Style- the Art of Writing Well

by F L Lucas

  CHAPTER 8: Good Health and Vitality

  HONESTY AND VERACITY, it seems then, can be kept only by constant self-control. ‘Know thyself’ – ‘Nothing too much’. But our much-governed generation, at least, should have learnt that too many controls are dangerous. Beginning as necessities, they often end as abuses. Through the ages, indeed, men have swung uneasily backwards and forwards from indulgence to austerity, from austerity to indulgence; partly from force of circumstances, partly because the innate aggressiveness of human nature can easily turn from tyrannizing others to tyrannizing itself. The ascetic is often one who sacrifices healthier pleasures to that of playing dictator in his own soul.

  There is the more danger of this because our conscious will-power finds it far easier to multiply checks and constraints on our vitality than to multiply that vitality itself. Bridles are sooner made than horses; but much less valuable. In literature at all events, energy without control is at least better than control without energy.

  When Mlle. Dumesnil was being rehearsed by Voltaire, she ended by crying in protest, ‘Il faudrait avoir le diable au corps pour arriver au ton que vous voulez me faire prendre.’ But Voltaire caught up her phrase: ‘Eh vraiment, oui, c’est le diable au corps qu’il faut avoir pour exceller dans tous les arts.’ [194] For once Blake would have emphatically agreed with him.

  ‘Bother the New Statesmen,’ runs a letter of T. E. Lawrence, ‘and the Odyssey, and all manufactured writing. Only the necessary, the inevitable, the high-pressure stuff is worth having.’ There is substance in his doctrine; though to decry the Odyssey as ‘manufactured’ seems mere perversity, due, I suppose, to his having exhausted and surfeited himself in translating it.

  It is this energy that strikes the reader of Aeschylus or Aristophanes among the ancients (though the classical mind, with its insistence on control, sometimes criticized them both for that very reason); it is this zest that makes so vivid some medieval writers like Chaucer or Froissart.

  But it was joye for to seen hym swete!

  His forheed dropped as a stillatorie.

  But, Lord Crist! whan that it remembreth me

  Upon my yowthe, and on my jolitee,

  It tikleth me aboute myn herte roote.

  Unto this day it dooth myn herte boote

  That I have had my world as in my tyme.

  Là se combattit le roi au dit Messire Eustache moult longuement, et Messire Eustache à lui, et tant qu’il les faisoit moult plaisant voir. [195]

  Sachez que l’oubliance du voir et la plaisance du considérer y étoit si grande, que qui eût eu les fièvres ou le mal des dents, il eût perdu la maladie. … [196]

  Many a typical figure of Reformation and Renaissance shows the same vibrant vitality – Henry VIII and Rabelais, Tamburlaine and Falstaff. ‘I pray better,’ cries Luther, ‘and I preach better when I am angry’; of the no less vehement Knox, the English Ambassador writes to Sir William Cecil, in a sentence that itself breathes the same magnificent energy: ‘I assure you the voice of this man … is able in one hour to put more life in us than five hundred trumpets continually blustering in our ears’; while Melville describes how the old preacher, after painfully climbing the pulpit, was the next moment ‘like to ding that pulpit in blads and flee out of it’. [197]

  The pulses of the neo-classic age take a more measured beat. Even the inner savagery of some of Racine’s characters goes satin-clad and silken-phrased. Yet at moments, in the rustic Bunyan or the polished Saint-Simon, the old fire blazes out again. Hatred and rage are not endearing; when roused by childish trivialities they become comic; and yet what verve in passages like these!

  (Saint-Simon to the Regent on the Duc de Noailles.) ‘Je ne cache pas que le plus beau et le plus délicieux jour de ma vie ne fût celui où il me serait donné par la justice divine de l’écraser en marmelade et de lui marcher à deux pieds sur le ventre.’ [198]

  (Of the public humiliation of the Duc du Maine.) ‘Je mourois de joie; j’en étois à craindre la défaillance; mon coeur, dilaté à l’excès, ne trouvoit plus d’espace à s’étendre. La violence que je me faisois pour ne rien laisser échapper étoit infinie, et néanmoins ce tourment étoit délicieux. … Je triomphois, je me vengeois, je nageois dans ma vengeance; je jouissois du plein accomplissment des désirs les plus continus de toute ma vie.’ [199]

  (How many novelists could give us such a glimpse into the realities of a human soul? But then I have long failed to understand how readers can be content with the trivial talk and shallow psychology of the ordinary novel.)

  Art is of course sometimes produced by frail and delicate personalities, as well as by those that are robustly intense – by figures like Gray with his wistful ‘leucocholy’, or Pater with his atmosphere of churchyard lilies, or Dowson who died at thirty-two in the very last year of the nineteenth century, as if resolved, even in that, to be perfectly fin-de-siècle. Yet the work of such weaker temperaments (despite the splendid exception of Gray’s Elegy) seems seldom first-rate. Dowson, for instances, ends by becoming a complete Lydia Languish. His love is not ‘a red, red rose’ – roses, for him, must be pallid; and women, shadows.

  With pale, indifferent eyes, we sit and wait

  For the dropt curtain and the closing gate.

  I was not sorrowful, but only tired

  Of everything that ever I desired.

  Such a world of anaemic spectres soon grows intolerable. I find myself turning back with longing and relief to the midnight laughter of Johnson, re-echoing from Fleet Ditch to Temple Bar; to the vigour of Scott or Hugo, Dickens or Dumas, Trollope or Balzac. Macaulay may be a Philistine; but he remains a Goliath, whose spear is a weaver’s beam, and whom no critical pebbles can kill. One understands (though one may also smile) the letter of Stendhal congratulating a friend on her son’s falling in love – ‘Peu importe l’objet, c’est une passion’; [200] one accepts the verdict of de Tocqueville (who was no Romantic) – ‘À mesure que je m’éloigne de la jeunesse je me trouve plus d’égards, je dirai presque de respect, pour les passions. Je les aime quand elles sont bonnes, et je ne suis pas bien sûr de les détester quand elles sont mauvaises. C’est de la force, et la force, partout où elle se rencontre, paraît à son avantage au milieu de la faiblesse universelle qui nous environne.’ [201]

  In fact, there are things less worth remembering than Gladstone’s view of sponges. At some weekend party the conversation turned on the bores of packing, particularly of packing wet sponges; and with his usual vehemence Gladstone interjected: ‘The only way is to wrap your sponge in a towel, put it on the floor, and stamp on it!’ Pleasing vision! Yet here stands revealed for a moment a glimpse of the character that made Gladstone’s career. Better be Gladstone than the sponge.

  Can such vitality be acquired? Hardly. One is born with it, or without. Yet at least one can avoid wasting it. When we read the lives of writers, it seems often as if they had squandered in one splendid conflagration the energy slowly accumulated, like a coal-measure, through a long, obscure ancestry of bourgeois or countryfolk. Sometimes, indeed, as with Scott or Trollope, the vigour of a writer seems merely one healthy outlet of his general robustness; but too often it is something artificially stimulated by excitements, mistresses, drink, or drugs. Probably the ideal life for the artist is an alternation of turbulence and tranquillity; as Wordsworth gained by the French Revolution and Annette Vallon, but lost in the end by too much Grasmere. Aeschylus at Marathon, Sophocles at the siege of Samos, Chaucer in his custom-house, Wyatt as Marshal of Calais or ambassador, Cervantes at Lepanto, Milton as Latin Secretary of the Commonwealth, were all being diverted from their vocation as writers; yet they wrote enough; and their work might well have lost its vigour, had they been mere sitters by the fire.

  In comparison with inborn character, then, technical precepts can do little to make a style vital. But something, I have suggested, may be gained by forcing oneself to be brief; and something further by forcing
oneself to be concrete. As life becomes more complex, sophisticated, and scientific, language is constantly tending to fade from a gallery of pictures to a blackboard of mathematical symbols. But concrete terms are to abstract as living things to ghosts. And abstractions are often deceiving ghosts at that. They tend to acquire so many meanings that they have none. Defoe said that in his England there were a hundred thousand stout fellows ready to fight to the death against Popery, without knowing whether ‘Popery’ were a man or a horse; doubtless there are nearly as many million stout fellows in the U.S.S.R. ready to fight to the death for ‘democracy’ without any idea that ‘democracy’, strictly speaking, is government not only for the people but by it. Yet in the language of the educated, and the half-educated, abstract terms constantly tend to encroach and multiply – partly from pretentiousness, partly from mere indolence. No doubt philosophers and scientists are compelled to live largely in a phantasmal world of general ideas; but the literary artist who too freely adopts their type of language may develop a sort of pernicious anaemia. Indeed, in the eighteenth century, with its worship of generalities, this disease became endemic.

  Le tube, image du tonnerre. [202]

  – Delille, of a shot-gun

  Là de l’antique Hermès le minéral fluide

  S’élève au gré de l’air plus sec ou plus humide;

  Ici par la liqueur un tube coloré

  De la température indique le degré. [203]

  – Colardeau, of barometer and thermometer

  When now with better skill and nicer care,

  The dexterous youth renews the wooden war,

  Beyond the rest his winding timber flies

  And works insinuating and wins the prize.

  – Nicholas Amherst, The Bowling Green

  To the rocks,

  Dire-clinging, gathers his ovarious food.

  – Thomson

  But these have at least unconscious humour; the prose of abstraction and periphrasis seldom offers even that consolation:

  That system of manners which arose among the Gothic nations of Europe, and of which chivalry was more properly the effusion than the source, is without doubt one of the most peculiar and interesting appearances in human affairs. The moral causes which formed its character have not, perhaps, been hitherto investigated with the happiest success; but to confine ourselves to the subject before us, chivalry was certainly one of the most prominent of its features and most remarkable of its effects. Candour must confess, that this singular institution was not admirable only as the corrector of the ferocious ages in which it flourished; but that in contributing to polish and soften manners it paved the way for the diffusion of knowledge and the extension of commerce, which afterwards, in some measure, supplanted it. Society is inevitably progressive. [204] Commerce has overthrown the ‘feudal and chivalrous system’ under whose shade it first grew; while learning has subverted the superstition whose opulent endowments had first fostered it. Peculiar circumstances connected with the manners of chivalry favoured this admission of commerce and this growth of knowledge; while the sentiments peculiar to it, already enfeebled in the progress from ferocity and turbulence, were almost obliterated by tranquillity and refinement. Commerce and diffused knowledge have, in fact, so completely assumed the ascendent in polished nations, that it will be difficult to discover any relics of Gothic manners, but in a fantastic exterior, which has survived the generous illusions through which these manners once seemed splendid and seductive. Their direct influence has long ceased in Europe; but their indirect influence, through the medium of those causes which would not perhaps have existed but for the mildness which chivalry created in the midst of a barbarous age, still operates with increasing vigour. The manners of the middle age were, in the most singular sense, compulsory: enterprising benevolence was produced by general fierceness, gallant courtesy by ferocious rudeness; and artificial gentleness resisted the torrent of natural barbarism. But a less incongruous system has succeeded, in which commerce, which unites men’s interests, and knowledge, which excludes those prejudices that tend to embroil them, present a broader basis for the stability of civilized and beneficent manners.

  Mackintosh was a good, clever, and learned man, honoured by Macaulay and adored by Mme. de Staël. His Vindiciae Gallicae (1791), from which this extraordinary passage comes, was translated by Louis Philippe and praised by Napoleon. Lord Abinger sat up all night to read it; and, with Paine’s Rights of Man, it is still remembered, where other replies to Burke’s Reflections are forgotten.

  Again, Mackintosh was a painstaking writer. We hear of his spending four or five days considering whether ‘utility’ or ‘usefulness’ were the better word. Yet the style of this passage seems to me abominable. Mackintosh is replying to Burke’s lament that chivalry is dead in an age when swords do not leap from their scabbards in defence of Marie Antoinette. About that famous purple patch I am not, I own, enthusiastic; I feel a certain sympathy with Sir Philip Francis’s dismissal of it as ‘pure foppery’; but Burke is at least alive. With Mackintosh, who can feel that he is discussing the real behaviour of real men who once really walked this solid earth, wearing uncomfortable clothes of real steel, living in uncomfortable walls of real stone; and still lie, some of them, under strangely real effigies in English cathedrals? Though dead six centuries, they seem to me far less dead than this fog-bank of abstract language, too vague for meaning and too sweeping for truth. Mackintosh is not without sonority, though his rhythm grows monotonous – too much like a pompous summing-up in a court of law. And he knows the use of alliteration. On the other hand there are too many whiches. But the real malady is, for me, his disastrous passion for abstract nouns – often three to a single line.

  No doubt the influence of Johnson is here largely to blame. But Johnson, fortunately, tended to grow out of this way of writing, so that the best parts of his Lives are more like his robust talk. True, at times even his talk became too like his earlier books; the story is familiar of his saying about The Rehearsal, ‘It has not wit enough to keep it sweet.’ ‘This,’ Boswell continues, ‘was easy; he therefore caught himself, and pronounced a more round sentence: “It has not vitality enough to preserve it from putrefaction.” ’ But, for us, Johnson lives by his other type of sentence which is not ‘round’, but hits straight; by images as concrete as the famous stone he kicked to confute Berkeley; by that homely realism which, like some boisterous cockcrow, scatters back to nothingness the ‘extravagant and erring’ phantoms of speculation. ‘Who eats a slice of plum-pudding the less because a friend is hanged?’ – ‘Five hours of the four-and-twenty unemployed are enough for a man to go mad in; so I would advise you, Sir, to study algebra. … Your head would get less muddy, and you will leave off tormenting your neighbours about paper and pack-thread, while we all live together in a world that is bursting with sin and sorrow.’ – ‘Buckinger had no hands, and he wrote his name with his toes at Charing Cross, for half a crown apiece; that was a “new manner of writing!” ’

  The truthfulness of these pronouncements may sometimes be questioned; but not, at least, their vigour. Or again, to turn to less frequented paths, there is that vociferous style (so startling to encounter in the eighteenth-century noblesse) which marks the letters of Mirabeau’s father and uncle as they discuss the young Mirabeau’s wayward character, and what to do with it.

  ‘C’est un embryon de matamore ébouriffé, qui veut avaler le monde avant d’avoir douze ans.’ – ‘Je ne connais que l’impératrice de Russie avec laquelle cet homme peut être bon encore à marier.’ – ‘Un brûlot, un fagot, une fusée, une ombre, un fou, du bruit, du vent, du pouffe et rien. C’est la pie des beaux-esprits et le geai des carrefours … ce n’est qu’un brouillard, c’est Ixion copulant dans la nue.’ – ‘Je n’ai rien à changer dans tes plans; mais tu m’envoies ton fils, est-ce pour le faire bouillir ou rôtir?’ [205]

  Not a happy family (wife, son, daughter imprisoned by the tyrannical old Marquis, till
even Maurepas complained, ‘Voilà soixante lettres ou ordres pour la famille Mirabeau. Il faudrait un sécretaire d’état exprès pour eux.’ [206] ); but a most enviable pungency of expression. Chesterfield might well have thought both brothers ‘Hottentots’; but the over-artificial delicacy of eighteenth-century society was bound to bring a revulsion towards the noble Hottentot. And though, like most human revulsions, it went too far, better sea-wind than hothouse; better a touch of nature untamed than fables like Florian’s without a wolf, or histories, like Lamartine’s of the Revolution, ‘without the mud’.

  For the same reason, still, one may turn back with relief to Defoe or Johnson or Macaulay from a rarefied atmosphere like that of the later Henry James whose characters, an enemy might say, find their main occupation in thought-reading (‘It ended in fact by becoming quite beautiful, the number of things they had a manifest consciousness of not saying’), or in counting under the microscope the bruises inflicted on their hypersensitivity [207] by some pea beneath ten mattresses (where the simplest remedy might have been a decent day’s work); while even their physical appetites are elusively satisfied on such ethereal fare as ‘something fried and felicitous’. Even those who are grateful for all that James added to life’s diversity, would perhaps do well to remember also the legend of Antaeus. When that giant son of Earth wrestled with Heracles, each time he was thrown to the ground he rose with strength renewed. For he had found fresh vigour in his immortal mother’s lap; and Heracles only prevailed by crushing him in the air. Style too must renew its strength by recurrent contact with solid earth.

  Therefore I would suggest, especially in prose, an inveterate distrust of all abstract words that are in the least vague; for the sake not only of vividness and life, but also of accuracy and truth. Sometimes such abstractions are indispensable; sometimes they gain brevity; but clarity usually matters more. When you say ‘horse’, anyone knows what you mean; but when you say ‘democracy’, half a dozen controversies bare their teeth in the shadows. Has not Professor Lovejoy catalogued over three-score different meanings in eighteenth-century use of that overworked word ‘Nature’? A clear word is like a finger-post pointing straight at its object; but our abstract terms are too often like signposts with many arms, some broken, some twisted, some half-effaced, pointing into a fog.