Style- the Art of Writing Well
Page 26
scarce with | great trav|ail crawl | unto | at midnight.
– Drummond of Hawthornden
For so | have I seen | a lark
rísing | fròm his | béd of | grass,
soaring | upwards | and sing|ing as | he ris|es
and hopes | to get | to Heav|en || and climb |
above | the clouds;
but the | poor bird | was beat|en back
with the | loud sigh|ings of | an east|ern wind
and his mot|ion made | irreg|ular and inconst|ant,
descend|ing more | at ev|ery breath | of the temp|est
than it could recover by the vibration and frequent
weighing of his wings;
till the litt|le creat|ure was forced | to sit down | and pant
and stay | till the storm | was ov|er;
and then | it made | a prosp|erous flight
and did rise | and sing
as if | it had learned | music || and mot|ion from | an ang|el
as he passed | sometimes | through the air || about | his min|istries
here | below.
– Jeremy Taylor
Now sínce | these deád | bònes [277] have | alreád|y outlást|ed
the liv|ing ones | of Methus|elah,
ànd in | a yard | under ground, | and thin | walls of clay,
outworn | all the strong | and spec|ious build|ings above | it;
and quiet|ly rest|ed
under | the drums | and trampl|ings of | three con|quests;
what Prince | can prom|ise such | diuturn|ity
unto | his rel|iques, or might | not glad|ly say,
Sic ego componi versus in ossa velim?
– Sir Thomas Browne
Nor will | the sweet|est delight | of gard|ens || afford | much com|fort in sleep;
wherein | the dul|ness of | that sense
shakes hands | with delect|able od|ours;
and though | in the bed | of Cle|opatr|a,
can hard|ly with an|y delight || raise up | the ghost | of a rose.
– Sir Thomas Browne
When all | is done, | human | life is, || at the greatest and | the best,
but like | a frow|ard child | that must | be played | with
and hum|oured a litt|le
to keep | it qui|et till | it falls | asleep;
and then | the care | is ov|er.
– Sir William Temple
… our dign|ity? That | is gone. || I shall say | no more | about | it.
Light lie | the earth | on the ash|es of Eng|lish pride!
– Burke [278]
She droops | not; and | her eyes,
rising | so high, | might be hidd|en by dist|ance.
But be|ing what | they are, | they can|not be hidd|en;
through the treb|le veil | of crape | that she wears,
the fierce | light | of a blaz|ing mis|ery
that rests | not for mat|ins or vesp|ers,
for noon | of day | or noon | of night,
for ebb|ing or | for flow|ing tide,
may be read | from the ver|y ground.
She is | the def|ier of God.
She al|so is | the moth|er of lun|acies,
and the | suggestr|ess of su|icides.
Deep lie | the roots | of her power;
but narr|ow is | the nat|ion that | she rules.
– De Quincey
The pres|ence that | thus rose || so strang|ely beside | the waters,
is express|ive of what | in the ways | of a thous|and years
men had come | to desire.
Hers is | the head | upon which || all ‘the ends | of the world | are come … ’
– Pater [279]
Let me | now raise | my song | of glor|y.
Heaven | be praised | for sol|itude.
Let me be | alone.
Let me cast | and throw | away | this veil | of be|ing,
this cloud | that chang|es with | the least breath,
níght and | dáy, and | áll night | and áll | day.
While I | sat here | I have | been chang|ing.
I have watched | the sky change.
I have seen | clouds cov|er the stars, | then free | the stars,
then cov|er the stars | again.
Now I look | at their chang|ing no more.
Now no | one sees | me and I | change no more.
Heaven | be praised | for sol|itude
that has | removed | the press|ure of | the eye,
the solic|itat|ion of | the bod|y,
and all need | of lies | and phras|es.
– Virginia Woolf
In fine, English prose of a poetic kind contains, I think, far more hidden metre than, so far as I know, has ever been recognized. But this is a dangerous secret, to be breathed only with discretion. [280] Ars est celare artem. It may be added that this is another beauty of which English literature would be robbed by those who would apply to prose the Wordsworthian heresy about verse, that the writer ‘to excite rational sympathy must express himself as other men express themselves’. Prose that comes too near to conversation must forfeit that rhythmical intensity which is rare in English talk (whatever may be true of Ireland).
There is, of course, another variety of rhythm which depends on the symmetrical arrangement of ideas as well as of syllables – antithesis. After its excessive use by prose-writers like Lyly and Johnson, by poets like Pope and his school, it might have been thought that antithesis would have become an exhausted and hackneyed thing. Yet it has not. Few modern writers, indeed, would dare abuse it as the eighteenth century did; yet antithesis keeps an eternal youth because it corresponds to an eternal need of human thinking. The mind is perpetually balancing and seeking balance; perpetually truth lies between opposed extremes, and wisdom between opposite excesses. So it is that when European literature begins, Homer is already full of μέν and δέ. Heaven knows the hoary antiquity of those two adversative particles. And there seems nothing more to say of antitheses but that a style which has too many of them will seem artificial, and a style which has too few will lack point.
There is another matter which concerns both rhythm and clarity alike – word-order. Just as the art of war largely consists of deploying the strongest forces at the most important points, so the art of writing depends a good deal on putting the strongest words in the most important places. In English, as I have said, the most emphatic part of a sentence is to be found at its end; the next most emphatic at its beginning; though, naturally, words or phrases that would normally comes towards the end, gain emphasis by being put at the beginning, from the very fact that this is abnormal. ‘This Jesus hath God raised up.’ ‘The atrocious crime of being a young man, which the honourable gentleman has with such spirit and decency charged upon me, I shall neither attempt to palliate nor deny.’ (Written by Johnson in a speech attributed to Pitt.) [281]
Needless to say, this principle of keeping emphatic words for the end, and the end for emphatic words, is by no means inflexible. Emphasis may be important: but more important still is variety. To end sentence after sentence with a thump would lead to maddening monotony. Besides, a writer like Pater may develop a particular fondness for sentences that end, not strongly, but with a diminishing cadence and a dying fall. Again and again, hearing a sentence of his read aloud, you would think it had reached its end; but instead of a full-stop there comes only a semi-colon; followed by some afterthought, often in the shape of a participial or subordinate clause. ‘That flawless serenity, better than the most pleasurable excitement, [282] yet so easily ruffled by chance collision even with the things and persons he had come to value as the greatest treasure in life, was to be wholly his today,| he thought, | as he rode | towards Tib|ur, || und|er the ear|ly sun|shine; | the marb|le of | its vill|as || glist|ening all | the way | before | him on | the hill|side.’ ‘And the true cause of his trouble is that he has based his hope on what he has seen in a dream, or his own fancy has put together; without previous
thought whether what he desires is in itself attainable and within the compass of human nature.’ It all seems to me very characteristic of the man, with his air of languorous precision – Pater the Epicurean arranging with a slightly affected delicacy the folds of what seems sometimes a Stoic mantle, sometimes an Anglican surplice. Still it is one way of ending sentences; and a useful variation.
In general, however, there seems to me much to be said for closes that are sharp and clean. Take this passage from Strachey’s Queen Victoria.
The English Constitution – that indescribable entity – is a living thing, growing with the growth of men, and assuming ever-varying forms in accordance with | the sub|tle and com|plex laws | of hum|an char|acter. | It is the child of wisdom and chance. | The wise | men of 16|88 moulded | it in|to the shape | we know; | but the chance | that George | I | could not | speak Eng|lish | gave it one of its essential peculiarities – the system of a Cabinet independent of the Crown and subordinate to the Prime Minister. The wisdom of Lord Grey saved it from petrifaction and destruction, and set it upon the path of Democracy. Then chance intervened once more; | a fem|ale sov|ereign happ|ened to marr|y | an ab|le and per|tinac|ious man; | and it seemed likely that an element which had been quiescent in it for years – the element of irresponsible administrative power – was about to become its predominant characteristic and to change completely the direction of its growth. | But what | chance gave, | chance took | away. | The Con|sort per|ished in | his prime; | and the English Constitution, dropping the dead limb with hardly a tremor, contin|ued its | myster|ious life || as if | he had nev|er been.
Try ending these sentences with words less emphatic. Replace ‘the subtle and complex laws of human character’ by ‘subtle and complex psychological laws’; ‘It is the child of wisdom and chance’ by ‘Wisdom and chance were its parents’; ‘subordinate to the Prime Minister’ by ‘which the Prime Minister controlled’; ‘the path of Democracy’ by ‘a democratic path’. You will, I think, lose much of the energy.
Consider, again, the words of the angel in Revelation: ‘Babylon is fallen, is fallen, that great city, because she made all nations drink of the wine of the wrath of her fornication.’ [283] ‘Q’ in his Art of Writing suggests that our first impulse is to emend for emphasis: ‘Babylon, that great city, is fallen, is fallen’ [284] (though he defends the Authorized Version, as keeping the fading close of the Vulgate, ‘cecidit, cecidit, Babylonia illa magna’). [285] But I doubt this impulse to alter it. The emphasis seems to me to lie quite naturally on the city’s greatness; which yet could not avert the retribution for her still greater crimes. The Revisers contrived to stress both the greatness and the fall, by putting one at the end of the clause, the other at its beginning: ‘Fallen, fallen is Babylon the great.’ And this seems best of all.
Take another example. Bain criticizes the word-order of Bacon’s fine sentence, ‘A crowd is not a company, and faces are but a gallery of pictures, and talk but a tinkling cymbal, where there is no love.’ For Bain argues that the reader mistakes the first three statements for universal truths, and is disconcerted by finding at the end the condition: ‘where there is no love’. He would therefore move ‘where there is no love’ to the beginning. This appears to me a disastrous improvement. The stress is on the emptiness of life without love; therefore this absence of love can be rightly kept till the end. No doubt the reader is taken by surprise when he comes to it; but did not Bacon mean him to be?
Contrast the following sentences by Bain himself, where the interest seems to me to flag before the end.
The Humour of Shakespeare has the richness of his genius, and follows his peculiarities. He did not lay himself out for pure Comedy, like Aristophanes; he was more nearly allied to the great tragedians of the classical world. … The genius of Rabelais supplies extravagant vituperation and ridicule in the wildest profusion; a moral purpose underlying. Coarse and brutal fun runs riot. … For Vituperation and Ridicule, Swift has few equals, and no superior. On rare occasion, he exemplifies Humour and, had his disposition been less savage and malignant, he would have done so much oftener.
It is rash work rewriting the style of others; Bain on Bacon has just illustrated that; but I cannot help thinking that here the result would at least have been clearer and crisper, had Bain paid more attention to his own sentence-endings.
The Humour of Shakespeare has the richness of his genius. He did not, like Aristophanes, lay himself out for pure Comedy; he was more nearly allied to the classic Tragedians. … The genius of Rabelais shows a wild extravagance of satire and ridicule, underlaid by moral purpose. His work is a riot of coarse and brutal fun. … In vituperation and ridicule none have surpassed and few have equalled Swift. But he rarely shows humour; he might indeed have done so oftener, had his temper been less savage and malignant.
Or take a more recent example from a work on the Napoleonic period. Of the negotiations with Russia about the Emperor’s second marriage, it says: ‘A few days later, however – on the 5th of February – despatches which made it sufficiently clear that Alexander, embarrassed by his mother’s dislike of Napoleon as a son-in-law, was countenancing delay to cover evasion, arrived from Petersburg.’ It does not make for ease to put twenty-three words between subject and verb. Nor is it important that the despatches originated in St. Petersburg – the obvious place. The important thing is the evasion. I should therefore myself prefer, ‘A few days later, however, on February 5th, despatches from Petersburg made it sufficiently clear that Alexander, embarrassed by his mother’s dislike of Napoleon as a son-in-law, was countenancing delay only to cover evasion.’
I suggest that anyone who goes through the next thing he writes, seeing to it that most of his sentences end with words that really matter, may be surprised to find how the style gains, like a soggy biscuit dried in the oven. [286] Though so simple (once it has been seen), this remains, I think, one of the most effective tricks of the trade; being based on a sound psychological reason. A similar principle applies to the endings of paragraphs.
Then there is the further art of suiting sound to sense, rhythm to meaning. Here, I think, critical analysis is mainly a matter of curiosity; it will not much help the writer, who here too will probably do better to rely on ear and intuition; and it may pervert the reader, either by distracting his attention from more serious matters to effects comparatively trivial, or by encouraging him to find fanciful significances where none exist. However, in verse (where sound is often relatively more important than in prose) it is not hard to find examples of sound that is clearly imitative.
πολλὰ δ’ ἄναντα κάταντα πάραντά τε δόχμιά τ’ ἦλθον.
– Homer – mules on a rough mountain-track
αὖθις ἔπειτα πέδονδε κυλίνδετο λᾶας ἀναιδής.
– Homer – the stone of Sisyphus bounds downhill again
ἔσωσά σ’ , ὡς ἴσασιν ‘ Eλλήνων ὄσοι ...
– Euripides – the hissing scorn of Medea
Quādrŭpĕd|āntĕ pŭtr|ēm || sŏnĭt|ū quătĭt | ūngŭla | cāmpūm.
– Virgil – galloping cavalry
Tūm cōrn|īx plēn|ā || plŭvĭ|ām vŏcăt | īmprŏbă | vōcĕ
Ēt sōla | īn sīcc|ā || sēc|ūm spătĭ|ātūr ăr|ēnā.
– Virgil – crow croaking and stalking on the sand
Heaven opened wide
Her ever-during gates, harmonious sound
On golden hinges moving
– Milton
On a sudden open fly,
With impetuous recall and jarring sound,
The infernal doors, and on their hinges grate
Harsh thunder that the lowest bottom shook
Of Erebus.
– Milton
’Tis not enough no harshness gives offence,
The sound must seem an Echo to the sense.
Soft is the strain when Zephyr gently blows,
And
the smooth stream in smoother numbers flows;
But when loud surges lash the sounding shore,
The hoarse rough verse should like the torrent roar.
– Pope
By the long wash of Australasian seas.
– Tennyson
Dry clash’d his harness in the icy caves
And barren chasms, and all to left and right
The bare black cliff clang’d round him as he based
His feet on juts of slippery crag that rang
Sharp-smitten with the dint of armed heels –
And on a sudden, lo! the level lake
And the long glories of the winter moon.
– Tennyson
The mellow ouzel fluted in the elm. [287]
– Tennyson
The moan of doves in immemorial elms,
And murmuring of innumerable bees.
– Tennyson
But such tricks soon find their limitations. And when fanciful modern critics try to persuade me that, in such-and-such a line, the broad ‘a’s suggest, say, the sound of a peach growing, I remember regretfully the sturdy good sense of Johnson on these matters:
This notion of representative metre, and the desire of discovering frequent adaptations of the sound to the sense have produced, in my opinion, many wild conceits and imaginary beauties. All that can furnish this representation are [288] the sounds of the words considered singly, and the time in which they are pronounced. Every language has some words framed to exhibit the noises which they express, as thump, rattle, growl, hiss. These, however, are but few, and the poet cannot make them more, nor can they be of any use but when sound is to be mentioned. The time of pronunciation was in the dactyllic measures of the learned languages [289] capable of considerable variety; but that variety could be accommodated only to motion or duration, and different degrees of motion were perhaps expressed by verses rapid or slow, without much attention of the writer, but when the image had full possession of his fancy: but our language having little flexibility, our verses can differ very little in their cadence. [290] The fancied resemblances, I fear, arise sometimes merely from the ambiguity of words; there is supposed to be some relation between a soft line and a soft couch, or between hard syllables and hard fortune.