Style- the Art of Writing Well

by F L Lucas

  One disastrous mistake, I cannot help thinking, is the fantastic stress now laid on reading and writing ‘criticism’. The critics are often blind guides – and in any case there are many more valuable activities, for which the longest life is all too brief. And criticism is not a science whose elements can be mass-taught to adolescents – it is a difficult art, at which even adults are seldom a notable success. With the young the result is often that they either just regurgitate the judgements they have been taught, or else, if they have a natural and healthy rebelliousness, the opposite of what they have been taught. Thence it is possible to arrive by easy stages at the happy notion, not uncommon among ‘intellectuals’, that taste consists of distaste, and that the loftiest of pleasures is that of feeling displeased; and thus to end by enjoying almost nothing in literature except one’s own opinions, while oneself incapable of writing a living sentence.

  So by false learning is good sense defac’d:

  Some are bewilder’d in the maze of schools,

  And some made coxcombs Nature meant but fools.

  Constantly and incorrigibly we forget how much harder it is to create, even with mediocre results, than to criticize. We can all criticize Napoleon’s folly in lingering so late into the autumn at Moscow; but how many of us would ever have got there? I conclude, not that we should fear to criticize frankly, but that it might often be done with rather more modesty by those who have created nothing themselves.

  At the University, English seems to me a good subject for a gifted few – perhaps as many as take Moral Science. Instead, it becomes thought a soft subject and attracts six times as many. The numbers could at least be reduced by demanding a sound knowledge of one ancient and one modern language besides one’s own. But, above all, what matters at school, at the University, and in after-life is not new interpretations of Shakespeare – they are usually false; not new theories of criticism – they are usually futile; but a knowledge of the best that has been said or written, and the power – I admit the limited extent to which this can be taught – to speak and write.

  If all this seems needless anxiety, listen to some results of that new specialization in English even at school, which I regard with particular misgiving. Thus writes a recent scholarship candidate.

  To be a poet, a man must have a particular frame of receptivity in his contact with the outer world. His medium may be prose, poetry, blank verse, or doggerel. If the essence is there, the formal ectoplasm slips off unnoticed.

  (Of inspiration.) The spark which achieves it cannot be superseded by a rule, but something must be its vehicle. In many cases the vehicle must be that of a prose-form. We now feel satisfied that temperament cannot be such a tortuously circuitous state of health as to pursue this figure eight, and are justified in concluding that external factors are the vital cog-wheels in determining the writer’s ‘niche’.

  (‘I could have gnawed it better with my teeth,’ cried William Morris once, in superb rage at some sculptural deformity; but ‘niches’ carved with ‘vital cog-wheels’!)

  Or, finally, of the close of The Tempest:

  This is made possible by the veneer of contented bewilderment and the soaring moral ceiling of the whole play, the treasure-house of fulfillment [sic].

  You see why one may have doubts about too much ‘English Literature’ in schools? Had this luckless youth, with his ‘veneer of contented bewilderment’, done Greek, his mind might have had something to bite on and acquired something of Greek grace and Greek self-control; had he done Modern Languages, he might at least have gained something useful; had he done Mathematics, he might have been forced to think; had he done History or Science, he might have realized something of the relentless need for evidence, and the implacability of facts. But he has learnt only to express worthless thought in worthless language. I often remember the smiling remark made to me by a veteran and famous Professor of English Literature: ‘Well, I’m thankful I didn’t do it myself at the University. I did Classics.’

  Take a more serious type of mind; give it six further years of English study; and it may produce a Ph.D. thesis written in this fashion:

  It is clear that the later poem was designed for delivery to audiences of mixed character and education, and it is addressed specially to the unlearned, for the better occupation of their minds in the place of secular entertainment, and therefore employing the same conventions and presented in the same manner and context: framed verbally and structurally to be recited aloud and attractively to chance as well as prepared gatherings of people of varying interests, by anyone able or accustomed to it, whether familiar (as a local curate, domestic clerk, or other member of a secular or religious community), or a stranger (casual visitor, mendicant, or other migrant by profession), usually by reason of motive and capacity one of the clergy.

  Such a research-student may turn his life into a concentration camp; he may amass in his own field an erudition to stagger Dr. Casaubon; but he cannot write. And where the words are so muddled, I suspect that the mind is muddled too.

  The two main objects, then, of education in English, I take to be, first, to get English well written; secondly, to get English writers appreciated and enjoyed. Now persons who write so ill have clearly failed in the first of these objects; but I am also doubtful if they can have much success in the second. It is, of course, true that to appreciate poetry, or painting, or music, one need not be able to write poetry, or to paint, or to play. When Whistler, in his law-suit against Ruskin, argued to the Attorney-General that a man who had not passed his life in the practice of painting could no more judge its technique than the ordinary citizen could instruct the Attorney-General on points of law, Whistler was indulging in sophistry. Clearly men may be connoisseurs of wine without being wine-growers; they may be gourmets without knowing how to boil an egg.

  Literary criticism is, however, not quite analogous. The critic of painting does not paint his criticism; but the critic of literature must also write himself. And if he shows no sense of handling words, it is as if an artist who could only draw and daub vilely should set up to pass judgement on others. He might be right; but his judgements would be highly suspect. There is therefore a good deal to be said for refusing to read literary critics who cannot write decently; though they may, of course, do valuable historical or textual research.

  My conclusion is that English students who write as ill as those I have quoted are not very likely to get much from their English studies; since those who possess so little style themselves can hardly judge it in others.

  ‘Ah,’ you may reply, ‘all this only shows, what we have always believed, that style cannot be taught.’

  I am afraid that this is often true. I will go further and admit that education often, so far from doing good in this respect, does positive harm. In real life, as in Scott, in Dickens, or in Hardy, the uneducated sometimes speak a far more living language than their social superiors. And they may likewise relish vivid speech in others, with the delighted zest of Hardy’s milkman.

  “More know Tom Fool – what rambling canticle is it you say, Hostler?” inquired the milkman, lifting his ear. “Let’s have it again – a good saying well spit out is a Christmas fire to my withered heart.”

  When Bruce had stabbed John Comyn in the Church of the Minorities at Dumfries, at the church-door he ran into Sir Thomas Kirkpatrick and cried, it is said, ‘I doubt [i.e. I fear (Ed.)] I have killed the Comyn.’ ‘Ye doubt!’ replied Kirkpatrick. ‘I mak siccar.’ [i.e. I’ll make sure (Ed.)] And, entering, he finished off the wounded man. These grim brevities Hume in his history (governed despite his genius by eighteenth-century sophistication) thought it necessary to polish – and destroy.

  Sir Thomas Kirkpatrick, one of Bruce’s friends, asking him soon after, if the traitor was slain, “I believe so,” replied Bruce. “And is that a matter,” cried Kirkpatrick, “to be left to conjecture? I will secure him.” [15]

  Or take a typical passage from Synge (Christy, in The Playboy of the We
stern World, has just begged Pegeen to marry him).

  PEGEEN (backing away from him). You’ve right daring to go ask me that, when all knows you’ll be starting to some girl in your own townland, when your father’s rotten in four months, or five.

  CHRISTY (indignantly). Starting from you, is it? (He follows her.) I will not, then, and when the airs is warming, in four months or five, it’s then yourself and me should be pacing Neifin in the dews of night, the times sweet smells do be rising, and you’d see a little, shiny new moon, maybe, sinking on the hills.

  PEGEEN (looking at him playfully). And it’s that kind of a poacher’s love you’d make, Christy Mahon, on the sides of Neifin, when the night is down?

  CHRISTY. It’s little you’ll think if my love’s a poacher’s, or an earl’s itself, when you’ll feel my two hands stretched around you, and I squeezing kisses on your puckered lips, till I’d feel a kind of pity for the Lord God is all ages sitting lonesome in His golden chair.

  PEGEEN. That’ll be right fun, Christy Mahon, and any girl would walk her heart out before she’d meet a young man was your like for eloquence, or talk at all.

  CHRISTY (encouraged). Let you wait, to hear me talking, till we’re astray in Erris, when Good Friday’s by, drinking a sup from a well, and making mighty kisses with our wetted mouths, or gaming in a gap of sunshine, with yourself stretched back unto your necklace, in the flowers of the earth.

  PEGEEN (in a low voice, moved by his tone). I’d be nice so, is it?

  CHRISTY (with rapture). If the mitred bishops seen you that time, they’d be the like of the holy prophets, I’m thinking, do be straining the bars of Paradise to lay eyes on the Lady Helen of Troy, and she abroad, pacing back and forward, with a nosegay in her golden shawl.

  PEGEEN (with real tenderness). And what is it I have, Christy Mahon, to make me fitting entertainment for the like of you, that has such poet’s talking, and such bravery of heart. [16]

  I confess that each time I re-read this, I could claw myself for pleasure, like the Cook of Chaucer (another writer whose common characters speak with a robust vitality beyond their ‘betters’). Had Wordsworth’s Westmorlanders talked with such zest, one could listen with more resignation to his tedious harpings on the speech of common men. You may of course answer that Synge’s Irish are mere literary rustics, as artificial as the scented shepherds of some pastoral Arcadia. But Synge did not think so.

  In writing The Playboy of the Western World, as in my other plays, I have used one or two words only that I have not heard among the people of Ireland, or spoken in my own nursery before I could read the newspapers. … Anyone who has lived in real intimacy with the Irish peasantry will know that the wildest sayings and ideas in this play are tame indeed, compared with the fancies one may hear in any little hillside cabin in Geesala, or Carraroe, or Dingle Bay. … When I was writing The Shadow of the Glen, some years ago, I got more aid than any learning could have given me from a chink in the floor of the old Wicklow house where I was staying, that let me hear what was being said by the servant girls in the kitchen. This matter, I think, is of importance, for in countries where the imagination of the people, and the language they use, is rich and living, it is possible for a writer to be rich and copious in his words, and at the same time to give the reality, which is the root of all poetry, in a comprehensive and natural form. In the modern literature of towns, however, richness is found only in sonnets, or prose poems, or in one or two elaborate books that are far away from the profound and common interests of life. One has, on one side, Mallarmé and Huysmans producing this literature; and, on the other, Ibsen and Zola dealing with the reality of life in joyless and pallid words. … In a good play every speech should be as fully flavoured as a nut or apple, and such speeches cannot be written by anyone who works among people who have shut their lips on poetry. In Ireland, for a few years more, we have a popular imagination that is fiery, and magnificent, and tender; so that those of us who wish to write start with a chance that is not given to writers in places where the spring-time of the local life has been forgotten, and the harvest is a memory only, and the straw has been turned into bricks. [17]

  Not a very gay picture of the results of education. Yet, I am afraid there is much truth in it – that towns, schools, and newspapers have done vast harm as well as good. We should face the unpleasant truth that civilization and education, while they sharpen the mind, often blunt the tongue; while they brighten the intelligence, often tarnish the imagination. Primitive language seems often a kind of magic; intellectual language, a kind of algebra. Remember Bunyan.

  This, I suppose, is partly why Montaigne was well content with the phrases of ‘les halles à Paris’ and ‘les rues françaises’; and why the purist Malherbe (1555–1628), ardent to perfect the French tongue, listened with serious attention to the porters of the Porte Saint-Jean (just as ‘Melancholy’ Burton listened for his diversion to the cursing bargees of Oxford). Again Vaugelas (1585–1650), continuing the search for pure French, made it his rule that ‘il vaut mieux d’ordinaire consulter les femmes et ceux qui n’ont point étudié que ceux qui sont bien savants en la langue grecque et en la latine’. [18 ] And Diderot, on the wider question of style in general, is more downright still. ‘C’est que le bon style est dans le coeur; voilà pourquoi tant de femmes disent et écrivent comme des anges, sans avoir appris ni à dire ni à écrire, et pourquoi tant de pédants diront et écriront mal toute leur vie, quoiqu’ils n’aient cessé d’étudier sans apprendre.’ [19]

  Whether women still speak better I do not know (though I think they tend to write better letters); to say that ‘le bon style est dans le coeur’ seems to me an exaggeration typical of the warm-hearted Diderot, though I believe it to be based none the less on a vital truth; but that education, learning, and research, instead of making men speak and write better, often make them do both worse, remains, I am afraid, a matter of simple observation. When Professor Gilbert Murray, if I remember rightly, confesses to sometimes wishing that the inhabitants of University towns were rather more like Polynesians, I know what he means. But at this point prudence enjoins silence.

  Am I suggesting, then, that we should despair of education, and try to go back to some illiterate Arcadia or Connemara of noble rustics? Of course not. There is no going back. But one can have the courage to admit that modern civilization has not been pure gain, without falling into the sentimental regrets of Rousseau. Nor have I any wish to belittle what we have gained. If we feel, for example, that there is more poetry in the primitive legends of Hellas or Eire, or in our own Northern Ballads, than in all the verse of the eighteenth century (which was yet, for the happy few, perhaps the most civilized of European centuries), that need not make us forget the splendour, delight, and charm in the prose of that great age. If Malherbe listened to porters, he was far from being one. And the Synge who immortalized peasants went himself both to Trinity College, Dublin, and to Paris. Most English writers, indeed, have been of the middle class, and many of them have been to Universities (though they have seldom written there). My point is merely that the sophisticated (ready though they may be to suppose so) do not necessarily express themselves better than the simple – in fact, may often have much to learn from them.

  Educators, indeed, are prone to believe too blindly in education. Chesterfield, for example, had the extraordinary notion that anyone could train himself to become ‘a model of eloquence’ and indeed anything else, except (he admits) a poet – ‘a drayman is probably born with as good organs as Milton, Locke, or Newton; but by culture they are much more above him than he is above his horse’. Similarly I once knew a clever man who fervently imagined that he could turn any normal child, if caught young enough, into a Trinity scholar. But my own experience is that firsts are born rather than made. In the same way, though painters have been and still are trained in schools, writers of value are not taught to write (though I believe something of the sort is advertised in London and in the United State
s) – they appear to teach themselves. The authors you read in ‘doing English’, from Chaucer to Virginia Woolf, never ‘did English’.

  It is true that Antiquity made efforts, persisting for centuries, to train orators. But the results seem significantly insignificant. It began when some of the Greek sophists professed to make men eloquent; they were followed by generations of rhetoricians who eventually swarmed over the whole Greco-Roman world, till Juvenal could speak of them as finding employment even in furthest Thule. But in practice not even Aristotle’s Rhetoric could prolong the great age of Attic oratory, then nearing its end; just as his Poetics brought no new life to dying Tragedy. As usual, critical theory could not procreate, it could only dissect. Cicero produced treatises on oratory, but no new Cicero. Writers like ‘Longinus’ or Quintilian, often interesting, often admirable, seem to have been equally barren of practical effect. And in the upshot, for the English (though not for the Scots) ‘rhetoric’ has become, ironically enough, a term of abuse. I cannot believe, despite Matthew Arnold, that critics have ever done very much good to the creative; though sometimes they have done a good deal of harm.

  One is too often reminded of the man in Chekhov who set out to teach his kitten an improved method of catching mice, till it cowered at the sight of one; or of that wise apologue uttered by Prince Mou of Wei, about the child from Shou-ling who was sent to Han-tan to learn the Han-tan walk – ‘he failed to master the steps, but spent so much time trying to acquire them, that in the end he forgot how one usually walks, and came home to Shou-ling on all fours’.

  None the less, though education may be less infallible and more perilous than sanguine souls assume, it remains an inescapable necessity. It spoilt Chekhov’s kitten: but it has to be imposed on every horse and hawk and hound. You cannot turn glass into diamonds; but diamonds can be polished; even glass can be cut. No one is born a writer. The greatest have had to learn. Only one learns most from trying to do things oneself; and my purpose is simply to make some suggestions, and provide some illustrations from the experience of others, which may perhaps help to shorten that painful process.