Style- the Art of Writing Well

by F L Lucas

  But besides these two aims – a deeper enjoyment of the good writing of others, and a better ability to speak, write, and think clearly oneself – the study of style has also a third object: to preserve the purity of the English tongue.

  It is unlikely that many of us will be famous, or even remembered. But not less important than the brilliant few that lead a nation or a literature to fresh achievements, are the unknown many whose patient efforts keep the world from running backward; who guard and maintain the ancient values, even if they do not conquer new; whose inconspicuous triumph it is to pass on what they inherited from their fathers, unimpaired and undiminished, to their sons. Enough, for almost all of us, if we can hand on the torch, and not let it down; content to win the affection, if it may be, of a few who know us, and to be forgotten, when they in their turn have vanished. The destiny of mankind is not governed wholly by its ‘stars’.

  Part of our heritage – you are now coming into it – is the English tongue. You may not be among the few in whose hands it becomes an Excalibur; but you can do your part to pass it on, clean, unrusted, undefiled.

  England no longer holds the place as a world-power that was hers fifty years ago. We no longer need a Kipling to warn us, as in the days of Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee, against blind and blatant arrogance:

  For frantic boast and foolish word,

  Thy mercy on Thy People, Lord!

  Indeed the essays I read sometimes give me an impression of the opposite kind – of a certain alarm and despondency among the young at seeing England overshadowed by two super-states to east and west. But I can really see no cogent reason for talking in the disheartened tones of an Athenian of the third century before Christ, or a Roman of the third century after. The England of the first Elizabeth, the England of Queen Anne, lived likewise in the shadow of more powerful and more populous rivals; that did not prevent the English of those days from enriching civilization to a degree surpassed by none; alike in literature and in thought. For they had two vital assets – the English character and the English tongue.

  Both remain.

  Granted, our position is difficult and dangerous. Yet, were it safer, it might be really more dangerous. For the English tend to be lazy – lazy in thought and lazy in effort, till a crisis comes. We need east winds.

  But our present concern is with language. On the quality of a nation’s language depends to some extent the quality of its life and thought; and on the quality of its life and thought the quality of its language. This can be seen, I think, without being fanciful, in the grace and subtlety of the best Greek, the lapidary strength of the best Latin, the bright clarity of the best French; and again in the stark brevity of the Icelandic sagas, or the oratorical melody of Italian, which half sings even when it speaks.

  Great writers may better a language; but they cannot remake it. There were times when Goethe groaned that he had to write in German. And one of the weaknesses of Roman literature under the Empire was the widening gap between the Latin of authors and the Latin of the common man. The language of a nation, like the land it lives by, needs constant cultivation and weeding. Degeneration can go far. Modern Greek has lost its infinitive and its future (now replaced by awkward periphrases); and degraded three vowels and three diphthongs to a single sound – ‘ee’. So that the Goddess of Health – ‘Hygieia’ – has been reduced to the cacophony of ‘Ee-yee-ee-a’. Such indeed is the common law of life. It is only too easy to go downhill. Oysters and barnacles once had heads.

  Here, I think, we have something to learn from the French. In poetry, and in the more poetic kinds of prose, English literature need fear no comparisons; but in more normal prose the French seem to me to keep a higher general level. And that I suspect to be partly because educated Frenchmen, and French educators, think, and care, more about it. When will you hear an Englishman exclaim ‘But that isn’t English’ in the tone of scorn and passion with which a Frenchman protests ‘Mais ce n’est pas français’?

  More than two centuries ago the Abbé Le Blanc, visiting England, was struck by the same contrast – ‘Aussi notre façon de louer un Ouvrage est aujourd’hui de dire: C’est un Livre bien fait, une Pièce bien écrite, un Discours bien arrangé. Les Anglois au contraire disent: C’est un Livre plein de bonnes, ou d’excellentes choses.’ [20] The French even invented an Academy to keep them straight. How far it has succeeded, I cannot say. But it remains one symptom of a conscious concern about language which the ordinary Englishman would think fussy, precious, or pedantic, and worthy only of more serious matters like Test Matches. [21 ]

  Now if the French have preserved in their prose this high average of excellence, it is not, I think, because they were born with a silver spoon of a language in their mouths. Many find French less melodious than Italian. Alfieri detested the very sound of it – its nasal whine. And a French writer has complained that it is pestered with swarms of little midge-like words – not only such forms as y, en, se, ne, le, la, but also ‘les auxiliaires avoir et être, le verbe faire, les conjonctions encombrantes; toute cette pouillerie de notre prose française.’ [22 ]

  Yet, as John Addington Symonds has pointed out, by assiduous cultivation the French have produced a finer harvest than some more favoured lands. Just as they cook better dishes than ours with inferior meat – or meat that used to be inferior: just as their women, often with less natural beauty than those of some other nations, can yet contrive a style and charm and grace that are unsurpassed. Hence, strangely enough, Goethe himself preferred in old age to read his own Faust in French; [23] and the French translation of Strauss’s Leben Jesu is said to have sold more copies in Germany than in France. I suggest that from reading French prose you may learn a good deal about writing English; and I feel, though this must remain a matter of taste, that English prose suffered badly when, in the early nineteenth century, French influence was replaced by German.

  On the other hand, I believe – though it may be prejudice – that among the causes and effects of the sometimes unhappy history of the German mind are certain qualities of the German tongue; a language that can lend itself splendidly to poetry, but in prose (with great exceptions like Schopenhauer or Nietzsche) seems prone at times to lose itself in a kind of ponderous Götterdämmerung of drifting obscurities and cloudy abstractions. Take an example from Hitler himself (on Judaism): ‘Eine von infernalischer Unduldsamkeit erfüllte Weltanschauung wird aber nur zerbrochen werden durch eine vom gleichen Geist vorwärtsgetriebene, vom gleichen stärksten Willen verfochtene, dabei aber in sich reine und durchaus wahrhaftige neue Idee.’ [24] To the ordinary English mind the idea of reading an eight-hundred-page book composed in such sentences is a nightmare; that it should be read with enthusiasm remains flatly incomprehensible. There was current in my War Department a jesting quotation, perhaps apocryphal, to express this side of the German mind: ‘Warum denn so einfach? Können Sie es nicht komplizierter machen?’ [25] We did not underestimate the formidable efficiency, pertinacity, and courage of our opponents. None the less, if you wish to talk imposing twaddle of an abstruse and abstract kind, though wonders can be done even in English, you will find it hard to equal German.

  Or consider a more particular point. One of the most important things, to my mind, in English style is word-order. For us, the most emphatic place in clause or sentence is the end. This is the climax; and, during the momentary pause that follows, that last word continues, as it were, to reverberate in the reader’s mind. It has, in fact, the last word. One should therefore think twice about what one puts at a sentence-end. But in a German sentence this final position may be reserved, by a most curious grammatical convention, for an infinitive or past participle; or, in a subordinate clause, for the main verb. Thus logical emphasis, unless particularly strong, tends to be sacrificed to mere grammar. One can see this happening even in the eloquence of Nietzsche: ‘Ich lehre Euch den Übermenschen. Der Mensch ist Etwas, das überwunden werden soll.’ [26] The ess
ential words are Übermenschen and überwunden; but, though Übermenschen gets its rightful pride of place, überwunden does not. [27] Here it may not much matter. But in longer sentences or clauses, German has a tendency to lose clarity and point. Hence the pleasant story of the man who, entering a foreign café where there sat groups of English, French, and Germans, noted that the English were of course entrenched round their table in solid silence; the French all gabbling at once; but the Germans listening to each other in turn with a tense concentration that for a moment astonished him. Then he realized – they were waiting for the verb! The curious thing is how rules so misguided could ever arise. They date, I am told, from a naïve Renaissance idea of capturing for German the excellence of Latin prose. The Romans had a marked tendency to put their verbs last; [28] that Roman tendency, it seems, became in German hands an iron law. Arminius might have laughed bitterly in his grave.

  Here English has been more fortunate. Like a rock smoothed by a glacier, it got rid of many a useless excrescence while our peasant forefathers groaned under their Norman conquerors. On the other hand, it has been constantly enriched from foreign sources, especially from French and, partly through French, from Latin. But it cannot now be left to look after itself, unless we are content to see it gradually become a kind of debased Basic. There are things that need to be taught; others, that need to be fought. We face plenty of dangerous influences – cheap newspapers, cheap books, giant towns, ubiquitous bureaucrats. Never were so many functionaries employed in packing so little meaning into so many words; partly from the natural pompousness of the official mind, partly from the need for legal or political caution. Of nineteenth-century democracy, a wise politician observed, ‘We must educated our masters’: that applies no less urgently to twentieth-century bureaucracy.

  Like our coastline, our language changes slowly but ceaselessly under the stress of time. Indeed, the change is not so slow as not to be noticeable at certain points within a lifetime. Take one example. ‘Not one Londoner in ten thousand,’ wrote Macaulay in 1837, ‘can lay down the rules for the proper use of will and shall. Yet not one Londoner in a million ever misplaces his will and shall.’ This, indeed, seems typical Macaulay. Admirably clear; trenchant; and yet surely exaggerated. Can we seriously believe that there were less than half-a-dozen persons in that happy London of 1837 who ‘ever’ fell into grammatical error on this point? But it may be doubted, without falling into Macaulay’s rashness, whether one Londoner in a hundred observes those rules today. Nearly all of us, so far as I can notice, whether high or low, whether writing or speaking, have come to say, for example, ‘I will go tomorrow from London to Cambridge.’ We do not mean, ‘I am willing to go’; we do not mean, ‘I am resolved to burst through Bishop’s Stortford or die’; we mean simply ‘I shall go’. I still think it would be better to say so.

  In my childhood one was taught that, in the first person singular or plural, ‘will’ implied willingness or determination; [29] ‘shall’, simple statement. Everybody knew that; except, of course, the uneducated, or Scots (evidently not including Macaulay), or Irishmen. Indeed, there was adduced to us in warning, as the drunken Helot before the young Spartans, that comic Irishman who fell into the sea and unwittingly discouraged rescue by bawling ‘No one shall save me. I will be drowned.’ Today, however, this poor Irishman seems vanished beneath the waters; and everybody, almost, has adopted his use of ‘will’.

  It seems to me rather a pity. If ‘I will see her tomorrow’ becomes a mere statement of fact, not of willingness or iron resolve, then willingness or resolve must, at least in writing, be expressed by some circumlocution, such as ‘I am willing, or am resolved, to see her tomorrow’. We shall have lost brevity. Or else we must italicize: ‘I will see her tomorrow.’ To some, italics are anathema; in moderation, I cannot see why a legitimate stress of the voice should not be marked by an equally legitimate convention in print; still, italics can easily be abused. [30 ]

  It may be argued on the other side that the older usage of ‘shall’ to express fact, and of ‘will’ to express willingness or determination, in the first person, whereas in the second and third persons it was the other way about, remained vilely complicated; [31] in now using ‘will’ to state mere fact, for all three persons alike, English laziness may be continuing that sensible process of simplification which has proved so valuable in the past, ridding us of things like case-endings and arbitrary genders.

  It is a nice point. I suspect that the ignorant will win, and that their incorrectness in this matter will end by becoming correct English. One cannot tell. But meanwhile I shall, and will, continue to fight a rearguard action in defence of the older use of ‘will’ and ‘shall’.

  Another, worse example of language changing before our eyes is provided by ‘as if’. We now hear and read on every side such phrases as ‘It looks as if negotiations are breaking down’. This seems to me detestable. ‘It looks as if’ is used as if it were equivalent to ‘it seems that’. But it is not equivalent. The full statement would be – ‘It looks as it would look if negotiations were breaking down.’ To use ‘are’ here, instead of ‘were’, is quite illogical. And if the French tend to be too logical, the English, I think, tend not to be logical enough.

  Style is my subject, not grammar. But bad grammar can spoil style; and a language can deteriorate till it becomes difficult for style to exist. If English ever reached, in the course of centuries, the condition once imagined by Professor Gilbert Murray in which it said things like ‘When ’e met ’e, ’e took off ’e ’at’, our Miltons would be likely to remain, if not mute, at least inglorious. There are dangers to which more of us, I think, might well be more awake; those who have had the good fortune to be most carefully educated, must accept in return the heaviest responsibility.

  It is not a question of banning all linguistic changes, as some writers on pure English are too apt to do. That is merely imitating King Canute and Mrs. Partington. In general I am, I own, a conservative in literature. I have seen too many leaders of literary revolts – and revolting most of them were. But since language cannot stand still, the main thing for the public interest is that alterations in vocabulary and idiom should not become too rapid, reckless, and wanton; as for the individual writer, I do not know where he will find better advice than Pope’s:

  Be not the first by whom the new are tried,

  Nor yet the last to lay the old aside. [32]

  That Britain, the Dominions, and the United States speak the same tongue means that English has a growing chance of becoming ultimately a world-language. [33] But this common language might easily grow common in a less desirable sense; it would be a pity if English, in gaining the whole world, were to lose its soul. By the beginning of our era, Greek had become a common tongue for the Near East; but it was not the Greek of Sophocles.

  I conclude, then, that the study of style in education has three main objects – the appreciation of English; the mastery of English; and the purity of English. If anyone does not find these three important enough, he seems to me greedy.

  You may be thinking: ‘All this is very magnificent and grandiloquent. But these fine or gloomy prospects of the English language are very remote; we shall be dead long before; and meanwhile we have our own gardens to cultivate. We grant your truism that it is excellent to be a master of one’s tongue. But how do we do it? In Ireland it was once thought enough to kiss the Blarney Stone. What is your recipe?’

  I have no Blarney Stone in my pocket. I offer only a few principles; a number of examples; and a few warnings.

  I must end (perhaps I should have begun) by asking your indulgence. For ‘Style’ is a most terrible subject to discourse upon. I am haunted by the mocking eighteenth-century lines:

  Rules for good verse they first with pain indite,

  Then show us what is bad, by what they write.

  To indite rules for good prose may seem just as pretentious. But I take shelter behind the m
assive bulk of Johnson. When Lady Macleod objected that a writer did not practise what he preached, ‘I cannot help that, madam,’ was his reply. ‘That does not make his book the worse. … I have, all my life long, been lying till noon; yet I tell all young men, and tell them with great sincerity, that no one who does not rise early will ever do any good.’

  Endnote

  1 S. Butler’s Notebooks, ed. G. Keynes and B. Hill, 1951, p. 290. [return to text]

  2 This story has not lost in the telling. Actually Plato is said to have left ‘a number’ of versions, not seventy, of the beginning (according to Quintilian, VIII, 6, 64, only of the first four words), not of the whole ‘first paragraph’, of his Republic.

  There is a similar story of Ariosto composing fifty-six variants of the first line of his Orlando Furioso (E. E. Kellett, Fashion in Literature (1931), p. 172; G. Murray, The Classical Tradition in Poetry (1927), p. 46). But I cannot trace the source of this. According to A. Panizzi’s edition of the poem (1834; I, cxx), the poet composed three versions – ‘Di donne e cavalier gli antiqui amori’, ‘Di donne e cavalier l’arme e gli amori’, ‘Le donne, i cavalier, l’arme, gli amori’. In any case Ariosto’s elaborate revisions in general are sufficiently illustrated in the facsimile pages of S. Debenedetti’s Frammenti Autografi dell’Orlando Furioso, 1937.

  [return to text]

  3 See The Idea of a University, 1935 ed., p. 322. [return to text]

  4 pp. 47–8 [return to text]

  5 But I do not believe him. It would be very hard for anyone with as much individuality as Hazlitt, or Butler, to keep it out of his writing. And thank Heaven! How much duller life would be if they could! Indeed, the essential in writing, as in living, is not to seem ‘somebody’, but to be one’s true self. [return to text]