by F L Lucas
Whilst we, earth’s latter singers, O stranger, are left lying
To moulder unremembered, in heaps past numbering.
Better the muted music of the swan than all the crying
Of jackdaws chattering shrilly across the clouds of spring. [98]
Tacitus’ life of his father-in-law Agricola occupies only twenty-four pages. Johnson in his Lives, Sainte-Beuve in his Causeries, have often covered their subjects more effectively in fifty pages, or less, than subsequent critics in monographs ten times the size. There is, indeed, a fine and trenchant brevity (though he had not always practised it himself) in the dictum of the ageing Chateaubriand: ‘I have written enough if my name will last: too much, if it will not.’
But the value of brevity is not so much to make writers write less (we can always cut them short by not reading them), as to make them write better. It is not only a practical, but also an artistic economy. Brevity can give grace, force, speed.
Grace comes largely from effects produced without apparent effort, from that subtle simplicity which has sometimes specially distinguished the Greeks and the French, and can be seen in the Temple of Wingless Victory, or in the best epigrams of the Anthology; in La Fontaine and La Rochefoucauld and La Bruyère; or even in those three wistfully witty words with which the Vicomtesse d’Houdetot took leave of life: ‘Je me regrette.’ [‘I miss me.’ (Ed.)]
Says this gravestone sorrow-laden: ‘Death has taken to his
keeping,
In the first flower of her springtide, little Theódotē.’
But the little one makes answer to her father: ‘Cease from
weeping,
Theódotus. Unhappy all men must often be.’
– Philitas of Samos; Palatine Anthology, VII, 481.
May! Be thou never grac’d with birds that sing,
Nor Flora’s pride!
In thee all flowers and roses spring,
Mine only died.
– William Browne, In Obitum M.S.
Mais elle étoit du monde, où les plus belles choses
Ont le pire destin;
Et, rose, elle a vécu ce que vivent les roses,
L’espace d’un matin.
– Malherbe, Consolation à M. du Périer. [99]
The grace of all these is so living largely because they too, like the rose, are brief. The first two pieces are complete as they stand; the third is accompanied by seventeen other stanzas – but I am inclined to feel it would be better without them.
Similarly with the Chinese preference for short poems; where, as they put it, even after the reader has finished, ‘the thought goes on’. [100]
The snow has gone from Chung-nan; spring is almost come.
Lovely in the distance its blue colours, the brown of the streets.
A thousand coaches, ten thousand horsemen pass down the
Nine Roads;
Turns his head and looks at the mountain – not one man!
– Po Chu-i, 772–846; tr. A. Waley.
The red tulip I gave you, you let fall in the dust. I picked it up. It
was all white.
In that brief moment the snow fell upon our love.
– Chang-wou-kien, b. 1879.
Briefer still the Japanese haiku:
A shower in spring, where an umbrella
And a raincoat walk conversing;
or:
A morning-glory [101] had entwined the well-bucket:
I begged for water; [102]
or:
My barn is burnt down –
Nothing hides the moon;
or (of rural silence):
A butterfly sleeps on the village bell.
A Japanese writer in this form, contemporary with Milton, Yasuhara Teishitsu, for the sake of posterity destroyed all his poems but three. There was brevity indeed!
Naturally I am not suggesting that writers should all try to sail down to posterity in an armada of nutshells; I am only giving examples of ‘gracious silences’. And brevity can bring not only grace but force. The unlovely communism of ancient Sparta contributed little to art or thought; but one quality of that iron race so struck the imagination of antiquity that the name of their country, Laconia, has added a word to the tongues of modern Europe – ‘laconism’. To the menaces, for example, of Philip of Macedon, they replied: ‘The Lacedaemonians to Philip. Dionysius is at Corinth.’ [103] And when he threatened, ‘If I enter Laconia, you shall be exterminated’, they wrote back the one word ‘If’. It was, indeed, fitting that Simonides should limit to two lines his epitaph on the Spartans fallen in the most glorious of Greek defeats, Thermopylae:
Tell them at Lacedaemon, passer-by,
That here obedient to their laws we lie.
A land of iron coinage and of iron speech.
If the Spartans provide a classic example of the power gained by compression, I feel that their Athenian rivals, alike in tragedy and oratory, tended on the contrary to lose strength by wordiness. When at the end of The Iliad Andromache, Hecuba, and Helen mourn over the dead Hector, the three of them together speak only forty-seven lines – and it is perfect; an Attic dramatist would have lamented far longer – and moved me less.
But it was Rome, nearer in temper to Sparta, that bred two writers who seem to me among the first great literary examples of the strength of brevity; though she produced also the somewhat verbose abundance of Cicero and the amplitude of Livy. I am not thinking of ‘Caesars Thrasonicall bragge of I came, saw and overcame’ (though his Commentaries are also an excellent example of clarity and brevity); nor of the clever, yet too snippety wisdom of Seneca: I am thinking of Horace, in those Odes where the sparingly chosen words stand bright and imperishable, like stones of a mosaic set in Roman cement itself as hard as stone; and of Tacitus. For I do not know any work whose first chapters surpass in tense concentration that opening of his Histories where he unveils his theme, and the state of the Empire in the January of A.D. 69, the Year of the Four Emperors. [104]
Opus adgredior opimum casibus, atrox praeliis, discors seditionibus, ipsa etiam pace saevom. Quattuor principes ferro interempti. Trina bella civilia, plura externa, ac plerumque permixta. Prosperae in Oriente, adversae in Occidente res. Turbatum Illyricum; Galliae nutantes; perdomita Britannia, et statim missa; coortae in nos Sarmatarum ac Suevorum gentes; nobilitatus cladibus mutuis Dacus; mota prope etiam Parthorum arma falsi Neronis ludibrio. Iam vero Italia novis cladibus vel post longam seculorum seriem repetitis afflicta. Haustae aut obrutae urbes fecundissima Campaniae ora. Et urbs incendiis vastata, consumptis antiquissimis delubris, ipso Capitolio civium manibus incenso. Pollutae caerimoniae, magna adulteria. Plenum exsiliis mare, infecti caedibus scopuli. Atrocius in urbe saevitum.
And so to the great rolling climax:
Hic fuit rerum Romanarum status, cum Servius Galba iterum, Titus Vinius, consules inchoavere annum sibi ultimum, rei publicae prope supremum. [105]
Here is a controlled brevity, deadly as the short sword of the Roman legionary; which no uninflected language can rival, and no rendering reproduce. It is interesting to contrast the hysteria of Roman decadence in the centuries that followed. When the historian’s descendant and namesake, Claudius Tacitus, was hailed emperor by the Senate in A.D. 275, it was, says the Historia Augusta, in the following terms: ‘ “Trajan too came old to the throne” (repeated ten times). “Hadrian too came old to the throne” (repeated ten times). “Antonius too came old to the throne” (repeated ten times). … “We make you an emperor, not a soldier” (repeated twenty times). “Command the soldiers to fight” (repeated thirty times).’ And so on. [106] At the accession of Claudius (A.D. 268) such vain repetitions had been carried even to eighty times! [107] As for the hysterically reiterated chants addressed by the Senate to Pertinax after the assassination of Commodus (A.D. 192), they must be read to be believed. [108] The individual phrases keep their Roman brevity; but their hysterical iteration recalls onl
y the ‘Sieg-heil’ and ‘Du-ce-du-ce’ of Nazi and Fascist. The reader of this orgy of verbiage feels that a race grown so neurotic was doomed even without the barbarians.
And yet even in the late Latin of St. Jerome’s Vulgate (383–405) the Latin tongue still keeps its terse energy. Nothing indeed can surpass the Job of our own Authorized Version:
Why died I not from the womb? why did I not give up the ghost when I came out of the belly?
Why did the knees prevent me? or why did the breasts that I should suck?
For now I should have lain still and been quiet, I should have slept: then had I been at rest,
With kings and counsellors of the earth, which built desolate places for themselves;
Or with princes that had gold, who filled their houses with silver.
But this remains far less concise than the Latin:
Quare non in vulva mortuus sum, egressus ex utero non statim perii?
Quare exceptus genibus? Cur lactatus uberibus?
Nunc enim dormiens silerem, et somno meo requiescerem:
Cum regibus et consulibus terrae, qui aedificant sibi solitudines:
Aut cum principibus, qui possident aurum et replent domos suas argento.
Forty-six words against eighty-one! No wonder Dr. Johnson would not hear of epitaphs in English.
The Dark and Middle Ages do not seem to have realized much of the grace or the force of brevity. Their years may often have been ‘nasty, brutish, and short’; but their days and evenings must often have seemed intolerably long – so boring that men often became unborable. The absence of printing could not prevent them from writing works like great whales. Catullus and Skelton both produced poems on young ladies’ sparrows; but Catullus’ poem has eighteen lines; Skelton’s one thousand three hundred and eighty-two. Yet at times, even in the Middle Ages, the virtue of terseness reappears in Latin hymn or vernacular lyric:
Dies irae dies illa,
Teste David cum Sibylla,
Solvet saeclum cum favilla. [109]
The Erth goes on the Erth glittering with gold;
The Erth goes to the Erth sooner than it wold;
The Erth builds on the Erth castles and towers;
The Erth says to the Erth, ‘All this is ours.’
Mais où sont les neiges d’antan? [110]
Or again there is the splendid brevity in the best Ballads:
May Margaret sits in her bower door
Sewing her silken seam;
She heard a note in Elmond’s wood,
And wish’d she there had been.
She loot the seam fa’ frae her side,
The needle to her tae,
And she is on to Elmond’s wood
As fast as she could gae.
And then there are the Icelandic Sagas. Iceland gave modern Europe its earliest parliament; but also, curiously enough, some of its first lessons in reticence. Indeed, the best of these tales of men and women who feel so much, and say so little, seem to me in some ways more tragic than any stage-tragedies, where the characters have constantly to unpack their hearts in tirades; since otherwise there could be no play. Few would wish to shorten the last speeches of Antigone, or Othello, or Phèdre; and yet I am not sure that the laconic words of Njal and Bergthora before the burning of Bergthórshvoll do not move me more; or the brief, bitter utterance of Gudrun Oswifsdottir above the slain Kiartan; or her summary in old age of her life’s vicissitudes: ‘I did the worst to him I loved the best’ – ‘Theim var ek verst, er ek unna mest.’ Such things go deeper and ring truer than all the windy eloquence of actors. I have seen real tragedies happen to those I knew: I found I respected most those that talked the least.
Again, Dante’s Divine Comedy is not a terse poem; yet it is terseness that gives life to some of its greatest lines. Thanks to that, what poet more leaves his sting in his hearers?
Non ragioniam di lor, ma guarda e passa. [111]
Vuolsi cosi colà, dove si puote
Ciò che si vuole; e più non dimandare. [112]
Cesare armato con gli occhi grifagni. [113]
(Of Semiramis) Che libito fe’ licito in sua legge. [114]
Amor che a nullo amato amor perdona. [115]
Quel giorno più non vi legemmo avante. [116]
E quindi uscimmo a riveder le stelle. [117]
Siena mi fe’, disfecemi Maremma. [118]
It is clear that Dante consciously admired brevity (in which his countrymen have not always followed him); for he attributes it to his pagan worthies in Limbo:
Genti v’eran con occhi tardi e gravi,
Di grande autorità ne’ lor sembianti;
Parlavan rado, con voci soavi. [119]
In medieval England, Chaucer and Malory are not brief writers; but at least they begin to show some sense of the value of brevity:
But flee we now prolixitee best is,
For love of God, and lat us faste go
Right to th’ effect, withouten tales mo.
The superiority of the best Canterbury Tales is partly due to a growing realization of this need. The Knight’s Tale is only a quarter the length of its original in Boccaccio. Similarly Malory’s stories are only from a half to a fifth of the length of his sources; had he been as verbose, he might well have been as forgotten.
At the Renaissance men seem at first too delighted with the new-found capacities of language to be very economical with it. Few poems are more leisurely than The Faerie Queene (Spenser might have retorted that queens should not run); and though Elizabethan drama is full of rapid action, most of it is also gorgeously full of words. Only seldom does it attain such superb compression as Webster’s
Cover her face: Mine eyes dazell: she di’d yong.
True, the sonnet spread, and the sonnet is a brief form; but it does not seem to encourage brevity so much as might be expected; especially when written in sequences. And often even a sonnet seems too long for what the sonneteer really has to say.
In Renaissance prose the Ciceronianism which had worshipped that orator’s sonorous amplitude produced a natural reaction. His elaboration irritated the good sense of Erasmus, and his wordiness the Gascon energy of Montaigne. A terser rival-model was provided by Seneca; though opponents jeered at his ‘pipkins’, or at ‘the dry chips of short-lunged Seneca’, or at the ‘hopping’ style of his Flemish imitator Lipsius (1547–1606). So developed a long conflict between le style périodique and le style coupé (a partly needless conflict, [120] I think, since a good writer has occasions for both); until the close of the seventeenth century in England brought victory to neither, but to the gentlemanly ease of Dryden, the honest plainness of Tillotson, the scientific precision of the Royal Society.
As a thinker, Bacon condemned the over-copious fluency of Cicero; but he also condemned as only ‘a little healthier’ the brevity of Seneca and Tacitus, because too artificially epigrammatic. As an essayist, on the other hand, he learnt from the style of Seneca’s Epistles. He bettered his model, however; and his epoch can show no more striking monument of concentrated brevity.
Iterations are commonly loss of time; but there is no such gain of time as to iterate often the state of the question; for it chaseth away many a frivolous speech as it is coming forth. [121] Long and curious speeches are as fit for despatch, as a robe or mantle with a long train is for a race. Prefaces, and passages, and excusations, and other speeches of reference to the person, are great wastes of time; and though they seem to proceed of modesty, they are bravery. [122] … Above all things, order and distribution, and singling out of parts, is the life of despatch: so as the distribution be not too subtile; for he that doth not divide will never enter well into business; and he that divideth too much will never come out of it clearly. To choose time, is to save time; and unseasonable motion is but beating the air. (Of Despatch.)
There are also good brevities in Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy; but his book rambles
– though it rambles delightfully, if taken in small doses. [123] Perhaps it is only after 1660 that brevity, like wit, comes at last into its own – in work like the maxims of La Rochefoucauld, the Pensées of Pascal, the Theophrastian characters of La Bruyère, the verse of Pope, the prose of Voltaire and Montesquieu, or parts of Sterne and Burke and Landor. A few examples will suffice here, as reminders of that great age.
La véritable éloquence consiste à dire tout ce qu’il faut et à ne dire que ce qu’il faut. [124]
– La Rochefoucauld
Words are like leaves; and where they most abound,
Much fruit of sense beneath is rarely found.
– Pope
Yes I am proud; I must be proud to see
Men not afraid of God, afraid of me. [125]
– Pope
‘I have left Trim my bowling-green,’ said my uncle Toby. My father smiled. ‘I have also left him a small pension.’ My father looked grave.
– Sterne
Pour bien écrire, il faut sauter les idées intermédiaires; assez pour n’être pas ennuyeux; pas trop, de peur de n’être pas entendu. Ce sont ces suppressions heureuses qui ont fait dire à M. Nicole que tous les bons livres étoient doubles. [126]
– Montesquieu
Jamais vingt volumes in-folio ne feront de révolutions: ce sont les petits livres portatifs à trent sous qui sont à craindre. Si l’Évangile avait coûté douze cents sesterces, jamais la réligion chrétienne ne se serait établie. [127]
– Voltaire
The present question is not how we are to be affected with it in regard to our dignity. That is gone. I shall say no more about it. Light lie the earth on the ashes of English pride!
– Burke
I had avoided him; I had slighted him; he knew it; he did not love me; he could not. [128]
– Landor, of Byron
Whom should we contend with? The less? It were inglorious. The greater? It were vain.
