Style- the Art of Writing Well
Page 1
Table of Contents
Cover
Publishing details
Currently available by the same author
Praise for Style
About the Author
A Brief History of Style
Preface
Author’s Acknowledgements
CHAPTER 1: The Value of Style
CHAPTER 2: The Foundation of Style – Character
CHAPTER 3: Courtesy to Readers (1), Clarity
A Note on Italics
CHAPTER 4: Courtesy to Readers (2), Brevity and Variety
A Note on Epithets
CHAPTER 5: Courtesy to Readers (3), Urbanity and Simplicity
CHAPTER 6: Good Humour and Gaiety
CHAPTER 7: Good Sense and Sincerity
CHAPTER 8: Good Health and Vitality
CHAPTER 9: Simile and Metaphor
CHAPTER 10: The Harmony of Prose
A Note on Final Cadences
CHAPTER 11: Methods of Writing
Publisher’s Acknowledgements
Publishing details
HARRIMAN HOUSE LTD
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First published 1955 by Cassell & Co. Ltd. Second edition published 1964 by Pan Books Ltd. First edition reissued as ‘Second edition’ in 1974 by Cassell & Co Ltd. This edition published 2012 by Harriman House Ltd, based on 1964 Pan second edition.
Copyright © F. L. Lucas
The right of F. L. Lucas to be identified as the Author has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
Author photo by Edward Leigh, FRPS, Cambridge; reproduced by permission of the Fellows and Provost of King’s College, Cambridge, and Dr S. Oliver Lucas.
ISBN: 9780857191885
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A CIP catalogue record for this book can be obtained from the British Library.
All rights reserved; no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise without the prior written permission of the Publisher. This book may not be lent, resold, hired out or otherwise disposed of by way of trade in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published, without the prior written consent of the Publisher.
To Sir Charles Tennyson
Currently available by the same author
The Decline and Fall of the Romantic Ideal
Seneca and Elizabethan Tragedy
Poems, 1935
Marionettes (a collection of verse)
Four Plays
Euripides and his Influence
Praise for Style
‘Style is filled with fine things … F. L. Lucas wrote the best book on prose composition for the not-so-simple reason that, in the modern era, he was the smartest, most cultivated man to turn his energies to the task.’
– Joseph Epstein, The New Criterion
‘Lucas’s advice can do nothing but good. His own style illustrates the virtues he commends.’
– Guardian
‘Lucas has written a delightful book, exemplifying brilliantly all that it seeks to instil; enjoyment of reading and mastery of writing.’
– Time and Tide
‘This is a splendid book. It must be set beside Q’s On the Art of Writing.’
– Times Educational Supplement
‘Young readers particularly should find his book useful not only for what it has to say about style but for the supple and manly prose in which it is written.’
– Times Literary Supplement
‘This book is certain to delight many readers and could help many writers. Mr. Lucas has distinguished himself in more than thirty volumes as a poet, a novelist, a translator, a biographer, a critic and an editor. He is entitled to write about style because he writes with style. He is always clear, harmonious and pointed. His quotations are lavish and often exquisite, revealing an enviable intimacy with the best writing in seven languages. He insists that style is an expression of character, and urges his pupils to be urbane, gay, honest and laconic. His book shows that he teaches by example as well as by precept.’
– Sunday Times
‘Lucas has written a thoroughly enjoyable and stimulating book.’
– Daily Telegraph
‘There is more sound sense in this book than in most attempts to improve the taste of the “young person” … Lucas’s book can be enjoyed, apart from its argument, as an anthology of splendid and unfamiliar passages in English, French and Latin.’
– Spectator
‘a romantic synthesis of the gentlemanly approach to literature … we are bound to approve … Lucas has one secret that he is too wise to give away. He is never dull.’
– The Cambridge Review
‘One of the great pleasures to be derived from this book is the copiousness of quotation, the entertaining relevance of anecdote drawn from several languages and various climes. … A book which anybody who at all loves prose must take delight in, and which whoever tries to write prose will profit by, for Mr. Lucas is never dogmatic, and practises what he preaches.’
– BBC Listener magazine
‘Lucas should know what he is talking about when it comes to writing a book about style. What is more important is that his book of nearly 300 pages has been written with style – so much so that it is one of the few books of its kind which can be read through from cover to cover at one sitting.’
– Yorkshire Post
‘The book’s most obvious merit lies in [its] quotations. There are almost as many in French as in English, and their range and aptness are remarkable.’
– New Statesman
‘When writers (and speakers) of English are no longer wordy, obscure, dull or pompous, then let this book go out of print; but not before. … To flick over the pages of the book is to get an impression of immense erudition. Erudite it certainly is. But Lucas wears his learning lightly. He has a nice feeling for the apt anecdote and the witty analogy; and from the storehouse of his vast knowledge come many fascinating tit-bits thrown out quite casually. … It would be quite wrong to think that this is a book only for students of “Eng. Lit.” It is for all writers who would please or persuade their readers, for all readers who would enjoy good writing more (and also enjoy more good writing).’
– Sir Bruce Fraser, editor of Gowers’ The Complete Plain Words
About the Author
Frank Laurence (‘Peter’) Lucas (1894–1967), Fellow of King’s College, Cambridge, was a distinguished literary scholar and one of the most versatile English writers of the twentieth century. Two of his books were best-sellers: Tragedy in relation to Aristotle’s ‘Poetics’ (1927, enlarged 1957), a handbook popular among literature students; and Style (1955), an acclaimed guide to the art of writing good prose. His most important contribution to scholarship was his four-volume Complete Works of John Webster (1927), the first modern edition of the Jacobean dramatist, which earned him the accolade ‘the perfect annotator’ from T. S. Eliot.
On a grand scale too were his volumes of verse-translations from Greek and Latin poetry, especially his Greek Poetry (1951) and Greek Drama (1954). His versions, in traditional metres and diction, were praised for their grace and fidelity. But though Lucas gained fame as critic and translator, his deepest wish was recognition as a creative writer. T. E. Lawrence admired his poems and became a f
riend. A few of these appeared in anthologies. The best surely deserve to be better known – including his First World War poems ‘Morituri – August 1915, on the road from Morlancourt’ and ‘ “The Night is Chilly but not Dark” ’ (both 1935); his poems based on legend and history, such as ‘The Destined Hour’ and ‘Spain 1809’ (1953); and his romantic lyrics like ‘Her Answer, in after years’ and ‘Dead Bee inside a window-pane’ (1935).
Of his fiction, Vita Sackville-West and E. M. Forster praised the sensitive, stylish novel-of-ideas, Cécile (1930), about love, philosophy and politics in the France of Turgot. Lucas also turned his hand to drama. The Bear Dances (1932) was the first dramatisation of the Soviets on London’s West-end stage. It was a brave attempt at ideological disinfectant, written at a time when Cambridge University (in his words) ‘grew full of very green young men going very Red’.
‘Perhaps the wisest way with controversy,’ Lucas writes in Style, ‘is to avoid it.’ It was a maxim he found hard to keep. He made an exception for what he saw as the obscurantism and decadence of much literary modernism. He made another for the threats to intellectual liberty, to Western Civilisation itself, from Fascism and Nazism. His powerful anti-appeasement letters to the British press from 1933 to 1939, some forty odd, though forgotten today, were widely admired at the time. They are models of the polemicist’s art. ‘This is the voice of the England I love,’ wrote a correspondent from Prague in 1938, ‘and for whose soul I was trembling when I heard about the welcome given Mr Chamberlain on his return from Munich.’ There were also articles, satires, books, public speaking, fund-raising, petitions, meetings with émigrés, help for refugees. The Nazis responded by placing him on their list for extermination once Britain had been defeated.
A fine linguist, Lucas was recruited by the Foreign Office on 3 September 1939 to Bletchley Park. One of the original three-man team in Hut 3, he served there throughout the War as a translator, Intelligence analyst and report-writer, on the busiest shift between 4 p.m. and 1 or 2 a.m. He became guru to the newer recruits and for a time acting head of the section. The high standards of accuracy and clarity that prevailed in Hut 3, his chief maintained, were largely due to Major Lucas being such a stickler for them. His recollections of Hut 3, now in the National Archives, are quoted in the history books.
In 1921, Lucas married E. B. C. (‘Topsy’) Jones, a gifted but now neglected novelist. Through the Cambridge Apostles and through Jones he became a marginal figure in the Bloomsbury Group: his closest friendships here were with Dora Carrington and with Charles and Marie Mauron. Bloomsbury ethics undid his first marriage in the late twenties; Cambridge ethics made his second, in 1932, to a young Girton graduate, Prudence Wilkinson, who shared his passion for grueling walks in wild scenery (Scotland, Ireland, Greece, Iceland and Norway) and who helped inspire his travel-writings. The tragic illness and early death of Prudence Lucas led indirectly to his third marriage, in 1940, to the Swedish psychologist Elna Kallenberg, ‘the stranger who came to me from over the sea when I most needed her’.
The last three decades of his life, focused on family life, were his happiest. Psychology became a passion; he wrote the fine works of his maturity, including Style; he wrote an essay on Happiness. His old campaigning energy he channeled into urgent warnings on the dangers of world over-population (The Greatest Problem, and Other Essays, 1960).
A. Z.
A Brief History of Style
Style, F. L. Lucas’s most famous book, began as a course of lectures at Cambridge given each year from 1946 to 1953, at first called ‘English Prose and the writing of it’, then ‘Style, from Aristotle’s Rhetoric onwards’ – and finally just ‘Style’.
The subject, indeed, had always interested Lucas. He wrote his first book, Seneca and Elizabethan Tragedy (1922) – still in print today – not because he liked Seneca or his plays but because he was intrigued by the Roman’s epigrammatic style. Oxford’s Sir Richard Livingstone, in a Foreword to Lucas’s second work, Euripides and his Influence (1923), wrote of this upcoming Cambridge don as “already known to the younger generation of scholars for his gifts of style and literary criticism”. Similar tributes followed in a writing career that spanned half a century and a dozen genres. Long before he came to write Style, Lucas had mastered the territory.
The immediate impetus for the lectures was, as Lucas hints in the book, his wartime work as an Intelligence analyst and report-writer in Bletchley Park’s Hut 3. Here the importance of writing well struck him more forcefully than ever. Though he couldn’t name Bletchley Park in the book, its spirit pervades these pages in their note of authority and conviction.
Lucas of course knew his predecessors’ work on the theme, from the guidebooks of Aristotle and Quintilian to Pater’s ‘Essay on Style’. As an undergraduate at Cambridge after the First World War he had attended the lectures of Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch with their emphasis On the Art of Writing. He knew (and had little time for) Sir Herbert Read’s English Prose Style (1928). But to call a book just Style, and set about expounding in it the art of writing well, took some confidence. Perhaps only Lucas, of all the critics of his generation, could have done it, and done it so well.
Style was published in July 1955 by Cassell & Company of London and by The Macmillan Company of New York. Witty, accessible and instructive, it had a wide appeal. It was warmly received by reviewers and readers. Journals usually hostile, that couldn’t forget Lucas’s attacks on Modernism in the twenties and thirties, found little to criticise. Even The Illustrated London News carried a prominent review, with a photograph of the author looking everyone’s idea of “highbrow”.
The first edition soon sold out; a second impression appeared later in 1955, followed by further reprints till the mid-1960s. Meanwhile, in the United States, Holiday magazine had asked Lucas to write a ‘digest’ for its March 1960 number. The resulting essay, ‘On the Fascination of Style’, reprinted in The Odyssey Reader: Ideas and Style (New York, 1968) brought further readers to the book and has remained in print in prose anthologies ever since.
From the start, however, Lucas had received letters of protest from some readers at the book’s often lengthy foreign-language quotations. For the second edition, therefore, published in paperback by Collier Books of New York in 1962 and by Pan Books of London in 1964, as well as making minor revisions he added footnote translations: reluctantly, as he explains in the enlarged Preface. These paperbacks proved popular; today surviving copies disappear quickly from Internet book sites.
In 1974 Cassell published a new edition it mistakenly called the “second”. Unaccountably, it reprinted the first rather than the real second. It added a Foreword by Sir Bruce Donald Fraser, who had revised Sir Ernest Gower’s classic The Complete Plain Words in 1973 and who admired Lucas’s book. This edition sold out by the late seventies. With second-hand copies of any edition now scarce and commanding inflated three-figure prices, a new printing is timely. The present edition is based on the 1964 Pan text, checked against the Cassell original.
Style discusses the qualities that make for clear, varied and pointed prose, with illustrations from numerous literatures and anecdotes from a lifetime’s experience of teaching English at Cambridge. Many readers of Style and not a few writers have felt a debt of gratitude to Lucas, counting themselves lucky to have discovered the book while young – or regretting that they hadn’t discovered it earlier. In the intervening years Style has had its successors and imitators. Readers with long memories still assert that it is the best book of its kind.
Alexander Zambellas
Department of Special Collections and Western Manuscripts, The Bodleian Library, Oxford, 2012
Preface
THIS BOOK CONSISTS of lectures given at Cambridge. Though they have been largely rewritten, I have kept a good deal of their original lecture-form, as being (I hope) rather less formal and less dogmatic. For to dogmatism those who write on language seem, for some reason, particularly prone; and I should like to make it clear at onc
e that, if at times I have put my views strongly, I do not forget that such matters of taste must remain mere matters of opinion.
On the other hand I have here added a good many more specimen passages from various authors. Perhaps I have quoted too much. But a book on style without abundant examples seems to me as ineffectual as a book on art, or biology, without abundant illustrations. Many of these passages are in French. That may be gallomania on my part; but I feel that French prose has often outstanding merits. In the original edition I left such foreign quotations untranslated; for I thought English versions of them might seem both inadequate, and insulting to my public. But since then I have been gently reproached by some readers – for instance, a lady in Denmark and a Discalced Carmelite Father in the Philippines – for baffling and tantalizing them with outlandish tongues. So English versions are now added as well. And I have kept these fairly literal; for it seemed more important to be useful than elegant.
I should perhaps also make it clear from the outset that this book is not concerned, except incidentally, with linguistic or grammatical details such as are dealt with in H. W. Fowler’s admirable Modern English Usage or its many successors. It is not that I undervalue these – on the contrary. They may be at times too purist, or too conservative; but they were never more needed. ‘Correctness’, however, is not my real concern; a style, like a person, may be perfectly correct, yet perfectly boring or unbearable. I have merely tried, successfully or not, to pursue the more general, more positive, but more elusive question – what are the qualities that endow language, spoken or written, with persuasiveness or power?
F. L. Lucas, 1964
Author’s Acknowledgements
Grateful acknowledgement is due to the following authors (or their executors) and publishers for permission to reprint in this volume extracts from works in which they hold the copyright: