Style- the Art of Writing Well

by F L Lucas

  So apparently, sooner or later, did Flaubert himself. Elsewhere he groans that he would gladly give up all the ninety-eight volumes he has so far read, and the half-ream of notes he has compiled, if only for three seconds he could feel really moved by the passions of his characters. And his niece records that he came to feel he had spent too long on such preliminary researches, and wanted to give the rest of his life to pure art.

  Of course, different minds vary enormously in their power to amass information without growing gorged and surfeited. Nothing in Gibbon’s vast history is more astounding than the calm enjoyment with which he seems to have produced it. He talks of it in the tone other men use of their hobbies. ‘This work’, he writes, ‘amused and exercised nearly twenty years.’ And again: ‘Some fame, some profit, and the assurance of daily amusement encourage me to persist.’ Whereas his great contemporary Montesquieu, toiling through Visigothic statutes, compared himself wearily to Saturn swallowing stones; and the completion of L’Esprit des Lois was reported to have left him too exhausted to read anything profounder than fairy-tales. All the more honour to him that his work yet remains so readable and so alive.

  But since for most of us the accumulation of facts does often prove highly exhausting, the vital point is to avoid getting stale. Often, indeed, the ideal of reading everything ever written on a subject seems to me a vain idol. Five centuries ago such an ambition was often feasible; [334] today it is often fantastic; tomorrow it will become still more so. Therefore it is important to develop a quick eye for fools whose books are not worth reading; and a quick power of disembowelling other books less foolish, but still of minor importance. [335] Otherwise, before the author puts pen to his own paper, he may easily have become a stuffed owl, with nothing new to say and with no energy for saying it.

  The second point, I think, is not to delay writing till too late. If one is going to read a hundred books on a given subject, it may often be better to start writing as soon as one has read, say, fifty of them. The rest can be taken in the intervals of writing, or after the first draft is written. In this way the writer will feel less like one of those Alpine peasants one sees scaling hillsides with haystacks on their heads. He will have more chance to produce original ideas of his own; and his style will be less likely to lose all life and lightness of touch.

  Later on, when the stage of revision arrives, he can complete his reading of what really must be read; then he can add what he has omitted, and rectify what he has forgotten or failed to grasp, with a memory refreshed, and with spirits raised by a sense that the body of his work is already created and it now remains only to make it better and better.

  No doubt there is a danger that such additions may overload or distort his original structure; but it proves, as a rule, far easier to lengthen a book than to shorten it. No doubt, too, one can be overtimid about losing inspiration while mastering material. I think Matthew Arnold sometimes was. He would write a poem like Sohrab and Rustum, based merely on some stray article in a French journal, without bothering to read further, either then or afterwards.

  However, the essential point is that good writing can seldom come from a jaded body or a bloated mind. Indeed, I am constantly astonished that scholars and men of letters should overstrain and overburden their own irreplaceable minds and bodies as no prudent general would ever do with his troops, no prudent rider with his horse, no prudent driver with his car. For a time, indeed, slavery may be made to pay – as with Balzac, writing eighteen hours a day on black coffee. But not only was the end of all that a total collapse; it is hard not to feel that Balzac’s output, had it been less in quantity, might have gained in quality and in style. [336] One who would be a stylist, I believe should be a careful steward of his own vitality.

  To recapitulate, the method of writing I have suggested, though there are doubtless many others, falls roughly into these stages.

  (a) Meditation and documentation. (b) Incubation.

  Periods of alternate thought, quick writing, and partial revision, till the first draft is complete.

  Revision; further documentation, correction, curtailment, and amplification. This can be repeated indefinitely, subject to the danger of the book’s growing unwieldy, overloaded, or stale.

  There are also various minor questions of method. Gibbon got a paragraph perfect in his head before writing it down; so did Pascal; it is probably far commoner to write, and to revise, sentence by sentence, clause by clause. Gibbon’s way may have advantages; but it requires an exceptional memory. Besides, I never know whether a sentence will seem right till I have seen it with my eyes in print. As one cannot afford in these times to have Balzac’s twenty-seven proofs (and even in that period of sweated compositors these lavish habits of his helped to drown him in debt), one has to be content with typescript. But see it one must. Even then, there are faults that only reveal themselves when one reads it aloud. Lytton Strachey, who followed Gibbon’s method, once argued to me that one cannot alter a word here and there, because each alteration of a word upsets others words which would have in their turn to be altered – and so ad infinitum. My only answer is, ‘In that case the impossible perpetually happens. Look at a manuscript-page of Madame Bovary.’ To some minds, however, I admit that this method of piecemeal alteration seems repugnant. Morris, for example, if dissatisfied with a piece of work, would write the whole thing afresh from the start.

  None the less, when I read of authors rewriting whole volumes a dozen times (if they really mean what they say), I cannot help wondering whether it might not have been better to revise more and rewrite less. The mere mechanical labour of a dozen rewritings is enormous; and unless there is careful collation, good things may get scrapped along with the bad; suppose what one wrote at some point in the second draft was, after all, better than what replaced it in the sixth, what labour to unearth it! And what a risk that it may get forgotten! Whereas if one writes the first draft on only a third or a quarter of each page, with plenty of space between lines, the rest of the page can be used for rewritings and additions. Then, all the variants remain under the writer’s eye; and he continues free to change his choice, and revert if necessary to his first ideas. Finally, if a whole page grows too congested, it can then be retyped, in its revised version, with minimum waste of time, since any page contains only a few lines. Further, the less matter there is on each page, the easier it is to alter the order of passages, or to insert new. In this way it is possible to do an equal amount of revising with far fewer rewritings of the whole. But I should not dare to suggest anything so obvious if writers did not often seem in practice to do the opposite, and so crowd their manuscripts as to leave themselves no room to turn. Paper may have grown costly; but it remains less precious than time, life, and energy.

  There is also a slight problem in the mechanical means employed for writing. I have known authors compose with a pencil in an armchair; but I think that process, if carried on for any length of time, can prove curiously demoralizing, and lead to slovenly style. Some can compose on a typewriter; but it needs considerable familiarity for that clicking, mechanical contraption to become second nature, whereas a pen soon grows a mere extension of one’s own forefinger. Lastly, there are those who, like Stendhal or the later Henry James, dictate. [337] This does well enough for business documents; but even antiquity saw its dangers for a writer. Habit, I suppose, may triumph even over these; but I feel that a serious writer should create in solitude; and the stylistic results of dictation can easily become abominable – facile, verbose, and sluttish. I have suggested that, in general, prose style should be neither too unlike talk, nor yet too like it; with dictation it may grow too like loose chatter.

  However, the main point in methods of composition remains, I think, this – to hold the balance between the more and the less conscious parts of the mind. Otherwise one may become either too coldly correct or too wildly eccentric. But naturally men will always disagree what the right balance is, or perhaps whether there
should be any balance at all. Blake would deny the importance I have given to the criticizing reason. Flaubert, on the contrary, might claim a higher value for cold detachment. ‘Il faut écrire froidement. Tout doit se faire à froid, posément. Quand Louvel a voulu tuer le duc de Berri, il a pris une carafe d’orgeat, et n’a pas manqué son coup.’ [338] He might indeed have quoted Diderot’s paradox on the self-possession of great actors. For it seems likely that, whereas the passionate player may be marvellous on Monday, but mediocre on Tuesday, only his calmer colleagues can be trusted to maintain a steady excellence.

  However, from the beginning of recorded time some temperaments seem born to prefer Dionysus, others Apollo. Men have never long agreed how drunk they liked art or literature to be. Most critical quarrels are really about nothing else. For myself, I have come passionately to prefer sense to sensibility, and even cynics (if one must have either) to rhapsodists and rapturists. To argue which gives more artistic pleasure is futile (though nothing seems able to stop men arguing about it). I can only suggest that humanity seems throughout its history to have suffered far worse from mental intoxications and fanaticisms than from any rare excess of sober reason. Both the Apolline and the Dionysiac types have produced memorable writers; but the bad writer of the Apolline type can seldom become anything worse than a bore, whereas the bad writer in the Dionysiac style may prove a mere maniac, disseminating mania. In short, though the pleasure-values of literature are outside argument, its influence-values seem to me in favour of balance and restraint. One cannot destroy Dionysus (as Pentheus found to his cost). And Dionysus has his gifts. But there are other powers better to trust than he.

  There remains another respect in which I think it is important for a writer not to let himself be tyrannized over by the less-conscious portions of his mind. He should not wait passively for ‘inspiration’. Ronsard, Herrick, Gray averred that they could not write except when the mood took them; Shelley denied that any man could will to produce a poem; Macaulay attributed his own success to never writing except when he felt in the humour, and his ideas flowed fast. But about inspiration there is a temptation to talk cant. Inevitably Gray’s view irritated Johnson who had lived on fourpence-halfpenny a day, and learned that ‘a man can always write if he sets himself doggedly to it’; though what he called ‘fantastick foppery’ in Gray was rather lack of resolution, or of compulsion. Poetry, indeed, may be harder to force than prose; but if Shelley’s adage were true, how could any long poem ever be written? Crabbe could set himself his steady thirty lines a day. You may not admire Crabbe. But Milton’s Paradise Lost, or the hundred and twenty dramas of Sophocles, could hardly have been composed by waiting on the whimsies of an imaginary Muse. [339] As for Macaulay, who appears to have expressed himself at dinner-tables like a cloudburst, one doubts if there were ever many days when he was disinclined to express himself on paper. There seems more sense in honest Trollope’s scornful comment that a tallow-chandler might as well await ‘the divine moment of melting’. Certainly Trollope lived up to his principles, and wrote even at sea, in the intervals of running out to be sick. Probably most writers have to drag themselves to their desks. There are minds that, like motor-cars, are hard to start from cold; but if one’s self-starter fails, the remedy is not to go for a walk, but to swing the engine. A man can make himself put down what comes, even if it seems nauseating nonsense; tomorrow some of it may not seem wholly nonsense after all. ‘Not a day without a line’ – or, as Swiss guides say, ‘doucement, mais toujours’ – seems to me in general a wiser policy than an alternating diet of lotus and midnight oil. For often, as Gautier put it, ‘L’inspiration consiste à s’asseoir à son bureau et à prendre la plume’. [340]

  It may be said, however, ‘Granted that good writing turns out to depend less on inspiration, and more on hard grind, than most people suppose, is there any real need for all this rewriting and repolishing?’ As Shelley is supposed to have said of Ariosto’s traditional fifty-six versions, [341] ‘is it worth so much trouble?’

  I agree that, like most things, the passion for perfection can be overdone. It is part of that good sense which is so valuable to style itself, to remember that fine phrases are not, after all, the summit of human achievement. Few of us will shed tears over the Italian author who, spying a textual error in the volume he was going to present to the Pope, died of heart-failure in the carriage; or even feel much sympathy with Alfred de Musset passing three sleepless nights over a misprinted comma. Even Flaubert’s distress at having written a double ‘de’ in ‘un bouquet de fleurs d’oranger’ may seem a little excessive. [342]

  Again, it is a truism that art should not be obtrusive; and ages more interested than ours in the conception of ‘the gentleman’, or ‘l’honnête homme’, have included among his qualities, not without reason, a certain grace of negligence. Some readers are irritated by the too careful polish of Stevenson; the accomplished diction and rhythm of Tennyon’s Idylls works less well for narrative than the less jewelled style of Chaucer or of Morris. For narrative generally gains by a rapidity like Homer’s; whereas verbal felicities may have a delaying effect, as the golden apples on Atalanta.

  There is also something irritating to robuster minds in a delicacy like Pater’s, who would not read Stevenson or Kipling for fear their stronger style might infect his own. Better, some may feel, if it had; better a muscular Philistine like Macaulay than such finicky valetudinarianism. Similarly with Amiel, who sterilized himself by a fastidiousness that could never ‘brutaliser son sujet’. [343]

  Literature itself, it may be argued, is only lessened by being made an idol, and only degraded by being exalted from human to divine. ‘Ce qui fit le bonheur de la littérature sous Louis XIV, c’est qu’alors c’était une chose de peu d’importance’ – ‘Les passions et les arts ne sont qu’une importance ridicule attachée à quelque petite chose’ [344] – these cynicisms of Stendhal have yet an element of truth often forgotten in Universities, studios, and salons. It is good to be a great writer: it remains more important to be an honest man.

  More important for the man himself – yes. But not always for society. There have been writers whose lives were warped by excessive concentration on literature, yet of whom the world must say, as Hal of Falstaff, ‘I could have better spar’d a better man.’ Whether their infinite pains were really worth while for Pope or Flaubert or Tennyson, no one can know; but they were well worth while for us.

  In any case there does not seem much practical danger of many authors rewriting their books seventeen times, or even seven. I suspect, on the contrary, that most authors do not revise enough, and that most books would be better for more pains.

  In his interesting volume, Modern Prose Style, Professor Dobrée has said, ‘The modern writer must not think of style’; and again, thirteen pages later, ‘In a sense all good live prose is experimental – as all good poetry is – a desperate attempt to say what has never been said before in spite of having to use the same words to say it in. Any original writer is engaged in a continual struggle with words, to wrest out of them, to hammer into them, meanings they never had before; if he did not want to do this, he would not be an original writer.’

  I hope he will forgive me if I do not find these two precepts altogether easy to reconcile; nor either of them altogether wise. I should have thought that any serious writer would do well to think quite a lot about style; but I doubt if all these ‘desperate’ efforts to hammer new meanings into words are likely to do much service either to the writer or to the language. In the end it is the reader that may become ‘desperate’. I distrust frantic resolutions to be ‘original’. I believe that a writer should try, not to be different from others, but to be himself; not to write ‘originally’, but as well as he possibly can. Real originality is spontaneous. Aeschylus or Herodotus, Shakespeare or Milton, even lesser writers like Beddoes or Landor, could hardly have hidden theirs, even had they tried. Caesar (not usually reckoned a ti
mid character) held that a writer should shun an unusual word as a mariner a reef; he would hardly have been more favourable to unusual ‘meanings’. His attitude towards language seems to me too conservative: perhaps it was a compensation for an attitude towards politics the reverse of conservative. But it is a tenable attitude; certainly I doubt if one can reasonably dogmatize that ‘all live prose’ must now do the opposite. Again, imagine Swift or Voltaire taking off their coats to hammer new meanings into words!

  Those who chase originality (as is far too common today) are more likely to find they have caught instead her ugly sister, eccentricity – like Seneca and Lyly, Meredith and Shaw. Progress may come from aiming, however hopelessly, at perfection; I question if perfection has often come in literature, from aiming at ‘progress’. Indeed, progress in literature has probably been as often downwards as upwards.

  My simple conclusion is that any writer with an artistic conscience must share that passion of any honest craftsman which will not let him rest till a piece of work is as good as he can make it: but, even so, he should also remember the eternal wisdom of Greece, ‘Nothing too much’; or of Israel, ‘Be not righteous overmuch; why shouldst thou destroy thyself?’

  Here are a great many words I have uttered about words – more than I had meant. The subject is indeed important, as I said at the beginning, not only to writers, but to all of us – both as readers and as ordinary human beings, who have to think in words, and to talk them, and to write them, at least in our letters. It is important to us, too, as inheritors of our native tongue, which each of us, in his own minute degree, must help to leave better or worse for those that come after us. We may question, indeed, whether style has ever been much improved by books on style. The influence of creative writers, of national history, of social change, surely weighs far more. And no teaching can give talent; yet sometimes, perhaps, it may help to save talent from being wasted. A lot of writing is too confused and obscure; a lot is too wordy; a lot is too peevish or pompous or pretentious; a lot is too lifeless; a lot is too lazy. These are not hopeless faults to cure oneself of, if only one can remember them. If you can remember to pursue clarity, brevity, and courtesy to readers; to be, if not gay, at least good-humoured; never to write a line without considering whether it is really true, whether you have not exaggerated your statement, or its evidence; to shun dead images, and cherish living ones; and to revise unremittingly – then, though you may not, even so, write well, you are likely at least to write less badly. For, obvious as such precepts are, nine-tenths of the books that are written seem to me to ignore one or more of them.