Style- the Art of Writing Well

by F L Lucas

  Motion, however, may be in some sort exemplified; and yet it may be suspected that even in such resemblances the mind often governs the ear, and the sounds are estimated by their meaning. One of their most successful attempts has been to describe the labour of Sisyphus:

  With many a wear step, and many a groan,

  Up a high hill he heaves a huge round stone;

  The huge round stone, resulting with a bound,

  Thunders impetuous down, and smokes along the ground. [291]

  Who does not perceive the stone to move slowly upward, and roll violently back? But set the same numbers to another sense:

  While many a merry tale, and many a song,

  Cheer’d the rough road, we wish’d the rough road long.

  The rough road then, returning in a round,

  Mock’d our impatient steps, for all was fairy ground. [292]

  We have now surely lost much of the delay, and much of the rapidity. [293] But to show how little the greatest master of numbers can fix the principles of representative harmony, it will be sufficient to remark that the poet who tells us that

  When Ajax strives some rock’s vast weight to throw,

  The line too labours, and the words move slow:

  Not so, when swift Camilla scours the plain,

  Flies o’er th’ unbending corn, and skims along the main;

  when he had enjoyed for about thirty years the praise of Camilla’s lightness of foot, tried [294] another experiment upon sound and time, and produced this memorable triplet:

  Waller was smooth; but Dryden taught to join

  The varying verse, the full resounding line,

  The long majestic march, and energy divine.

  Here are the swiftness of the rapid race, and the march of slow-paced majesty, exhibited by the same poet in the same sequence of syllables, except that the exact prosodist will find the line of swiftness by one time longer than the line of tardiness. [295] Beauties of this kind are commonly fancied; and, when real, are technical and nugatory, not to be rejected, and not to be solicited. [296]

  Though one may differ on details, in essentials Johnson seems to me right. Both in verse and prose there are occasions when the rhythm may be made to suit the sense. But such artifices, even when really intended, have only a limited scope, like noises off in the theatre. The sounds of galloping hoofs, rolling thunder, whistling winds or locomotives, so beloved by the B.B.C., are well enough, but they make a very minor part of the drama. There are critics who adore to analyse such minutiae of style, often because they like to admire artistic work for different reasons from those of the ordinary person, and would rather dwell microscopically on the beauty of the blades of grass in Botticelli’s Primavera than feel the tragic beauty of the whole. But such aesthetes do not seem to me very large-minded. It is too easy to become a kind of critical beauty-doctor more interested in make-up than in humanity.

  Imitative passages exist. They can give pleasure. But it remains, I think, pleasure of a minor kind. A good example (whether or no it is a good passage) may be found in Kingsley’s Yeast (ch. III).

  He tried | to think, | but the riv|er would | not let | him. | It thund|ered and spouted out || behind | him from | the hatch|es, | and leapt madly past him, and caught his eyes in spite of him, | and swept | them away | down its danc|ing waves | , and let them go again only to sweep them down again and again, [297] till his brain felt a delicious dizziness | from the ev|erlast|ing rush || and the ev|erlast|ing roar. | And then below, how it spread, and writhed, and whirled into transparent fans, hissing and twining snakes, polished glass wreaths, huge crystal bells, which boiled up from the bottom, | and dived | again | beneath | long threads | of cream|y foam, | and swung | round posts | and roots, | and rushed blackening under dark weed-fringed boughs, and gnawed at the marly banks, | and shook | the ev|er-rest|less bul|rushes, | till it was swept away and down over the white pebbles and olive weeds, | in one | broad ripp|ling sheet | of molt|en sil|ver, | towards | the dist|ant sea. | Downwards | it fleet|ed ev|er, | and bore | his thoughts float|ing on | its oil|y stream; | and the | great trout, | with their yell|ow sides | and pea|cock backs, | lounged among the eddies, and the silver grayling dimpled and wandered upon the shallows, and the May-flies flickered and rustled round him like water-fairies, with their green gauzy wings; the coot clanked musically among the reeds; the frogs hummed [298] their ceaseless vesper-monotone; | the king|fisher dart|ed from | his hole | in the bank | like a blue spark | of electr|ic light; | the swallows’ bills snapped | as they twined | and hawked | above | the pool; | the swifts’ wings whirred like musket balls, [299] as they rushed screaming past his head; | and ev|er the riv|er fleet|ed by, | bearing his eyes away down the current, till its wild eddies | began | to glow | with crim|son || beneath | the setting sun. [300]

  No doubt all this foams down as tumultuously as the river; yet I do not feel wholly happy about it. It seems to strain after effect too much to be effective. It froths a little.

  But, apart from rhythm, there is also the wider question of beauty or fitness in the sound of words themselves. But here too there is a need for scepticism; for here too the ear is often duped. Logan Pearsall Smith, for example, asserted it was ‘obvious’ that ‘long vowels suggest a slower movement than the shorter vowels’. Now it is true that ‘crawl’, ‘creep’, ‘dawdle’ have long vowels and connote slow movement; while ‘skip’, ‘run’, ‘hop’ have short vowels and suggest speed. But ‘leap’, ‘dart’, ‘speed’ are also long – and yet rapid; while ‘drag’, ‘shilly-shally’, ‘hesitate’, ‘dilatory’, despite all their short vowels, indicate slowness.

  No doubt, again, there are some intrinsically ugly words in English, especially pompous polysyllabic words; and others that are intrinsically beautiful; but far fewer of both than we think. E. E. Kellett somewhere tells of some aesthetic body debating which was the most beautiful word in the language; they had almost decided on ‘swallow’, when some ill-intentioned person asked ‘Bird or gulp?’ After that, no more was heard of ‘swallow’. ‘Greece’ may be thought a beautiful word:

  The Isles of Greece, the Isles of Greece!

  The glory that was Greece.

  But ‘grease’? ‘The glory that was grease’? Yet the sound is indistinguishable. [301] ‘Grace’ may seem lovely to the ear, as to the eye; but the French ‘graisse’? ‘Scavenger’, on the other hand, so far as sound goes, might be a noble word; but the sense kills the sound. If ‘forlorn’ meant a kind of potato, would it still ring like ‘a bell’? Would it please us any better than ‘Cominform’? Would ‘Mesopotamia’ rejoice the ear, if it were the name of a disease? ‘Mary Stuart’ is etymologically ‘Mary Styward’, that is, ‘Pig-keeper’; but fortunately for the dignity of that royal name which Alan Breck was proud to bear, most of us forget its derivation. One understands the small boy who said, shuddering, ‘Death! I wish it wasn’t called that. I don’t think I should mind so much if it were called “Hig”. ’ But I suspect that in a short time ‘Hig’ would come to sound as sombre and as sinister. ‘Death’ may seem a breathless, mysterious word; but, when it is a question of boiling a picnic-kettle, who finds anything terrible in the sound of ‘meth’? It was this amazing power of association that Wordsworth forgot when he theorized about common words being best. English has hundreds of musical lines about the sea:

  The unplumb’d, salt, estranging sea.

  The sad, sea-sounding wastes of Lyonesse.

  Yet surely FitzGerald was not unreasonable in complaining that English has nothing better than ‘the miserable word “sea” ’ to express that thing of beauty and terror which for the Greeks was ‘thalassa’ – in whose very syllables one seems to hear the dashing of the surges on some Aegean shore? Why, ‘sea’ is hardly even a word; being identical in sound with a mere letter of the alphabet. It seems inferior even to ‘mer’, ‘Meer’, ‘mare’. And yet our poets manage.

  The point may
perhaps be illustrated by analogy. Think of the meanings (and associations) of a group of words as an electric current; of their sounds as the conductor. Some conduct better than others; some offer marked resistance. A savage touching an electrified copper-wire may suppose the magic to lie in the wire itself; and similarly we are apt sometimes to attribute to verbal sounds a beauty to which indeed they may lend themselves, but which is not always intrinsically theirs. The letter may borrow glories from the spirit. The ear is enormously suggestible. Provided, in short, that a sentence is fine in sense, and fine in rhythm, and easy to articulate – not congested with consonants nor disfigured by jingles, I doubt if it will gain quite so much further beauty or effectiveness from the actual sounds of its syllables – from vowel-play and dentals and labials and the rest of it – as precious persons who revel in this sort of subtlety sometimes suppose. The whole business is liable to degenerate into mere foppery and frippery. [302]

  I am not denying that play on consonants and vowels can be found; as in this passage from Swift:

  There is a portion of enthusiasm assigned to every nation, which if it hath not proper objects to work on, will burst out and set all into a flame. 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.

  Those who like this kind of analysis can point to the scornfully hissing sibilants at the end, to the snarling ‘r’s (‘litera canina’), to that recurrence of ‘p’, ‘v’, and ‘f’ which Stevenson thought particularly potent.

  So with this passage of Burke, likewise concerned with stuffed illusions:

  We have not been drawn and trussed, in order that we may be filled, like stuffed birds in a museum, with chaff and rags, and paltry blurred shreds of paper about the rights of man. We preserve the whole of our feelings, native and entire, unsophisticated by pedantry and infidelity.

  Here again are the scornful sibilants, the growling ‘r’s, the ‘p’s, ‘v’s, and ‘f’s.

  How far such effects were consciously intended, I do not know. Whether they matter much, I am doubtful. It is dangerously easy to grow fanciful about them. After all, there is only a limited number of vowels available, and a rather less limited number of consonants. One must therefore allow a good deal for coincidence. As a colonel of mine used philosophically to remark, when German shells grouped themselves uncomfortably close, ‘They have to burst somewhere.’ Further, even where effects of this kind seem certainly intended, as in some of the lines quoted earlier from Tennyson, there may still be wide disagreement as to what sounds are pleasing. Tennyson, for example, had what seems to me something like a mania about ‘kicking the geese out of the boat’; that is, avoiding the juxtaposition of a word ending with ‘s’ and a following word beginning with it. Yet other poets like Pope, whose ear was no less punctilious, appear to find nothing so terrible about this, and would as soon have written ‘Freedom broadens slowly down’ as ‘Freedom slowly broadens down’ (which is, in fact, apt to be misquoted in the first form). [303] Similarly Dryden got a bee in his bonnet about hiatus; but who minds it? [304]

  There is, however, one sound-device whose importance is less dubious. Let us return a moment to

  The sad, sea-sounding wastes of Lyonesse.

  There is nothing fanciful about the effects, here, of alliteration. This ancient device was already potent in classical poetry; it was the basis of the versification used by our Teutonic forefathers; it has formed countless stock-phrases in proverbial or daily speech, like ‘naked as a needle’, ‘common as the cartway’, ‘by might and main’, ‘by fair means or foul’, ‘in for a penny, in for a pound’. Apart from the pleasure alliteration appears to produce, it does also, I think, act as a kind of lubricant to language, making it easier to articulate.

  No doubt, it is also a dangerous device. This ‘hunting the letter’ grows monotonous in Langland, affected in Lyly, tiresome in Swinburne; who indeed confessed the faults of his style, while continuing to indulge them in the very confession, when he wrote of his Gautier ode, ‘the danger of such metres is diffuseness and flaccidity. I perceive this one to have a tendency to the dulcet and luscious form of verbosity which has to be guarded against lest the poem lose its foothold and be swept off its legs sense and all, down a flood of effeminate and monotonous music, or be lost and spilt in a maze of draggle-tailed melody.’ Perhaps a still stranger example is that quoted by Stevenson [305] from Macaulay:

  Meanwhile the disorders of Kannon’s Kamp went on inKreasing. He Kalled a Kouncil of war to Konsider what Kourse it would be advisable to taKe. But as soon as the Kouncil had met, a preliminary Kuestion was raised. The army was almost eKsKlusively a Highland army. The recent viKtory had been won eKsKlusively by Highland warriors. Great chiefs who had brought siKs or seven hundred fighting men into the field did not think it fair that they should be outvoted by gentlemen from Ireland, and from the Low Countries, who bore indeed King James’s Kommission, and were Kalled Kolonels and Kaptains, but who were Kolonels without regiments and Kaptains without Kompanies.

  I confess that I find this rather shattering; indeed, difficult though that might be, I think it might have rather shattered Macaulay himself. Alliteration can be an excellent tool: but there are few that need more discretion in their use.

  To recapitulate, then, I am driven to the following heretical conclusions about sound and rhythm.

  (1) The reader of prose generally dislikes obvious patches of verse. Yet unobvious patches of verse often lurk in our finest pieces of impassioned prose. Therefore it appears that they please us, provided we do not notice exactly how we are being pleased.

  (2) This disguise of metrical rhythms can be effected partly by moderation in their use; partly by wide variation of the rhythms employed – iambic, trochaic, anapaestic, even dactylic; partly by wide variation in their length, from two or three feet to six or seven. Blank verse, as particularly recognizable, is particularly dangerous. Safety lies in variety.

  (3) Metrical fragments are specially common (and often specially effective), as a sentence nears its close.

  (4) A tendency to metre can be counteracted by abundance of consecutive unstressed syllables. One way of obtaining this abundance is to employ plenty of polysyllables. But this easily becomes pompous or ugly, as in the passages quoted from Meredith. [306] (Indeed, Demosthenes is said to avoid any series of three or more short syllables.) It may also help to use rather short [307] or rather long clauses (for the metrical effect becomes most conspicuous when a clause is exactly the length of a verse). In general, prose of a rather flat, semi-conversational tone, remote from poetry, seems less apt to run to metre; or to be detected, if occasionally it does.

  (5) But those who are too frightened of verse-rhythms are liable to produce a prosaic kind of prose, lacking rhythm of any kind.

  (6) I cannot make it too clear that the effectiveness of verse-rhythms in prose depends on their remaining unobserved. To read them aloud stressing their metre would be as perverse as the contrary efforts of inferior actors to speak Shakespearian metre as if it were blank prose.

  (7) Both in verse and in prose the sound and rhythm can sometimes be made echoes of the sense. But such things are limited in scope and importance. They are apt to seem trivial tricks. And critics who dwell too much on them, tend themselves to produce more sound than sense.

  (8) Fewer words than is generally supposed are intrinsically beautiful or (apart from certain types of galumphing polysyllables) intrinsically ugly. The main thing is that sentences should meet the needs of the respiration, and that combinations of words should come easily off the tongue.

  (9) Alliteration is valuable; but perilous.

  A Note on Final Cadences

  Ancient Greek and Latin writers of rhythmic prose developed certain favourite cadences (clausulae) for the ends of sentences, and even
of clauses – to precede, in short, the places where the speaker paused to breathe. Indeed it becomes clear that ancient audiences had more delicate ears than ours; partly perhaps because ancient literature was far more largely spoken or read aloud. [308]

  It is true that different writers or orators varied widely in their tastes (for example, Isocrates, Cicero, Plutarch liked – ᴗ ᴗ ᴗ – ᴗ ; but Lysias, Aeschines, Brutus, Sallust, Livy, and Tacitus shunned it). [309] Again Cicero carefully eschewed in his own practice some clausulae that in theory he praised.

  Since Cicero, however, was the one surviving classic eminent both in theory and in practice, medieval Latin adopted some of his favourite cadences (though, of course, with stress replacing quantity). These favourite cadences consisted of a cretic (– ᴗ –) followed by from one to two and a half trochees; and their three main varieties were called cursus planus, cursus tardus, and cursus velox.

  Such accentual Latin cadences flourished from the fourth to the sixth century; they revived in the tenth, and were taken up by the Roman Curia; and they occur in the Latin of Dante and Petrarch. Renaissance scholarship, however, naturally dropped them as barbarous.

  At the Reformation the writers of the English Prayer Book appear to have adopted, consciously or unconsciously, rhythms of this kind from the Roman Missal and Breviary. (They also occur in the English Bible.)

  So far there seems general agreement. But it has further been argued that final cadences of this kind play an important part throughout artistic English prose.

  This is asking a good deal. One can believe that English ecclesiastics at the Reformation, familiar with ecclesiastical Latin, might reproduce its cadences in their English; one could believe that later religious-minded writers, familiar with the Prayer Book, might reproduce its cadences in secular prose. But it remains a little hard to believe that ordinary English writers who had never heard of clausula or cursus should reinvent their English equivalents.