Style- the Art of Writing Well

by F L Lucas

  ‘I use the metaphorical,’ said Meredith, ‘to avoid the long-winded.’ Often he did this effectively.

  Slave is the open mouth beneath the closed.

  Time leers between above his twiddling thumbs.

  When the renewed for ever of a kiss

  Whirls life within the shower of loosened hair.

  A kiss is but a kiss now! And no wave

  Of a great flood that whirls me to the sea.

  But as you will! We’ll sit contentedly

  And eat our pot of honey on the grave.

  Strain we the arms for Memory’s hours,

  We are the seized Persephone.

  Thousand eyeballs under hoods

  Have you by the hair.

  Enter these enchanted woods

  You who dare.

  Unfortunately, I feel, Meredith lacked a Greek sense of restraint; as might be expected from one who held the somewhat simple faith that ‘the core of style’ is ‘fervidness’, and would even rebuke young ladies because their nostrils were not lively, nervous, and dilated. Vitality became for him, at times, a sort of St. Vitus’ dance; and in the coils of his twisted ideas he would writhe and mouth like a new Laocoön. Thus sharing Browning’s cult for mere violence, he shared also Browning’s slightly vulgar itch to astonish; so that Morley could describe him at home, on the approach of a new visitor, ‘forcing himself without provocation into a wrestle for violent effects’; and Stevenson lament the admixture with his finer qualities of ‘the high intellectual humbug’. Hence a frequent abuse of metaphor in his later work, such as these lines from The Empty Purse.

  He cancelled the ravaging Plague

  With the roll of his fat off the cliff.

  Do thou with thy lean as the weapon of ink,

  Though they call thee an angler who fishes the vague

  And catches the not too pink.

  Attack one as murderous, knowing thy cause

  Is the cause of community. Iterate,

  Iterate, iterate, harp on the trite:

  Our preacher to win is the supple in stiff:

  Yet always in measure, with bearing polite.

  Yet to Meredith there does belong the credit of seeing and stating the truth that metaphor need not be, as some suppose, an otiose and time-wasting ornament, like a maze in a country-house garden; but can provide at times a most trenchant short-cut.

  As for the humour that imagery can give, I do not know who illustrates this better than dear Fuller. Naturally he got into trouble for it, then and since, with critical owls. Sometimes, indeed, it is not clear whether his humour is intended, or is just the quaintness of his wit – whether we are laughing with him or at him. But often there is no doubt; and, for me, passages like the following make him much more congenial than some Metaphysical minds before him, in the school of Donne, who display their quips with such peacock gravity, and seem too conceited about mere conceits.

  Some serious books that dare flie abroad, are hooted at by a flock of Pamphlets.

  There are some Birds (Sea-pies by name) who cannot rise except it be by flying against the winde, as some hope to achieve their advancement, by being contrary and paradoxical in judgement to all before them.

  (Of tall men.) Ofttimes such who are built four stories high, are observed to have little in their cockloft.

  (Of Sir Francis Drake.) In a word, should those that speak against him fast till they fetch their bread where he did his, they would have a good stomach to eat it.

  Thus dyed Queen Elizabeth, whilest living, the first maid on earth, and when dead, the second in heaven.

  They who count their calling a prison, shall at last make a prison their calling.

  (Of a crippled saint.) God, who denied her legs, gave her wings.

  Wherefore I presume my aunt Oxford will not be justly offended, if in this book I give my mother [245] the upper hand and first begin with her history. Thus desiring God to pour his blessing on both, that neither may want milk for their children, nor children for their milk, we proceed to the business.

  (Of Cambridge Castle.) At this day the castle may seem to have run out of the gate-house, which only is standing and employed for a prison.

  Take away Fuller’s images, and you rob his humour of half its charm.

  For wit in simile and metaphor, let us turn to Swift. His case is the more interesting in that he is sometimes supposed to have almost wholly disdained much imagery. But to say ‘the Rogue never hazards a figure’ [246] is absurd. He put one (a half-dead metaphor, it is true) even on his tomb – ‘ubi saeva indignatio ulterius cor lacerare nequit’. It would be special pleading to point out that The Tale of a Tub is a series of metaphors, or to recall the Bigendians and Littleendians, the high Heels and low, of Gulliver. But the comparative rarity of Swift’s images is not more marked than their point, and often their deadliness, when they do occur. It was Swift that provided Matthew Arnold with a famous watchword in the allegory of the bee’s ‘sweetness and light’, as contrasted with the dirt and poison of the spider (though Swift himself, unhappily, too often chose to be more spider than bee). And when Swift proclaims ‘Surely man is a broomstick’; when he compares Dryden under Virgil’s helmet to a mouse under a canopy of state; or poets preyed on by poets to fleas bit by lesser fleas; when he predicts ‘like that tree, I shall die at top’; when he groans that he is dying ‘in a rage, like a poisoned rat in a hole’, could his rancour have found utterance half so telling without the images? And how bitter is the wit of these!

  Old men and comets have been reverenced for the same reason; their long beards, and pretences to foretell events.

  The reason why so few marriages are happy, is, because young ladies spend their time in making nets, not in making cages.

  (Of lovers.) They seem a perfect moral to the story of that philosopher, who, while his thoughts and eyes were fixed upon the constellations, found himself seduced by his lower parts into a ditch.

  If the quiet of the state can be bought by only flinging men a few ceremonies to devour, it is a purchase no wise man would refuse. Let the mastiffs amuse themselves about a sheepskin stuffed with hay, provided it will keep them from worrying the flock.

  It remains true, however, that Swift is, in general, unusually sparing of simile and metaphor. (And the images he does use are mainly meant not to charm, but to wound.) That is partly why, to me, he is on the whole an unattractive writer – bleak, monotonous, and depressing, though impressive, like a Pennine moorland – not like the Highlands. But Johnson has already said it. ‘That he has in his works no metaphor, as has been said, is not true; but his few metaphors seem to be received rather by necessity than choice.’ [247] ‘This easy and safe conveyance,’ Johnson continues, ‘it was Swift’s desire to attain, and for having attained he deserves praise. For purposes merely didactic, when something is to be told that was not known before, it is the best mode; but against that inattention by which known truths are suffered to lie neglected, it makes no provision; it instructs, but does not persuade.’ This, I think, is just. That widening of sympathy which, for me, is so largely the true end of literature, in Swift’s writing remains rare. He does not persuade.

  It is idle to wish, as Swift trots like a lean grey wolf, with white fangs bared, across his desolate landscape, that he were more like a benevolent Saint Bernard; he would cease to be Swift. Being what he was, he made a striking addition to the infinite variety of the world; but one Swift seems to me quite enough. And his style is of interest as showing both what trenchancy the presence of imagery can give, and how much charm and colour its absence takes away.

  We have so far seen how imagery can add strength and speed, wit and humour. But no less important is its power to stamp a work with a writer’s particular individuality. This was clear long before psychologists began using the images of our dreams to reveal mental conflicts hidden even from ourselves. The light thrown on Shakespeare’s mind by the imagery of his plays, and of one play as contrasted with another, h
as been abundantly – perhaps too abundantly – examined. [248] Writers, again, have used imagery to mark the personality of their characters. It is not least by his metaphors and similes that the tone of impatient impetuousness in Hotspur is brought to life.

  I had rather be a Kitten and cry mew.

  Oh, he’s as tedious

  As a tyred Horse, a rayling Wife,

  Worse than a smoakie House. I had rather live

  With Cheese and Garlick in a Windmill farre,

  Than feede on Cates, and have him talke to me,

  In any Summer-House in Christendome.

  You sweare like a Comfit-makers Wife …

  Sweare me, Kate, like a Lady, as thou art,

  A good mouth-filling Oath: and leave ‘In sooth’,

  And such protest of Pepper Ginger-bread,

  To velvet-guards and Sunday-Citizens.

  Or consider that pair of very different soldiers, Uncle Toby and his corporal. ‘ ’Tis supposed, continued the Benedictine, that St. Maxima has lain in this tomb four hundred years, and two hundred before her canonization. – ’Tis but a slow rise, Brother Toby, quoth my father, in this selfsame army of Martyrs. [249] – A desperate slow one, an’ please your Honour, said Trim, unless one could purchase. I should rather sell out entirely, said my uncle Toby. – I am pretty much of your opinion, Brother Toby, said my father. – Poor St. Maxima, said my uncle Toby low to himself’. [250]

  But a more solid instance may be found in Johnson of the way a man’s images can make him still more himself. ‘His mind’, says Boswell, ‘was so full of imagery, that he might have been perpetually a poet; yet it is remarkable, that, however rich his prose is in this respect, his poetical pieces, in general, have not much of that splendour, but are rather distinguished by strong sentiment and acute observation.’ Take away Johnson’s figures, especially in his talk, and you will weaken a good deal that impression of snorting, militant energy which made Goldsmith say of him, in another metaphor, that if his pistol missed fire, he would knock you down with the butt; and Boswell, no less vividly, that he used no vain flourishes with his sword – ‘he was through your body in an instant’. Typical, for example, are Johnson’s troops of ‘dogs’ – not only ‘Whig dogs’, or ‘factious dogs’, or (of Chesterfield) ‘I have hurt the dog too much already’; but also (before his own portrait) ‘Ah ha! Sam Johnson, I see thee! And an ugly dog thou art!’ – ‘I had rather see the portrait of a dog I know than all the allegorical pictures they can shew me in the world’ [251] – ‘If you call a dog Hervey, I shall love him’ – ‘What, is it you, you dogs! I’ll have a frisk with you.’

  Then there are the bulls he launched at Hume and at Rousseau.

  Truth, sir, is a cow which will yield such people no more milk, and so they are gone to milk the bull.

  If a bull could speak, he might as well exclaim: ‘Here am I with this cow and this grass; what being can enjoy greater felicity?’

  And again, of Edward’s attack on Warburton: ‘Nay, he has given him some smart hits to be sure; but there is no proportion between the two men; they must not be named together. A fly, sir, may sting a stately horse and make him wince; but one is but an insect, and the other is a horse still.’ Omit the second sentence, and how much less Johnsonian the whole becomes!

  So with Johnson’s criticisms. Today they may at times seem false, or old-fashioned; but often, by their gift of metaphor, they still outlive the more meticulous judgements of lesser men. ‘He treads upon the brink of meaning’ – ‘if their conceits were far-fetched, they were often worth the carriage’ – ‘a quibble was to him the fatal Cleopatra for which he lost the world and was content to lose it’ – ‘if blank verse be not tumid and gorgeous, it is crippled prose.’ When he dismissed Gray’s Odes as ‘cucumbers’, it was in the scornful heat of conversation; but the more considered judgement in the Life of Gray – ‘He has a kind of strutting dignity, and is tall by walking on tiptoe’ – lives longer, I find, in the memory than whole chapters by lesser critics. Again what mockery of literary vanity can compare with Johnson on Richardson? – ‘that fellow Richardson, on the contrary, could not be contented to sail quietly down the stream of reputation, without longing to taste the froth from every stroke of the oar’ – ‘that fellow died merely for want of change among his flatterers; he perished for want of more, like a man obliged to breathe the same air till it is exhausted’. And finally when Johnson is himself confronting critics, how typically and genially gigantic is the figure with which he ends! (He is writing to Thomas Warton about the Dictionary.) ‘What reception I shall meet with upon the shore, I know not … whether I shall find upon the coast a Calypso that will court, or a Polyphemus that will eat me. But if a Polyphemus comes to me, have at his eye!’ [252]

  Lastly, the poetry of metaphor. There are owls who want prose to be wholly prosaic. Some kinds of it, yes. Like Locke’s. [253]

  But, whereas poetry is better without any prose in it, prose can often embody a great deal of poetry. Prose in poetry is a blemish like ink on a swan; but prose without poetry becomes too often as drab and lifeless as a Sunday in London. By ‘poetry’ in this sense I do not mean ‘fine writing’, such as De Quincey and Ruskin were sometimes tempted to overdo; I mean a feeling for the beauty, grace, or tragedy of life. It is thanks to this that some can find more essential poetry in Sir Thomas Browne than in Dryden; in Landor than in Byron; in some paragraphs of Yeats’s prose than in twenty shelves of minor verse. And one of the things that reduce me to annual rage and despair in correcting examination papers is the spectacle of two or three hundred young men and women who have soaked in poetry for two or three years, yet seem, with rare exceptions, not to have absorbed one particle of it into their systems; so that even those who have acquired some knowledge yet think, too often, like pedants, and write like grocers.

  To illustrate, then, the poetry that can be added by metaphor and simile let our instances be Chateaubriand and Flaubert – both masters of prose, who yet carried through their lives a tormenting mixture of poetry and irony, romance and bitter realism. There are moments when they make one think of Swift; but, for me, their poetic gift lifts them far above him, as above the long aridity of the Sahara stands up the range of Atlas. Obviously it is not by imagery alone that prose can become poetic – it plays no part in words like those of the old priest to Atala: ‘L’habitant de la cabane et celui du palais, tout souffre, tout gémit ici-bas; les reines ont été vues pleurant comme de simples femmes, et l’on s’est étonné de la quantité de larmes que contiennent les yeux des rois.’ [254] Here are simply mingled memories of the Hebrew Scriptures and of the French Terror. Yet Chateaubriand’s images do remain one of the most frequent channels by which poetry enters his prose.

  (Of great writers and their commentators.) On croit voir les ruines de Palmyre, restes superbes du génie et du temps, au pied desquelles l’Arabe du désert a bâti sa misérable hutte.

  (How crushing the scorn of that last wretched monosyllable!)

  Quelquefois une haute colonne se montrait seule debout dans un désert, comme une grande pensée s’élève, par intervalles, dans une âme que le temps et le malheur ont dévastée.

  La redingote grise et le chapeau de Napoléon placés au bout d’un bâton sur la côte de Brest feraient courir l’Europe aux armes.

  La jeunesse est une chose charmante; elle part au commencement de la vie, couronnée de fleurs, comme la flotte athénienne pour aller conquérir la Sicile.

  Le coeur le plus serein en apparence ressemble au puits naturel de la savane Alachua; la surface en paraît calme et pure, mais quand vous regardez au fond du bassin, vous apercevez un large crocodile, que le puits nourrit dans ses eaux.

  Je ne fais rien; je ne crois plus ni à la gloire ni à l’amour, ni au pouvoir ni à la liberté, ni aux rois ni aux peuples. … Je regarde passer à mes pieds ma dernière heure.

  Personne ne se crée comme moi une société réelle en invoquant des omb
res; c’est au point que la vie de mes souvenirs absorbe le sentiment de ma vie réelle. Des personnes mêmes dont je ne me suis jamais occupé, si elles meurent, envahissent ma mémoire: on dirait que nul ne peut devenir mon compagnon si’l n’a passé à travers la tombe, ce qui me porte à croire que je suis un mort. Où les autres trouveront une éternelle séparation, je trouve une réunion éternelle; qu’un de mes amis s’en aille de la terre, c’est comme s’il venait demeurer à mes foyers; il ne me quitte plus. … Si les générations actuelles dédaignent les générations vieillies, elles perdent les frais de leur mépris en ce qui me touche: je ne m’aperçois même pas de leur existence.

  Je vais partout bâillant ma vie.

  La vie est une peste permanente. [255]

  I do not much like Chateaubriand as a person; but I do not envy those who cannot enjoy the melancholy music of this arrogant and lonely Lucifer.

  Flaubert is less of a posing egotist; more honest and more lovable. But his strength, too, stands rooted in bitterness; which is, I suppose, not quite the finest kind of strength. (In his correspondence with George Sand he seems at times almost like some fretful child of genius whom that wise old woman tries vainly to console.) Yet not even his character, nor his characters, live more vividly in my memory than the brilliant images whose marble seems to gleam out, now defiant, now mournfully resigned, through the green gloom of that Norman garden beside the seaward windings of the Seine.

  Moi, je déteste la vie; je suis un catholique, j’ai au coeur quelque chose du suintement vert des cathédrales normandes.

  (Of Emma Bovary’s fading passion.) Cette lueur d’incendie qui empourprait son ciel pâle se couvrit de plus d’ombre et s’effaça par degrés.

  Leur grand amour où elle vivait plongée, parut se diminuer sous elle comme l’eau d’un fleuve qui s’absorberait dans son lit, et elle aperçut la vase.

  La parole humaine est comme un chaudron fêlé où nous battons des mélodies à faire danser des ours, quand on voudrait attendrir les étoiles.