Lucidity, Simplicity, Euphony
2008-10-19 15:41阅读：
Lucidity, Simplicity, Euphony
By W. Somerset Maugham
I have never had much patience with the writers who claim from the
reader an effort to understand their meaning. You have only to go
to the great philosophers to see that it is possible to express
with lucidity the most subtle reflections. You may find it
difficult to understand the thought of Hume, and if you have no
philosophical training its implications will doubtless escape you;
but no one with any education at all can fail to understand exactly
what the meaning of each sentence is. Few people have written
English with more grace than Berkeley. There are two sorts of
obscurity that you find in writers. One is due to negligence and
the other to wilfulness. People often write obscurely because they
have never taken the trouble to learn to write clearly. This sort
of obscurity you find too often in modern philosophers, in men of
science, and even in literary critics. Here it is indeed strange.
You would have thought that me
n who passed their lives in the study of the great masters of
literature would be sufficiently sensitive to the beauty of
language to write if not beautifully at least with perspicuity. Yet
you will find in their works sentence after sentence that you must
read twice to discover the sense. Often you can only guess at it,
for writers have evidently not said what they intended.
Another cause of obscurity is that the writer is himself not quite
sure of his meaning. He has a vague impression of what he wants to
say, but has not, either from lack of mental power or from
laziness, exactly formulated it in his mind and it is natural
enough that he should not find a precise expression for a confused
idea. This is due largely to the fact that many writers think, not
before, but as they write. The pen originates the thought. The
disadvantage of this, and indeed it is a danger against which the
author must be always on his guard, is that there is a sort of
magic in the written word. The idea acquires substance by taking on
a visible nature, and then stands in the way of its own
clarification. But this sort of obscurity merges very easily into
the wilful. Some writers who do not think clearly are inclined to
suppose that their thoughts have significance greater than at first
sight appear. It is flattering to believe that they are too
profound to be expressed so clearly that all who run may read, and
very naturally it does not occur to such writers that the fault is
with their own minds which have not the faculty of precise
reflection. Here again the magic of the written word obtains. It is
very easy to persuade oneself that a phrase that one does not quite
understand may mean a great deal more than one realizes. From this
there is only a little way to go to fall into the habit of setting
down one's impressions in all their original vagueness. Fools can
always be found to discover a hidden sense in them. There is
another form of wilful obscurity that masquerades as aristocratic
exclusiveness. The author wraps his meaning in mystery so that the
vulgar shall not participate in it. His soul is a secret garden
into which the elect may penetrate only after overcoming a number
of perilous obstacles. But this kind of obscurity is not only
pretentious; it is short-sighted. For time plays it an odd thick.
If the sense is meagre time reduces it to a meaningless verbiage
that no one thinks of reading.
Simplicity is not such an obvious merit as lucidity. I have aimed
at it because I have no gift for richness. Within limits I admire
richness in others, though I find it difficult to digest in
quantity. I can read one page of Ruskin with delight, but twenty
only with weariness. The rolling period, the stately epithet, the
noun rich in poetic associations, the subordinate clauses that give
the sentence weight and magnificence, the grandeur like that of
wave following wave in the open sea; There is no doubt that in all
this there is something inspiring. Words thus strung together fall
on the ear like music. The appeal is sensuous rather than
intellectual, and the beauty of the sound leads you easily to
conclude that you need not bother about the meaning. But words are
tyrannical things, they exist for their meanings, and if you will
not pay attention to these, you cannot pay attention at all. Your
mind wanders. This kind of writing demands a subject that will suit
it. It is surely out of place to write in the grand style of
inconsiderable things.
But if richness needs gifts with which everyone is not endowed,
simplicity by no means comes by nature. To achieve it needs rigid
discipline. So far as I know ours is the only language in which it
has been found necessary to give a name to the piece of prose which
is described as the purple patch, it would not have been necessary
to do so unless it were characteristic. English prose is elaborate
rather than simple. It was not always so. Nothing could be more
racy, straightforward and alive than the prose of Shakespeare; but
it must be remembered that this was dialogue written to be spoken.
We do not know how he would have written if like Corneille he had
composed prefaces to his plays. It may be that they would have been
as euphuistic as the letters of Queen Elizabeth. But earlier prose,
the prose of Sir Thomas More, for instance, is neither ponderous,
flowery nor oratorical. It smacks of the English soil. To my mind
King James's Bible has been a very harmful influence on English
prose. I am not so stupid as to deny its great beauty. It is
majestical. But the Bible is an oriental book. Its alien imagery
has nothing to do with us.
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Those hyperboles, those
luscious metaphors, are foreign to our genius. I cannot but think
that not the least of the misfortunes that the Secession from Rome
brought upon the spiritual life of our country is that this work
for so long a period became the daily, and with many the only,
reading of our people. Those rhythms, that powerful vocabulary,
that grandiloquence, became part and parcel of the national
sensibility. The plain, honest English speech was overwhelmed with
ornament. Blunt Englishmen twisted their tongues to speak like
Hebrew prophets. There was evidently something in the English
temper to which this was congenial, perhaps a native lack of
precision in thought, perhaps a naive delight in fine words for
their won sake, an innate eccentricity and love of embroidery, I do
not know; but the fact remains that ever since, English prose has
had to struggle against the tendency to luxuriance. When from time
to time the spirit of the language has reasserted itself, as it did
with Dryden and the writers of Queen Anne, it was only to be
submerged once more by the pomposities of Gibbon and Dr. Johnson.
When English prose recovered simplicity with Hazlitt, the Shelley
of the letters and Charles Lamb at his best, it lost it again with
De Quincey, Carlyle, Meredith and Walter Pater. It is obvious that
the grand style is more striking than the plain. Indeed many people
think that a style that does not attract notice is not style. They
will admire Walter Pater's, but will read an essay by Matthew
Arnold without giving a moment's attention to the elegance,
distinction and sobriety with which he set down what he had to
say.
The dictum that the style is the man is well known. It is one of
those aphorisms that say too much to mean a great deal. Where is
the man in Goethe, in his birdlike lyrics or in his clumsy prose?
And Hazlitt? But I suppose that if a man has a confused mind he
will write in a confused way, if his temper is capricious his prose
will be fantastical, and if he has a quick, darting intelligence
that is reminded by thematter in hand of a hundred things, he will,
unless he has great self-control, load his pages with metaphor and
simile. There is a great difference between the magniloquence of
the Jacobean writers, who were intoxicated with the new wealth that
had lately been brought into the language, and turgidity of Gibbon
and Dr. Johnson, who were the victims of bad theories. I can read
every word that Dr. Johnson wrote with delight, for he had good
sense, charm and wit. No one could have written better if he had
not wilfully set himself to write in the grand style. He knew good
English when he saw it. No critic has praised Dryden's prose more
aptly. He said of him that he appeared to have no art other than
that of expressing with clearness what he thought with vigor. And
one of his Lives he finished with the words: 'Whoever
wishes to attain an English style, familiar but not coarse, and
elegant but not ostentatious, must give his days and nights to the
volumes of Addison.' But when he himself sat down to write it was
with a very different aim. He mistook the orotund for the
dignified. He had not the good breeding to see that simplicity and
naturalness are the truest marks of distinction.
Whether you ascribe importance to euphony, the last of the three
characteristics that I mentioned, must depend on the sensitiveness
of your ear. A great many readers, and many admirable writers, are
devoid of this quality. Poets as we know have always made a great
use ofalliteration. They are persuaded that the repetition of a
sound gives an effect of beauty. I do not think it does so in
prose. It seems to me that in prose alliteration should be used
only for a special reason; when used by accident it falls on the
ear very disagreeably. But its accidental use is so common that one
can only suppose that the sound of it is not universally offensive.
Many writers without distress will put two rhyming words together,
join a monstrous long adjective to a monstrous long noun, or
between the end of one word and the beginning of another have a
conjunction of consonants that almost breaks your jaw. These are
trivial and obvious instances. I mention them only to prove that if
careful writers can do such things it is only because they have no
ear. Words have weight, sound and appearance; it is only by
considering these that you can write a sentence that is good to
look at and good to listen to.
I have read many books on English prose, but have found it hard to
profit by them; for the most part they are vague, unduly
theoretical, and often scolding. But you cannot say this of
Fowler's Dictionary of Modern English Usage. It is a
valuable work. I do not think anyone writes so well that he cannot
learn much from it. It is lively reading. Fowler liked simplicity,
straightforwardness and common sense. He had no patience with
pretentiousness. He had a sound feeling that idiom was the backbone
of a language and he was all for the racy phrase. He was no slavish
admirer of logic and was willing enough to give usage right of way
through the exact demesnes of grammar. English grammar is very
difficult and few writers have avoided making mistakes in it. So
heedful a writer as Henry James, for instance, on occasion wrote so
ungrammatically hat a schoolmaster, finding such errors in a
schoolboy's essay, would be justly indignant. It is necessary to
know grammar, and it is better to write grammatically than not, but
it is well to remember that grammar is common speech formulated.
Usage is the only test. I would prefer a phrase that was easy and
unaffected to a phrase that was grammatical. One of the differences
between French and English is that in French you can be grammatical
with complete naturalness, but in English not invariably. It is a
difficulty in writing English that the sound of the living voice
dominates the look of the printed word. I have given the matter of
style a great deal of thought and have taken great pains. I have
written few pages that I feel I could not improve and far too many
that I have left with dissatisfaction because, try as I would, I
could do no better. I cannot say of myself what Johnson said of
Pope: 'He never passed a fault unamended by indifference, nor
quitted it by despair.' I do not write as I want to; I write as I
can.
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But Fowler had no ear. He
did not see that simplicity may sometimes make concessions to
euphony. I do not think a far-fetched, an archaic or even an
affected words is out of place when it sounds better than the
blunt, obvious one or when it gives a sentence a better balance.
But, I hasten to add, though I think you may without misgiving make
this concession to pleasant sound, I think you should make none to
what may obscure your meaning. Anything is better than not to write
clearly. There is nothing to be said against lucidity, and against
simplicity only the possibility of dryness. This is a risk that is
well worth taking when you reflect how much better it is to be bald
than to wear a curly wig. But there is in euphony a danger that
must be considered. It is very likely to be monotonous. When George
Moore began to write, his blunt style was poor; it gave you the
impression that he wrote on wrapping paper with a pencil. But he
developed gradually a very musical English. He learnt to write
sentences that fall away on the ear with a misty languor and it
delighted him so much that he could never have enough of it. He did
not escape monotony. It is like the sound of water lapping a
shingly beach, so soothing that you presently cease to be sensible
of it. It is so mellifluous that you hanker for some harshness, for
an abrupt dissonance, that will interrupt the silky concord. I do
not know how one can guard against this. I suppose the best chance
is to have a more lively faculty of boredom than one's readers so
that one is wearied before they are. One must always be on the
watch for mannerisms and when certain cadences come too easily to
the pen ask oneself whether they have not become mechanical. It is
very hard to discover the exact point where the idiom one has
formed to express oneself has lost its tang. As Dr. Johnson said:
he that has once studiously formed a style, rarely writes
afterwards with complete ease.' Admirably as I think Matthew
Arnold's style was suited to his particular purposes, I must admit
that his mannerisms are often irritating. His style was an
instrument that he had forged once for all; it was not like the
human hand capable of performing a variety of actions.
If you could write lucidly, simply, euphoniously and yet with
liveliness you would write perfectly: you would write like
Voltaire. And yet we know how fatal the pursuit of liveliness may
be: it may result in the tiresome acrobatics of Meredith.Macaulay
and Carlyle were in their different ways arresting. But at the
heavy cost of naturalness. Their flashy effects distract the mind.
They destroy their persuasiveness; you would not believe a man was
very intent on ploughing a furrow if he carried a hoop with him and
jumped through it at every other step. A good style should show no
sign of effort. What is written should seem a happy accident. I
think no one in France now writes more admirably than Colette, and
such is the ease of her expression that you cannot bring yourself
to believe that she takes any trouble over it. I am told that there
are pianists who have a natural technique so that they can play in
a manner that most executants can achieve only as the result of
unremitting toil, and I am willing to believe that there are
writers who are equally fortunate. Among them I was much inclined
to place Colette. I asked her. I was exceedingly surprised to hear
that she wrote everything over and over again. She told me that she
would often spend a whole morning working upon a single page. But
it does not matter how one gets the effect of ease. For my part, if
I get it at all, it is only by strenuous effort. Nature seldom
provides me with the word, the turn of phrase, that is appropriate
without being far-fetched or commonplace.
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