Style- the Art of Writing Well

by F L Lucas

  But if concreteness is thus the backbone of style, there remain, as usual, limitations. For one thing, here too the law of variety overrules. No writer is more master of the concrete than Shakespeare.

  He that depends

  Upon your favours, swimmes with finnes of Leade,

  And hewes down Oakes with rushes.

  King, be thy thoughts Imperious, like thy name.

  Is the Sunne dim’d, that Gnats do flie in it?

  By Heaven, I had rather Coine my Heart,

  And drop my blood for Drachmaes.

  Th’expence of spirit in a waste of shame.

  To lie in cold obstruction, and to rot,

  This sensible warme motion, to become

  A kneaded clod …

  Th’expectansie and Rose of the faire State,

  The glasse of Fashion, and the mould of Forme.

  But notice also that, with Shakespeare, even abstractions do not remain the impalpable wisps and waifs of mist that they often are on ordinary lips. They grow solid; they take life; the ‘cloud like a man’s hand’ grips like a hand indeed.

  Thou visible God,

  That souldrest close Impossibilities,

  And mak’st them kisse.

  And arte made tung-tide by authoritie,

  And Folly (Doctor-like) controuling skill,

  And simple-Truth miscalde Simplicitie,

  And captive-good attending Captaine ill.

  Adversity’s sweet milke, Philosophie.

  Leane Famine, quartering Steele, and climbing Fire.

  Personification, you say, is easy? But not personification so solid and tangible as this. Shakespeare’s vividness even in abstraction seems the healthy offspring of a mind that disdained all vaporous vagueness; cared little for general theories; saw, heard, smelt, tasted, or touched even the most rarefied concepts; materialized and embraced even the most platonic ideas.

  But the writer who seeks vitality in concrete details and vivid touches has still to beware of confounding his skill with covetousness. He can become nigglingly minute, oppressively multitudinous.

  Why has not Man a microscopic eye?

  For this plain reason, Man is not a fly.

  Say, what the use, were finer optics giv’n,

  T’ inspect a mite, not comprehend the heav’n?

  How minute a description should be remains a fascinating problem; and I know no better starting-point for discussing it than Johnson on tulips.

  You will remember, in Johnson’s Rasselas, Imlac’s theory of poetry: ‘The business of a poet is to examine, not the individual but the species; to remark general properties and large appearances; he does not number the streaks of the tulip, or describe the different shades in the verdure of the forest. He is to exhibit in his portraits of nature such prominent and striking features, as recall the original to every mind; and must neglect the minute discriminations, which one may have remarked, and another have neglected, for those characteristicks which are alike obvious to vigilance and carelessness.’

  Art, thought Johnson, following Aristotle, is imitation; the artist’s business is to remind us; and our pleasure is to recognize. [208] If the poet says a tulip has seventeen streaks of tawny-yellow, am I to run into the garden to count them? When tulips, anyway, are probably out of season? (A strange view. Johnson wisely says elsewhere that the writer makes new things familiar, as well as familiar things new. Why may he not tell us something new about tulips? If he seems trustworthy, we would take his word for it – as we take Shakespeare’s when, flatly transgressing Johnson’s rule, he describes on Imogen’s breast ‘a mole Cinque-spotted: Like the Crimson drops I’ th’ bottome of a Cowslippe.’)

  Moreover Johnson held, again following Aristotle, that serious poetry should both generalize (for this is more philosophic) and idealize (for this is nobler). Now petty peculiarities are not general – the streaks of tulips may vary; and they are not noble. God may see with equal eye ‘A hero perish or a sparrow fall’; but we do not.

  Similarly Johnson’s friend, Reynolds, on painting: ‘The whole beauty and grandeur of the art consists in my opinion in being able to get above all singular forms, local customs, particularities and details of every kind.’ (Just those details, in fact, that Romantics and Realists were lovingly to seek.) But Reynolds makes one vital admission which Johnson had not made: ‘I am very ready to allow that some circumstances of minuteness and particularity frequently tend to give an air of truth to a piece, and to interest the spectator in an extraordinary manner’; this, however, needs ‘peculiar nicety of discernment’. Reynolds, in short, might have allowed the warts in Cromwell’s portrait; Johnson presumably not (unless to humiliate the Whig dog). Fortunately Boswell was to include plenty of warts in his portrait of Johnson.

  Reynolds’s view seems to me much more reasonable than Johnson’s; how far is it borne out by the practice of literature?

  The Greeks, I think, tend to keep, in this also, near to the happy mean. Homer (who surely cannot have been blind from birth) has the keenest vision for little, vivid things, especially in his similes – he sees the dog Argus wagging his tail and laying back both his ears as he recognizes, dying, his master returned after twenty years of war and wandering; or the sudden darkening of the sea as the west wind rises; or the way the inrolling wave washes off the falling snow upon a beach. ‘Homère,’ observes Voltaire, ‘exprime tout ce qui frappe les yeux’; whereas ‘les Français, qui n’ont guère commencé à perfectionner la grande poésie qu’au théâtre, n’ont pu et n’ont dû exprimer alors que ce qui peut toucher l’âme’. [209] This does not seem to me quite true. Homer does not express everything that strikes the eye; he markedly avoids the ugly. He will, indeed, describe wounds in even excessive detail; but, by an extraordinary departure from realism, if his heroes survive, they are never permanently maimed or disfigured. No one-legged warrior hobbles across the Trojan plain. [210] The only human deformity I can recall among his characters is the loathed demagogue Thersites. None the less, Voltaire’s distinction remains essentially just.

  Similarly, Hesiod notices such details as the swollen foot nursed by the vagrant’s hunger-wasted hand. Amid the giant figures of Aeschylus there is place also for the lice that torment the warriors under Troy, for the tiny whining gnat that could wake Clytemnestra, as she pretends, from slumbers tormented with anxiety for her husband overseas. Theocritus can paint the lizard in the old stone walls beneath the blaze of noon, or the reflection in the calm Sicilian sea of the dog that dashes barking along the beach. To be subtle without ceasing to be simple; to be realist, yet not crude; to be minute at the right moment, but not all the time; to add here and there the little concrete touch, but only here and there – this, at their best, the Greeks achieved.

  Latin literature dwells perhaps less on such vivid details – except in its comedy; in didactic poetry like Virgil’s Georgics; in familiar poetry like some of Horace; in satire like Juvenal; or in fiction like Petronius. (And such exceptions even eighteenth-century taste allowed.) But the Middle Ages, uncowed by criticism, went back to enjoying the tulip with all its streaks. ‘Dante,’ says Voltaire, ‘accoutuma les Italiens à tout dire.’ [211] For example, as the Sodomites peer at him and Virgil through the dimness of Hell,

  sì ver noi aguzzavan le ciglia

  Come vecchio sartor fa nella cruna. [212]

  Villon, again, sees the blackened faces of his comrades a-swing on the gallows, pecked and pitted by the crows, ‘like thimbles’. Chaucer notes unerringly the hare-like glare in his Pardoner’s eyes; the hairs on the Miller’s wart,

  Reed as the brustles of a sowes eryes; [213]

  how the slack skin shakes on old January’s neck, as he trolls to his young May; how the friar in the Summoner’s Tale, kissing the goodwife, ‘chirketh as a sparwe’ and – superb touch – shoos the cat from the bench where he sits down (for cats cannot pay subscriptions). Chaucer, indeed, seems to me a perfect master in the art of dealing with
tulips; he never becomes one of those writers with whom one cannot see the tulip for the streaks.

  But here, on the other hand, is the sort of thing that can happen when the temptation of realistic detail is indulged to excess. ‘There came and stood at the foot of my bed the shape of a mannikin (homunculi) most hideous to behold. His stature, as far as I could discern, was middling, his neck thin, his face emaciated, his eyes coal-black, his brow knitted and wrinkled, his nostrils squat, his mouth pouting, his lips blubber, his chin narrow and receding, his beard goatish, his ears hairy and pointed, his hair bristling and dishevelled, his teeth canine, the back of his head tapering, his chest protruded, his back humped, his haunches quivering, his raiment filthy, his whole body vibrating with eagerness and impatience. Seizing hold of the top of the bed on which I was lying, he shook the whole bedstead in terrible fashion.’ [214] Raoul Glaber has here drawn a most conscientious devil; but the reader’s memory and imagination are so smothered under this inventory, often illogical in its order, that the vision, intended to be horrific, remains blurred and unconvincing. Far better are the devilkins which, says Caesarius of Heisterbach, a priest saw at Mainz dancing attendance on an overdressed lady, ‘as gay as a peacock’. ‘On the train that trailed far behind her he observed a number of demons sitting. They were small as dormice [215] and black as Ethiops, grinning and clapping their hands and hopping hither and thither like fish caught in a net.’ These imps are much more vivid; partly because they are less catalogued, partly because, as Lessing would have noted with approval, they become a moving picture, instead of being painted statically, like Raoul Glaber’s demon, item by item, feature by feature.

  With the earlier Renaissance the ‘General’ has not yet been hoisted into the saddle to become a tyrant; Montaigne or Ronsard or Shakespeare can still be realistically precise without being thought ‘low’. The sentry in Hamlet can speak of ‘Not a Mouse stirring’, and the hero stabs Polonius behind the arras with the cry ‘How now, a Rat?’ But Voltaire found that mouse grotesque; Racine, whose father and grandfather had been content to have, for their punning arms, a rat and a swan (Ratcygne), bestirred himself to get rid of ‘ce vilain rat’; and Grainger, it will be recalled, in his Sugar-cane having first written ‘Now, Muse, let’s sing of mice’, ennobled ‘mice’ to ‘rats’, and then ‘rats’ to ‘the whisker’d vermin race’. For ‘race’ is a glorious abstraction; no one has ever seen a race. On similar principles, the technical sea-terms used in his Annus Mirabilis later gave Dryden pangs of artistic conscience incomprehensible to readers of Masefield.

  Fortunately some less noble forms like fiction, satire, or burlesque had escaped these aristocratic taboos; hence the circumstantial detail which enlivens Defoe’s novels, or Gulliver, or The Rape of the Lock. The Romantics restored this freedom to literature at large, realizing once more that even small things may become great by their associative, suggestive, or symbolic power – like the daisy or the mouse of Burns; or Coleridge’s last red leaf dancing on its December bough; or Wordsworth’s lesser celandine, or his daisy

  with its star-shaped shadow thrown

  On the smooth surface of the naked stone.

  This realization is, indeed, summed up in the flower that Tennyson plucked from the wall:

  Flower in the crannied wall,

  I pluck you out of the crannies,

  I hold you here, root and all, in my hand,

  Little flower – but if I could understand

  What you are, root and all, and all in all,

  I should know what God and man is.

  Our ignorance remains; but so, henceforward, does the nameless flower that symbolized it so well. [216]

  The Pre-Raphaelites in their turn made the truthful counting of tulip-streaks one of their basic principles. Thus Rossetti records how the agonized grief that bowed a man’s head to earth might leave him, unlike Coleridge’s wedding-guest, no wiser – except for the vain, irrelevant vision that

  The woodspurge has a cup of three.

  That counting of the cups of woodspurges is not futile: it becomes an emblem of grief’s tragic futility.

  But in the modern world the danger of excess in minute realism has grown greater, perhaps, than ever before. The novel in particular, seeking verisimilitude, has often accumulated trivial observations and trumpery conversations (as if there were not bores enough in real life, without looking for them in books), till the reader often feels as if he were buried to the neck in an ants’ nest of petty, laborious, irritating creatures. Rossetti might vividly put a mouse in the cell of his praying monk, as a sign of its rapt silence; but not hundreds of mice, as if it were the tower of the Bishop of Bingen. The later Tolstoy reacted strongly against the ‘superfluous detail’ of realistic fiction like Gogol’s and his own. The common-sense conclusion still seems that one should love vivid details, but love them with discretion and with distrust. For without a fastidious, yet practical sense of values this sort of art can degenerate into a sedulous incatenation of fleas. One feather of the eagle will often suffice – and ‘I forget the rest’.

  There is, for example, a touch in Flaubert’s Madame Bovary that by its subtle simplicity has left a lasting mark on my memory – his picture of his poor romance-besotted heroine in her drab, provincial home gazing nostalgically at the stain of yellow wax on her dancing-shoes, which recalls her momentary glimpse of her false paradise in the ball at the château. That yellow wax seals itself on the reader’s mind.

  Here, again, are four silences.

  (Of lovers.)

  They tread on clouds, and though they sometimes fall,

  They fall like dew, but make no noise at all.

  So silently they one to th’ other come,

  As colours steal into the Peare or Plum.

  – Herrick

  (Night in the American wilderness.)

  On dirait que des silences succèdent à des silences. [217]

  – Chateaubriand

  (After the speech of Hamilcar before the Ancients at Carthage.)

  Et le silence pendant quelques minutes fut tellement profond qu’on entendait au loin le bruit de la mer. [218]

  – Flaubert

  He was sitting motionless, on the bare ground – so motionless that as I came near a little bird rose from the dried mud, two paces from him, and passed across the pond, with little beats of its wings, whistling as it went.

  – Turgeniev [219]

  All four seem to me superb; but in different ways. Herrick, as a poet, is not so much concerned to intensify our impression as to enrich it with the similar beauty of other silences – the noiselessness of the summer orchard, of the clouds that sink along the hills. Chateaubriand heightens our sense of the hush of the virgin forest by making the concrete more abstract – ‘des silences succèdent à des silences’; and thus achieves a stillness yet completer than those lovely lines of La Fontaine:

  O belles, évitez

  Le fond des bois et leur profond silence.

  (In both writers, naturally, the beauty of their verbal music helps.) Flaubert and Turgeniev, on the other hand, make us hear the stillness more vividly by adding one small concrete detail of circumstantial evidence – how utter the quiet must have been, if the distant sea could be heard, or a little bird grow so bold! Johnson, I suppose, might have approved the sentence of Flaubert – the sea is grand, and general, and appropriate here because on its shifting restlessness was built the dominion of Carthage herself; he might have questioned Turgeniev’s little bird, the little beats of its wings, its whistling as it flew, as being too trivial – and yet how they too bring the scene to life!

  It was this same sense of the need to make writing vividly alive that made Dostoievski demand of a writer who had described a man throwing money from the window to an organ-grinder, ‘I want to hear that penny hop and chink.’ [220]

  And so, more and more, Reynolds seems to me right, rather than his friend Johnson. ‘Some circumstances of
minuteness and particularity frequently tend to give an air of truth to a piece, and to interest the spectator in an extraordinary manner’; though Reynolds seems no less right in stressing the need for ‘a peculiar nicety of discernment’.

  All this, no doubt, applies particularly to descriptive writing; but there are, I think, few styles of any kind that do not gain new strength from a passionate hatred of unreality, of the woolly and the nebulous, the indefinite and the imprecise. Well for the writer who remembers always not only sense, but also the senses.

  This seems to me one of the great excellences of Macaulay. Often his ideas may be somewhat shallow; but they are sharp. His mind was so richly furnished with vivid details from the past that he was never at a loss for illustration and analogy; and where so many historians or political thinkers have produced only valleys of dry bones, he could add living flesh and coloured raiment. He might deride the relic-mongering of Horace Walpole – ‘researches after Queen Mary’s comb, Wolsey’s red hat, the pipe which Van Tromp smoked during his last seafight, and the spur which King William struck into the flank of Sorrel’; but perhaps he was himself, in a way, less unlike Walpole than he supposed. For, mentally, he too was a tireless collector of precise antiquarian detail; and it is typical, not only that he should love thus to catalogue Walpole’s treasures, but that he should add to them the name, even, of King William’s horse.

  What’s in the name of Sorrel? Quite a lot, I think, for the vividness of the passage. How much duller, if he had said simply ‘King William’s spurs’! Indeed this magic of proper names exemplifies yet again the power of the concrete, the definite, the individual. And of that magic, like Marlowe and Milton, Macaulay was well aware. It is easy, for instance, to propound the general principle that men have repeatedly been fooled by hopes that a hostile nation will collapse economically; but from Macaulay’s pen it comes with a very different energy: ‘As if Alboin could not turn Italy into a desert till he had negotiated a loan at five per cent, as if the exchequer bills of Atilla had been at par.’ [221] Rhetoric? And why not? The English seem often curiously prim and prudish about rhetoric. There is good rhetoric and bad; and I see no cause why we should avert fastidious faces from what satisfied Pericles and Pitt, Burke and Abraham Lincoln.