by F L Lucas
At least it is well that such things should be discussed. A civilized language cannot develop as the unselfconscious child of circumstance, like the tongue of a primitive people. And perhaps even primitive peoples are less unselfconscious about it than we think. Even Athenian fishwives had strong views on Attic Greek. In any case, once education comes, it inevitably brings with it rules and precepts; some for better, some for worse. And these rules and precepts must constantly be open to thought and questioning. Such has been my object. But those who try to contribute to such questioning would be foolish to hope too much. They must rest in the end, as Pope said he was,
Content, if hence th’ unlearn’d their wants may view,
The learn’d reflect on what before they knew.
What the world will be like a century hence, was never so impossible to foresee. Like a gigantic snowball, larger and larger, faster and faster, science hurtles with us all into the unknown. Let us at least hope it is not towards a world of swarming ant-heaps populated by highly mechanized barbarians, a new Dark Age, with technocrats in place of theologians. But whatever the future, no part of our traditional inheritance from the past seems less likely to be superseded than human speech – together with the memorable things that men have made with words.
The English of that future, even if its bounds are ever more widely set, will inevitably differ more and more from ours. [345] That is part of the eternal change of things, and can be accepted without too much regret. But what that English of the hereafter is like, depends, as I have said, in its minute degree on what each of us says each day of our lives. One may hope that it will still be a language plain yet rich, simple yet subtle, graceful yet strong. Whether the effort to keep it so succeeds or fails, I trust that even those who disagree most strongly with all I have said, will yet agree that this effort needs, generation after generation, to be made.
Endnotes
311 Cf. his boast to Mme. Hanska in 1835: ‘Il fallait dix ans à un auteur, dans le XVIIIme siècle, pour fair dix volumes. J’en aurai fait quatorze cette année.’ (‘In the 18th century it took an author ten years to write ten volumes. I shall have written fourteen this year.’) Perhaps the eighteenth-century method, however, had more advantages than Balzac supposed. [return to text]
312 ‘Which all the same must still be deleted.’ [return to text]
313 ‘Well, Monsieur, are you inspired today?’ [return to text]
314 Further details in the chapters on ‘Wit’ and on ‘Creation and Criticism’ in my Literature and Psychology. [return to text]
315 Cf. Proust: ‘Il y a plus d’analogie entre la vie instinctive du public et le talent d’un grand écrivain qui n’est qu’un instinct réligieusement écouté, au milieu du silence imposé à tout le reste, un instinct perfectionné et compris, qu’avec le verbiage superficiel et les critères changeants des juges attitrés.’ ‘There is more in common between the instinctive life of the public and the talent of a great writer (which is simply an instinct religiously listened to, while silence is imposed on everything else – an instinct perfected and understood) than either shares with the superficial verbiage and changing criteria of the official judges.’ Le Temps Retrouvé (1927), II, p. 46. ‘Instinct’ seems hardly the right word. But it remains true, I think, that many critics live to excess in conscientious consciousness; thinking too much, feeling and dreaming too little, blinded by inability to shut their peering eyes. [return to text]
316 Cf. Montesquieu’s idea that one can give one’s thoughts order and logic in one’s study; but ‘dans le monde, au contraire, on apprend à imaginer; on heurte tant de choses dans les conversations que l’on imagine des choses; on y voit les hommes comme agréables et comme gais; on y est pensant par la raison qu’on ne pense pas, c’est à dire que l’on a les idées de hasard, qui sont souvent les bonnes.’ (‘In society, on the contrary, one learns to use one’s imagination; one encounters so many different matters in the conversations there, that one imagines things; one sees men there in a light that is agreeable, and gay; one is thinking, just because one is not thinking, that is to say one has fortuitous ideas, which are often the really good ones.’) Happy age, when such conversation was to be found! [return to text]
317 It seems to me not impossible that the superior ease of the Lives owes something to the incessant conversation, often with minds above the average, of Johnson’s later years, when he had become a lion. [return to text]
318 Cf. Quintilian, X, 3, 17–8: ‘manet in rebus temere congestis quae fuit levitas. Protinus ergo adhibere curam rectius erit atque ab initio sic opus ducere ut caelandum, non ex integro fabricandum sit. Aliquando tamen adfectus sequemur, in quibus fere plus calor quam diligentia valet.’ ‘Things hastily thrown together keep their original flimsiness. Accordingly it will answer better to take more care, and conduct one’s work from the start in such a way that it will need merely to be chiselled, not wholly recast. Still, at times we shall be wise to follow the moods of the moment, where warmth of feeling commonly provides more force than any laboured effort.’ [return to text]
319 Coleridge’s much-discussed distinction between Fancy and Imagination seems not irrelevant here. These terms do not strike me as happy, for in older English Fancy and Imagination are the same thing; and if one wishes to make scientific distinctions of this kind, it may be wiser, as scientists do, to coin new words, free from muddling associations. And the distinction itself seems to have occasioned a lot of false profundity. In general, what Coleridge would call ‘imaginative’ appears to differ from what he would call ‘fanciful’ merely by being more serious, more deeply felt, more an expression of real emotion than an exhibition of cleverness. But it may also be true that ‘imaginative’ ideas often gain their finer quality from having been brooded in the Unconscious, like the materials of The Ancient Mariner; not superficially juggled together by the fully conscious intellect. It would follow (as seems likely anyway) that no sharp line can be drawn between the ‘fanciful’ and the ‘imaginative’ – one fades into the other, like colours in the spectrum. [return to text]
320 The neo-Classic age already knew this. Cf. Roscommon –
And write with fury, but correct with phlegm;
and Walsh’s notion that, ideally, one should be in love to write love-poems, and out of love to correct them.
[return to text]
321 ‘Read it to me as an enemy would.’ [return to text]
322 ‘Genius is simply a great capacity for patience.’ [return to text]
323 ‘I can’t correct, I can’t and I won’t. Nobody ever succeeds in it, great or small.’ But Byron should have been content to speak for himself. And at times even he would revise, and discuss alternative revisions, with considerable care. (See R. E. Prothero, Byron’s Works (Letters and Journals), II, pp. 145–161.) [return to text]
324 I find myself gasping at Trollope’s advice, in his admirable Autobiography, to young writers: ‘That their work should be read after it has been written is a matter of course – that it should be read twice at least before it goes to the printers, I take to be a matter of course.’ Twice! [return to text]
325 ‘Every day I am learning to write.’ [return to text]
326 Similarly Rodin at sixty observed that he was beginning to understand his art; Hokusaï (1760–1849) made a like remark at seventy-three. [return to text]
327 His sixteenth Provinciale had to be produced in haste: ‘cette lettre est donc plus longue qu’il ne souhaitoit’. (‘Accordingly this letter is longer then he wished.’) As usual, brevity needed time. [return to text]
328 A. Albalat, Le Travail du Style (1903), p. 150. (A highly instructive book.) [return to text]
329 The reader may like to be reminded by some examples of the vast improvements sometimes made by revision.(1) Since then at an uncertain hour
Now ofttimes and now fewer,
That anguish comes and makes me tell
My ghastly aventure.
(2) Since then at an uncert
ain hour
That agony returns:
And till my ghastly tale is told,
My heart within me burns.
- Coleridge, Ancient Mariner
(1) Underneath the bearded barley
The reaper, reaping late and early,
Hears her ever chanting cheerly,
Like an angel, singing clearly,
O’er the stream of Camelot.
Piling the sheaves in furrows airy,
Beneath the moon, the reaper weary
Listening whispers, ‘ ’tis the fairy
Lady of Shalott.’
(2) Only reapers, reaping early
In among the bearded barley,
Hear a song that echoes cheerly
From the river winding clearly,
Down to tower’d Camelot:
And by the moon the reaper weary,
Piling sheaves in uplands airy,
Listening, whispers ‘ ’Tis the fairy
Lady of Shalott.’
– Tennyson, Lady of Shalott
.
Compare the development of Housman’s ‘coloured counties’ from ‘sunny’, through ‘pleasant’, ‘checkered’, ‘patterned’, ‘painted’ (in a dream), to its final form.
[return to text]
330 Quoted in R. Lynd, Books and Writers (1952), p. 93. [return to text]
331 Examples of second thoughts that do not seem better.(1) She took me to her elfin grot,
And there she wept and sigh’d full sore,
And there I shut her wild wild eyes
With kisses four.
(2) She took me to her elfin grot,
And there she gaz’d and sighed deep,
And there I shut her wild sad eyes –
So kiss’d to sleep.
– Keats, La Belle Dame Sans Merci
.
(The ‘Knight at arms’ also declines into a ‘wretched wight’.)(1) Awake! for Morning in the Bowl of Night
Has flung the Stone that puts the Stars to Flight:
And lo! the Hunter of the East has caught
The Sultán’s Turret in a Noose of Light.
(2) Wake! for the Sun, who scatter’d into flight
The Stars before him from the Field of Night,
Drives Night along with them from Heav’n, and strikes
The Sultán’s Turret with a Shaft of Light.
– Fitzgerald, Omar Khayyam
.
(The desert Arabs flung a stone into a cup as a signal for striking camp. In the later version this vivid local colour fades away.)
[return to text]
332 ‘He has not time to spoil them.’ [return to text]
333 ‘This super-abundance of documents has enabled me not to be pedantic.’ [return to text]
334 Still more, nine centuries ago, when the happy Benedict of Clusa could boast in 1028 (whether or not one believes him): ‘I have two large houses filled with books. … There is not in the whole earth a book that I have not.’ [return to text]
335 ‘Sir,’ said Johnson, ‘do you read books through?’ There are many, no doubt, that it is a pity not to; but many more where he that runs and skips, reads quite enough. [return to text]
336 Cf. Browning’s remark to Gosse, according to Mr. Harold Nicolson (quoted by Miss B. Patch, Thirty Years with G. B. S., p. 243). Gosse had congratulated the poet on having nothing to regret. But Browning replied that he regretted not having been a civil servant: ‘Had I been a civil servant, I should have been at my office all day and only written in the evening. I have written too much, my dear Mr. Gosse; I have over-written; I have written myself out. If I had been a civil servant, I should have written better and much less.’ Of how many other professional writers might the same be said! [return to text]
337 The blind Milton had to. But then he had presumably composed his verses first, and memorized them before dictating. [return to text]
338 ‘One should write coldly. Everything should be done in cold blood, tranquilly. When Louvel wanted to assassinate the Duc de Berri, he drank a carafe of barley-water, and did not miss.’ [return to text]
339 Milton preferred to compose between the autumnal and spring equinoxes; but if he was thus limited to six months in the year, he could all the less afford to be capricious while they lasted. [return to text]
340 ‘Inspiration consists in sitting down at one’s desk and taking up one’s pen.’ [return to text]
341 See note 2 on p. 3. [return to text]
342 On the other hand Thackeray seems a little too slipshod with his ‘wife of a clergyman of the Church of England.’ But cf. p. 214. [return to text]
343 ‘Treat his subject roughly, brutally.’ [return to text]
344 ‘What made the fortune of literature under Louis XIV was the fact that literature was then a matter of trivial importance.’ – ‘The passions and the arts are simply a ridiculous importance attached to some trifle.’ [return to text]
345 Broadcasting, for example, may perhaps tend to make style less pompous by bringing it closer to ordinary talk; there remains the danger that it might bring style too close to talk – that it might vulgarize, as well as simplify. One can sometimes see this happening already. [return to text]
Publisher’s Acknowledgements
Harriman House and Christopher Parker wish to express their special gratitude to Dr S. Oliver Lucas; Dr Patricia McGuire, Archivist of King’s College, Cambridge; and Alexander Zambellas, of the Bodleian Library, Oxford. Without their gracious help this new edition would not have been possible.
We would also like to thank The New Criterion (www.newcriterion.com) and Mr Joseph Epstein, whose article ‘Heavy sentences’ (tinyurl.com/heavysentences) brought attention to this neglected classic and thereby helped set in train its reissue.
