Style- the Art of Writing Well
Page 24
Les plaisirs comme des écoliers dans la cour d’un collège avaient tellement piétiné sur son coeur, que rien de vert n’y poussait et ce qui passait par là, plus étourdi que les enfants, n’y laissait pas même, comme eux, son nom gravé sur la muraille.
Il ne faut pas toucher aux idoles: la dorure en reste aux mains.
Elle le corrompait par-delà le tombeau.
Les noeuds les plus solidement faits se dénouent d’eux-mêmes, parce que la corde s’use. Tout s’en va, tout passe; l’eau coule et le coeur oublie.
L’avocasserie se glisse partout, le rage de discourir, de pérorer, de plaider … O pauvre Olympe! ils seraient capables de faire sur ton sommet un plant de pommes de terre. [256]
J’ai eu tout jeune un pressentiment complet de la vie. C’était comme une odeur de cuisine nauséabonde qui s’échappe par un soupirail. On n’a pas besoin d’en avoir mangé pour savoir qu’elle est à faire vomir.
Fais-toi une cuirasse secrète composée de poésie et d’orgueil, comme on tressait les cottes de maille avec de l’or et du fer.
L’auteur, dans son oeuvre, doit être comme Dieu dans l’Univers, présent partout, et visible nulle part.
Le vrai poète pour moi est un prêtre. Dès qu’il passe la soutane, il doit quitter sa famille … il faut faire comme les amazons, se brûler tout un côté du coeur.
Je suis un homme-plume.
(Of his art.) C’est un ulcère que je gratte, voilà tout.
Pourvu que mes manuscrits durent autant que moi, c’est tout ce que je veux. C’est dommage qu’il me faudrait un trop grand tombeau; je les ferais enterrer avec moi comme un sauvage fait de son cheval.
Je n’attends plus rien de la vie qu’une suite de feuilles de papier à barbouiller de noir. Il me semble que je traverse une solitude sans fin, pour aller je ne sais où. C’est moi qui suis tout à la fois, le désert, le voyageur, et le chameau.
(Of Leconte de Lisle.) Son encre est pâle.
On peut juger de la bonté d’un livre à la vigueur des coups de poing qu’il vous a donnés … je crois que le plus grand caractère du génie est, avant tout, la force.
Les illusions tombent, mais les âmes-cyprès sont toujours vertes. [257]
One cannot say of Flaubert what he himself said of Voltaire: ‘Qui a eu plus d’esprit que Voltaire et qui a été moins poète?’ [258]
These examples of strength and swiftness, wit and humour, personality and poetry may well be more than sufficient. Try to rewrite such things without metaphor or simile – you will sacrifice half their life and energy. In fine, Johnson, like Aristotle, seems to me right: ‘And, Sir, as to metaphorical expression, that is a great excellence in style, when it is used with propriety, for it gives you two ideas for one; conveys the meaning more luminously, and generally with a perception of delight.’
To say, then, that ‘metaphor is of no particular relevance’ to prose, seems to me stupefying. My conclusion is that those who have no gift for metaphor and imagery are doubtless wise to keep clear of it; but that those who have it, whether in writing or in speech, will find few qualities that better repay cultivation.
Endnotes
223 Why? [return to text]
224 English Prose Style (1928), pp. 26, 34. In the second edition (1952) the last two sentences are omitted. [return to text]
225 See Milman Parry, ‘The Traditional Metaphor in Homer’, Classical Philology, 1933; W. B. Stanford, Greek Metaphor, 1936. [return to text]
226 Lit. ‘screw-wing’. [return to text]
227 The Romance of Words (1912), p.97. [return to text]
228 For Robert Byron, Gibbon was ‘a pseudo-historian’. But at least Gibbon could write. Nor would he have spelt Cilicia ‘Silicia’. [return to text]
229 English Prose Rhythm, p. 126. [return to text]
230 Her hair. [return to text]
231 Her face. [return to text]
232 Her lips. [return to text]
233 Her teeth. [return to text]
234 Her cheek. [return to text]
235 A lovelock. [return to text]
236 Her lips. [return to text]
237 Quoted in Sir Herbert Read, English Prose Style (1928 ed.), p. 31. [return to text]
238 Aubrey’s Brief Lives, ed. O. L. Dick (1950), ‘Lancelot Andrewes’, p. 7. [return to text]
239 Cf. Locke’s view that, in writings which aim at truth, all figurative expressions are ‘perfect cheats’. [return to text]
240 Nor was he even very consistent in avoiding simile and metaphor himself. He begins the first passage quoted above with a metaphor. Of alchemists seeking the Philsopher’s Stone he says: ‘if an Experiment lye never so little out of their rode, it is free from their discovery: as I have heard of some violent creatures in Africk, which still going a violent pace straight on, and not being able to turn themselves, can never get any prey but what they meet just in their way.’ And again: ‘Now there is an universal desire, and appetite after knowledge, after the peaceable, the fruitful, the nourishing knowledge: and not after that of the antient Sects, which only yielded hard indigestible arguments, or sharp contentions instead of food: which when the minds of men requir’d bread, gave them only a stone, and for fish a serpent.’ [return to text]
241 ‘In the thought of Montesquieu, at the moment one least expects it, suddenly the summit turns to gold.’ [return to text]
242 ‘The people always act too much or too little. Sometimes with 100,000 arms it overthrows everything; sometimes with 100,000 feet it merely crawls like an insect.’ – ‘Spain has behaved like that demented king who asked that all he touched might turn to gold.’ – ‘England is tossed by winds whose effect is not to sink her, but to bring her safe to port.’ – ‘Relativity is the sponge that effaces all prejudices.’ [return to text]
243 Tu proverai sì come sa di sale lo pane altrui, e com’ è duro calle
lo scendere e il salir per l’altrui scale.
– Paradiso, XVII.
Thou shalt make trial what salt and bitter fare
The bread of others; and how hard a path
Still to toil up and down another’s stair.
[return to text]
244 Varnhagen von Ense, Denkwürdigkeiten (1843–59), VIII, p. 112. [return to text]
245 Cambridge. [return to text]
246 Joseph Warton (Pope’s Works (1797 ed.), IX, p. 84) asserts that Johnson said this to him. Johnson, as he himself admitted, could talk at times very ‘loosely’; but I feel some doubt whether he can really have uttered anything so inaccurate. (See G. B. Hill, Johnson’s Lives of the Poets (1905), III, p. 51; and contrast p. 186 below.) [return to text]
247 This I do not feel. [return to text]
248 See especially W. H. Clemen, The Development of Shakespeare’s Imagery, 1951 – an excellent study, though at times, I think, a little apt to grow too microscopic in the search for hidden significances; too forgetful that the stage is not the study. Not the least interesting thing in Shakespeare’s images is their advance from being merely ornamental to become relevant, concentrated, suggestive. In his prentice work he often uses them merely to impress; but later to express what in no other way could have been expressed so poignantly. They had been mere jewellery: they become the life and feature of his characters. [return to text]
249 Compare Sterne’s own remark: ‘If ever the army of martyrs was to be augmented or a new one raised – I would have no hand in it, one way or t’other.’ [return to text]
250 Another example of this somewhat obvious form of humour is the nautical Ben of Congreve’s Love for Love. [return to text]
251 A little curious when one recalls Johnson’s rather excessive fondness for allegory in The Rambler. [return to text]
252 Johnson wrote ‘eyes’; but this plural must surely be a slip of his pen. [return to text]
253 Cf. Locke, Of Education: ‘If he have a poetic vein, it is to me the strangest thing in the world, that his father should desire or suffer it to be
cherished or improved.’ At least, admirably honest! [return to text]
254 ‘Dwellers in huts, dwellers in palaces – all alike suffer and groan here below. Queens have been seen weeping like humble women; and men have marvelled how many tears were contained in the eyes of kings.’ [return to text]
255 ‘It is like seeing the ruins of Palmyra, superb relics of genius and of time, at whose foot the Arab of the desert has built his miserable hut.’
‘At times a tall column appeared towering alone amid desolation, as a great thought rises up, at moments, in a soul that time and calamity have laid waste.’
‘The grey overcoat and the hat of Napoleon, hoisted on a stick off Brest, would send all Europe rushing to arms.’
‘Youth is a charming thing; it sets off at life’s beginning, crowned with flowers, like the Athenian fleet on its way to conquer Sicily.’
‘The heart that is calmest in appearance, resembles the natural well of the savannah of Alachua: the surface seems calm and pure; but when you peer into the basin’s bottom, you perceive a huge crocodile which the well feeds in its depths.’
‘I do nothing; I believe no longer either in glory or in love, in power or in liberty, in kings or in peoples. … I watch passing at my feet my final hour.’
‘No one has my power of creating a real society by summoning the ghosts; it has reached such a point that the life of my memories swallows up all consciousness of my real life. Even persons whom I never took notice of, if they die, invade my memory; one would think that no one could become my companion without passing the gate of the grave – which leads me to think that I am myself a dead man. Where others will find an eternal separation, I find an eternal reunion; if one of my friends departs from this world, it is as if he came to live at my fireside; he leaves me no more. … If the generations of today despise the generations that are now grown old, they waste their contempt so far as I am concerned: I do not even notice their existence.’
‘I go everywhere yawning away my life.’
‘Life is a permanent plague.’
[return to text]
256 It seems unlikely that Flaubert had ever read Macaulay’s serious exultation (in his Essay on Southey’s Colloquies) at the pleasing prospect of cultivation being carried hereafter to the very tops of Helvellyn and Ben Nevis. [return to text]
257 ‘As for me I detest life; I am a catholic, and have in my heart something of the green mould of the cathedrals of Normandy.’
‘This glare like a conflagration that turned her pale sky to purple, became more deeply covered in shadow, and by degrees grew dim.’
‘This great love of theirs in which she lived immersed, seemed to ebb beneath her, like the waters of a river sinking into its bed; and she perceived the slime.’
‘Human speech is like a cracked cauldron where we bang out tunes fit for dancing bears, when our longing is to touch the heart of the stars.’
‘Pleasures, like schoolboys in a schoolyard, had so trampled on her heart, that nothing green grew there now; and whatever passed through it, more heedless than the schoolboys, did not even leave, like them, its name scratched on the wall.’
‘One should never touch idols: their gilding comes off on the hands.’
‘She corrupted him still, from beyond the tomb.’
‘The knots that are most firmly tied, untie themselves, because the cord wears out. All goes, all passes; the water flows, and the heart forgets.’
‘Everywhere there insinuates itself the love of quibbling, the rage to hold forth, to perorate, to plead cases. … Poor Olympus! They would be capable of turning your summit into a potato-patch.’
‘Even quite young, I had a complete presentiment about life. It was like a nauseous smell of cookery, exhaling through a ventilator. No need to taste it, to know that it is sickening.’
‘Make yourself a hidden cuirass of poetry and pride, as mailcoats were woven out of gold and iron.’
‘The author in his work should be like God in the Universe – everywhere present, nowhere visible.’
‘The true poet, for me, is like a priest. From the moment he dons his cassock, he must quit his family … one should imitate the Amazons and cauterize one whole side of one’s breast.’
‘I am a man-pen.’
(Of his art.) ‘It is an ulcer that I scratch – no more.’
‘Provided my manuscripts last as long as I do, I ask no more. A pity that I should need too big a tomb – or I would have them buried with me, as a savage does with his horse.’
‘I expect nothing further from life than a series of sheets of paper to daub with black. I feel as if I were crossing to an endless desolation, bound for I know not what. I am myself desert, traveller, and camel all in one.’
(Of Leconte de Lisle.) ‘His ink is pale.’
‘One can judge the goodness of a book by the energy of the punches it has given you. … I believe that the greatest characteristic of genius is, above all, force.’
‘Illusions fall; but cypress-souls are ever-green.’
[return to text]
258 ‘Who has ever had more brilliance than Voltaire; and who has been less of a poet?’ [return to text]
CHAPTER 10: The Harmony of Prose
THE MUSIC OF PROSE is a difficult and even dangerous subject: [259] difficult, because it is intricate and obscure; dangerous, because the more delicate elements in literature can sometimes be damaged by too much critical dissection. Critics, I know, are often indignant at this suggestion – they are apt to feel that the words, and even the bread, are being taken out of their mouths. But it did not really need Freud to discover that our emotions can often be weakened by excessive introspection. The more they know about literature, the less some people – though, of course, by no means all – seem really to feel it. [260] There are some things in its enjoyment that need sharp wits and concentrated attention: but there are also others that are, I think, best left to the less-conscious parts of the mind. Therefore I should be the last to claim over-much from the analysis that follows. Apart from a few simple principles, the sound and rhythm of English prose seem to me matters where both writers and readers should trust not so much to rules as to their ears. Such principles as do emerge are on the whole more likely to serve our sense of curiosity than our sense of beauty; at most, they may suggest not so much what to do as what to avoid.
The first consideration is practical. Speech should not be made difficult to speak: but it may become so if it juxtaposes sounds difficult to articulate (as in Browning’s unspeakable ‘nor soul helps flesh now more than flesh helps soul’); or, again, if its clauses grow so long as to run the speaker out of breath. In short, as Flaubert put it, a good style must meet the needs of the respiration. It therefore seems common sense that a writer should carefully read his manuscript aloud, or at least read it to his inward ear.
True, most modern literature is meant for the silent reader; even so, a sentence is unlikely to be very good if anyone who quotes it, or reads it aloud, is left breathless – for other reasons than admiration.
Besides, an author who would please or move his readers will often wish to do so by sound as well as sense. Here rhythm becomes important. Feeling tends to produce rhythm; and rhythm, feeling. Further, a strong rhythm may have a hypnotic effect which holds the reader, as the Ancient Mariner held the Wedding Guest; prevents his attention from wandering; and also makes him more suggestible. This, indeed, is a main function of metre.
But in prose, since it is not poetry, nor even vers libre, a too metrical rhythm will probably move the sensitive reader, not to sympathy, but to mirth or irritation – as, for instance, when Dickens is swayed by his feelings into patches of blank verse. Prose needs a less obtrusive, more elusive, kind of music. On the other hand, the writer who has no ear, or no care, for rhythm of any kind, may produce a sort of prose that is over-prosaic, humdrum, or downright ugly.
All this, indeed, is ancient history. ‘The form of style’, says Aristotle of orat
ory, [261] ‘must be neither metrical nor yet without rhythm. For if it is metrical, it becomes unconvincing, because it seems artifice. Also it distracts the hearer, by making him listen for some cadence to recur. … On the other hand, the unrhythmical is formless. Prose style must have form, but not metre: for the formless is both unpleasing and ungraspable.’
Similarly Isocrates: ‘Prose should not be wholly prosaic; for that would be dry: nor metrical; for that would be too obvious. It should contain a mixture of metrical forms, especially iambic and trochaic.’ [262]
In practice, many classical writers took elaborate pains with rhythm, particularly at sentence-ends (the ‘clausula’). But they do not help us much; partly because of the great difference between the classical languages, where the main factor was quantity, and our own, where stress is supreme; and also because in their preferences they differ widely among themselves. [263] It seems more practical here to consider some specimens of English rhythmical prose – both as models and as warnings. [264]
Take one of the golden passages of the Authorized Version, where Job curses the day that gave him birth:
Let the stárs | of the twí|light thereóf | be dárk; [265] (iambic-anapaestic)
let it lóok | for líght, | but have nóne; (iambic-anapaestic)
(P) neíther | lèt it | seé the | dáwning | òf the | dáy. (trochaic)
Becaúse | it shút | not ùp || the doórs | of my móth|er’s wómb, (Alexandrine)
nor hid sorrow from mine eyes.
Why diéd | I nót | from the wómb? (iambic-anapaestic)
whý did | I nót | give ùp | the ghóst || when I cáme oùt of | the bél|ly (fourteener)