by F L Lucas
Je lui dis que je m’en étais allé un samedi au marché, et qu’en présence de tout le monde j’avais acheté un sac et une petite corde pour lier la bouche d’icelui, ensemble un fagot, ayant pris et chargé tout cela sur le col à la vue d’un chacun; et comme je fus à ma chambre, je demandai du feu pour allumer le fagot, et après je pris le sac, et là j’y mis dedans toute mon ambition, toute mon avarice, ma paillardise, ma gourmandise, ma paresse, ma partialité, mon envie et mes particularités, et toutes mes humeurs de Gascogne, bref tout ce que je pus penser qui me pourrait nuire, à considérer tout ce qu’il me fallait faire pour son service; puis après je liai fort la bouche du sac avec la corde, afin que rien n’en sortît, et mis tout cela dans le feu; et alors je me trouvai net de toutes choses qui me pouvaient empêcher en tout ce qu’il fallait que je fisse pour le service de Sa Majesté. [51]
A most vivid revelation of character; most graphically written. For, fire-eater as he was, Montluc knew the importance of being able to marshal words as well as troops. ‘Je crois que c’est une très belle partie à un capitaine que de bien dire’ – ‘Plût à Dieu que nous qui portons les armes prissions cette coutume d’écrire ce que nous voyons et faisons! Car il me semble que cela serait mieux accommodé de notre main (j’entends du fait de guerre) que non pas des gens de lettres; car ils déguisent trop les choses, et cela sent son clerc.’ [52]
Yet I quoted this passage about the siege of Siena, not for its vivid style, but because it seems to me an admirable summary of what those who wish to attain style would be wise to do, each time they took pen in hand.
You may say that you came for a lecture, not a sermon. If so, I am sorry; but I speak the truth as I see it. The beginning of style is character. This discovery was not first made by me, but by others better able to judge; and since I made it, I have been surprised to find confirmation even where one might least have looked for it. None had believed more passionately than Flaubert in the vain cry of ‘Art for Art’s sake’; yet at fifty-seven, the year before he died, he writes to Madame Sabatier: ‘Une théorie esthético-morale: le coeur est inséparable de l’esprit; ceux qui ont distingué l’un de l’autre n’avaient ni l’un ni l’autre.’ [53] And Samuel Butler, having begun by denying style, yet comes full circle before he ends: ‘I have also taken much pains, with what success I know not, to correct impatience, irritability and other like faults in my own character – and this not because I care two straws about my own character, but because I find the correction of such faults as I have been able to correct makes life easier, and saves me from getting into scrapes, and attaches nice people to me more readily. But I suppose this really is attending to style after all.’ It is, indeed.
My conclusion is: If you want to write decently, do not begin by reading up all about Synecdoche and Metonymy and the other pretty figures that dance in the rhetoricians’ manuals – you can meet them later; but always remember the bag of Montluc.
‘But,’ you may object, ‘you have said that the problem of style was concerned with the impact of one personality on many. You have gone on and on about the character of the writer. But what about the character of his public? Is that not also important?’
Yes, it is: sometimes to an unfortunate degree. One can sympathize with the anger of Schopenhauer, asking if ever man had so detestable a set of contemporaries as he; or with Flaubert’s ‘Mon Dieu, dans quel âge m’avez-vous fait naître!’ [54] But the writers I most admire have not considered too much the tastes of their immediate public.
The arts of speaking or writing, like some sciences, can be either pure or applied. The applied form aims at some practical purpose – as in addressing a jury, canvassing a constituency, composing official memoranda or propaganda, writing for money. Here, obviously, a style is not good if it is not good for its audience. But the writer of pure literature hopes to be read by men whom he does not know – even by men unborn, whom he cannot know. He must therefore write more to please himself, trusting so to please others; or he may write for an ideal audience, of the kind that he values – for les âmes amies. He may – I think he should – show this unknown audience the courtesy due to any audience, of communicating as clearly as he can what he thinks and feels; but he may well consider that to set about satisfying tastes not his own would be a betrayal and a prostitution.
No doubt great writers have sometimes acted otherwise. Shakespeare seems to have contrived to serve both God and Mammon, both his own ideals and popular taste – though not, to judge from some bitter phrases in the Sonnets, without moments of revulsion and shame. Dryden, again (in contrast to the inflexible Milton) offers a striking instance of the terrible pull exerted by public taste, or lack of it. If much Restoration Drama is poor, or worse, that could hardly have been otherwise with the type of audience whose tone was set by the Whitehall of Charles II – men and women who were largely rakes, or brutes, or both, thinly veneered with French polish and Spanish rodomontade – as shallowly cynical as the bright young of the nineteen-twenties, yet at moments as foolishly romantic as the intoxicated young of the eighteen-twenties. The surprising thing, then, is not that All for Love should be shallower than Antony and Cleopatra, but that it contains as fine things as it does. Dryden can here be praised for not being more subdued than he was, to what he worked in.
And then there is Scott; who, never making an idol of literature as compared with still more important things in life, felt no hesitation about consulting his sales-returns to see what the public liked.
But though in judging past writers it is vital to remember the character of their audiences, I confess that my preference in this matter is for those who have never given in to the world – who have remained as proud as Lucifer, as unbending as Coriolanus. When Wordsworth, or Hopkins, follows his own crotchets to the limit, Wordsworth seems to me at times rather stupid, and Hopkins downright silly; but I respect their independence. I like the aloofness of Landor, and Stendhal’s acceptance of being unappreciated for half a century to come, and Flaubert’s disdain for both critics and public. And when Ibsen said that, if Peer Gynt were not the Norwegian idea of poetry, then it was going to become so, this seems finely consistent with his brave contempt for all ‘compact majorities’.
In fine, I think the author of character will not bow too much to the character of his audience. Courtesy is better than deference. Confucius, as so often, hit the mark, when he said that the gentleman is courteous, but not pliable; the common man pliable, but not courteous.
But if character is important for style, what characteristics are most important? There are, I think, several human qualities that, despite all the variations in ethics from time to time and place to place, men have generally agreed to value; and have especially valued, whether consciously or not, in writers or speakers. I mean such things as good manners and courtesy towards readers, like Goldsmith’s; good humour and gaiety, like Sterne’s; good health and vitality, like Macaulay’s; good sense and sincerity, like Johnson’s. These are the opposites of some of the failings Montluc burnt in his bag. And I propose to treat them one by one in the chapters that follow.
Endnotes
34 p. 3. [return to text]
35 I suppose Butler meant, and perhaps wrote, ‘euphoniously’ – few men have been less given than he to euphemism – that is, calling unpleasant things by pleasant names. [return to text]
36 But contrast pp. 241–5. [return to text]
37 Cf. Sainte-Beuve on Victor Cousin: ‘Le style de Cousin est grand, il a grand air, il rappelle la grande époque à s’y méprendre; mais il ne paraît pas original, rien n’y marque l’homme, l’individu qui écrit. Bossuet, par moments, ne parlerait pas autrement, et Cousin n’est pas Bossuet.’ (‘Cousin’s style is grand, his air is grand, he is deceptively like the Grand Period [of Louis XIV]; but he does not seem original, nothing in his work is distinctive of the man – the individual – who is writing. Bossuet, at moments, would say the same; and Cousin is not Bossuet.’ Causeries du
Lundi, XI, p. 469.) In short, borrowed plumes fall off. [return to text]
38 Rhetoric, II, 1. [return to text]
39 IX, 2. Compare the Roman definition of a good orator – ‘Vir bonus, dicendi peritus’ – ‘A good man with practice in speech.’ Optimistic perhaps; but, in the long run, not without truth; and truer of literature, which has a longer run than oratory. (This definition is said to be Cato the Elder’s. See Seneca the rhetorician, Controv., I, 9; Quintilian, XII, 1, 1.) Compare too Anatole France – ‘Les grands écrivains n’ont pas l’âme basse. Voilà, M. Brown, tout leur secret.’ Though ‘tout’ is too much. (‘Great writers have not mean souls. That, Mr. Brown, is their whole secret.’) [return to text]
40 Sometimes cited as ‘Le style, c’est l’homme’; sometimes in the form ‘le style est de l’homme’. But it is weakened both by the addition of ‘de’ and by the omission of ‘même’. Needless difficulties, I think, have also been made over the meaning. Gosse, for example, (s.v. ‘Style’ in Encyclopaedia Britannica, 1910 edition) reminds us that Buffon was a biologist and that the sentence comes from his Natural History; therefore, he says, Buffon really meant that style ‘distinguished the language of man (homo sapiens) from the monotonous roar of the lion or the limited gamut of the bird. Buffon was engaged with biological, not with aesthetic, ideas.’
But I doubt if Buffon would have stooped to the platitude of telling us that man has style, birds not. It too much recalls the Anti-Jacobin:
The feather’d tribes on pinions skim the air,
Not so the mackerel, and still less the bear.
Actually, Buffon’s phrase comes, not from his Natural History, but from his Discours sur le Style, his inaugural address to the French Academy. It seems to me not in the least ‘biological’. And I take Buffon to be saying with classic calm very much what Victor Hugo proclaimed with romantic fervour:
Quiconque pense, illustre, obscur, sifflé, vainqueur,
Grand ou petit, exprime en son livre son coeur.
Ce que nous écrivons de nos plumes d’argile,
Soit sur le livre d’or comme le doux Virgile,
Soit comme Aligieri sur la bible de fer,
Est notre proper flamme et notre proper chair.
(‘Whoever thinks, be he famous or obscure, hissed or triumphant,
Great or small, expresses in his book his heart.
Whatever with our pens of clay we write,
Whether like the gentle Virgil on a page of gold,
Or like Dante in a scripture of iron,
Is our own flesh, our own flame.)
Or, as Gibbon put it, more briefly and clearly: ‘Style is the image of character’ (Autobiographies of E. Gibbon, ed. J. Murray, 2nd ed. 1897, p. 353). The idea itself goes back far further. Socrates is credited with saying: ‘As a man is, so is his speech’; similar maxims occur in Plato and Menander; and Seneca discusses it at length in Epistle 114.
[return to text]
41 Tsui Chi, Short History of Chinese Civilization (1942), p. 53. [return to text]
42 Importance of Living (1938), p. 384. [return to text]
43 In the most subjective forms of writing, such as the personal lyric, the writer’s own feelings may become the main thing, and the audience may recede into the background. In Mill’s phrase, the poet is less heard than overheard. Yet this convention contains a good deal of fiction. The poet may, indeed, proclaim as proudly as Hafiz: From the east to the west no man understands me –
The happier I that confide to none but the wind!
Yet even modern poets, of whom the first of these lines would be far truer than of Hafiz, still seek publishers and read proofs. Whatever is published invites a public. And most prose-writers, at all events, are not much less conscious than the orator of addressing an audience.
[return to text]
44 Cf. the definition of ‘Patron’ in Johnson’s Dictionary – ‘commonly a wretch who supports with insolence, and is paid with flattery’; and the couplet in The Vanity of Human Wishes: There mark what ills the scholar’s life assail,
Toil, envy, want, the Patron, and the jail.
(‘The Patron’ was substituted by Johnson, after his affray with Chesterfield, for ‘the garret’ of the original version.)
[return to text]
45 A reference to the death of his dear, queer Tetty. [return to text]
46 Unpublished Letters, ed. E. L. Griggs (1932), II, pp. 131–2. (Coleridge wanted Byron to recommend his poems to ‘some Publisher’, in the hope that Byron’s influence would obtain him better terms.) [return to text]
47 In the margin of his Pepys (1825) edition Coleridge expressed a franker opinion of Byron’s work: ‘W. Wordsworth calls Lord Byron the mocking bird of our Parnassian ornithology, but the mocking bird, they say, has a very sweet song of his own, in true notes proper to himself. Now I cannot say I have ever heard any such in his Lordship’s volumes of warbles; and in spite of Sir W. Scott, I dare predict that in less than a century, the Baronet’s and the Baron’s poems will lie on the same shelf of oblivion, Scott be read and remembered as a novelist and the founder of a new race of novels, and Byron not be remembered at all, except as a wicked lord who, from morbid and restless vanity, pretended to be ten times more wicked than he was.’
So far from being ‘a swan’, Byron had not ‘ever’, apparently, seemed to Coleridge even so much as a mocking bird. It is rash to pass judgement on the animosities of authors; one never knows all the facts; though sometimes, as here, one may seem to know pretty well. At all events, in 1816 Coleridge had accepted £100 from Byron; in 1824, while Coleridge sat safe in Highgate, Byron had died for Greece in the marshes of Missolonghi. Coleridge’s marginal note, like his letter, might have been better left unwritten.
[return to text]
48 It is pleasant to contrast the refusal by Leconte de Lisle, though very poor, of a pension of 300 francs a month from Napoleon III on condition that he would dedicate his translations to the Prince Imperial. ‘Il serait sacrilège,’ he replied, ‘de dédier ces chefs d’oeuvre antiques à un enfant trop jeune pour les comprendre.’ (‘It would be sacrilege to dedicate these masterpieces of Antiquity to a child too young to understand them.’) To the honour of the Second Empire, Leconte de Lisle got his pension none the less. [return to text]
49 For a detailed comparison, from this point of view, between two typical passages of Chaucer and Dryden, see my Decline and Fall of the Romantic Ideal (1948 ed.), pp. 214–18. [return to text]
50 Cf. Goethe to Ekermann: ‘To Shakespeare, Sterne, and Goldsmith my debt has been infinite’ – ‘Ich bin Shakespeare, Sterne, und Goldsmith unendliches schuldig gewesen.’ [return to text]
51 ‘I told the King that I had gone off one Saturday to the market, and in sight of everybody bought a bag, and a little cord to tie its mouth, together with a faggot, taking and shouldering them all in the public view; and when I reached my room, I asked for fire to kindle the faggot, then took the bag and stuffed into it all my ambition, all my avarice, my sensuality, my gluttony, my indolence, my partiality, my envy and my eccentricities, and all my Gascon humours – in short, everything that I thought might hinder me, in view of all that I had to do in his service; then I tightly tied the mouth of the bag with the cord, so that nothing should get out, and thrust it all in the fire. And thus I found myself clear of everything that could impede me in all I had to do for the service of His Majesty.’ [return to text]
52 ‘I think it a very fine quality for a commander to be eloquent.’ – ‘Would to God that we men of the sword could adopt this habit of writing down what we see and do! For I think we should manage it better (I am talking of military affairs) than men of letters; for they dress things up in too many disguises, and that gives a clerkly savour.’ [return to text]
53 ‘Here is an aesthetical-ethical theory – the gifts of the heart cannot be separated from those of the intelligence; those who have drawn a distinction between them, possessed neither.’ Correspondance (1926), VIII,
p. 209 (February 1879). [return to text]
54 ‘My God, into what an age hast Thou caused me to be born!’ [return to text]
CHAPTER 3: Courtesy to Readers (1), Clarity
One should not aim at being possible to understand, but at being impossible to misunderstand.
– Quintillian
Obscurité … vicieuse affectation.
– Montaigne
CHARACTER, I HAVE SUGGESTED, is the first thing to think about in style. The next step is to consider what characteristics can win a hearer’s or a reader’s sympathy. For example, it is bad manners to give them needless trouble. Therefore clarity. It is bad manners to waste their time. Therefore brevity.
There clings in my memory a story once told me by Professor Sisson. A Frenchman said to him: ‘In France it is the writer that takes the trouble; in Germany, the reader; in England it is betwixt and between.’ The generalization is over-simple; perhaps even libellous; but not without truth. It gives, I think, another reason why the level of French prose has remained so high. And this may in its turn be partly because French culture has been based more than ours on conversation and the salon. In most conversation, if he is muddled, wordy, or tedious, a man is soon made, unless he is a hippopotamus, to feel it. Further, the salon has been particularly influenced by women; who, as a rule, are less tolerant of tedium and clumsiness than men.
First, then, clarity. The social purpose of language is communication – to inform, misinform, or otherwise influence our fellows. True, we also use words in solitude to think our own thoughts, and to express our feelings to ourselves. But writing is concerned rather with communication than with self-communing; though some writers, especially poets, may talk to themselves in public. Yet, as I have said, even these, though in a sense overheard rather than heard, have generally tried to reach an audience. No doubt in some modern literature there has appeared a tendency to replace communication by a private maundering to oneself which shall inspire one’s audience to maunder privately to themselves – rather as if the author handed round a box of drugged cigarettes of his own concoction to stimulate each guest to his own solitary dreams. But I have yet to be convinced that such activities are very valuable; or that one’s own dreams and meditations are much heightened by the stimulus of some other voice soliloquizing in Chinese. The irrational, now in politics, now in poetics, has been the sinister opium of our tormented and demented century.
