraged by the airs of the literary, protested impatiently that in this, ‘the hydro-electric age’, men’s worship of mere verbiage was out of date – for ‘the spark-gap is mightier than the pen’. Seemingly it escaped him that the rhetoric of the Führer had already reduced the scientists of the Third Reich into docile slaves, who demonstrated at his bidding the virtues of a non-existent Aryan race, or forged the weapons that were to force his infernal gospel on the world. Similarly in the Soviet Union we have seen biologists compelled to bow to ‘Marxism’ and to find once more, like Galileo, orthodoxy mightier than science.

  And, again, Señor de Madariaga has quoted a pleasant item on Darwin from a catechism current in Franco’s Spain: ‘This so-called scientist was born in Shrewsburg [sic], England. Endowed by God with a considerable gift of observation, but with very little intelligence. … ’

  Our grandfathers hopefully chanted ‘Great is the truth, and shall prevail’; they knew little of propaganda. Mankind has not yet mastered language; often it has mastered them – scientists and all. Few of them realize this. And that only makes it worse.

  True, it is not always by excellence of style that books exert this appalling power. It was not by beauty of language that the writings of Marx became a new gospel. Flaubert himself, that saint and martyr of style, felt driven to confess that the greatest writers were pre-occupied with greater things than perfect words. ‘Ce qui distingue les grands génies, c’est la généralisation et la création. … Est-ce qu’on ne croit pas à l’existence de Don Quichotte comme à celle de César? Shakespeare est quelque chose de formidable sous ce rapport. Ce n’était pas un homme, mais un continent; il y avait des grands hommes en lui, des foules entières, des paysages. Ils n’ont pas besoin de faire du style, ceux-là; ils sont forts en dépit de toutes les fautes et à cause d’elles. Mais nous, les petits, nous ne valons que par l’exécution achevée. Hugo, en ce siècle, enfoncera tout le monde, quoiqu’il soit plein de mauvaises choses; mais quel souffle! quel souffle! Je hasarde ici une proposition que je n’oserais dire nulle part: c’est que les très grands hommes écrivent souvent fort mal, et tant mieux pour eux. Ce n’est pas là qu’il faut chercher l’art de la forme, mais chez les seconds (Horace, la Bruyère).’ [11 ]

  There seems to me much truth in this; but not quite enough. Granted that Scott, or Dickens, or Balzac may often write carelessly, even badly, surely at their greatest moments they owe much of their greatness to their style. [12] Granted that Hugo is often dull, and sometimes grotesque, his triumphs seem to me to depend less on his characters, or his ideas, than on his language, music, and imagery. [13 ] Shakespeare himself has been accused of feeble plots, shallow characterization, superficial ideas – not always with injustice; but even those who brought such charges have admitted the mysterious magic of his ‘verbal abracadabra’. And when Flaubert denied style to the greatest, did he remember Homer?

  In reality, I think, he is only repeating the simple point of ‘Longinus’ two thousand years before – that faulty greatness in a writer stands above narrower perfections; Pindar, for example, above Bacchylides. Most of us would agree. But then how amazing it remains that this perfection of style can still do so much to immortalize writers of the second magnitude, like Horace and Virgil, Pope and Racine, and Flaubert himself!

  In short, I do not know which is more striking – the clumsy inadequacy of words, or their world-shaking power. So long as men remain emotional creatures, they will continue to be taken, like rabbits, by the ears.

  But you may still be feeling, with some impatience, ‘What is all this to us? We are not proposing to be great statesmen, nor great writers. It is unlikely that most of us will compose so much as a pamphlet, or sway the passions even of a parish council.’ True. Yet we all talk – often more dully than we need. We all write letters – though it seems likely that, in this age of turmoil and telephones, the art of writing them has declined; which is a great pity. We all have personal relations, which at times depend vitally on a sense of what to say, how to say it, and what to leave unsaid. And even the most utilitarian will find that there are few careers where it does not sometimes become important to be able to put a case with persuasiveness, or facts with precision. For instance, I have wartime memories of congested signals-communications, where messages had to be clear if they were not to be disastrous, yet brief if they were to get sent at all. That was an unlooked-for, but unforgettable lesson. And finally, since a good deal of literature owes its power largely to its style, without a sense of style how can it be fully enjoyed?

  When Phoenix was chosen by Peleus as tutor for his young son Achilles, he was to teach the boy two things:

  Therefore he set me by thee, to guide thee and to teach,

  To make thee a doer of deeds, and a master too of speech. [14]

  That ideal is not yet out of date.

  What, after all, are the objects of education? Knowledge? That is only one, and not the greatest. Look forward ten years. Most of the facts and dates so laboriously accumulated will have slipped away. Sooner or later, most of us find that our memories are sieves.

  The Danaïds in Hell filled sieves for eternity; we do the same through our lives on earth. Even through Cambridge Lethe flows, as well as Cam.

  There are, if I may cite my own experience, minor plays by Webster, or partly by Webster, that I have read and re-read two dozen times, written about, annotated, corrected and recorrected in proof – and yet today I have forgotten even their plots. I had in the First War to memorize the organization of the German Army – yet today that knowledge has vanished from my brain almost as completely as that German Army faded from the earth. Such acquisitions may surviv
e in the Unconscious; no doubt they could quickly be revived; but meanwhile they are gone. And perhaps better so. A too good memory can become like a crowded lumber-room, where it grows hard to move and think; there are better things to do than to ride through life like the White Knight, clattering with saucepans and mousetraps. In any case most of us know accurately only what we constantly relearn; memory is a dipsomaniac, needing to be perpetually refreshed.

  For this reason, if I may say so, many educators astonish me. It is not only that they often do not seem to know what is worth knowing. They constantly forget how much we forget. But a skill once acquired – for example, the power to speak and write and enjoy one’s own language, or another – is less easily lost, more quickly recovered, than mere accumulations of facts. And it seems to me more important to go out in life able to think straight and communicate clearly than even to know – and remember – the contents of every English book since Cædmon. Then, like Medea, even if you lose everything else, you can still feel ‘Myself remains’. Whereas stuffed geese, even if stuffed with the Universe, remain geese.

  One might have thought, then, that a prime object of education in English would be to learn to write it. If you read Q’s Art of Writing, you will see how passionately he hoped that would happen here. And I remember how he would grunt with wistful irritation over some of the abstruser critics then in fashion: ‘But the fellows can’t write!’ He could. And partly for that reason I suspect that some of those who thought him ‘out of date’ will be far sooner out-of-date themselves.

  Since then, English has taken a wider place in our schools and Universities. But quantity is not quality. And one may sometimes wonder whether this vast increase is really serving either English literature or the English character.