by F L Lucas
But, be poetry as it may, my conclusion is this – that a prose-writer should not overstate, except when he carries overstatement to such outrageous lengths that he is obviously jesting. (As in Giles Earle’s comment, reported by Walpole, on the Lord Mayor’s address to the Commons: ‘By God, I have heard an oyster speak as well twenty times.’) For the rest, a prose-writer should state exactly what he feels; or else – and this is often more effective – deliberately understate. But how difficult to persuade young writers of this! So often their impulse is to assume that talking big is the same as talking vigorously. As well suppose that the best way to sing well is to sing loud. I have been told that when the late Sir Edward Marsh, composing his memoir of Rupert Brooke, wrote ‘Rupert left Rugby in a blaze of glory’, the poet’s mother, a lady of firm character, changed ‘a blaze of glory’ to ‘July’. I cannot guarantee that this is true; but it is worth remembering.
Here I am brought back to my Icelanders. Never, I think, were men and women more passionate than those of the Sagas; and yet at crises of their fate they are content with a sentence or two, perhaps of grim understatement, where a character in Attic or Elizabethan drama might howl or roar for pages together. ‘Do not weep, mother,’ is Grettir’s last farewell to her. ‘If they fall on us, it shall be said you bore sons, not daughters.’ And (though I also laugh at him) I have a specially fond memory for a certain obscure Helgi in the Helganna Saga, who in some fray had his lower lip cut off. ‘Then said Helgi, “I was never a handsome man, but thou hast not mended matters much.” Then he put up his hand and thrust his beard into his mouth and bit it with his teeth.’ After which the battle proceeded. Contrast and compare this with Lavater’s description of the romantic Fuseli: ‘His look is lightning, his word a storm, his jest death, his vengeance hell. At close quarters he is rather trying.’ I cite this because its style illustrates the effectiveness both of humorous overstatement and of dry understatement at the same time.
In short, you may ironically overstate, or ironically understate; but I suggest that you should always flee from blind exaggeration as from the fiend.
Now among the various passions that tempt a writer to distort, one seems to me especially dangerous. And that is a passion for his own cleverness. Well for those who can be both wise, and good, and clever; but this third quality, though the least valuable of the three, has a horrid habit of playing cuckoo in the nest to the two others. A useful essay might be written on the ravages of cleverness in literature (and indeed in all the arts). In Greece I suppose this fault first appears with the rhetorical euphuism of Gorgias; but even Euripides is at times too clever to be true. At Rome cleverness corrupted the verse of Ovid and Lucan, the prose and verse of Seneca. In our literature this dangerous ingeniousness reappears in the euphuism of Lyly, the Metaphysical poetry of writers like Donne, Herbert, Vaughan, Crashaw, and Marvell, the Metaphysical prose of Browne and Fuller. If much of their work remains memorable, this is partly, I think, because, thank Heaven, these writers were not always conceited or Metaphysical – Donne can be as passionately direct as Catullus, Herbert as simple as Christina Rossetti. And partly because some of them, like Lyly, Marvell, and Fuller, had also a sense of humour. For it is when cleverness leads to falsity that it becomes hateful; but there is no deception in a jest. Thus Donne can cry to a mistress sick with fever.
Oh doe not die, for I shall hate
All women so, when thou art gone,
That thee I shall not celebrate,
When I remember, thou wast one.
I see no sign that this is meant to be taken humorously; yet I cannot take it seriously; accordingly I find it merely silly – a futile and heartless juggle with paradoxes. But with Marvell’s Coy Mistress, since I see an ironic smile hovering round the poet’s mouth (‘The grave’s a fine and private place’), its hyperboles become magnificent jesting, and the whole piece one of the best of all really Metaphysical poems. The weakness of writers of this school is that they so often ask one to accept mere mental antics as profound truth or sincere feeling. Most of us are familiar with Johnson’s verdict, honest but incomplete, in his Life of Cowley; some may remember Housman’s two-word summary – ‘intellectually frivolous’; but the best criticism I know of Metaphysical writing, and indeed of all writing which sacrifices truth to cleverness, comes from one of the Metaphysical poets themselves – George Herbert; who, I suppose, was too genuine a person not to grow tired of fooling, as he sometimes did, with such quips and quibbles as ‘Jesu’ – ‘I ease you’, or the idea of Christ leaving us his grave-clothes to serve as a handkerchief.
When first my lines of heavenly joys made mention,
Such was their lustre, they did so excel,
That I sought out quaint words, and trim invention;
My thought began to burnish, sprout, and swell,
Curling with metaphors a plain intention,
Decking the sense, as if it were to sell. …
As flames do work and wind, when they ascend,
So did I weave myself into the sense.
But while I bustled, I might hear a friend
Whisper, How wide is all this long pretence!
There is in love a sweetness ready penn’d:
Copy out only that, and save expense.
If we ever we are tempted overmuch to seek, or overmuch to admire, the tinsel of mere brilliance and ingenuity, it is time, I think, to remember those moving lines.
Of course, I am aware that this attitude is today far from orthodox. Our century has made a craze of Metaphysical poetry. But that does not alter my opinion. This is a critical age; and critics very humanly prefer the kind of writing where they can expound difficulties and subtleties, as with the Metaphysicals; or, at need, invent them, as with Greek Drama or Shakespeare. You can talk for days about a stanza of Donne’s, where with a stanza of Christina Rossetti’s there may be nothing to do but feel it. But I am not convinced that this makes Donne’s the better kind of poetry. Indeed, I sometimes wonder if there have not been two great disasters in the history of modern letters: the first when literature began to be a full-time profession, with writers like Dryden and Lesage, instead of remaining a by-product of more sanely active lives; the second, when the criticism of literature became likewise a profession, and a livelihood for professors. However, that pretty problem would take too long to pursue.
With the later seventeenth century, both in England and in France, good sense reasserted itself and an end was made to the reign of paradoxy. As has been admirably summarized by Boileau:
Jadis de nos auteurs les pointes ignorées
Furent de l’Italie en nos vers attirées.
Le vulgaire, ébloui de leur faux agrément,
A ce nouvel appât courut avidement.
La faveur du public excitant leur audace,
Leur nombre impétueux inonda le Parnasse:
Le Madrigal d’abord en fut enveloppé;
Le Sonnet orgueilleux lui-même en fut frappé;
La Tragédie en fit ses plus chères délices;
L’Elégie en orna ses douloureux caprices;
Un héros sur la scène eut soin de s’en parer,
Et sans pointe un amant n’osa plus soupirer;
On vit tous les bergers, dans leurs plaintes nouvelles,
Fidèles à la pointe encor plus qu’à leurs belles;
Chaque mot eut toujours deux visages divers:
La prose la reçut aussi bien que les vers;
L’avocat au palais en hérissa son style,
Et le docteur en chaire en séma l’évangile.
La raison outrageé enfin ouvrit les yeux,
La chassa pour jamais [191] des discours sérieux. …
Ce n’est pas quelquefois qu’une muse un peu fine
Sur un mot, en passant, ne joue et ne badine,
Et d’un sens détourné n’abuse avec succès:
Mais fuyez sur ce point un ridicule excès. [192]
The last hundred years, however, ha
ve seen other creative writers succumb to this form of too ingenious falsity; which is less generous than the kind of enthusiastic exaggeration we have just seen in Belloc and Chesterton. For they were at least carried away by enthusiasm for their subject – for the Normans or the English; but the falsity of the too clever is due to excessive enthusiasm for their own cleverness. Browning did not always escape that; nor Meredith; nor Henry James. With Wilde it mattered less, for he was the jester of his generation; though when he does touch serious subjects, as in his dictum that books cannot be moral or immoral, only well or badly written, one can see the symptoms of that self-deception which was to turn his jests at last into tragedy.
But, among all English writers, I know no clearer example of the perils of cleverness than Bernard Shaw, who ended by selling himself to his own wit, as Faust sold his soul to Mephistopheles; until this onetime disciple of serious thinkers like Samuel Butler and Ibsen, this onetime reformer who had laboured generously for Fabian Socialism and fearlessly denounced British oppression in Ireland and in Egypt, became, I feel, a hoary mountebank, with no passion left except for making men stare by representing every worse cause as the better, and assuming the permanent role of devil’s advocate, whether for Mussolini in Ethiopia or for Stalin in the Kremlin. Voltaire too was often over-clever; he could at times behave ignobly towards personal opponents, fulsomely towards the great; but at least he devoted his later years to denouncing oppression, not to condoning it. I cannot tell how time will judge Shaw as compared with his old rival Wells; but justice, I think, must finally recognize that Wells, even if he died in disillusion and despair, was all his life a man of passionate good will towards mankind, where G.B.S. became in the end merely a kind of court-zany to the British public. Wellington was very sound in his rooted distrust and contempt for ‘clever devils’.
I draw the conclusion that it is wiser to use one’s mind as telescope, or microscope, or magic crystal, than as a looking-glass; and I would suggest that it is foolish to take singing-lessons from peacocks.
I will close with one precise example, from a mind more civilized, I think, and more human than Shaw’s, of the danger of falling in love with one’s own epigrams. Lytton Strachey’s reputation has suffered in recent years because it has become felt that he, too, preferred wit to truth; in my own opinion this reaction has gone too far, for his Victoria, his Portraits in Miniature, and some of his criticism seems to me likely to last. But consider this from his famous essay on The Lives of the Poets: ‘Johnson’s aesthetic judgements are almost invariably subtle, or solid, or bold; they have always some good quality to recommend them – except one: [193] they are never right.’ An amusing paradox; it might well please the author when he hit on it; but it should not have pleased him so much as to blind him to its untruth and let him print it. Had he written ‘they repeatedly seem to us wrong’, his epigram would still have kept plenty of point; as it stands, it exaggerates. For I should not have thought it difficult to adduce judgements of Johnson’s that are not only admirably put, but also admirably true: for instance, his argument that the Three Unities are, as dogmatic rules, a vain superstition; or his statements that ‘words too familiar, or too remote, defeat the purpose of a poet’, that Milton knew human nature ‘only in the gross’, that Gray is ‘tall by walking on tiptoe’, that Congreve’s characters with their perpetual repartee are ‘intellectual gladiators’, that the philosophical parts of Pope are shallow. Even those who do not wholly accept these verdicts would be rash to pronounce them false. And how excellent are many of Johnson’s notes on Shakespeare; to say nothing of his Preface!
‘Johnson’, continues Strachey, ‘never inquired what poets were trying to do.’ He inquired with the Metaphysicals; he inquired with Pope. ‘He could see nothing,’ his critic proceeds, ‘in the splendour and elevation of Gray, but “glittering accumulations of ungraceful ornaments” ’; yet what of that noble tribute to the Elegy with which Johnson’s Life of Gray concludes?
‘Johnson’, we are finally told, ‘had no ear, and he had no imagination.’ No ear?
Yet hope not life from grief or danger free,
Nor think the doom of man revers’d for thee.
Loosen’d from the minor’s tether,
Free to mortgage or to sell,
Wild as wind and light as feather,
Bid the sons of thrift farewell.
No imagination? ‘That man is little to be envied, whose patriotism would not gain force upon the plain of Marathon, or whose piety would not grow warmer among the ruins of Iona.’ And were not Johnson’s later years hag-ridden by the imagined terrors of the afterworld?
Strachey knew all this; but I imagine he forgot it, as Macaulay might have done, in the effort to make his own paradox as dazzling as possible. Where so cultured and gifted a writer could be temporarily blinded, we may well take warning.
The conclusion is simple, yet hard. A writer should remember that about his Muse there is a good deal of the Siren. He should view his mental offspring as relentlessly as a Spartan father – if it is not perfectly sound, let it be cast out. If he does not expose it, others will, in a different sense. No doubt such austerity is not easy. It may involve infanticide on the scale of Herod; and it was not his own children that Herod was killing. Yet better that, than falsity.
But play no tricks upon thy soul, O man;
Let fact be fact, and life the thing it can.
Endnotes
177 p. 31. [return to text]
178 p. 40. [return to text]
179 Fifty Sermons, XXXIII. [return to text]
180 Cf., for instance, James I’s ineffable defence, to his Council, of his expensive minions: ‘I, James, am neither a god nor an angel, but a man like any other. Therefore I act like a man and confess to loving those dear to me more than other men. You may be sure I love the Earl of Buckingham more than anyone else, and more than you who are here assembled. … Jesus Christ did the same, and therefore I cannot be blamed. Christ had his John and I have my George.’ [return to text]
181 Beside the Sermon on the Mount, Donne’s Sermons seem like Solomon in his glory beside the lilies of the field. But whether Donne’s ballets of skeletons in cloth of gold have really much in common with genuine Christianity is another question. [return to text]
182 The reader may wonder if this round bull-dog figure can have had many ‘angles’. [return to text]
183 A small point. But unless there is a comma after ‘watched’, the reader may be misled for a fraction of a second to read ‘watched the whole huge invasion’. And I am against readers being misled, if it can be avoided, even for a fraction of a second. [return to text]
184 ‘The wing.’ A moment since, it was ‘wings’. And not all ears may like the jingle of ‘wing’ and ‘swinging’. [return to text]
185 There seems some anticlimax in ‘as with a hammer’ – Von Kluck was provided with equipment a good deal more formidable than hammers. [return to text]
186 Why ‘Creçy’ for ‘Crécy’ (or, if you will, ‘Cressy’)? Further, it becomes horribly apparent here that the author has confused Crécy-en-Brie, E. of Paris, with Crécy-en-Ponthieu, N. of Abbeville, the scene of Edward III’s victory, over 100 miles away. [return to text]
187 ‘All’? [return to text]
188 I am not much taken with the idea of ‘tackling’ Gloucester. It seems to me an example of writing that comes too close to colloquial speech; which is as bad as departing too far from it. [return to text]
189 For example, when he accused Pitt’s Regency Bill of putting a crown of thorns on the King’s head, and a reed in his hand, with the cry, ‘Hail, King of the British!’; when he called Louis XVI ‘a man with the best intentions that probably ever reigned’; and the French clergy of the Old Régime ‘the most discreet, gentle, well tempered, conciliatory, and pious persons who in any order probably existed in the world’; and the bringing of Louis XVI from Versailles to Paris ‘the most horrid, atrocious, and afflicting spectacle, that perha
ps ever was exhibited to the pity and indignation of mankind’. At such moments Burke forgot the wise advice of Hamlet to the players: ‘in the verie Torrent, Tempest, and (as I may say) the Whirlewinde of Passion, you must acquire and beget a Temperance that may give it Smoothnesse.’ [return to text]
190 A. J. Balfour, Dr. Clifford on Religious Education; quoted by Desmond MacCarthy in Portraits, pp. 21–2. [return to text]
191 ‘Pour jamais’! What optimism! [return to text]
192 ‘The use of quips, unknown to our writers in earlier days, Was imported into our verse from Italy.
The vulgar, dazzled by their charm,
Rushed eagerly after this new bait.
With the public favour, quips grew bolder,
And their headlong hordes now flooded Parnassus;
First the Madrigal was wrapped up in them;
Then even the lofty Sonnet grew stricken;
Tragedy made quips her dearest delight;
Elegy adorned with them its wayward laments;
The hero on the stage took pains to deck himself with them;
And without a quip no lover dared now to sigh for his love.
Every shepherd in his new plaints,
Showed still more fidelity to the quip than to his sweetheart;
Every word had always two different faces,
And prose welcomed the quip no less than verse;
With this the lawyer in the courts made his style bristle,
With this the theologian in the pulpit bestrewed the Gospel.
But finally outraged Reason opened her eyes
And drove the quip from serious writing forever. …
Not that, sometimes, a delicate Muse may not,
In passing, play and trifle with some word,
Or successfully wrest terms from their meaning:
But beware in this matter of the excess that grows grotesque.’
(L’Art Poétique, II.)
[return to text]
193 ‘Some good quality except one’ seems dubious English. [return to text]