Style- the Art of Writing Well

by F L Lucas

  ‘What cruel destiny was it that doomed me to like and admire a critic who so little returns my feelings! For M. Ferdinand Brunetière there exist merely two kinds of criticism – the subjective,which is evil, and the objective, which is good. In his view, M. Jules Lemâitre, M. Paul Desjardins, and myself are infected with subjectivity – the worst of plagues; for from subjectivity one falls into illusion, into sensuality, into concupiscence, and judges the works of men by the pleasure they give; which is abominable. For one must not take pleasure in any creative work until one knows whether it is right to take such pleasures; for, since man is a rational animal, he must, first of all, reason; for it is necessary to reason rightly, and it is not necessary to find enjoyment; for it is the special quality of man to seek to instruct himself by means of dialectic, which is infallible; for one must always append a truth to the end of a train of reasoning, as a knot to the end of a pigtail; for, otherwise, the reasoning would not hold, and it is essential it should hold; for then one combines a number of reasonings together to build an indestructible system, which lasts a dozen years. And this is why objective criticism is the only kind that is good.’ (La Vie Littéraire, III, Préface.)

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  151 ‘A gentleman does not plume himself on anything.’ [return to text]

  152 I am sometimes asked by pupils, ‘What shall we do about expressing personal opinions? Should one say “I”?’ I do not see what else to say. ‘We’ sounds like an old-fashioned leader-writer. ‘One’ is often clumsy, and ‘one’s’ still clumsier. ‘The present writer’ is pompous; nor was I much drawn to a facetious variation I was once offered – ‘the present scribe’.

  ‘I’ seems the only frank and honest form; it will not make a writer seem egotistic, unless his general tone is that. Actually it is far more modest (and often more truthful) to say ‘I cannot admire this poem’ than to say ‘This poem is worthless’, with the assurance of a President of the Immortals conducting the Last Judgement.

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  153 Compare the curious self-satisfaction of this passage from De Quincey’s Rhetoric: ‘Our explanation (of Aristotle’s view of rhetoric) involves a very remarkable detection, which will tax many thousands of books with error in a particular point supposed to be as well established as the hills. We question, indeed, whether any fulminating powder, descending upon the schools of Oxford, would cause more consternation than the explosion of that novelty which we are going to discharge.’ Oxford seems to have stood it pretty well. De Quincey, in Elton’s phrase, ‘is capable of being dismally jaunty and lamentably vulgar’. Luckily he did not always write like this. [return to text]

  154 A proposed variation – ‘shant’, ‘wont’, ‘cant’ – seems still more unpleasant; indeed, the last is indistinguishable from ‘cant’ in a worse sense. [return to text]

  155 e.g. Otway: ‘Boy, don’t disturb the ashes of the dead With thy capricious follies.’

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  156 ‘Back of the shop.’ Montaigne held that it was, so to say, when at the back of one’s shop, that one was really happy. [return to text]

  157 ‘I am getting right off my subject’ – ‘But is not that just my way of talking?’ [return to text]

  158 ‘The manner of speaking I like is a manner that is naïve and simple, alike on paper and on the tongue; a manner full of juice and sinew, brief and close-packed; not so much delicate and combed, as vigorous and blunt … the manner not of a pedant, nor of a friar, nor of a lawyer, but rather of a soldier.’ [return to text]

  159 Later editions often print ‘make’; the subject, however, is not ‘Proper Words’, but the whole formula ‘Proper Words in Proper Places’. [return to text]

  160 ‘In Voltaire the form clothes the idea – transparently – and no more. With Rousseau the art becomes too obvious, and there can be seen beginning the reign of form, and consequently its decadence.’ [return to text]

  161 Lucian and Timotheus. [return to text]

  162 Palatine Anthology, IX, 314. [return to text]

  CHAPTER 6: Good Humour and Gaiety

  My great ambition is not to grow cross.

  – Horace Walpole

  Caressez longtemps votre phrase, elle finira par sourire. [163]

  – Anatole France

  NO MANUAL OF STYLE that I know has a word to say of good humour; and yet, for me, a lack of it can sometimes blemish all the literary beauties and blandishments ever taught.

  Good humour is, indeed, a part of urbanity. (‘What!’ you groan. ‘Still more on that tedious topic?’) But though one cannot have urbanity without good humour, one may have good humour without the least urbanity. I would suggest that a style is usually much the better for both. Any week you may read reviews that were clearly written in a temper; any year you may watch literary controversialists growing peevish and cross; but it does not make them either more pleasant or more persuasive. Even examination answers are too apt, I think, to grow vituperative and shrill about any writer who has the misfortune to displease the candidates; but they are optimistic if they imagine that most examiners find this either impressive or endearing.

  Ill-humoured writing appears to have three main objects. One is to give pain; of that the less said the better. A second, often instinctive rather than reasoned, is to vent one’s spleen on paper, and push it at the public. It may be good for the spleen; but less good for the public. A better outlet might have been the wastepaper basket. A third object of cross and irritated writing is to make as many other people as possible cross and irritated also. Pope wanted Sporus and Sappho contemned and hated by others, as they were by him. But contempt and hatred do not seem, as a rule, such valuable states of mind that one should attempt to propagate them; nor is the attempt very likely to succeed. For most of our quarrels, grievances, or hates the world cares little; and posterity will care still less. Even if the persons you attack are really as evil as Iago, or as stupid as Caliban, your readers will murmur, ‘Oh, exaggerated!’ And they are likely either to yawn, or to laugh at you; unless you are clever enough to make them laugh with you (but, for that, you need humour rather than ill humour). In short, imagine the greatest man you can think of, in a bad temper – does he still, at that moment, seem great? No. Not even were he Alexander. Real greatness implies balance and control.

  True, poets are proverbially irritable. The artistic temperament is apt to be highly strung; and writers, especially in the last three hundred years since they became professionals, have tended to take too little exercise. In most walks of literature you will come now and then on some dishevelled Muse, screaming and scratching. But the effects are seldom very happy. Renaissance scholars snarling at one another, ‘May God confound you for your theory of impersonal verbs!’ or boasting that they had made opponents die of sheer mortification; Milton hailing an antagonist as ‘a pork … a snout in pickle … an apostate scarecrow’; Pope in The Dunciad exchanging kicks with donkeys and wrestling with chimney-sweeps; Swinburne and Furnivall baptizing each other ‘Brothelsdyke’ and ‘Pigsbrook’ – all these are hardly inspired, or inspiring. When Housman flayed incompetent scholars, generally Teutonic, he was, indeed, so clever as to be sometimes amusing, but so irritable as to become sometimes puerile; and those who most admire him may most regret that tetchy side of him. Literary Paris, with all its brilliance, has long made itself, I feel, slightly ridiculous, as a perfect Corsica of petty vendettas. French writers composing their recollections too often bore one with their enemies; and if Monsieur So-and-so is rejected for the Academy, yelps of Schadenfreude may echo through the Press: ‘Il a le pif bien défleuri.’ [164] The style suits the sentiment. And here are two longer examples of the ill effects of peevishness on men who, in their right minds, could write a good deal better.

  I am informed that certain American journalists, not content with providing filth of their own for the consumption of their kind, sometimes offer to their readers a dish of beastliness which they profess to have gathered
from under the chairs of more distinguished men. …

  A foul mouth is so ill-matched with a white beard that I would gladly believe the newspaper-scribes alone responsible for the bestial utterances which they declare to have dropped from a teacher whom such disciples as these exhibit to our disgust and compassion as performing on their obscene platform the last tricks of tongue now possible to a gap-toothed and hoary-headed ape, carried at first notice on the shoulders of Carlyle, and [165] who now in his dotage spits and chatters from a dirtier perch of his own finding and fouling: coryphaeus or choragus of his Bulgarian tribe of autocoprophagous baboons, who make the filth they feed on. [166]

  It is when he comes to sex that Mr. Galsworthy collapses finally. He becomes nastily sentimental. He wants to make sex important, and he only makes it repulsive. Sentimentalism is the working off on yourself of feelings you haven’t really got. We all [167] want to have certain feelings; feelings of love, of passionate sex, of kindliness, and so forth. Very few people really feel love, or sex passion, or kindliness, or anything else that goes at all deep. So the mass just fake these feelings inside themselves. Faked feelings! The world is all gummy with them. They are better than real feelings, because you can spit them out when you brush your teeth; and then tomorrow you can fake them afresh. …

  Mr Galsworthy’s treatment of passion is really rather shameful. The whole thing is doggy to a degree. The man has a temporary ‘hunger’; he is ‘on the heat’ as they say of dogs. The heat passes. It’s done. Trot away, if you’re not tangled. Trot off, looking shamefacedly over your shoulder. People have been watching! Damn them! But never mind, it’ll blow over. Thank God, the bitch is trotting in the other direction. She’ll soon have another trail of dogs after her. That’ll wipe out my traces. Good for that. Next time I’ll get properly married and do my doggishness in my own house. [168]

  These two specimens seem enough to illustrate my point that peevishness may be no great improvement to a style. It would not be hard to bring similar examples from living writers or periodicals whose utterance constantly recalls the weary monotone of a fretful midge. But that, perhaps, would be ill-humoured.

  This is not to suggest that good humour is invariably right; or to deny that a healthy hate for certain things may become both good in itself and an excellent source of energy. There are wishy-washy people who mask their indolence or cowardice under an intolerable tolerance – the sort of persons who travelled quite serenely in Fascist Italy, and thought the Nazis had their good points, if only war-mongering liberals would not irritate them. There are times when it is good to be angry; there are things that it is feeble not to loathe. One would not wish Tacitus coolly detached towards Nero and Domitian (as Gibbon could afford to be at the calmer distance of seventeen centuries); and there is no place for good humour in front of Belsen and Buchenwald. But, for the writer, even that hatred and anger should be controlled. This, indeed, is one of the eternal paradoxes of both life and literature – that without passion little gets done; yet, without control of that passion, its effects are largely ill or null. One is told that the abominations of the Inquisition used to enrage Sir Richard Grenville to the point of chewing wine-glasses. Unhealthy, one would have thought; and, despite the immortal Revenge (whose last fight was quixotry rather than war), I suspect that Sir Francis Drake, with his good-humoured bowls, did more real good to England and more real harm to Spain.

  Hate-literature – satire and invective – has never been thought the highest kind; especially in prose, which has, on the whole, less licence to be daemonic than verse. And when the pen does have to become a sword, even then it is usually more trenchant when its steel remains cold. The laughter of Horace, the indolent scorn of Dryden, the impish smile of Voltaire seem to me more effective, and more attractive, than the rage of Juvenal, the snarl of Swift, the virulence of Pope.

  To genius indeed many things are possible which other men are wise to avoid. I most freely admit that great style has been sometimes produced in the worst possible humour; and that in writers a certain strength has often gone with bitterness (though it has usually been, as with Tacitus or La Rochefoucauld, a general astringency of temper; a bitterness with things in general, rather than with particular people.) The most magnificent cursing I know is in the Old Testament prophets; yet in bulk their virulence grows tedious and odious. If anything could make one sympathize with Nineveh, some of them would. Some ancient critics, it is true, placed Archilochus, the founder of satire, almost on a level with Homer; but time, perhaps not accidentally, has failed to preserve him; and though his savagery was supposed to have driven its victims to suicide, the best fragments of his work now surviving show pathos or humour rather than gall. Juvenal’s writing, says Victor Hugo, was ‘au-dessus de l’empire romain l’énorme battement du gypaëte au-dessus du nid de reptiles’. [169] Yet here, I think, Hugo rather romanticizes; picturing himself as just such another eagle above the empire of Napoleon III. And I feel no great longing to re-read Les Châtiments. Indeed, if you look more closely, you will find that even Juvenal’s best-remembered lines come, not from his fulminations against Levantine aliens or learned ladies, but from things like his picture, sorrowful rather than angry, of the vanity of all human wishes except for soundness of body and of mind.

  Similarly with the too-prolonged railings or wailings of Langland, Jonson, Swift, Junius, Rousseau, Carlyle, Ruskin – it would have harmed none of them to read once a year Molière’s Misanthrope. For, though Alceste has noble qualities, it is himself he frustrates, rather than the knaves and fools. Even the simple Uncle Toby was wiser. ‘I declare, quoth my uncle Toby, my heart would not let me curse the Devil himself with so much bitterness. – He is the father of curses, replied Dr. Slop. – So am not I, replied my uncle. – But he is cursed and damned already to all eternity, replied Dr. Slop. – I am sorry for it, quoth my uncle Toby.’ And even the acrid Pope sometimes knew better:

  But since, alas! frail beauty must decay,

  Curl’d or uncurl’d, since locks will turn to grey,

  Since painted, or not painted, all shall fade,

  And she who scorns a man must die a maid:

  What then remains but well our pow’r to use,

  And keep good humour still, what’er we lose?

  Had he but kept it himself! I am glad Pope’s portraits of Atticus and Atossa were written; but I should not like to see them written by someone I liked personally; and a little of such things goes a long way.

  Therefore, whatever genius may have done, for ordinary mortals good writing is, I believe, more likely to go with good humour. Especially in criticism. Both Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch and Sir Desmond MacCarthy, for example, doubtless made critical mistakes (even Aristotle did); they could be justly severe, when necessary, as MacCarthy was towards Mr. Auden’s curious remarks on Tennyson; but nothing they wrote showed petulance, or peevishness, or pique. Anger may be a useful source of power; but it is worse than useless unless under control. And it is strange – not less strange for being not uncommon – that men should so often hope to be agreeable by being disagreeable. ‘Les honnêtes gens ne boudent pas.’ (‘Decent people do not sulk.’)

  Gaiety is a more positive quality than good humour – and more perilous; but equally ignored by authorities on English style (who seldom exhibit much of it). Yet I know nothing more effective than a touch of this for relaxing tension, or restoring a sense of proportion. And those who can never relax tend to become, both in life and in letters, a weariness to themselves and to others. With awkward strangers, or awkward committees, or police-constables awkward in a different sense, there is no ice-breaker to equal a smile (if you can get one) – except a laugh, which is better still. You may remember how when Wilkes was canvassing the electors of Middlesex, some sturdy citizen growled, ‘Vote for you, Sir! I’d sooner vote for the Devil’; and how Wilkes smilingly rejoined, ‘But in case your friend should not stand?’ No wonder he was elected; no wonder he disarmed even the
Tory antipathy of Johnson.

  When Demeter, says the legend, was mournfully wandering the world to find her lost Persephone, she came at last to Eleusis; there the jests of a Thracian maidservant, Iambē, daughter of Pan and Echo, brought even to her sad lips a smile; and from that Iambē came the iambic metre of Ionian satire and Attic comedy, the ancestor of our own. So, for the Greeks, the consolations of gaiety received divine sanction. Comedy itself was a religious ritual; and the tragic trilogy, equally religious, had to be followed by a mocking satyric drama, ‘tragedy at play’. Even philosophy learned to smile, in the dialogues of Plato, and in the tradition of the Laughing Philosopher of Abdera.

  Queen of the Phantom faces that no smiles ever brighten,