Style- the Art of Writing Well
Page 12
73 To say that everyone can admire the Isles of Greece seems to me false; to say that everyone who admires it can put his admiration into words seems even falser. [return to text]
74 Eloquence that is not ‘forcible’ is hardly eloquence; and most readers can see for themselves that the Isles of Greece is ‘fervent’. Swinburne was, I think, overfond of what he might have called ‘accumulative and alliterative aggregations of adjectives’. [return to text]
75 If the orator had chosen a different subject, he could hardly have made the same points. [return to text]
76 Surely one may take the ‘favourable circumstances’ for granted. [return to text]
77 After ‘bringing down the house’ (a somewhat tired metaphor), it seems an anticlimax merely to ‘shake the platform’. And unless the applause was ‘merited’, it would be beside the point. [return to text]
78 The reader of this type of criticism may be expected to know that Dryden’s satires are in couplets. (Not that Byron’s Isles of Greece seems to me much like Dryden.) [return to text]
79 ‘Very’ is a facile means of emphasis that easily becomes a tic. It occurs here thrice in twenty lines. [return to text]
80 Readers without poetic instinct would be irrelevant. [return to text]
81 If all the properties of the best poetry cannot ‘ever’ be named, a fortiori they cannot be named ‘easily’. ‘Can ever’ makes ‘can easily’ superfluous. [return to text]
82 Literary men are often, I think, rashly fond of scientific analogies. It is not clear why the colours of flowers should be any easier to explain than their scent. [return to text]
83 Critics are apt to talk as if any example taken at random must be truly representative. Clearly it may quite well be exceptional – the first marble pulled out of a bag may be white, and yet ninety-nine others in it be black. Such random choices seem to me a lazy and irritating habit – why not take the trouble to choose an example that is really typical? [return to text]
84 Wordsworth’s what? His poetry? But, if so, ‘poetry’ has to be supplied from a good way back. For once, there seems a word too few. [return to text]
85 No other poem would be relevant. [return to text]
86 This habit of saying that something is the most something in all literature seems tiresome: (a) one knows the critic has not read all literature; (b) if he had, he would not remember it; (c) his statement could only be true, even for him, if he had read all literature with this comparison constantly in mind (and one knows he has not); (d) it would also be necessary that the relevant qualities of all the works compared should be commensurable (which is most improbable); (e) since tastes so differ, it is certain that others would disagree. [return to text]
87 The reader naturally suspects that this odd pair is only coupled together because there are three letters common to both; a reason that seems inadequate. [return to text]
88 This is merely a roundabout way of saying ‘If you disagree with me, you are an imbecile’; which, even if true, would be a little dictatorial. [return to text]
89 This kind of apology seems to me a mistake. If the writer has any doubts whether a phrase is affected, he should not use it; if he is sure it is not affected, he should offer no excuse. Qui s’excuse, s’accuse. [return to text]
90 ‘None of all great poets’ seems to me not English; nor do I see why it should become so. [return to text]
91 Swinburne, Miscellanies (1911 ed.), pp. 125–7. [return to text]
92 Excluding in each case the four lines of Wordsworth. [return to text]
93 The psychologist might add that the reason lies in unconscious or half-conscious memories and emotions; as in Hazlitt’s tale of the man who, in 1794, looking out of a window at Llangollen, found he had unaccountably lost his appetite, and only realized later that among the faces outside he had seen, though not consciously recognized, a government spy.
Take that, to me, enchanting verse –
‘And we in dreams behold the Hebrides.’
It is easy enough to enumerate the chiming vowel-sounds and alliterated consonants; to point out how blessed the corruption that turned the dull ancient name ‘Ěbudes’ into ‘Hebrides’, with its ringing ‘r’; and to talk about their associations with Thomson and Collins and the ’45 and Johnson and Wordsworth. Yet, after all, does it help much? Indeed one may ask if the modern critical mania for such analyses does not at times do positive harm, by trying too much to drag the unconscious up into consciousness, like ancient prophets divining from entrails. Their divinations were imposture; they destroyed a living thing; and they made of it a mess.
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94 T. L. Kington Oliphant, The New English (1886), II, p. 232. [return to text]
95 The Peace of the Augustans (1948 ed.), p. 302. [return to text]
96 ‘I am further expanding this volume, as those hounds of Germans judge the value of books by their cubic content.’ [return to text]
97 Balzac produced an average of four to five volumes annually for nineteen years; Trollope lists forty-five books written from 1847 to 1879 (receipts £68,939 17s 5d.). [return to text]
98 Antipater of Sidon (Palatine Anthology, VII, 713). [return to text]
99 ‘She was this world’s, that for fairest things disposes The harshest destiny.
Rose as she was, her span was but a rose’s –
A single morn had she.’
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100 According to H. A. Giles, Chinese Literature (1901), p. 145, the ideal length for poems in the T’ang period (A.D. 600–900) was thought to be twelve lines; though others were only eight or four. None exceeded a few hundred.
And yet despite this brevity the 1707 collection of T’ang poetry alone comprised (appalling thought!) no less than forty-eight thousand nine hundred poems, in thirty good-sized volumes.
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101 A beautiful creeper. [return to text]
102 i.e. rather than disturb the plant. [return to text]
103 Five words in the original. (Dionysius the Younger, who succeeded his father as despot of Syracuse, fell from power in 345 B.C. and ended his days in exile at Corinth, by one account as a schoolmaster.) See Plutarch, On Garrulity. [return to text]
104 Cf. Montesquieu: ‘Tacite qui abrégeoit tout, parce qu’il voyoit tout.’ (‘Tacitus who shortened everything, because he saw everything.’) [return to text]
105 Such a style is really untranslatable; but here is a rough version: ‘I am entering on a work rich in disasters, savage wars, civil strife; even its peace was cruel. Four emperors perished by the sword. There were three civil wars; more wars abroad; often both at once. Things went well in the East, ill in the West. Illyricum was troubled; the Gauls wavered; the full conquest of Britain was achieved, but at once abandoned; the Sarmatic and Suevic tribes rose against us; Dacia became famous by heavy blows given and received; Parthia, too, nearly drew the sword, duped by a false Nero. Italy itself was stricken by disasters, either wholly new or unknown for centuries. Cities were swallowed up or overwhelmed on the richest part of the Campanian coast. Rome was wasted with conflagrations; her most ancient shrines destroyed; the Capitol itself kindled by Roman hands. There were profanations of religious rites, adulteries in high places. The seas were crowded with exiles; and rocky islets stained with murder. Rome itself saw cruelties yet more savage. … Such was the state of the Empire when Servius Galba assumed his second consulship, with Titus Vinius for colleague, in the year that was to be their last, and came near being the last for Rome.’ (Tacitus, Histories, I, 2 and 11.) [return to text]
106 Flavius Vopiscus, Tacitus, V. [return to text]
107 Trebellius Pollio, Claudius, IV. [return to text]
108 Lampridius, Commodus, XVIII. [return to text]
109 ‘A day of wrath shall that day be, As David and the Sibyl prophesy –
It shall dissolve the world to ashes.’
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110 ‘But where are the snows of yesteryear?’ [return to
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111 ‘Let us not speak of them; but look and pass.’ [return to text]
112 ‘Thus it is willed, there where each thing willed Becomes a thing possible: ask thou no more.’
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113 ‘The weaponed Caesar with the falcon eyes.’ [return to text]
114 ‘That, in her laws, she made things liked to be things allowed.’ [return to text]
115 ‘Love that exempts from love no heart beloved.’ [return to text]
116 ‘And in it for that day we read no further.’ [return to text]
117 ‘And issued thence to see once more the stars.’ [return to text]
118 ‘Siena gave me birth; Maremma, death.’ [return to text]
119 ‘Figures were there, with glances grave and slow, And with a semblance full of majesty;
Seldom they spoke, with voices calm and low.’
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120 For interesting examples see G. Williamson, The Senecan Amble, 1951. (The metaphor of ‘ambling’ comes from Shaftesbury’s Characteristics; but it hardly seems very apt. Seneca’s pointed style suggests to me less an easy-paced palfry than a, not fretful, but suavely philosophic porcupine.)
Fronto (Loeb edition, II, 102) better compares his jerky, staccato movement to ‘a trotting horse that never breaks into full gallop.’
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121 How seldom really practised by chairmen! All this essay, ‘Of Despatch’, and that ‘Of Discourse’, are admirable, and relevant to our subject. [return to text]
122 i.e. ostentation. [return to text]
123 See p. 85. [return to text]
124 Briefer still in MS. – ‘L’éloquence est de ne dire que ce qu’il faut.’ (‘Eloquence consists in saying only what is necessary.’)
Cf. the effectiveness of another of La Rochefoucauld’s shortenings, cited by Lanson – the MS. version ‘Celui qui vit sans folie n’est pas si raisonnable qu’il voudrait le faire croire’ becomes ‘Qui vit sans folie n’est pas si sage qu’il croit.’ (‘He who lives without folly is not so prudent as he thinks.’)
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125 The first of these two couplets is one of those precepts of mere good sense that have made men deny Pope the name of poet; but if the second, with its daemonic concentration (and truth) is not poetry, I do not know what is. [return to text]
126 ‘To write well one must skip intermediate ideas – enough to avoid being boring; though not excessively, for fear of not being understood. It was these felicitous suppressions that made M. Nicole say that all good books were double.’ (As containing twice as much as they actually said.) [return to text]
127 ‘Never will twenty folios start revolutions; it is the little pocket-volumes costing 30 sous that are dangerous. If the Gospel had cost 1200 sesterces, Christianity would never have prevailed.’ [return to text]
128 The view has been expressed that ‘to be emotive’ (to me, a horrible phrase – let us say, ‘to stir emotion’), prose must be written in long rhythms. Often, no doubt. But why ‘must’? These passages seem passionate enough. [return to text]
129 Johnson, to the end of his life, had really two styles – one rather pompous and ponderous, for general disquisitions; the other light and lively for narrative, or for lighter moods, in letters. The average length of his sentences, however, drops by two-fifths between the early Ramblers and the Lives. (See W. K. Wimsatt, Prose Style of Johnson, 1941.) [return to text]
130 i.e. his commission. [return to text]
131 Characteristic, therefore, is Wellington’s admiration for Pitt’s last and shortest public speech, in reply to the Guildhall toast of ‘the Saviour of Europe’ – ‘I return you many thanks for the honour you have done me, but Europe is not to be saved by any single man. England has saved herself by her exertions, and will, as I trust, save Europe by her example.’ ‘That was all,’ commented Wellington. ‘He was scarcely up two minutes; yet nothing could be more perfect.’ [return to text]
132 Even Proust might sometimes have learned from the curtness of his own Duc de Guermantes; who, it may be remembered, used to evade invitations by wiring: ‘Impossible venir. Mensonge suit.’ (‘Impossible to come. Lie follows.’) [return to text]
133 Quoted in G. Saintsbury, History of English Prose Rhythm; but it is remarkable not only for the briskness of its rhythm, but also for the tripping liveliness of its wording. Like Saintsbury, I have modernized the punctuation, which is confusingly light in the original. [return to text]
134 ‘Now at last it is some use to be studious, and to serve God wholeheartedly.’ [return to text]
135 Anatomy of Melancholy, Part II, Section III, Member VII. [return to text]
136 Herbert Spencer (‘The Philosophy of Style’ in Essays Scientific, Political, and Speculative) suggested that the essential principle of good style was economy of effort. This principle does, I think, partly explain why we value clarity, variety, and some forms of brevity. But it seems over-simple. Readers do not always wish to be as indolent as possible. On the contrary, many of them welcome, if it seems worth while, a challenge to use their wits. Indeed some, as we have seen, can take a perverse pleasure even in obscurity. [return to text]
137 The passage is imitated from Seneca the Elder on Cassius Severus. Significantly Seneca adds that Cassius was not a successful declaimer. He may have overdone his brevity. [return to text]
138 On this point P. B. Ballard (Thought and Language (1934), p. 152) gives some interesting figures for the first one hundred and fifty sentences of Macaulay’s William Pitt and an equivalent passage of Gibbon.
Macaulay
Number of sentences with three to four words 7
Number of sentences with five to nine words 25
Number of sentences with ten to fourteen words 28
Number of sentences with fifteen to nineteen words 20
Number of sentences with over nineteen words 70 (nearly half)
Ten sentences have over sixty-five words; and one of these has two hundred and eighteen. The median number of words per sentence is eighteen (i.e. as many sentences have more than eighteen words as have less; not to be confused with the average number).
In the corresponding Gibbon passage no sentence has under ten words; none has over seventy-two; and the median is 34.5. So far as it goes, this greater variety of Macaulay seems to me a gain.
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139 Much as I loathe that ubiquitous pismire of a word – ‘the’, Bentham’s omissions of it here too much suggest a telegram. [return to text]
140 When first published, the Fragment was variously attributed to Lord Mansfield or Lord Camden. When Bentham owned his authorship, sales fell (as happened also when Samuel Butler owned to Erewhon). [return to text]
141 I am thinking of genuinely long periods, which their construction makes indivisible; not of accumulations of short clauses separated by colons, or semicolons, which could as well be full stops. The ear can hardly tell that they are not full stops; and in style the final appeal, I think, should be to ear rather than eye. [return to text]
142 These diminutives, imitated from the Latin poem of the dying Emperor Hadrian to his soul, are not really translatable in English. Very roughly – ‘Little soul of Ronsard, little gentle darling one, dearest guest of my body, now as a feeble, pale, meagre, lonely little one, you descend to the cold kingdom of the dead.’ [return to text]
143 Perhaps suggested by Horace’s ‘deus abscidit Oceano dissociabili’. [return to text]
CHAPTER 5: Courtesy to Readers (3), Urbanity and Simplicity
URBANITY IS AN old-fashioned word; perhaps an old-fashioned thing. Some geniuses have been above it; many, not geniuses, have thought themselves above it; or have not thought about it at all. But, for the ordinary writer, it seems to me an important part of being civilized. After all, etymologically, urbanity and civilization are much the same – they cover those qualities that distinguish the better type of city-dweller from the boor. Urbanity is
that form of true politeness which sets men at ease, as contrasted with the false kind that leaves its victims stiff, red, and bothered; and it is largely based on simple sympathy and unpretentiousness. I find it an embarrassing subject on which to lay down principles; for a lecture on this form of manners finds it hard to avoid an appearance of that very pretentiousness of which it urges the avoidance. Still if one has thought about a subject for years, and hopes that some use to others may perhaps come of it, it is no use being modestly tongue-tied. Enough to admit – as of course one must – that one may be totally wrong.
In speaking, or writing, some flatter; some hector. Writers are less tempted than speakers to flatter, because the reader is out of sight, and solitary; though they have sometimes stooped to flatter particular persons from whom they had hopes. In general, however, the writer’s temptation is not so much to flatter as to pontificate.
Most people like being flattered, if it is done well enough; the strange thing is that part of the public likes to be hectored, as much as healthier minds resent it. When I was a shy little boy at school, my benevolent housemaster once said: ‘But people, you know, take you at your own valuation.’ It is often true; yet in the long run you are likely to be found out. Their prophetic mantles, for example, served Carlyle and Ruskin very successfully for decades; yet those solemn robes look a little moth-eaten now.
But the fatal objection to hectoring, or playing oracle, is just that it entails being charlatan, or fool, or both. Life seems to me to admit only of probabilities, not certainties; and though in crises of action – say, when a ship, or a state, is in danger – dictatorial methods may be vital, in literature or thought I can see no place for dictators. Far better the historic Socrates who knew only that he knew nothing (unlike the self-opinionated personage who wears his name in some of Plato’s later dialogues); far better the smiling headshake of Montaigne, tranquil on his pillow of doubt. There have been, no doubt, arrogant geniuses, like Swift, or Blake, or Chateaubriand; but there have also been other, more attractive geniuses free from all such pretentiousness, like Horace or Chaucer, Montaigne or Molière, Goldsmith or Hardy. I can hardly doubt which of these two types is the better model for those not geniuses to follow. And if this seems a platitude, I only wish it were more so in practice.