Style (Harriman Classics): The art of writing well

Style

The art of writing well

F. L. Lucas

foreword by

Joseph Epstein

Contents

About the Author

A Brief History of Style

Foreword by Joseph Epstein

Preface

Author’s Acknowledgements

Chapter 1

The Value of Style

Chapter 2

The Foundation of Style – Character

Chapter 3

Courtesy to Readers (1), Clarity

Chapter 4

Courtesy to Readers (2), Brevity and Variety

Chapter 5

Courtesy to Readers (3), Urbanity and Simplicity

Chapter 6

Good Humour and Gaiety

Chapter 7

Good Sense and Sincerity

Chapter 8

Good Health and Vitality

Chapter 9

Simile and Metaphor

Chapter 10

The Harmony of Prose

Chapter 11

Methods of Writing

Publisher’s Acknowledgements

Publishing details

About the Author

Frank Laurence (‘Peter’) Lucas (1894–1967), Fellow of King’s College, Cambridge, was a distinguished literary scholar and one of the most versatile English writers of the twentieth century. Two of his books were best-sellers: Tragedy in relation to Aristotle’s ‘Poetics’ (1927, enlarged 1957), a handbook popular among literature students; and Style (1955), an acclaimed guide to the art of writing good prose. His most important contribution to scholarship was his four-volume Complete Works of John Webster (1927), the first modern edition of the Jacobean dramatist, which earned him the accolade ‘the perfect annotator’ from T. S. Eliot.

On a grand scale too were his volumes of verse-translations from Greek and Latin poetry, especially his Greek Poetry (1951) and Greek Drama (1954). His versions, in traditional metres and diction, were praised for their grace and fidelity. But though Lucas gained fame as critic and translator, his deepest wish was recognition as a creative writer. T. E. Lawrence admired his poems and became a friend. A few of these appeared in anthologies. The best surely deserve to be better known – including his First World War poems ‘Morituri – August 1915, on the road from Morlancourt’ and ‘ The Night is Chilly but not Dark ’ (both 1935); his poems based on legend and history, such as ‘The Destined Hour’ and ‘Spain 1809’ (1953); and his romantic lyrics like ‘Her Answer, in after years’ and ‘Dead Bee inside a window-pane’ (1935).

Of his fiction, Vita Sackville-West and E. M. Forster praised the sensitive, stylish novel-of-ideas, Cécile (1930), about love, philosophy and politics in the France of Turgot. Lucas also turned his hand to drama. The Bear Dances (1932) was the first dramatisation of the Soviets on London’s West-end stage. It was a brave attempt at ideological disinfectant, written at a time when Cambridge University (in his words) grew full of very green young men going very Red.

Perhaps the wisest way with controversy, Lucas writes in Style, is to avoid it. It was a maxim he found hard to keep. He made an exception for what he saw as the obscurantism and decadence of much literary modernism. He made another for the threats to intellectual liberty, to Western Civilisation itself, from Fascism and Nazism. His powerful anti-appeasement letters to the British press from 1933 to 1939, some forty odd, though forgotten today, were widely admired at the time. They are models of the polemicist’s art. This is the voice of the England I love, wrote a correspondent from Prague in 1938, and for whose soul I was trembling when I heard about the welcome given Mr Chamberlain on his return from Munich. There were also articles, satires, books, public speaking, fund-raising, petitions, meetings with émigrés, help for refugees. The Nazis responded by placing him on their list for extermination once Britain had been defeated.

A fine linguist, Lucas was recruited by the Foreign Office on 3 September 1939 to Bletchley Park. One of the original three-man team in Hut 3, he served there throughout the War as a translator, Intelligence analyst and report-writer, on the busiest shift between 4 p.m. and 1 or 2 a.m. He became guru to the newer recruits and for a time acting head of the section. The high standards of accuracy and clarity that prevailed in Hut 3, his chief maintained, were largely due to Major Lucas being such a stickler for them. His recollections of Hut 3, now in the National Archives, are quoted in the history books.

In 1921, Lucas married E. B. C. (‘Topsy’) Jones, a gifted but now neglected novelist. Through the Cambridge Apostles and through Jones he became a marginal figure in the Bloomsbury Group: his closest friendships here were with Dora Carrington and with Charles and Marie Mauron. Bloomsbury ethics undid his first marriage in the late twenties; Cambridge ethics made his second, in 1932, to a young Girton graduate, Prudence Wilkinson, who shared his passion for grueling walks in wild scenery (Scotland, Ireland, Greece, Iceland and Norway) and who helped inspire his travel-writings. The tragic illness and early death of Prudence Lucas led indirectly to his third marriage, in 1940, to the Swedish psychologist Elna Kallenberg, the stranger who came to me from over the sea when I most needed her.

The last three decades of his life, focused on family life, were his happiest. Psychology became a passion; he wrote the fine works of his maturity, including Style; he wrote an essay on Happiness. His old campaigning energy he channeled into urgent warnings on the dangers of world over-population (The Greatest Problem, and Other Essays, 1960).

a. z.

A Brief History of

Style

Style , F. L. Lucas’s most famous book, began as a course of lectures at Cambridge given each year from 1946 to 1953, at first called ‘English Prose and the writing of it’, then ‘Style, from Aristotle’s Rhetoric onwards’ – and finally just ‘Style’.

The subject, indeed, had always interested Lucas. He wrote his first book, Seneca and Elizabethan Tragedy (1922) – still in print today – not because he liked Seneca or his plays but because he was intrigued by the Roman’s epigrammatic style. Oxford’s Sir Richard Livingstone, in a foreword to Lucas’s second work, Euripides and his Influence (1923), wrote of this upcoming Cambridge don as already known to the younger generation of scholars for his gifts of style and literary criticism. Similar tributes followed in a writing career that spanned half a century and a dozen genres. Long before he came to write Style, Lucas had mastered the territory.

The immediate impetus for the lectures was, as Lucas hints in the book, his wartime work as an Intelligence analyst and report-writer in Bletchley Park’s Hut 3. Here the importance of writing well struck him more forcefully than ever. Though he couldn’t name Bletchley Park in the book, its spirit pervades these pages in their note of authority and conviction.

Lucas of course knew his predecessors’ work on the theme, from the guidebooks of Aristotle and Quintilian to Pater’s ‘Essay on Style’. As an undergraduate at Cambridge after the First World War he had attended the lectures of Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch with their emphasis On the Art of Writing. He knew (and had little time for) Sir Herbert Read’s English Prose Style (1928). But to call a book just Style, and set about expounding in it the art of writing well, took some confidence. Perhaps only Lucas, of all the critics of his generation, could have done it, and done it so well.

Style was published in July 1955 by Cassell & Company of London and by The Macmillan Company of New York. Witty, accessible and instructive, it had a wide appeal. It was warmly received by reviewers and readers. Journals usually hostile, that couldn’t forget Lucas’s attacks on Modernism in the twenties and thirties, found little to criticise. Even The Illustrated London News carried a prominent review, with a photograph of the author looking everyone’s idea of ‘highbrow’.

The first edition soon sold out; a second impression appeared later in 1955, followed by further reprints till the mid-1960s. Meanwhile, in the United States, Holiday magazine had asked Lucas to write a ‘digest’ for its March 1960 number. The resulting essay, ‘On the Fascination of Style’, reprinted in The Odyssey Reader: Ideas and Style (New York, 1968) brought further readers to the book and has remained in print in prose anthologies ever since.

From the start, however, Lucas had received letters of protest from some readers at the book’s often lengthy foreign-language quotations. For the second edition, therefore, published in paperback by Collier Books of New York in 1962 and by Pan Books of London in 1964, as well as minor revisions he added footnote translations: reluctantly, as he explains in the enlarged Preface. These paperbacks proved popular; until the Harriman House editition of 2012, surviving copies disappeared quickly from Internet book sites.

In 1974 Cassell published a new edition it mistakenly called the ‘second’. Unaccountably, it reprinted the first rather than the real second. It added a foreword by Sir Bruce Donald Fraser, who had revised Sir Ernest Gowers’s classic The Complete Plain Words in 1973 and who admired Lucas’s book. This edition sold out by the late seventies. With second-hand copies of any edition scarce and commanding inflated three-figure prices, a new printing in 2012 was timely. The Harriman House edition of that year was based on the 1964 Pan text, checked against the Cassell original. This 2020 reissue is the same text, re-set in a new design and with minor corrections.

Style discusses the qualities that make for a lucid, varied and emphatic prose style, with illustrations from numerous literatures and anecdotes from a lifetime’s experience of teaching English at Cambridge. Many readers of Style and not a few writers have felt a debt of gratitude to Lucas, counting themselves lucky to have discovered the book while young – or regretting that they hadn’t discovered it earlier. In the intervening years Style has had its successors and imitators. Readers with long memories still assert that it is the best book of its kind.

Alexander Zambellas

Department of Special Collections

and Western Manuscripts

The Bodleian Library, Oxford

Foreword

by Joseph Epstein

The way to write is well, and how is your own business.

– a. j. liebling

Writing cannot be taught, as I came to realize after attempting to teach it for thirty years to university students, but it can be learned. One can only teach the mistakes bad writers make, and provide examples of what makes good writers good. But one cannot teach a love of language, the power of observation, a sense of drama, an aptitude for metaphor and simile, the rhythm of a well-constructed sentence or paragraph. Above all, one cannot teach desire – specifically, the desire, one dominating all other desires, to write something striking and stirring, original and memorable.

If writing cannot be taught, it can be learned one way, and one way only. This is by reading those writers who have achieved the mastery that is the name of one’s own desire. Every superior writer I have known, or have known about, is or was a slow reader. The reason is that writers read differently than non-writers. People without literary ambition might ask what a book means, if it is significant, if it gives pleasure. Writers ask these same questions along with two others, which slow them down considerably: how exactly did the author achieve his effects, and what from his work can I appropriate – a euphemism, of course, for steal – for my own writing.

Books on how to write abound, but none I know is all that helpful. Books that address specific problems, of grammar, of punctuation, of usage, are more useful. On usage nothing surpasses H. W. Fowler’s Modern English Usage, first published in 1926 and, mirabile dictu, a modest bestseller when it first appeared in America. Good writing is about more than mere correctness, yet without correctness no good writing is possible. Fowler everywhere offers specific instructions, and was what in the business is known as a prescriptionist, believing in standard English (rather than a descriptionist, who believes that popular use should set the standard), but he is never rule-bound, often technical but never stuffy. On split infinitives, as on ending sentences with prepositions, his sensible line is avoid both if possible, but always break both rules rather than write anything awkward.

Correct English is no guarantee of anything beyond correctness. One may write impeccable English and still be dull, dreary, even stupid. Yet to lapse into incorrectness, not to know the difference between further and farther, disinterest and uninterest, currently and presently, shall and will, is to court the contempt of those who do. While at it one may as well get these and many other small things right. No point, really, in offending that small but often extremely touchy minority group, the educated.

From Aristotle through Horace, Tacitus and Quintilian on to Edgar Allen Poe, Walter Raleigh and Arthur Quiller-Couch up to Strunk and White’s Elements of Style in our own day, there has been no shortage of manuals on oratory and writing. The most useful, I have found, is F. L. Lucas’ Style, partly because it does not pretend to instruct but in even greater part because of the wide-ranging literary intelligence of its author whose own style, lucid, learned, authoritative, rarely fails to persuade. One has to admire the sang-froid of an author who, at the close of a splendid book on the subject of style, writes: We may question, indeed, whether style has ever been much improved by books on style.

F. L. Lucas (1894–1967) was a Cambridge don and all-round man of letters. He wrote a novel and poetry and criticism, and brilliant biographical essays. In 1923, the year after its publication, he wrote in disparagement of T.S. Eliot’s Wasteland, though Eliot seems not to have held it against him, and praised Lucas’ own four-volume edition of John Webster. The Decline and Fall of Romanticism (1936), a survey of the romantic ideal from antiquity to the present, was perhaps his best-known book. His two books of biographical essays of eighteenth-century figures, The Search for Good Sense (1958) and The Art of Living (1959), rise to the level of literature. Lucas began as a classicist, and was at ease in Greek and Latin. He was a man of a generation that assumed people who had intellectual pretensions were naturally fluent in French, and a vast number of the examples of prose style and comments in Style are in French, for which, in the book’s first edition, he chose to supply no translations, lest he seem to insult his readers.

Seneca and Elizabethan Tragedy (1922) is the title of Lucas’ first book, a title that gives one an immediate sense of both its author’s learning and his range. The book was written when Lucas was not yet thirty, but exhibits the brilliance and authority that would mark all his writing. Consider his comparison of Greece and Rome, a model of penetration and concision: For Greece is sweetness, Rome strength, Greece is nerve, and Rome muscle, Greece genius and intellect, Rome talent and character, Greece the Parthenon, Rome the Colosseum, Greece youth, and Rome middle-age.

Written when Lucas was sixty, Style is a vade mecum of its author’s opinions, tastes, point of view. As for that point of view, as Lucas himself avers toward the end of book, it is Apollonian (as opposed to Dionysian). For myself, Lucas writes, I have come passionately to prefer sense to sensibility, and even cynics (if one must have either) to rhapsodists and rapturists … 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. Balance and restraint is what Lucas finds in the writers he admires; tradition and form often loom quite as large for him as elevated emotion and high color.

If one is to write a book about style, one ought to be in possession of a splendid style oneself, which Lucas clearly was.

A brilliant writer, his prose tends toward the aphoristic. Memory is a dipsomaniac, he writes in Style, needing to be perpetually refreshed. On the dangers of self-deception for the writer, he notes: one can often feel more respect for the man who deceives others than for one who deceives himself. Again: There must always be an antipathy between the poetic and the philosophic mind… The only philosopher who published passable poetry was George Santayana, who, if his reputation depended on his verse, would have long ago been forgotten.

In Rhetoric, Aristotle held that the talent for metaphor and simile was a gift and could not be learned. Lucas had that gift. His similes and metaphors, studded through the pages of Style, often dazzle. Of those writers who, in attack mode, damage themselves more than others, he remarks that if today we have fewer vultures, I doubt if there is any decrease in owls and peacocks. On seeking perfection in writing, he notes: A pearl may be perfect, yet in some lights it grows dull; where a diamond flashes its brilliant answer to the least ray, no matter whence. Contra Yeats, who claimed all the world a stage and thereby masks were required, Lucas writes: Reticence, by all means – but not pretence. Veils – but not masks. He admires Horace and Tacitus for their powers of concision; of the latter writing that his controlled brevity [is] deadly as the short sword of the Roman legionary.

Style is not chiefly concerned with correctness nor grammar, but with the qualities that endow language, spoken or written, with persuasiveness or power. The two main meanings of style as Lucas uses it are: "(1) ‘a way of writing’; and (2) ‘a good way of writing.’" Of course there is no unitary style, but many styles, including period styles (rococo, baroque, etc.), temperamental styles (flamboyant, understated, etc.), ornamented and unadorned styles. True style, whatever its period or personal psychology, always shines through.

While musicians and visual artists seem to have been born, no one, Lucas notes, is born a writer. The greatest have had to learn. In Style his aim is to make the task less painful, which he proposes to do by offering some suggestions and providing illustrations from the lives of writers of the past. He adds: But besides these two aims – a deeper enjoyment of the good writing of others, and a better ability to speak, write, and think clearly oneself – the study of style has also a third object: to preserve the purity of the English tongue. Throughout Style he writes of the need to preserve the heritage of English and of the debt we all owe to the language: On the quality of a nation’s language depends to some extent the quality of its life and thought; and on the quality of its life and thought the quality of its language.

Style ends with Lucas emphasizing the need to keep English plain yet rich, simple yet subtle, graceful yet strong.

Lucas provides brief portraits of the writers he both admires and disdains. The latter, in this book at least, tend to predominate. Among the writers whose style he criticizes are Donne, Dryden, Swift, Coleridge, Shelley, De Quincey, Carlyle, Ruskin, Browning, Pater, Swinburne, Saintsbury, Shaw, Henry James (in his late phase), and Virginia Woolf. Of the brilliant critical essays of Miss Woolf, he writes: … I feel that her amused passion for the fantastic became itself too fantastic; she had to heighten the oddities even of real life, as if her pen were a hypodermic syringe injecting yet more alcohol into the reeling drunkenness of reality.

On the credit side, Lucas admires Chaucer, Montaigne, La Rochefoucauld, La Bruyere, Samuel Johnson, Walpole (in his letters), Gibbon, Burke, Montesquieu, Flaubert, Lytton Strachey (more for his Queen Victoria than for his Eminent Victorians), Thomas Hardy, and of course Shakespeare. His taste, in short, runs to the straightforward over the ornamental, the precise over the precious, the manly over the mannered. He prefers French prose over French poetry, and German poetry over German prose (excepting only Schopenhauer and Nietzsche).

Lucas is highly critical of criticism itself. I sometimes wonder, he writes, 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. Taste, for Lucas, is more important than distaste; and critical theory could not procreate, it could only dissect. Best he did not live long enough to read this sentence from the academically much admired current-day critic Judith Butler:

The move from a structuralist account in which capital is understood to structure social relations in relatively homologous ways to a view of hegemony in which power relations are subject to repetition, convergence, and rearticulation brought the question of temporality into the thinking of structure, and marked a shift from a form of Althusserian theory that takes structural totalities as theoretical objects to one in which the insights into the contingent possibility of structure inaugurate a renewed conception of hegemony as bound up with the contingent sites and strategies of the rearticulation of power.

Style provides chapters on clarity, urbanity, brevity and variety, humor and gaiety, and more. Much instruction about prose composition is to be had in these chapters, but because it does not come across as instruction, it goes down all the more easily. From his chapter ‘The Harmony of Prose’, which takes up the matter of word order, I years ago learned the importance of beginning and ending sentences where possible with strong words, and have done my best ever since to avoid beginning sentences with the words There or It or ending them with weak prepositions. From his chapter ‘Good Health and Vitality’, I learned, as he there puts it, 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. In the chapter ‘Courtesy to Readers: Brevity and Variety’, I learned that variety is a law more important than brevity (from Isaac Babel on the subject of brevity I also learned that no composition is finished until no sentence in it can be removed).

All the chapters in Style revert back to and fill out the early chapter, ‘The Foundation of Style – Character’, which gives the book its overarching theme and makes the work unique. In this chapter Lucas introduces the radical, but if one thinks about it quite sensible, notion that character is at the center of good writing, no matter what the form.

Many of Lucas’ criticisms of writers are ultimately criticisms of their characters. So in Milton he finds a want of gaiety; in Donne a strong vein of insincerity; in Shelley an element of self-deception; in Pater an affected delicacy. Swinburne, he notes, suffered from a dearth of ideas, even of sense, and from this incurable dysentery of words. Shaw he finds a writer who ended by selling himself to his own wit, as Faust sold his soul to the devil. These are all flaws, please note, in character that affected their author’s style. On the other side of the ledger, Lucas applauds such things as good manners like Goldsmith’s; good humour and gaiety like Sterne’s; health and vitality like Macaulay’s; good sense and sincerity like Johnson’s.

The beginning of style, Lucas writes, is character. Buffon said that style and the man were the same (Le style c’est l’homme meme); Lucas, I think, would have modified Buffon to read that style also reveals the man. Literary style, he held, is simply a means by which one personality moves others. The problems of style, therefore, are really problems of personality – of practical psychology. By character Lucas does not mean simple goodness. Goodness is no substitute for genius, he writes, but neither is genius for goodness.

V. S. Naipaul defined style as a way of viewing the world. And so it is. But that way is clearly informed by one’s character. For Lucas style is personality clothed in words, character embodied in speech. He adds: " … if you wish your writing to seem good, your character must seem at least partly so. And since in the long run deception is likely to be found out, your character had better not only seem good, but be it." He notes that before Napoleon appointed anyone to an important post he first asked if he had written anything, and if so he wanted to read it so that he could see its style.

Lucas contends that no fineness of character is likely to make an ungifted man write well (though I think that even this sometimes happens); but it can make a gifted one write far better. Reverting to writers to furnish his examples, he writes: … I find myself preferring Montaigne to Bacon, Flaubert and Hardy to Wilde and Shaw, as being fundamentally more honest characters; Sterne and Voltaire to Swift and Rousseau, as having more gaiety and good humor; Tennyson and Arnold to Browning and Meredith, as personalities more sensitive and self-controlled. He closes this passage by noting that after the criticism of the past half century, with all its acidulated sciolists and balderdashing decadents, he turns with relief to Desmond McCarthy because his writing was not only witty and amusing, but also wise and good.

Judgments of character in authors are not easily made. Flaubert wrote that the gifts of the heart cannot be separated from those of the intelligence; those who have drawn a distinction between them, possessed neither. Yet no one ever wrote a more heartless book than Flaubert’s own Madame Bovary, in which the author’s contempt for every character in the book shines through blindingly. Lucas recognizes that often writers, objectionable in much of their conduct, put the best parts of themselves in their books. The carrion-side of Baudelaire is rotten, he writes, but not his tragic compassion for human waste and suffering. He makes similar claims for those flawed characters Rousseau, Byron, and Coleridge. If it were to be revealed that Shakespeare was a murderer, would the best of his plays lose any of their power? Perhaps not. But, then, a man with Shakespeare’s imagination, the retort might be, could not possibly commit murder.

After all qualifications are allowed, Lucas holds that character can be deduced from style and style from character. In his book on Seneca, he writes: Seneca had almost everything, talent, culture, style, a great and sonorous language, a magnificent literary ancestry, a divine tradition to follow and maintain; but a living soul he had not. Because he wanted soul, Seneca was finally never quite first-rate. In his The Influence of Euripides (1923), Lucas writes that in Euripides’ steadfast loyalty always to light and freedom, lies his claim to honour not only among the great dramatists, but also among the great men of the world. In our day, the courage of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn lends his books an indisputable authority and power.

Apart from such obvious flaws in style as pretentiousness and obscurantism, insincerity and self-congratulation, other flaws in writers include exhibitionism (e.g., Norman Mailer, whose own person became his only subject), obsessive interest in sex (e.g., Philip Roth, who without sex to write about would have been out of business), vengefulness (Saul Bellow, a literary bluebeard who used his novels to slay his ex-wives). How one wishes F. L. Lucas were still alive to interpret the styles of James Baldwin, Joan Didion, Tom Wolfe, and so many others, including (with trepidation) my own!

Joseph Epstein

2020

To Sir Charles Tennyson

Preface

This book consists of lectures given at Cambridge. Though they have been largely rewritten, I have kept a good deal of their original lecture-form, as being (I hope) rather less formal and less dogmatic. For to dogmatism those who write on language seem, for some reason, particularly prone; and I should like to make it clear at once that, if at times I have put my views strongly, I do not forget that such matters of taste must remain mere matters of opinion.

On the other hand I have here added a good many more specimen passages from various authors. Perhaps I have quoted too much. But a book on style without abundant examples seems to me as ineffectual as a book on art, or biology, without abundant illustrations. Many of these passages are in French. That may be gallomania on my part; but I feel that French prose has often outstanding merits. In the original edition I left such foreign quotations untranslated; for I thought English versions of them might seem both inadequate, and insulting to my public. But since then I have been gently reproached by some readers – for instance, a lady in Denmark and a Discalced Carmelite Father in the Philippines – for baffling and tantalizing them with outlandish tongues. So English versions are now added as well. And I have kept these fairly literal; for it seemed more important to be useful than elegant.

I should perhaps also make it clear from the outset that this book is not concerned, except incidentally, with linguistic or grammatical details such as are dealt with in H. W. Fowler’s admirable Modern English Usage or its many successors. It is not that I undervalue these – on the contrary. They may be at times too purist, or too conservative; but they were never more needed. ‘Correctness’, however, is not my real concern; a style, like a person, may be perfectly correct, yet perfectly boring or unbearable. I have merely tried, successfully or not, to pursue the more general, more positive, but more elusive