Style- the Art of Writing Well
Page 5
6 Works (1798), IV, p. 361. It is curious how much less well Horace Walpole writes when, as here, he writes formally. Montesquieu, on the other hand (like Buffon), did not share this neo-classic prejudice: ‘Un homme qui écrit bien, n’écrit pas comme on écrit, mais comme il écrit.’ (‘A man who writes well, does not write “as people write”, but as he writes.’) This seems to me much truer; though, of course, there are also some bad writers who write like no one else. Some may think Euphues an example of this; some, Meredith. [return to text]
7 Also, adds the Oxford Dictionary (with unintended irony), ‘used as a weapon of offence, for stabbing, etc.’ For the Latin stĭlus comes from the root STIG – cf. Greek στίζω, stigma, stimulus, instigate, stick, German stechen, stecken. We should, were English a logical language, write ‘stile’ (cf. German Stil, Italian stile, Spanish estilo). But the Latin stĭlus became corrupted to stylus by confusion with the Greek στῦλος, ‘a pillar’; and this spurious ‘y’ does at least save us now from confusing the ‘styles’ of writers with the ‘stiles’ of field-paths. [return to text]
8 Compare some of the diverse meanings of ‘poetry’, which have similarly provoked futile controversy: (1) verse writing; (2) good verse writing; (3) writing, not in metre, which excites similar feelings to those aroused by good verse; (4) qualities in things outside literature (e.g. painting, spring, moonlight) which also excite similar feelings. [return to text]
9 It is superbly ironical to find Voltaire, of all people, objecting to this: ‘Point de plaisanterie en mathématiques. … La plaisanterie n’est jamais bonne dans le genre sérieux.’ (‘Let there be no jesting in mathematics. … Jesting is never good in serious literature.’ Dictionnaire Philosophique, ‘Style’.) Fontenelle and Gibbon knew better; and so, indeed, did Voltaire. [return to text]
10 Lord Lucan in his turn maintained that the fatal charge was due to a further misunderstanding of his own orders to Lord Cardigan, commanding the Light Brigade. (Kinglake, Invasion of the Crimea, IV, p. 248.) [return to text]
11 ‘What distinguishes great geniuses is the power to generalize and to create. … Do we not believe in the real existence of Don Quixote as firmly as in Caesar’s? Shakespeare in this respect is something tremendous. He was not a man, he was a whole continent; there lived in him great men, whole multitudes, whole landscapes. No need for writers like that to labour at style; they are powerful despite all their faults – even because of them. But we – we little men – can succeed only by finish of execution. Hugo, in our century, will overwhelm all rivals, although he is full of things that are bad; but what inspiration he has, what inspiration! I will venture here an assertion that I should never dare utter anywhere else – that is, that very great writers often write very badly – and so much the better for them. It is not to them that you must look for the art of form, but to the writers of a second rank (Horace, La Bruyère).’ Correspondance, 25 September 1852. Contrast Voltaire: ‘sans le style, il est impossible qu’il y ait un seul bon ouvrage en aucun genre d’éloquence et de poésie.’ (‘Without style there cannot possibly be a single work of value in any branch of eloquence or poetry.’) But here Flaubert is surely more reasonable. [return to text]
12 For example, in Scott the appeal of Jeanie Deans to Queen Caroline, or the malediction of Meg Merrilies (see A. W. Verrall, Literary Essays); in Dickens, the description of Chancery at the beginning of Bleak House. Balzac might indulge in fatuities like ‘Un torrent de pensées découla de son front’ (‘A torrent of thoughts poured from his brow’), ‘Le général se tourna pour jeter à la mer une larme de rage’ (‘The general turned away to cast into the sea a tear of rage’), ‘Voilà deux ans que mon coeur se brise tous les jours’ (‘For two years now my heart has been breaking every day’); but he could also write things as trenchant as Vautrin’s advice to Rastignac on success: ‘Il faut entrer dans cette masse d’hommes comme un boulet de canon ou s’y glisser comme une peste. L’honnêteté ne sert à rien’ (‘One must penetrate this human mass like a cannon-ball, or glide into it like a pestilence. Decency is futile.’) Or there is the description of Rastignac after the burial of Goriot: ‘Rastignac, resté seul, fit quelques pas vers le haut du cimetière, et vit Paris tortueusement couché le long des deux rives de la Seine, où commencaient à briller les lumières. Ses yeux s’attachèrent presque avidement entre la colonne de la place Vendôme et le dôme des Invalides, là où vivait ce beau monde dans lequel il avait voulu pénétrer. Il lança sur cette ruche bourdonnante un regard qui semblait par avance en pomper le miel et dit ces mots grandioses: “A nous deux maintenant”.
‘Et pour premier acte du défi qu’il portait à la Société, Rastignac alla dîner chez Mme. de Nucingen.’
(‘Rastignac, left alone, took a few paces to the summit of the cemetery, and saw Paris extended in its windings along both banks of the Seine, with its lights beginning to glitter. His gaze fastened almost greedily on the stretch, between the Column of the Place Vendôme and the dome of Les Invalides, where lived that high society into which he had willed to make his way. Towards that buzzing hive he cast a glance that seemed already in anticipation to suck out its honey, and said magnificently – “Now we two are matched!”
‘And, as a first gesture of his challenge to society, Rastignac went to dine with Mme. de Nucingen.’)
[return to text]
13 As in Gastibelza: Dansez, chantez, villageois, la nuit tombe.
Sabine un jour
A tout vendu, sa beauté de colombe
Et son amour,
Pour l’anneau d’or du comte de Saldagne,
Pour un bijou …
Le vent qui vient à travers la montagne
Me rendra fou.
(‘Dance, villagers, and sing; the night is falling.
One day Sabine
Sold all – her dove-like beauty
And her love –
Just for the gold ring of the Comte de Saldagne,
Just for a jewel …
The wind that comes across the mountainside
Will drive me mad.’)
The theme is common: the style is not. Flaubert himself, writing to George Sand in December 1875, becomes juster to Hugo’s style: ‘Je donnerais toutes les légendes de Gavarni pour certaines expressions et coupes des maîtres comme, “l’ombre était nuptiale, auguste et solennelle”, de Victor Hugo.’
(‘I would give all the episodes of Gavarni for certain expressions and phrases of the great masters, such as Victor Hugo’s line – “The darkness was bridal, solemn, and august.” ’)
[return to text]
14 Iliad, IX, 442–3. τοὔνεκά με προέηκε διδασκέμεναι τάδε πάντα,
μύθων τε ῥητῆρ’ ἔμεναι πρηκτῆρά τε ἔργων.
Certainly Achilles had learnt those lessons. I know no eloquence in all literature that can surpass his replies to Agamemnon (Iliad I), to the envoys of Agamemnon (Iliad IX), and to the aged Priam at his feet (Iliad XXIV).
[return to text]
15 See J. M. Robertson, Essays towards a Critical Method (1889), p. 25. [return to text]
16 Plays (1924 ed.), pp. 269–71. [return to text]
17 Preface to The Playboy (in Plays, 1924 ed., p. 183). [return to text]
18 ‘It is usually better to consult women and the unlearned rather than those who are deeply erudite in Greek and Latin.’ [return to text]
19 ‘The truth is that good style is found in the heart. Hence the reason why so many women talk and write like angels, without ever having learnt either to talk or to write; and why so many pedants will talk and write badly all their lives, though they have studied ceaselessly, without learning a thing.’ [return to text]
20 ‘And so our way now-a-days of praising a writer’s work is to say: “It’s a well-constructed book, a well-written play, a well-arranged discourse.” But the English say, on the contrary: “It’s a book full of good – of excellent – things.” ’ J. B. Le Blanc, Lettres d�
�un François (1745). I quote from the 1749 edition, III, p. 17 (Letter LXVII). [return to text]
21 At times, indeed, this purism has been carried to lengths where it becomes comical. ‘An hour before his death,’ says Racan of Malherbe (1555–1628), ‘he suddenly revived to rebuke his hostess, who was nursing him, for some word that to his mind was not good French; and when reprimanded by his confessor, replied that he could not help it – that to his last moment he was set on upholding the purity of the French tongue.’ Père Bouhours is said to have expired (1702) with the words: ‘Je vas, ou je vais, mourir; l’un ou l’autre se dit.’ (‘Je vais – or je vas – mourir (“I am going to die”); either is correct.’) And of the purist Prince de Beauvau some ironic wit remarked, according to Chamfort: ‘Quand je le rencontre dans mes promenades du matin et que je passe dans l’ombre de son cheval … j’ai remarqué que je ne fais pas une faute de français de toute la journée.’ (‘When I meet him on my morning-walks and the shadow of his horse falls on me … I have noticed that I do not make a single mistake in French all that day.’) My point is that these fantastic tales are typically French, and not easy to match in English. [return to text]
22 ‘The auxiliaries avoir and être, the verb faire, the cumbersome conjunctions; all those vermin of our French prose.’ J. A. Symonds, Essays Speculative and Suggestive (1907 ed.), p. 199. [return to text]
23 In Gérard de Nerval’s version. ‘En allemand je ne peux plus lire le Faust, mais dans cette traduction française chaque trait me frappe comme s’il était tout nouveau pour moi.’ (‘I cannot read Faust any more in German, but in this French translation every detail strikes me as if it were quite new for me.’ Sainte-Beuve, Nouveaux Lundis, III, p. 311.) Of Hermann and Dorothea Goethe similarly preferred the Latin version to the original German. [return to text]
24 Mein Kampf (1936 ed.), pp. 506–7. Literally, ‘A with infernal intolerance filled view of life will only be shattered by the like spirit impelled, by the like strongest will championed, but in itself pure and fundamentally truthful new idea.’ [return to text]
25 ‘Why then so simple? Can’t you make it more complicated?’ [return to text]
26 ‘I teach you of the Superman. Man is something that shall be overpassed.’ [return to text]
27 Cf. ‘Ach, es giebt so viel Dinge zwischen Himmel und Erde, von denen sich nur die Dichter Etwas haben träumen lassen.’ ‘Und verloren sei uns der Tag wo nicht Ein Mal getanzt wurde! Und falsch heisze uns jede Wahrheit, bei der es nicht ein Gelächter gab!’ The important words are ‘getanzt’ and ‘Gelächter’; but they are elbowed away from the end by the colourless ‘wurde’ and ‘gab’. [return to text]
28 But of course they were not enslaved by it. Cf. the close of Caesar, Gallic War, II: ‘Ob easque res ex litteris Caesaris dies quindecim supplicatio decreta est, quod ante id tempus accidit nulli’ – ‘which till then had happened to none!’ [return to text]
29 Cf. Shakespeare, Venus and Adonis, 409: ‘I know not love (quoth he) nor will not know it.’ [return to text]
30 See p. 60. [return to text]
31 E.g. ‘You shall see her’ (i.e. ‘You will be allowed to’); or ‘You shall see her’ (i.e. ‘You must’). [return to text]
32 Cf. p. 107. A like principle applies, I think, to idioms. For example, shall we split infinitives? Older writers did; including Johnson himself. Then a taboo developed – like many taboos, not very rational. One may argue: ‘I see no reason to consistently avoid split infinitives. “Consistently to avoid split infinitives” is strained: “to avoid consistently split infinitives” reads as if “consistently” belonged to “split”. ’ It may, however, be replied that, as things are, any split infinitive distracts the attentive reader; who begins asking, ‘did he split it on purpose, or from ignorance?’ Therefore the cautious will see here a psychological reason against split infinitives; these jolt some readers; and it takes no great ingenuity to avoid them.
Similarly ‘due to’ is now becoming a prepositional phrase, equivalent to ‘owing to’ – ‘They stopped work, due to the rain.’ To this new usage there are two objections. First, it can be ambiguous (was the stoppage, or the work, ‘due to’ the rain?). Secondly, it has not yet established itself; it can irritate; and it may never establish itself. ‘Wait and see.’
[return to text]
33 Contrast the situation at the beginning of the eighteenth century, when English literature was still little known outside England and, as Jespersen points out, Veneroni’s Dictionary (1714) covered, as ‘die 4 europäischen Hauptsprachen’, Italian, French, German, and Latin; not English. But already Hume foresaw the future, when he advised Gibbon against writing in French (24 October 1767): ‘Let the French, therefore, triumph in the present diffusion of their tongue. Our solid and increasing establishments in America, where we need less dread the inundation of Barbarians, promise a superior stability and duration to the English language.’ (One may not feel quite so sure of the ‘stability’.) [return to text]
CHAPTER 2: The Foundation of Style – Character
MOST DISCUSSIONS OF style seem to me to begin at the wrong end; like an architect who should disregard foundations, and give his mind only to superstructure and decoration. They plunge into the tricks of the trade – the choice of words, the employment of epithets, the build of paragraphs. Yet here their rules seem often arbitrary, their precepts often capricious; and I grow as bored and rebellious as, I take it, Laertes did while listening to the injunctions of Polonius (even though some of the injunctions are excellent, and Laertes himself shared only too fully his father’s fondness for lecturing). I begin to damn all tricks of all trades; to forswear tricks of any sort; to wish I were away on a Scottish hillside, or among Greek peasants who have never heard of such coxcombries; in fact, to feel very like Samuel Butler in his continuation of that passage I quoted at the beginning: [34 ]
A man may, and ought to take pains to write clearly, tersely and euphemistically: [35] he will write many a sentence three or four times over – to do much more than this is worse than not rewriting at all: [36] he will be at great pains to see that he does not repeat himself, to arrange his matter in the way that shall best enable the reader to master it, to cut out superfluous words, and, even more, to eschew irrelevant matter: but in each case he will be thinking not of his own style but of his reader’s convenience. Men like Newman and R. L. Stevenson seem to have taken pains to acquire what they called a style as a preliminary measure – as something they had to form before their writings could be of any value. I should like to put it on record that I never took the smallest pains with my style, have never thought about it, do not know nor want to know whether it is a style at all or whether it is not, as I believe and hope, just common, simple straightforwardness. I cannot conceive how any man can take thought for his own style without loss to himself and his readers.
As I have already said, I suspect that Butler really knew he had an excellent style; but chose, aggressive creature, to misuse ‘style’ to mean ‘elegant mannerism’, in order then to damn it. But my point is this. Literary style is simply a means by which one personality moves others. The problems of style, therefore, are really problems of personality – of practical psychology. Therefore this psychological foundation should come first; for on it the rules of rhetoric are logically based. These are not (when they are sound) arbitrary or capricious. And when they are seen to be neither arbitrary nor capricious, but rational and logical, they may then cease to be irritating or boring.
The primary question, therefore, is how best to move and direct men’s feelings. For even the most factual writing may involve feeling. Even the coldest biological monograph on the habits of flatworms, or the most detached piece of historical research into the price of eggs under Edward I, may be written so lucidly, argued so neatly, as to stir pleasure and admiration. Even mathematical solutions (though here I speak with trembling) can have aesthetic beauty.
Further, apart from the charm of neatne
ss and lucidity, the influence of personality intrudes itself even into subjects where men try to be dispassionately judicial. You may have a new theory of trade-cycles; your evidence may be excellent; but, though the truth may in the end prevail anyway, no matter how personally repellent its advocate, you are likely to make it prevail much more quickly if you know not only how to state, but how state persuasively.
In less scientific and more literary forms of writing or speaking, the element of emotion becomes far larger; and so does the importance of persuasiveness.
A nation, for example, has to be persuaded that though Hitler is at Dunkirk, there can be no question of white flags (then, fortunately, little persuasion was needed); or a reader has to be persuaded that a skylark is not a bird, but ‘a blithe spirit’ (to which, I own, I remain somewhat recalcitrant).
But persuasion, though it depends partly on the motives adduced for belief – how plausibly they are put, how compellingly they are worded – depends also, and sometimes depends still more, on the personality of the persuader. Just as, when we are advised in real life, we are often influenced as much by the character of the adviser as by the intrinsic merits of his advice.
Style, I repeat, is a means by which a human being gains contact with others; it is personality clothed in words, character embodied in speech. If handwriting reveals character, style reveals it still more – unless it is so colourless and lifeless as not really to be a style at all. The fundamental thing, therefore, is not technique, useful though that may be; if a writer’s personality repels it will not avail him to eschew split infinitives, to master the difference between ‘that’ and ‘which’, to have Fowler’s Modern English Usage by heart. Soul is more than syntax. If your readers dislike you, they will dislike what you say. Indeed, such is human nature, unless they like you they will mostly deny you even justice.